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 secretary between 1931 and his retirement, gaining the peerage that has generally rewarded royal servants of his status, in 1936.
Focusing on Wigram’s family is instructive. He was married to the daughter of a paragon of British India, Field Marshal Sir Neville Chamberlain. Their eldest son served with the Grenadier Guards in the Second World War and then commanded its 1st Battalion in 1955–6. He was married to the daughter of another Grenadier, General Sir Andrew ‘Bulgy’ Thorne, who had made his mark on history while staff-captain to Brigadier-General Fitzclarence, by whipping-in the fine counter-attack that enabled the Worcesters to repair the broken British line on the Menin Road on 31 August 1914. ‘The Worcesters saved the Empire’, wrote a grateful Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force.13 Not only did their eldest son, heir to the family’s barony, also serve in the Grenadiers, but so too did their son-in-law, Major General Sir Evelyn Webb-Carter, who commanded the Household Division in 1988– 2001. Clive Wigram’s grandson, Captain Charles Malet of the Coldstream Guards, has served in Afghanistan, and was an extra equerry to the queen at the time of writing.
Michael Adeane, maternal grandson of Lord Stamfordham, was private secretary to Elizabeth II for the first twenty years of her reign. He had taken over from Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, unusually a yeomanry (territorial cavalry) officer rather than a regular, and handed over to Martin Charteris of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. It was only with the latter’s departure in 1977 that military officers lost what had become firm tenure of this crucial post, although Robin Janvrin, who took over in 1999, had served in the Royal Navy for eleven years. It may be that his successor, Christopher Geidt, represents a definitive break with tradition, having been a member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office before initially joining the royal household as assistant private secretary in 2002.
CHAPTER 3
PARLIAMENT’S ARMY
AS THE MONARCHY’S power has shrunk over the three and a half centuries of the army’s existence, so that of the House of Commons has increased. We can chart this process and its effect on the army through events like the constitutional settlement of 1688, the last royal veto of legislation in 1707, the great reform bills of the nineteenth century, and the 1911 Parliament Act. It has certainly not removed royal influence, but it has transformed the nature of political control. What is less obvious is that, as the process has spun on, the links between the army and the legislature have become progressively weaker, to the point where almost any major professional group is more widely represented in both houses of parliament than the armed forces. In one sense the development is as much social as political, with the army’s increasing professionalisation and diminishing size reducing the political visibility and impact of its officers.
Restoration parliaments imposed no control over the army, provided the king was able to pay for it. The 1661 Militia Act gave Charles II command of ‘all forces by land and sea and all forts and places of strength’, and both Charles and his brother James II proceeded to run the army as what John Childs calls ‘a department of the royal household under the command of the king and his nominees’.1 It had no foundation in common or statute law, and its code of discipline, the Articles of War, stemmed from the royal prerogative. It was not until 1689 that discipline was given the force of statute.
The senior regiment of infantry of the line, the Royal Scots (in existence since 1633 but allowed to claim seniority only from 1661), had fought at Sedgemoor in 1685 as the Earl of Dumbarton’s Regiment. It had previously served under Monmouth on the continent, and a poignant story has him looking out from Bridgwater church towards the royal camp and seeing the regiment’s saltire colours in the gloaming. He would be sure of victory, he sighed, with Dumbarton’s drums behind him.
In 1689 the new government of William and Mary was shipping troops to the Low Countries to fight the French. The fact that the army had not fought for James II the previous year reflected the defection of senior officers and James’s failure of will rather than its affection for William. Scots troops were particularly concerned about being sent abroad while English and Dutch units remained in Britain. After serious unrest along the line of march, the Royal Scots mutinied when they reached Ipswich; over 600 of them set off northwards. The deserters were rounded up with little bloodshed, escorted back to London, and shipped thence to Holland. Nineteen officers were tried, and all but one, who was executed on Tower Green, were simply stripped of
