BRITISH ARMY OFFICERS IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY AND NAPOLEONIC WARS - PART TWO
BRITISH ARMY OFFICERS IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY AND NAPOLEONIC WARS – PART TWO
A constant curse to those who had to administer the purchase system was the payment of ‘over regulation’ prices. Here an officer who wished to retire or purchase promotion would demand a sum in addition to the official price. This was entirely illegal and the Duke of York laid down that any officer caught asking for or paying anything over the regulation price was, on conviction by court martial, to be cashiered, lose his commission (and be therefore unable to realise any money by selling it), with half the value going to the informant. Despite this copper’s nark’s charter, the practice went on.
In October 1808 Lieutenant John Orrok, serving with the 33rd Foot in India, wrote to his father that a Major Quin had said that he would sell out provided that he got £5,000 in addition to the full price of his commission. The regulation price for a majority was £2,600 and the difference between a major’s and a captain’s commission, the step, was £1,100. Captain Lambton would contribute £3,000 on top of the step and would get the major’s vacancy, while Orrok would find £2,000 over and above the step of £950 and get Lambton’s captain’s vacancy. Although Orrok was seventh in seniority of lieutenants, none of those above him could afford to purchase. Orrok did say that there was a lieutenant of the regiment, now in England, who did have the money, but as he had gone home under arrest he was probably not a contender. Despite the blatant illegality of this transaction, Orrok was encouraged to find the money by his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Gore. In contrast, Captain Robert Crauford – ‘Black Bob’, the famous commander of the Light Division who, by now then a major general, was killed at the storming of Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812 – had been offered £2,500 on top of the regulation amount for his captaincy, which he refused, insisting that he would accept only that amount sanctioned by the sovereign.
While purchase was the norm, there were all sorts of exceptions. There was no purchase in the Royal Artillery or the Royal Engineers. While officers of the infantry and cavalry might be expected to learn their trade as they went along, those who took charge of large amounts of explosive, either for putting in cannons or for blowing things up, and who needed to understand technical matters, like placing siege guns or building bridges, had to know what they were up to. Candidates for commissions in those arms attended the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, opened in 1741, for a course lasting between eighteen months and two years, engineers spending an extra six months. Candidates had to be between the ages of fourteen and sixteen on entry, be of a minimum height of four feet nine inches and be ‘well grounded in vulgar fractions, able to write a good hand and have gone through the Latin Grammar’. It was recommended, though not compulsory, that entrants should have some knowledge of the French language. Thereafter promotion was by strict seniority, which might seem a fairer system, but it had grave disadvantages, one being that while purchase allowed men of real ability to rise to high rank while they were young enough and fit enough to do it justice, many of the artillery and engineer officers were, while not quite dribbling down their waistcoats, far too old, far too fat and far too unfit to be of much use. As officers of the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers took their initial seniority as subalterns from their positions in the final examination before commissioning, a difference of one or two places could mean a wait of several years when it came to promotion – a powerful incentive to study. Hence the officer who was, in practice if not in name, Wellington’s Commander Royal Artillery in the latter stages of the Peninsula War was Alexander Dickson, a thirty-six-year-old substantive captain, local major but made a lieutenant colonel in the Portuguese army to give him some clout. The post would normally have been filled by an officer of at least major general’s rank. Similarly, his chief engineer was Richard Fletcher, a major, local lieutenant colonel and finally a substantive lieutenant colonel before being killed at the siege of San Sebastian in 1813.
First commissions might be granted free of purchase when new regiments were being raised, and an officer from the militia who transferred to the regular army bringing a set number of recruits with him, might be granted a free commission. Lieutenant John Kincaid, adjutant of the 1st Battalion 95th Rifles at Waterloo, a Scot who had been a lieutenant in the North Yorkshire Militia, obtained a free commission in the 95th in 1809 as a second lieutenant by bringing volunteers for his militia unit with him. Queen’s pages, teenage sons of the gentry selected to wait upon the queen and carry her train on formal occasions, were granted free first commissions in the Guards. Free commissions were also awarded to those who excelled in the passing out examination from the Royal Military College, which was located at Great Marlow from 1802 until 1812, when it moved to Sandhurst. Graduates of the college not granted free commissions took first priority for purchase. Orphans of officers killed in action could also be granted free first commissions at the discretion of the Commander-in-Chief.
