Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
gone, and the laps of his frock coat were perforated with balls.’7 He promptly volunteered to lead a second fruitless attempt, from which only nineteen men of two hundred survived. Dyas was eventually made captain in the Ceylon Regiment, and ended his days as a resident magistrate in Ireland.
Infinitely more controversial was John Nicholson, born in 1822 to a family of Scots Lowland stock who moved to Ulster in the early seventeenth century. Educated at the Royal School, Dungannon, he gained a commission in the East India Company’s army in 1839. Nicholson quickly showed aptitude for political work, and the discovery of his brother’s emasculated body in the Khyber Pass did much to harden an already tough character. He believed in the application of what he called ‘swift, stern justice’, and on one occasion politely apologised to the officers waiting in their ante-room: dinner would be delayed because he had been hanging the Indian cooks. There was something of the wholly unforgiving Old Testament deity in him. When he appeared in the British camp on Delhi Ridge in 1857, black-bearded, grey-eyed, and unshakeably convinced in the righteousness of his cause, one young officer thought that he was ‘by the grace of God … a king coming into his own.’8 He was only a regimental captain but had just been appointed brigadier general to lead the Mobile Column down from Peshawar. When the British stormed Delhi, he was mortally wounded. As he lay dying, gut-shot in a sweltering tent, he thanked God that he still had the strength to pistol the British commander if he ordered a retreat.
Whatever Charles II’s problems, financial or domestic, officer recruitment was not one of them. There was a glut of ex-officers who had fought for his father, as well as former members of the New Model who had adhered to George Monck. The problem was not so much finding officers as in accommodating even a fraction of the claimants on royal gratitude who already had impressive military credentials. John Gwyn had just missed Edgehill, the first major battle of the war, but was at the storm of Brentford a few weeks later, and fought on throughout the first civil war, becoming a captain. He was in arms in the second civil war, and then fought in Scotland before joining Charles II’s little army in Flanders, where he was captured at the battle of the Dunes in 1658. Gwyn had lost his commission by 1663 and was then serving as a gentleman trooper. His Military Memoirs, a vivid account ‘of all the field-fights and garrisons I have been in’, were written with a view to gaining the employment to which his service seemed to entitle him. There were thousands of John Gwyns about, but in 1665 only 210 officers in Charles’s regiments and another 134 in his garrisons. By 1684 the overall number of permanent commissions had risen to 613. This increase resulted from bringing the Tangier garrison and the Earl of Dumbarton’s regiment (later the Royal Scots) onto the English establishment, and the raising of one new regiment, the Royal Dragoons. Even at the height of the Dutch War in 1678 there were still under a thousand officers, many of whom lost their commissions when war-raised units were disbanded. Gwyn was right to stress his royalist background (though we cannot tell what good it did him) because this was an army wholly dominated by old cavaliers. In 1665, 65 per cent of officers had fought for Charles I or been in exile with his son, and only 10 per cent, most of them concentrated in the Coldstream Guards, had served the Protectorate. Rather more, a full 25 per cent, had held commissions in the English brigade in Dutch service.
There was never a homogeneous officer corps. At this early stage, there were three broad groups of officers, a categorisation that would persist until well into the eighteenth century. First came the professionals, whom John Childs calls men ‘who were forced to look to their swords in order to earn a living’. Before the regular army came into existence there had been English families like the Cravens, Russells, Sidneys, and Veres who had traditionally sent their young men off to serve on the continent. Much the same thing happened in Scotland. Among the Scottish officers in Russian service in the early seventeenth century we find the names Crawford, Wemyss, and Hamilton. Alexander Crawford assured the tsar that he already had eight years experience as an officer in the Danish and Swedish armies, and was just the fellow to command a regiment.9 The Hapsburgs, with their long-running wars against the Turks, were always on the lookout for smart young men. Their charmingly credulous acceptance of self-devised genealogy (‘Descended from King Arthur: why then, your highness, that must make you a prince’) and eagerness to bestow titles of their own, made them attractive employers. Ireland, with its heartbreaking catalogue of rebellion and disappointment, was a fruitful source of officers. Field Marshal Maximilian Ulysses von Browne, one of the most competent Austrian commanders of the Seven Years War, was son and nephew of Irish gentlemen exiled after the failure of Tyrone’s rebellion in 1603. Over the years the royal and imperial Rangliste included the delightful composites Franz Moritz Graf von Lacy and Laval Graf Nugent von Westmeath. The Prussians could do as well when they put their minds to it, and when an English war correspondent, Lieutenant Colonel Ponsonby, got into difficulties at the battle of Rezonville in 1870 he was saved by Oberleutnant Campbell von Craigmillie.
