the government could expect the support of his brother, already an MP, and joined his regiment at Northampton. William himself soon became Whig member for that most addled of rotten boroughs, Old Sarum, which had no resident voters at all. He made strident attacks on government policy, causing Prime Minister Robert Walpole, always slow to turn the other cheek, to observe ‘We must muzzle this terrible cornet of horse.’ In 1736 Walpole duly secured the dismissal of Pitt and several other military and naval MPs who had opposed the government. The move was not popular in the house, but none of the dismissed officers was reinstated. In 1764 Lieutenant General Henry Conway, who enjoyed the prestigious colonelcy of the 1st Royal Dragoons, voted against the government and was stripped of his colonelcy. The opposition at once protested that this was military punishment for political offence, and although George III did not restore Conway ‘he never again breached the principle enunciated by Conway’s supporters’, and Conway himself went on to be commander-in-chief.18
By the 1780s it was clear that the espousal of firm political views was not necessarily a bar to either high rank or employment in sensitive posts. Three of the most senior generals in North America, William Howe (C-in-C 1775–78), Henry Clinton (C-in-C 1778–82) and John Burgoyne, who surrendered at Saratoga in 1777, were serving MPs. Both Howe and Burgoyne were Whigs, and had spoken in Parliament against the American war. Howe had assured his Nottingham constituents that he would not serve against the colonists. When he agreed to do so one told him that: ‘I don’t wish you to fall, as many do, but I cannot say I wish success to the undertaking.’ Howe replied that ‘I was ordered, and could not refuse, without incurring the odious name of backwardness to serve my country in distress.’19
The social unrest that followed the Napoleonic wars saw the clearest example of politically-engaged officers attaining high rank despite firmly held opinions. Charles James Napier was a scion of a military family: his father Colonel George Napier and brothers George and William were soldiers, and another brother was a sailor. He earned a brilliant reputation as an infantry officer in the Peninsula. The Napiers were all radicals, and in George senior’s case experience of revolt in America, Ireland, and France had given him much sympathy for the rebels. For Charles, the process owed much to his wide reading while at the Senior Division of the Royal Military College. In 1839 the government appointed him to command Northern District as a major general. It was a courageous choice, for he was known to sympathise with the Chartists, who constituted the greatest threat to the order he was sworn to preserve, to hate the Corn Laws that kept the price of bread artificially high, and to tell the government precisely what its errors were.
Charles Napier was able to distinguish between personal sympathy with the Chartists and professional determination to keep the peace. He was inclined to the view that ‘the best way of treating a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards’, and a notion of responsibility to the Crown rather than its ministers also helped him deal with the inconsistencies in his own position. He made it clear that if the ‘physical force’ Chartists rose, then he would crush them. ‘Poor people! They will suffer’, he wrote. ‘We have the physical force not they … What would their 100,000 men do with my hundred rockets wriggling their fiery tales among them, roaring, scorching, tearing all they came near.’20 This combination of genuine sympathy and absolute firmness made him a notable success in the post.
He went to India, where his sense of natural justice (laced with a good slug of ambition) encouraged him to beat the Amirs of Sindh at Miani, going on to rule the newly annexed province with benevolent despotism. He returned home in 1847 after much bickering with the East India Company’s hierarchy. In 1849 that arch-conservative the Duke of Wellington was sure that Napier was the only general capable of rescuing the Sikh War from the head-on enthusiasm of the commander-in-chief in India, Sir Hugh Gough. By the time Napier arrived Gough had sledge-hammered his way to victory, and his subsequent trial of strength with the viceroy, Lord Dalhousie, saw Napier return home under a cloud.
Charles Napier died a general and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, an achievement not prevented by his political views or notorious scruffiness. His brother William, who had also fought with distinction in the Peninsula, was no less radical. When on half-pay in the 1830s, he declined suggestions that he should stand as an MP, and even more wisely refused command of the Chartists’ projected ‘National Guard’. He was a regular speaker at political meetings, and argued that while the army as an institution might indeed be politically neutral, ‘if a soldier does not know and love the social happiness springing from equal and just laws, how, in God’s name, is he to fight as the soldier of a free nation ought to fight?’21
He was not re-employed between the end of the Napoleonic wars and appointment as lieutenant governor of Guernsey in 1842, and in the meantime had produced his multi-volume History of the War in the Peninsula. This remains an extraordinary achievement, not least because of its flashes of tangible affection for private soldiers, such as John Walton, in Napier’s company of 43rd Foot on the retreat to Corunna. Walton was charged by determined French horsemen, but
stood his ground, and wounded several of his assailants, who then retired, leaving him unhurt, but his cap, knapsack, belts and musket were cut in about twenty places, his bayonet was bent double, and notched like a saw.22
There was much more to the book than narrative. Napier was convinced that the French army embodied the egalitarian principles of which he approved, while the British was dominated by privilege. ‘Napoleon’s troops fought in bright fields where every helmet caught some beams of glory,’ he wrote, ‘but the British soldier conquered under the cold shade of the aristocracy.’23 William Napier also died a general and a knight, as did his third martial brother, Thomas, who lost his right arm at Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812. Being in the same political camp as the rest of his family, Thomas was delighted to be governor of Cape Colony when slavery was abolished across the empire in 1834.
In the early nineteenth century in the unreformed House of Commons, officers sometimes sat for family-controlled constituencies. Occasionally, as an ingredient of the oleaginous mix of influence and obligation then known as ‘interest’, they were installed on behalf of a powerful patron, either because he valued their support, or because he believed that possession of a seat in parliament might improve their own career prospects. Lieutenant General Sir John Moore (killed at Corunna in 1808) was the son of a Glasgow doctor who acted as bear-leader to the Duke of Hamilton on his Grand Tour, travelling with the party. Hamilton not only secured John an ensign’s commission in the 51st Foot, but then proceeded to have him elected for the family-run Lanark Burghs in 1784–90. General Sir Henry Clinton sat from 1772 to 1784, first for Boroughbridge and then for Newark upon Trent. These were both constituencies controlled by his cousin, the Duke of Newcastle, who devoted almost as much attention to fostering his career as he did to the breeding of his affable Clumber spaniels. His widow married Thomas Crauford, and in 1802 gave another of her family’s pocket boroughs, East Retford, to his brother Robert ‘Black Bob’, who was to be mortally wounded commanding the Light Division at Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812.
There was much the same pattern in the Irish House of Commons until its disappearance with the Union of 1800. Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, sat for the family borough of Trim, and Edward Pakenham, brother of Wellesley’s wife Kitty, for his own family’s Longford borough. Galbraith Lowry Cole (Kitty’s rejected suitor) sat first for Irish constituencies, and then represented Fermanagh in the British House of Commons, although he spent most of his time commanding one of Wellington’s divisions in the Peninsula. He might have discussed politics with several of his senior colleagues, including cavalry commander Lieutenant General Sir Stapleton Cotton, MP for Newark in 1806–1814 and in the upper house as Lord Combermere thereafter.
From the 1790s there were as many redcoats as black in the Commons, for, with the country mobilised against France, it was hard to tell regulars from militia or volunteer officers. About half the members returned in 1790–1820 held part-time commissions. Indeed, Robert Crauford was nicknamed ‘the regular colonel’ to distinguish him from the numerous MPs whose
