Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
Tower. Perhaps most surprising was the resurgence of Colonel Solomon Richards, once lieutenant colonel of Oliver Cromwell’s own regiment of foot, appointed by James in September 1688 and then reappointed by William. Richards immediately sacked five suspect officers, but did not last long. In 1698 he brought his regiment away from Londonderry at the beginning of its famous siege, glumly reporting that the place was doomed, and William duly sacked him, not for political unreliability but for incompetence.16 Charles Trelawney was a Cornishman whose military career, with spells in the English regiment in French service and the garrison of Tangier, was classically that of the cash-strapped professional. He had been Percy Kirke’s lieutenant colonel, and took over the Queen’s Regiment from him. In 1688 he deserted to William, and returned to his regiment to get rid of his lieutenant colonel, major and eleven other officers.
These measures took some time to take effect. In April 1689 John Evelyn, who had just heard that James had landed in Ireland ‘and was become master of that kingdom’, feared that ‘This is a terrible beginning of more troubles, especially should an army come thence into Scotland, people being generally disaffected here and everywhere else, so that the sea and land men would scarce serve without compulsion.’17 There were mass desertions, at least as much because of the disruption caused by the new postings and William’s decision to send some of his English regiments to fight in the Low Countries while many Dutch remained in Britain. Some units mutinied on their way to Harwich and Ipswich for embarkation. The poor reputation of the English may have encouraged Marshal d’Humières to attack the Prince of Waldeck’s allied force at Walcourt that April, but he received a sharp rebuff, not least because the newly created Earl of Marlborough had his English contingent well in hand. A commission ‘for reforming the abuses in the army’ was appointed in May, but the commissioners discovered that there were by now few Jacobite officers left, although there were abuses aplenty, like incomplete clothing, pay in arrears, and the familiar racket of colonels pocketing the pay for men who did not exist.
William’s policy of appointing Dutchmen to senior commands (and giving them peerages, albeit Irish ones) exasperated his senior officers. Friction between the professional and gentleman officers remained. Although some of the former vanished – Hugh Mackay and John Lanier were killed at the shockingly bloody battle of Steenkirk in 1692 and Percy Kirke died of fever – others, like Marlborough and his brother Charles, Salamander Cutts, and Thomas Tollemache were rising stars. Trailing in their wide slipstream were the new professionals, no longer men who had to serve abroad because there were no vacancies in a small force dominated by court interest, but young men, often from the middling gentry or commerce, who sought to make a long-term career in the army. They served alongside men who would have been comfortable enough roistering with Charles II’s red-heeled gallants but did not intend to soldier forever.
Although William hated the practice of buying commissions, and would happily have adopted the Dutch custom of promoting men on merit, purchase was by now too deeply entrenched for him to expunge it. It remained central to providing officers for an army that, in the reigns of William and his successor Anne, grew in size and self-esteem to become a force of European stature. It expanded, but not steadily, as wartime growth was usually matched by peacetime contraction. James II’s army of around 20,000 rose to some 70,000 in 1709, up to 134,500 in 1762 at the height of the Seven Years War, down to around 40,000 in 1793 and then up to a staggering quarter-million in 1814. In Victoria’s long reign it bottomed out at 91,300 in 1839, and then rose again to exceed 200,000 by 1861. By this time, despite the strictures of Liberal politicians and the complaints of economists, the old pattern of expansion and contraction was constrained by the need to defend the empire and fight a series of small wars, some of which, like the Crimean War of 1853–6 and the second Boer War of 1899–1902, had the uncomfortable ability to morph into big ones.
Whatever the system’s purely military defects, it did have the political advantage of producing an officer corps which, while far from homogeneous, was composed largely of men with the proverbial ‘stake in the country’. Regimental rolls were filled with officers who wanted stability. Charles Clode, writing in 1871, argued that the system attracted ‘men of independent means – not merely professional officers,’ and added that Wellington had approved of purchase because ‘it brings into the service men of fortune and character – men who have some connection with the interests or fortunes of the country.’18 The historian Sir John Fortescue maintained that the whole system was economical: for an officer’s pay rarely exceeded the interest on the price of his commission; secure: because officers were bound over for good behaviour on the price of their commissions; and convenient: because sales ensured a steady flow of promotion. Across the whole period 1660–1871 about two-thirds of commissions were purchased. In peacetime the great majority were bought, but in wartime it was difficult to ensure a steady flow of young men whose relatives were prepared to disgorge a substantial sum to give the lad an early chance of death or dismemberment. In 1810, for instance, about four-fifths of all commissions – whether on first appointment or promotion – had been given without purchase.
Purchase was never universal. It did not apply in the artillery or engineers, where officers advanced by remorseless seniority, and there were always non-purchase vacancies that could be given to NCOs promoted to adjutants’ posts or deserving young men able to generate sufficient interest to get a free ensigncy, perhaps by serving as a gentleman volunteer. Once the system was fully established, vacancies left as a result of death, retirement or promotion were filled by the next most senior officer on the regimental list, so ‘a bloody war or a sickly season’ helped the impecunious to rise. In William’s day the rules had not solidified and abuses were common: Percy Kirke’s son, inconveniently also named Percy, was made an ensign at the age of twelve months in 1684, a captain on his sixth birthday in 1689 and by the time he reported for duty he was his regiment’s senior captain. He went on to be colonel of the Queen’s, like his father and, like him died a lieutenant general. The practice of commissioned well-connected children went on well into the eighteenth century. Lord George Lennox, second son of the Duke of Richmond, was made an ensign at the age of thirteen in 1751 and was lieutenant colonel commanding the 33rd Foot just seven years later at the age of 20. If some officers were too young, others were too old, for there was no way of forcing a man to retire. In 1699 Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Compton, who had survived being pistolled in the chest in the first confused clash on Sedgemoor, was seventy years old, three years younger than his colonel, the Earl of Oxford. Compton evidently had some life left in him, for he had just married a 17-year-old.
Although the detail of purchase varied between 1660 and its abolition in 1871, its general principles are so clear that this is a good moment to explain how it worked. A young man purchasing a commission made an investment, and the pay of his new rank provided him with a dividend. As he bought successive promotions his investment increased, and when he eventually retired he ‘sold out’ and cashed in his shares. The regulation price of his commission might not increase greatly since the initial purchase – in 1766 a lieutenant colonelcy in an infantry regiment cost £3,500 and had only gone up to £4,500 by 1858. But the fact that the purchaser would have to add a non-regulation premium, varying according to the desirability of the regiment in question, meant that that he could expect to make a profit on his investment to support his old age. In 1745 Lieutenant Colonel Cuthbert Ellison sold his commission in the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers for £3,500, saying that his poor health was the ‘great motion’ behind his selling. His estate in County Durham was hopelessly encumbered with debt, but he hoped the proceeds of selling his commission would, with another annuity left him by his uncle, ‘support me with decency, in the decline of life.’ This ‘delightful old hypochondriac’ then proceeded to live for another forty years, dying in 1785 at the age of eighty-seven.19
Like most investments a commission was never wholly secure. If an officer was killed in action or died of natural causes its value was usually lost, although there were times when a grateful government might waive the rules. In 1780 Major John André, adjutant general to Sir Henry Clinton, commander-in-chief in North America, was caught in civilian clothes carrying letters to Benedict Arnold, a major general in the Continental Army who was about to betray West Point to the British. An American court-martial sentenced him to death as a spy, and George Washington, stiffly adhering to the letter of the law, declined to vary the mode of his execution from hanging to