general, a civilian appointed by letters patent under the great seal, was responsible for advising both monarch and commander-in-chief on the administration of military law, submitting the sentences of courts-martial with recommendations for confirmation or rejection. He attended some trials himself, sometimes as prosecutor but more usually to assist the court and to ensure that the law was obeyed. The apothecary general, another civilian, was responsible to the secretary at war, and supplied the army with medical and hospital stores.
At the start of the period this system worked ponderously, as one example shows.
In 1758 Lieutenant General Bligh was selected to go on foreign service in command of a body of cavalry. Lord Barrington [secretary at war] first wrote to him, by command of the king, that he was appointed to that service. He then wrote to the Commissioners of the Treasury to tell them that five regiments of cavalry were to go on foreign service, that their lordships might give orders to the Victualling Board for a supply of bread and forage. He next sent orders to each regiment to hold themselves in readiness to embark. He then wrote to the Paymaster-General, signifying to him the King’s pleasure, that he should issue subsistence to the men, and twelve months off-reckoning to the Colonels; and lastly, to the Apothecary-general, desiring him to send immediately a supply of medicines for the expedition.48
Had the detachment included artillery or engineers the Board of Ordnance would have required a separate approach, and getting the force to its destination would demand the co-operation of the Navy Board, which would furnish and, if necessary, escort the transports. It is small wonder that the historian Sir John Fortescue was to call the entire apparatus, characterised as it was by overlapping, duplication, and decentralisation, as ‘a hopeless organisation for war’.
The army’s fighting strength lay in its regiments of infantry and cavalry, self-contained enterprises with their own administrative and financial structures, which provided officers and soldiers with a focus for their loyalty: a small, compact, self-regarding world in which they lived and, all too often, died. The most senior were the Household troops, horse- and footguards. Most European armies maintained bodies of Household troops – Austria was a notable exception – in which birth and breeding were prized. Regiments of the Russian Guard maintained 3–4,000 supernumerary NCOs on their lists, all from the higher nobility, and the French Maison du Roi cavalry was entirely composed of noblemen.
British guards regiments, quartered in and around London, shared some of the characteristics of European Household troops with, as we have just seen, a close relationship with the royal family. They also enjoyed a rank-structure which ensured that guards officers ranked higher in the army than they did in their regiments. When John Aitchison of 3rd Foot Guards was promoted lieutenant on 22 November 1810 his commission granted him ‘the rank of captain in our army,’ and guards captains ranked as lieutenant colonels of the line. The three regiments of foot guards – the 1st (subsequently Grenadier) 2nd (Coldstream) and 3rd (later Scots Fusilier Guards and later still Scots Guards) – were officered by gentlemen but recruited from men who differed little from recruits into the remainder of the army. But in the eighteenth century the Household Cavalry still included units with gentlemen serving in their ranks, and whose corporals were commissioned officers. In 1760 the Life Guards comprised two troops of Horse Guards and two of Horse Grenadier Guards, and a full regiment of Royal Horse Guards Blue, or Blues for short. In 1788 the Horse Guards and Horse Grenadier Guards were restructured into two regiments, 1st and 2nd Life Guards: most of the gentlemen serving in their ranks were discharged, although some became officers in the new regiments. The three regiments of Household Cavalry – two of Life Guards and the Blues – retained a peculiar terminology for their NCO ranks, with their sergeants being styled ‘corporal of horse’ and sergeant-majors ‘corporal major’.
There was never any doubt that the guards, regardless of military seniority and social standing, took their share of fighting. Although they did not serve in India, they fought in North America, the Peninsula, during the Hundred Days and in the Crimea, and certainly felt war’s rough edge. The Hon John Rous, who joined the Coldstream Guards as a volunteer in Spain before being commissioned ensign in December 1812 cheerfully reported that ‘I am bitten all over by fleas and bugs’. After Vitoria he told his mother that ‘we went through some very severe work owing to the wet weather and not having any rations of biscuit; we were five days in arrears, but there were scarcely any grumbles amongst our men who seemed to be aware of the consequence of pushing on and the impossibility of the Commissariat department keeping up with us.’ Yet he retained a young gentleman’s sartorial aspirations, asking for ‘two pairs of short boots with buckles at the sides (Kennett, 39 Silver Street, Golden Square) made some for me that I brought out and I believe he has my measure.’49
There were moments when guards officers’ resolve to take their campaigning as comfortably as possible conflicted with a more austere high command. In 1813 when Wellington saw several guards officers using umbrellas he sent Lord Hill over with a message: ‘Lord Wellington does not approve of the use of umbrellas during the enemy’s firing, and will not allow the gentlemen’s sons to make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of the army…’ Yet there was no doubting the distinctive contribution the guards made to the battles of the era, as this account by Private Bancroft of the Grenadiers in which he describes the desperate fighting around the Sandbag Battery at Inkerman demonstrates:
I bayoneted the first Russian in the chest: he fell dead. I was then stabbed in the mouth with great force, which caused me to stagger back, where I shot this second Russian and ran a third through. A fourth and fifth came at me and ran me through the right side. I fell but managed to run one through and brought him down. I stunned him by kicking him, whilst I was engaging my bayonet with another. Sergeant-Major Algar called out to me not to kick the man that was down, but being dead he was very troublesome to my legs; I was fighting over his body. I returned to the Battery and spat out my teeth: I found only two.50
The infantry and cavalry of the line formed the bulk of the army. Renumberings, the raising of new regiments which took the numbers of disbanded units and, in the cavalry, changes in terminology as fashionable lancers and hussars replaced the less fashionable light dragoons, make the charting of regimental lineage a science bordering on the occult, but the trends are clear. The army’s establishment varied with the ebb and flow of national security. Junior, more recently-raised regiments faced disbandment with the onset of peace, with their officers sent on half-pay and their soldiers discharged or sent to strengthen regiments that were to be retained.
Enterprising officers who sought long-term careers strove to obtain commissions in senior regiments. Conversely, in 1763, James Boswell, lobbying as persistently as unsuccessfully for a commission in the London-based guards, told Lord Eglinton that he would not ‘catch at any string’. Any other commission, which might involve posting to some distant garrison, would be ‘a rope wherewith to hang myself; except you can get me one that is to be broke [eg disbanded], and then I am not forced from London.’51 In contrast, his friend Captain the Hon Andrew Erskine, who wanted to serve on, had the bad luck to hold a commission in the 71st, disbanded that year along with all regiments junior to the 70th: he remained on half-pay till 1765.
In 1783, as the American war ended, the 106th Foot was transferred to the Irish establishment (where the authorised strength of units was much lower and their cost, in consequence, smaller), and a dozen regiments of foot were disbanded: another ten followed the next year. There was no blood-letting on quite this scale after the Napoleonic wars. In 1817 ten infantry regiments were disbanded, but there were still 95 on the establishment on George III’s death in 1820, and 100 on William IV’s death in 1837. The cavalry was no less vulnerable to peacetime economies: four regiments of light dragoons were disbanded in 1783 and in 1818–19 three more regiments of light dragoons and one of lancers
