Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
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heard what you said, prince’, said Monro, ‘Here is that damned old general after me again. Jump in the car, or you will spoil my appetite for breakfast.’11 The prince also served in Egypt and Italy, but the same hard rule of no real action applied. He was unquestionably touched by all the suffering he saw. There is a painful account of his brushing the cheek of a badly wounded soldier with his lips. When assessing the complex character of Edward VIII, shot through with self-indulgence and populism, we should not under-emphasise the impact of the war, which saw him snared by a protective privilege he had never demanded and would willingly have discarded.
His brother Bertie’s status as ‘spare’ rather than ‘heir’ meant that he had been able to embark on a full-time naval career, serving first as a Dartmouth cadet and then being posted to the dreadnought HMS Collingwood in 1913. At Jutland three years later Collingwood was bracketed by a salvo from Derrflinger or Lützow. He recalled the excitement of being aboard a great ship shuddering under the recoil of her guns, with water from the splashes of shell-bursts surging across the decks. Bertie transferred to the RAF on its formation in 1918 and, when he succeeded to the throne on Edward’s abdication in 1936, he was the only British monarch who had qualified as a pilot. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth had no sons, but their eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was appointed colonel of the Grenadier Guards in January 1942, on her sixteenth birthday. At her first official function officers found her ‘charming, and very sincere’. In February 1945 she was commissioned into the Auxiliary Territorial Service as Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, and completed her basic training in driving and maintenance at No 1 Mechanical Transport Training Centre at Aldershot. She became colonel-in-chief of the Grenadiers on her accession, and for many years wore the regiment’s uniform at the Queen’s Birthday Parade. Until 1986 she attended the parade mounted, latterly on her favourite mare Burmese.
Between 1971 and 1976 Prince Charles trained with both the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, qualifying as both fixed-wing and helicopter pilot. He also commanded the coastal minehunter HMS Bronington during the last year of his service. The Princes, William and Harry, both trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and were commissioned into the Blues and Royals – a 1969 amalgamation of the Royal Horse Guards, whom we first glimpsed as Colonel Unton Crooke’s Regiment, in 1660, and the Royal Dragoons, raised in 1661 for duty in Tangiers. Prince William, denied the chance of operational service by the same concerns that kept the future Edward VIII in limbo, qualified as a Search and Rescue pilot. Prince Harry characteristically affirmed, ‘There’s no way that I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.’ He served in Afghanistan, and might have stayed there longer had an unhelpful intervention by the press not drawn attention to his presence, imposing unacceptable risk on those serving alongside him. In 2008 Prince Harry received his medal for campaign service at Combermere Barracks, Windsor from his aunt, Princess Anne, colonel of the Blues and Royals.
As we branch off from the direct royal line, so the undergrowth thickens, with junior members of the ruling house serving on their own account or marrying into military families. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who was to marry the future George VI, lost one brother, in that most traditional of Highland regiments, the Black Watch, at Loos in 1915. She also lost a cousin, also in the Black Watch, at Ypres, Belgium in 1914, and another cousin, this time a Grenadier, at Cambrai in 1917. Centuries earlier illegitimate offspring also played their part in the process. Of Charles II’s extensive illegitimate brood, Henry, Duke of Grafton commanded the 1st Foot Guards, lined out along the Bussex Rhine as the Duke of Monmouth’s rag-tag men ran in through the mist at Sedgemoor in 1685; he was mortally wounded attacking Cork in 1690. His half-brother Monmouth, on the other side of the ditch at Sedgemoor, had commanded English troops in French service, showing courage that left him briefly when he pleaded with James II for his life, though he had recovered his self-possession when he faced the axe on Tower Hill.
James II’s own child, James, Duke of Berwick, one of the four offspring borne him by Arabella Churchill, emerged as a general of European stature. He had already served against the Turks in Hungary when, in 1688, he did more to check the disintegration of the royal army than his father. In French service after 1690, he was largely responsible for wrecking allied hopes in Spain during the War of Spanish Succession. Although his character showed that streak of inflexible cruelty that had marked his father’s, he was the most capable of the later Stuarts, and had become marshal of France by the time that a cannon-ball carried him off at Philippsburg in 1734.
William IV’s illegitimate son, George Fitzclarence, served in the Peninsula, became the army’s deputy adjutant general, and his father eventually made him Earl of Munster. All four of his boys served in the army or the navy; the youngest was killed in the assault on the Redan in the Crimea. Amongst George Fitzclarence’s grandsons were twin brothers, Edward, killed at Abu Hamid in the Sudan in 1897, and Charles, who won the VC with the Royal Fusiliers (first raised in 1685) in the Boer War, then transferred to the Irish Guards in its formation in 1900, and finally died as a brigadier-general on 11 November 1914 in the desperate fighting outside Ypres. His name heads the cruelly long list of officers and men missing in the Ypres Salient battlefields between 1914 and mid-1917, graven in stone on the Menin Gate memorial.
It would be easy to develop the theme more widely, but the point is already hammered home. The monarch was at the centre of a wide constellation of military officers, often serving in the regiments of the Household Division, who were familiar figures at many of the court’s activities, from official events at Buckingham Palace or Windsor, Royal Ascot or shooting parties at Sandringham. Members of the royal family serve as colonels-in-chief of regiments, and Court and Circular announcements still chart the passage of lieutenant colonels as they report at the palace to formally take over command. Although George VI was constitutionally more cautious than his predecessors, he encouraged senior officers to open their hearts to him. Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) for much of the war, found the process very helpful. ‘At 3.15 went to see the King,’ he wrote on 21 December 1943, ‘who kept me for 1¼ hours. He was in excellent form and most interested in all details of conferences and of my visit to Italy. He has a wonderful knowledge of what is going on.’12 But regimental politics could corrupt even the most scrupulous monarch. In 1946, Field Marshal Montgomery, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, hoped to reduce the Foot Guards by the same proportion as the infantry of the line, but found his plans dashed when the major general commanding the Household Division appealed directly to the king. Nor should the long influence of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother be underestimated, especially as far as the Black Watch and the London Scottish were concerned.
The military importance of the monarchy goes beyond the ties of family, friendship, and familiarity. The significance of both the Dukes of York and Cambridge serving as commander-in-chief of the army for such long periods can scarcely be overstated. Moreover, some of the monarch’s most trusted servants were military officers, whether at court for short tours of duty as aides-de-camp or equerries, or in key long-term appointments like private secretary and assistant private secretary. The urbane and gossipy Frederick ‘Fritz’ Ponsonby was grandson of Peninsula veteran General Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby. He served in the Grenadier Guards during the Boer War and the First World War. His court career started as an equerry to Queen Victoria in 1894, going on to be assistant private secretary to both Victoria and Edward VII, and ending up as lieutenant governor of Winsdor Castle till 1935, the year of his death.
His immediate superior in 1901–13 was Francis Knollys, long a civilian, but a former officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers with good military connections. Both his father, a general and Crimean veteran, and brother served in the Scots Guards. Knollys’s successor as private secretary was the honest but humourless Arthur Bigge, better known by his peerage title of Lord Stamfordham. Bigge was a gunner who had served in the Zulu War of 1879, he was the queen’s private secretary for the last years of her reign, and then served George V in the same capacity for most of his life. He was succeeded by Clive Wigram, who had been commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1893 and had then gone off to the Indian army. Wigram made his mark as assistant chief of staff to the Prince of Wales (the future George V) during his 1905–6 tour of India, returned to serve as equerry until George succeeded, and became the king’s assistant private secretary, going on to be private