After 1660, though, there was at least a chance that some professionals could serve their own country. Professor Childs’ sample of forty-three of these officers shows them to have been a mixed bunch, with eight of them sons of peers, ten born to baronets or knights, and twenty to ordinary gentlemen, with just five from poor backgrounds.10 Most were second or third sons, underlining their dependence on military service. Until the army’s wartime expansion of 1672 there were simply not enough vacancies in the English establishment for all these men, and commissions cost money that they could rarely afford. Some served in foreign armies (as their fathers or uncles might have done before them) or in overseas garrisons, whose troops were not part of the establishment. Tangier, in particular, was a source of both regular employment and frequent combat.
Two of Tangier’s paladins, admirable examples of the professional warrior, were Andrew Rutherford, Earl of Teviot and Sir Palmes Fairborne. We must not be misled by Teviot’s title. He was the impecunious fifth son of a junior branch of a great Scots family. Like many of his countrymen, Teviot learnt his trade abroad, becoming a lieutenant general in the French service where he earned a fine reputation for courage. In 1662 Charles made him governor of Tangier and an earl in the Scots peerage, but a misjudgement in the endemic irregular war against the Moors saw him caught outside the city’s walls in a savage little battle in which he was killed, with nineteen other officers and nearly 500 men. The ‘worthy and brave’ Fairborne was the son of Colonel Stafford Fairborne, royalist governor of Newark in the first civil war. This claim on royal patronage was not enough to get him a regular commission though, and he had already helped defend Crete against the Turks before he was made a captain in the Tangier Regiment in 1662. Fairborne spent much of his time as deputy governor of Tangier, not much helped by the fact that his master, the one-eyed William, 2nd Earl of Inchiquin (given the job because of his late father’s distinguished service to the royalist cause in Ireland) was incompetent and vindictive. In 1678 Fairborne slipped his eldest son Stafford into the governor’s regiment as an ensign. The lad was only twelve, and he would have been gratified by the fact that after eight years in the army, Stafford Fairborne shifted to the navy and died an admiral. Palmes Fairborne was mortally wounded in October 1680, but lived a day or two and so saw his soldiers mount the attack that ended the long siege of Tangier and enabled the English to conclude a three-year peace treaty. In the long term Tangier was untenable and was evacuated in 1684: the Tangier Regiment was taken onto the establishment as the Queen’s Regiment. Other professionals served in the English force in Portugal until its disbandment in 1668 or the Anglo-Dutch brigade in the Dutch service, whence several slipped back into the English army.
In contrast, the six regiments of horse and foot on the English establishment were in the hands of ‘gentleman officers’: the second category of officers. A sample of 188 who served between 1661 and 1685 shows thirty-nine to have been the sons of peers, seventy-three of baronets or knights, fifty-eight of ordinary gentlemen: the remaining eighteen were low-born.11 It is striking to see that eighty of these officers were first sons, content to serve until they inherited. They were far happier to mount guard in Whitehall or Windsor than to fry their brains in Tangier. Most had bought their commissions. The classic arguments in favour of purchase had yet to be made, but public offices of all sorts – ‘places’ – were commonly bought and sold, so this practice ran comfortably with the venial tide of the times. A man who desired a first commission or promotion had first to obtain royal approval, and then find an officer prepared to sell, and agree a price with him. A set