Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
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With the exception of Queen Mary and her sister Anne, all British monarchs who ruled 1625–1760, had fought in battle. Charles II received his baptism of fire at twelve at Edgehill in 1642. His brother, James II, had also participated in the Civil War, and was a lieutenant general in the French service during the Interregnum. He accompanied the royal army to the West Country to face William of Orange in 1688 although, racked by nose-bleeds, he was not an inspiring commander. William himself was an accomplished general. His invasion of England in unreliable autumn weather, in the face of a well-posted royal navy and an army whose internal collapse could not be confidently predicted, betokened extraordinary self-confidence. He beat James (also present in person on the field) at the Boyne in 1689, where he was clipped by a cannon-ball that came within an inch or two of changing history.
The first Hanoverians came from a Germanic tradition of soldier-kings. The future George I had fought the Turks as a young man and served as an Imperialist officer in the War of Spanish Succession. His eldest son commanded the allied army in the victorious battle of Dettingen in 1743. The first two Georges took a close interest in the day-to-day running of the army. During their reigns it was still small enough for them to know all senior officers by name and repute. When Lieutenant General Lord George Sackville was court-martialled for failure to charge as ordered at Minden in 1759, George II personally struck his name from the roll of the Privy Council. The king also penned an order, which was read at the head of every regiment in the service, saying that such conduct was ‘worse than death to a man who has any sense of honour’. Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, the king’s second son, was wounded at Dettingen, narrowly beaten by Marshal Saxe at Fontenoy, and then broke the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746. Defeated in Germany in 1757, he was disgraced on his return home. Opinion on ‘Butcher Cumberland’ has now softened somewhat. His style of command was uncomfortably Germanic; he was easily impressed by severe officers like Lieutenant General Henry ‘Hangman’ Hawley. He backed the seedy and idiosyncratic James Wolfe, victor at Quebec in 1759. The attractive old Huguenot warrior, Field Marshal Lord Louis Jean, Lord Ligonier, always thought Cumberland a good general.
George III had a military brood. His eldest son, the Prince of Wales or ‘Prinny’ (later George IV) was no soldier, although in later life he came to believe that he had served with Wellington in the Peninsula. ‘So I have heard you say, Sir’, the Duke would observe when the Regent recounted another martial triumph and turned to him for support. Prinny’s younger brother Frederick, Duke of Albany and York, was not a successful field commander, for the French thrashed him in both 1793 and 1799. However, he was a serious-minded commander-in-chief of the army from 1798 to 1827. There was a brief gap in 1809–11, after he had been forced to resign when it transpired that his mistress, Mary Ann Clark, had been dabbling in the sale of commissions. George III’s fourth and seventh sons, Edward, Duke of Kent, and Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge, both became field marshals, although they never held command in the field. His fifth son, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, lost an eye at Tournai in 1794, later commanded the Hanoverian army and succeeded as King of Hanover in 1837.
The third son of George III, Prince William, broke with family tradition by joining the navy at the age of thirteen, and fought at the battle of Cape St Vincent in 1780. Captain John Peebles saw him in New York during the American War, and reported that he was ‘a very fine grown young man, smart and sensible for his years … & sufficiently well grown, a strong likeness of the King … he was in a plain Midshipman uniform, and took off his hat with a good grace.’7 Commissioned lieutenant in 1785 he was a captain the following year. Prince William served under Horatio Nelson in the West Indies, and the admiral reported that: ‘In his professional line, he is superior to two-thirds, I am sure, of the [Navy] list; and in attention to orders, and respect to his superior officer, I hardly know his equal.’8
Created Duke of Clarence in 1789 by his reluctant father, to avoid political embarrassment, William sought active command during the Napoleonic wars, though without success. He managed to get involved in a skirmish near Antwerp in early 1814, narrowly avoiding capture thanks to the efforts of Lieutenant Thomas Austin of the 35th Foot. When George IV died without legitimate issue in 1830, Clarence ascended the throne as William IV. His simple, approachable style gained him many supporters, but his intervention in military affairs was not a success. Coming from a highly centralised service, he had no feel for the army’s innate tribalism. He insisted that soldiers should wear red, and sailors, blue, resulting in light cavalry (traditionally clad in what had begun as workmanlike blue) becoming redcoats. Most of them gladly reverted to blue in 1840, although the 16th Lancers, perverse as ever, retained red to become the ‘Scarlet Lancers’.
