Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. Richard Holmes
regular army by the duke’s reforms and was now a radical MP, raised the question in the House. A committee of enquiry could find no clear link between Mary Ann Clark’s acceptance of bribes and the granting of commissions, but the duke, duly acquitted of selling them, was urged, in treacly tones, ‘to exhibit a right example of every virtue, in imitation of his Royal parent’. He had to resign as commander-in-chief, but was reappointed in 1811 and remained in office till his death in 1827.
His younger brother Clarence joined the navy in 1779 and served in the American war. Peebles saw him in New York and thought him ‘a very fine young man, smart and sensible for his years, & sufficiently well grown, a strong likeness of the King…he was in a plain Midshipman uniform, & took off his hat with a good grace…’10 He was promoted steadily, becoming admiral of the fleet in 1811. Denied much active service in his naval capacity, he managed to accompany the army on an expedition to the Netherlands in January 1814. Displaying more pluck than prudence, he got up amongst the advanced skirmishers at Merxem, and was saved from capture by Lieutenant Thomas Austin of the 35th Foot in a brisk action in which he behaved very well. As a naval officer he had a sharp eye for detail, and this did not bode well. In March 1834 he conducted a minute inspection of the guards, horse and foot, and then ‘had a musket brought to him, that he might show them the way to use it in some new sort of exercise that he wanted to introduce: in short, he gave a great deal of trouble and made a fool of himself.’11 He believed that sailors should wear blue and soldiers red, and instituted a brief and unpopular deviation from the custom by which light cavalry regiments wore blue. They reverted to blue in 1840 with the exception of the 16th Lancers, which earned it the nickname ‘Scarlet Lancers’.
William’s illegitimate son, George Fitzclarence, served in the 10th Hussars in the Peninsula, and went on to become deputy adjutant-general: the king made him Earl of Munster, with rather a bad grace, in 1831. Lieutenant John ‘Scamp’ Stilwell of the 95th, believed to be a natural son of the Duke of York, was killed at Waterloo. Another of the duke’s alleged by-blows, Captain Charles Hesse of the 18th Hussars, was wounded there. Charles Greville described him as ‘a short, plump, vulgar-looking man,’ but he was a famous Lothario and had affairs with both Princess Charlotte and the Queen of Naples. He was killed in a duel in 1832, ironically by Count Leon, an illegitimate son of Napoleon by Eleonore Develle, a young lady-in-waiting of Napoleon’s sister Caroline. In 1840 the disreputable Leon challenged his cousin Louis, the future Emperor Napoleon III, then in exile in London, but the duellists and their seconds were arrested on Wimbledon Common.
The late Victorian army lay under the conservative shadow of the queen’s cousin, George William Frederick Charles, Duke of Cambridge, son of George III’s seventh son. Given command of 1st Division in 1854 at the age of 35, he was the only divisional commander in the Crimea not to have served in the Peninsula, and some of the misfortunes suffered by his men in their untidy advance at the Alma sprang from his inexperience. ‘What am I to do?’ he asked Brigadier General ‘Gentlemanly George’ Buller, an unreliable fount of advice. ‘Why, your Royal Highness,’ replied Buller, ‘I am in a little confusion here – you had better advance, I think.’12
He was in the very thick of the fighting at Inkerman, where his division bore the brunt of the battle. The duke laconically ordered the Grenadier Guards to clear the Russians from the sand bag battery: ‘You must drive them out of it.’ The Grenadiers did as they were told, and the duke then halted them, but part of the 95th, in another division, surged on past, led by a huge Irish lance-corporal shouting: ‘We’re driving them, sir, we’re driving them.’13 Captain Richard Temple Godman of the 5th Dragoon Guards thought that he had been marked by the battle. ‘He is said to be in an extraordinary state of excitement since Inkerman,’ he wrote on 12 November 1854. ‘He seems much liked by the soldiers. I hope there is nothing wrong with his mind.’14 All was certainly not well with his body, for he was apparently as verminous as his men. When the surgeon of the Scots Fusilier Guards complained to his servant that his shirt was full of lice, the servant replied: ‘The Duke of Cambridge is covered with them, sir.’15 He became commander-in-chief of the army in 1856, and had to be bullied into retiring at the age of 76 in 1895. He set his face firmly against military reform, fearing that tradition would be undermined, and arguing that the army’s success had been repeatedly demonstrated on the battlefield and could be ensured by a repetitious round of field-days and inspections.
Queen Victoria, disbarred by her gender from military service, nonetheless appeared, when a young woman, in a fetching uniform of a round black hat with a red and white plume, a general’s tunic (turned down at the collar to show white blouse and black cravat) and dark blue riding habit. She rode side-saddle on a horse with field-marshal’s badges on its saddle-cloth and holsters. Victoria took her military duties very seriously, presenting medals with evident pride and, at the very end of her life, doing her best to sign commissions personally despite failing health and a burgeoning of temporary appointments to meet the demands of the Boer War. Her alleged partiality for the Scots Fusilier Guards caused resentment in the Guards Brigade, and when the regiment fell back in some disorder at the Alma as the result of a misunderstood order, the Grenadiers and Coldstream, coming on steadily through the fire, chorused: ‘Shame! Shame! What about the queen’s favourites now?’16 Her husband, Prince Albert, took a lively interest in military affairs. He attended the allied Council of War, held in London on 16 April 1855, and helped dissuade Napoleon III from going to take personal command in the Crimea. He was Colonel of the 11th Hussars and the Rifle Brigade, and both retained his name as part of their regimental titles until the amalgamations of the 1960s.
Many officers found comfort, then as now, in claiming to serve the monarch rather than the government, although it was not always an easy distinction to make in an age when officers often sat in the House of Commons, usually returned for a seat where their family or friends had a controlling interest. In 1775, William Howe, then a major general and MP for Nottingham, assured his constituents that his political principles precluded him from accepting a command in North America. When he did agree to serve there, an aggrieved elector told him frankly: ‘I don’t wish you to fall, as many do, but I cannot say I wish success to the undertaking.’ Howe replied that ‘my going thither was not of my seeking. I was ordered, and could not refuse, without incurring the odious name of backwardness to serve my country in distress.’17
A generation later, John Fitzmaurice of the 95th believed that a soldier should have no politics, and Francis Skelly Tidy, who commanded a battalion of the 14th at Waterloo, told his daughter that he was neither Whig nor Tory: ‘I am a soldier and one of His Majesty’s most devoted servants, bound to defend the crown with my life against either faction as necessary.’18 General Sir Charles Napier, conqueror of Sind, had radical political views, and when in charge of Northern Command in England hoped that the ‘physical force’ Chartists did not attempt an armed rising, for their own good. ‘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 tails among them, roaring, scorching, tearing and smashing all they came near?’19 He was perfectly prepared to take extreme action to defend the state, though he had little time for its government. Sergeant Samuel Ancell of the 58th Regiment a veteran of the siege of Gibraltar, summed up his own allegiance in words reminiscent of those put by Shakespeare into Henry V’s mouth, the night before Agincourt:
Our King is answerable to God for us. I fight for him. My religion consists in a firelock, open touch-hole, good flint, well-rammed charge, and seventy rounds of powder and ball. This is the military creed. Come, comrades, drink success to British