charge, and seventy rounds of powder and ball. This is the military creed. Come, comrades, drink success to British arms.2
In 1914 Dora Foljambe, married to a keen Territorial, with a brother in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, a brother-in-law in the same battalion and two sons in the regular army, was delighted to see that the government had apparently shrunk from using the army to enforce Home Rule in Ireland. She told her daughter, married to yet another rifleman, that
I am very glad this did happen as it shows the feeling in the army against being used as a political tool – for one party against another – if there is to be civil war the army must break up or stand in a body for the King, it is impossible they should fight side by side with the [Irish] Nationalists who cheered every Boer victory in the South African war. Our army is not made up of paid levies.3
Writing in 1972, Lieutenant Colonel John Baynes affirmed that the monarch’s
immense significance to the armed forces must first be strongly emphasised … This link with the Head of State is not merely symbolic, but reflects a close loyalty to the person of the Queen as well as to her office. No firmer guarantee of the British soldier’s exclusion from politics exists than his personal dependence on the authority of Her Majesty.4
Robert William Lowry’s commissions lie before me. His appointment as ensign in the 47th Foot, dated 7 June 1841, is signed by Queen Victoria (black ink over a pencil cross reminding the young monarch where she should put her name), though by the time he became a lieutenant colonel on 18 February 1863 the queen entrusted such work to the army’s commander-in-chief, her uncle, George, Duke of Cambridge. He later became the epitome of conservatism, telling the officers of Aldershot garrison, assembled to hear a lecture on cavalry, ‘Why should we want to know anything about foreign cavalry? … We have better cavalry of our own. I fear, gentlemen, that the army is in danger of becoming a mere debating society.’5 But he had commanded a division in the Crimea, fighting bravely in the shocking bludgeon-match at Inkerman, and was, as William Robertson recalled, ‘a good friend of the soldier and extremely popular with all ranks of the army.’6 When he signed Robert Lowry’s new commission he was interested not only in military reform, but in maintaining (though with diminishing success) that he was directly subordinate to the monarch rather than to the secretary of state of war.
His rather deliberate ‘George’, with a curlicue swinging round from the last letter to encircle his name, looks restrained on a document rich in stamps and seals. Both commissions are made of robust parchment, folded in four, with the holder’s name on an outer fold, and fit neatly in the inside pocket of an officer’s tunic. Lowry’s second commission is almost exactly the same size as my own – though that was produced almost a century later. When Cambridge was eventually prised out of office in 1895, after a tenure just short of forty years, Victoria resumed signing commissions on her own behalf. Declining health and the flood of new commissions necessitated by the army’s expansion for the Boer war (1899–1902) made things difficult but, borne on by a powerful sense of duty, she struggled hard against having a signature stamp until she was at last persuaded that it would not be misused.
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.