In her youth Queen Victoria appeared in a prettily modified version of a general’s uniform, and took military duties very seriously. She had a passionate interest in regimentalia, especially where it concerned the Scots regiments so close to her heart. In 1877 she told the Duke of Cambridge that projected amalgamations would create insuperable problems as far as tartans were concerned, for ‘to direct the 42nd to wear the Cameron tartan, or my own Cameron Highlanders to wear that of the Black Watch, would create the greatest dissatisfaction, and would be unmeaning.’ She went on to warn against the compromise of using the ‘Royal Hunting Tartan … which is a sort of undress Royal Stewart, [and] will not be appreciated by the Highlanders, nor considered advisable by the Queen’.9
Her husband Prince Albert was colonel of both the 11th Hussars and the Rifle Brigade. He ensured that two of the equerries allocated to their eldest son, the future King Edward VII, were upright men who had won the Victoria Cross in the Crimea. Albert, had he lived longer, might have ensured that the prince received a proper military education. As it was, young Bertie was commissioned lieutenant colonel on his eighteenth birthday, and in the summer of 1861 was sent off to the Curragh, the great military camp near Dublin, to train with the Grenadier Guards.
The project was not a success. Amongst the visitors to the Curragh was the actress Nellie Clifden, ‘a London lady much run after by the Household Brigade’ who did not need much persuading to share the prince’s bed. Bertie’s parents soon found out: Prince Albert wrote him a pained paternal letter, and Victoria always attributed her husband’s fatal illness to the shock and disappointment caused by the news. Despite this inauspicious apprenticeship and his reputation for being ‘lackadaisical’, Edward took a serious interest in military reform, notably in the period of national soul-searching that followed the Boer War. His adviser, Lord Esher, sought to persuade him that he was de facto commander-in-chief of the army, an argument strengthened by the abolition of the post of commander-in-chief in 1904. The following year he affirmed that:
There is always to be developed as time goes on the authority of the King as Commander-in-Chief. I mean in all personal questions. The King should adhere tenaciously to his right to veto any appointment. Gradually it will become clear to everyone that under the King a C-in-C was an anomaly.10
Edward’s heir apparent was Prince Albert Victor. Albert died from influenza in 1892, leaving his brother George heir. George married his late brother’s fiancée, Princess Mary of Teck. He had served as a naval cadet with his elder brother and was commissioned sub-lieutenant in 1884. George left the navy on his marriage and lived quietly in York Cottage on the Sandringham Estate, succeeding to the throne in 1910. The couple had six children, five of them sons. Their eldest, Edward (known in the family as David), had served as a naval cadet and midshipman. As an undergraduate at Oxford he had trained in the university Officers’ Training Corps. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards, and urged Lord Kitchener to allow him to go to France with his regiment, saying ‘What does it matter if I am shot? I have four brothers.’ Kitchener pointed out that it was not the risk of death but the possibility of capture that prevented him from serving at the front. General Sir Dighton Probyn VC, the distinguished warrior-turned-courtier, feared that the young prince felt ‘disgraced’ by his inability to share his generation’s risks.
The Prince of Wales spent 1915–16 on the Western Front, occasionally under shellfire, sometimes closer to the fighting than was wise, but scarcely deserving the Military Cross he was awarded in 1916. General Sir Charles Monro tells us that he heard that the prince had gone up the line, early in the morning, with a Grenadier battalion. He set off in pursuit