A sergeant could be awarded a free first commission, either for gallantry or for continuous good service. Contrary to popular opinion now, there were quite a lot of them and by the time of Waterloo in 1815 around 10 per cent of the officers at regimental duty had been commissioned from the ranks . They were particularly in demand as adjutants in line battalions. Today the adjutant is the battalion staff officer, responsible for ensuring that the commanding officer’s policy is put into practice as well as overseeing ceremonial and discipline. What is now ceremonial drill, where battalions form divisions, march past in column of companies, and form into line before halting, was then tactics – the evolutions necessary on the battlefield to bring the unit to the right place at the right time and deliver maximum fire on the enemy. This required an understanding of a large number of words of command and an ex-sergeant might often be much more knowledgeable of the commands and of the actions to be taken on them than an officer from a conventional background.
A commissioned sergeant might be promoted into a vacancy caused by death, but once peace was declared, very few had the money to progress further, and in the 1820s and 1830s there were numbers of very elderly lieutenants and captains, who, because they had not bought their commissions, could not, under the rules then extant, sell them until they had completed twenty-five years’ service. While on active service an ex-NCO could fit in and be respected for his knowledge and ability, in peacetime many found it difficult to fit into the officers’ mess, and, according to evidence given by Wellington to a committee of inquiry in 1842, too many turned to drink.
In wartime an officer, might progress up the ranks free of purchase by leading a Forlorn Hope. When a fort or a fortified town was being besieged, there were three ways for the attackers to gain entry – over, under or through. Over meant escalade, the placing of ladders against the walls for the attacking troops to climb up, a very dangerous method if the defenders were at all awake, although it was by escalade that the first British troops were into Badajoz in 1812. Under meant tunnelling under the walls and setting fire to the pit props, thus collapsing the tunnel and the walls above it, a long and difficult undertaking and usually impossible if the objective was built on rock, as was Ciudad Rodrigo, taken in 1812. Through meant hammering away at the walls with siege guns – 24 or 32 pounders – until a breach was created, through which the attackers could gain entry. Once a breach had been made and the engineers had deemed it ‘practicable’ – which meant that it could be ascended by a soldier without using his hands – a small body of men was needed to seize and hold the breach to allow the main body to enter and take on the defending garrison. That body was known as the ‘Forlorn Hope’, an apt term from the Dutch ‘verloren hoop’ or lost hope and the officer commanding it was promoted one rank free of purchase if he survived, which he frequently did not. At Badajoz the last words of Major Peter O’Hare, 95th Rifles, as he led the forlorn hope against the breach, were ‘A lieutenant colonel or cold meat in a couple of hours’. For O’Hare it was cold meat, whereas the twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant John Gurwood of the 52nd Light Infantry, who commanded the forlorn hope at Ciudad Rodrigo, got away with a slight head wound, collected his captaincy and retired many years later as a lieutenant colonel[*].
Another method of obtaining a free commission was ‘recruiting for rank’, whereby a man who raised a company’s worth of men was granted a captain’s commission. Only resorted to when the army was desperate for recruits (in other words, quite often), it was highly unpopular amongst officers who were already in the service, as it allowed the new entrant to supersede all those already holding lieutenant’s and ensign’s rank. Meanwhile, a somewhat last-gasp approach to getting a free commission was to enlist as a gentleman volunteer. These were young men who could not raise the money for a commission nor obtain a free one, and who served as private soldiers without pay (although messing with the officers) in the hope of showing sufficient ability to obtain an ensign’s vacancy arising by death. In time of peace this was not, of course, a swift method to becoming an officer and there appears to have been very few, if any, such men still in the army by the time of Waterloo.
A peculiarity of the system was the holding of double rank by officers of the Guards, who as the monarch’s personal troops held both regimental rank and army rank. This meant that captains in the Guards who were serving with their regiments were company commanders and paid as captains. When employed outside the regiment, however, they were lieutenant colonels and treated and paid as such. Similarly lieutenants were captains or majors in the army, depending upon seniority and ensigns lieutenants, while majors were colonels in the army and lieutenant colonels major generals. This can be confusing, as it is often said that ‘six Guards lieutenant colonels were killed at Waterloo’, whereas there were but four battalions of Guards at Waterloo, and a battalion is commanded by a lieutenant colonel. In fact one of these lieutenant colonels was a captain by regimental rank and an ADC to Wellington, while the other five were company commanders in their Guards battalions with the regimental rank of captain. Double rank was abolished in 1871 as part of the series of army reforms undertaken by Gladstone’s secretary for war, Edward Cardwell, from 1870 – 1874.
[*] He also compiled Wellington’s despatches (twelve volumes plus an index, published in 1837 and an essential aid for the scholar of the period) and committed suicide in December 1845.