KING GEORGE'S OFFICERS - PART THREE
KING GEORGE’S OFFICERS – PART THREE
As commissions and promotions were strictly regulated by the Horse Guards, the only influence over promotion a commander in the field could have was when an officer was killed in action, and when he sent an officer home carrying despatches. As a commission was not inheritable property and died with the holder, the vacancy could be filled free of purchase, and custom dictated that when this happened on active service the local commander of the forces could fill it with a deserving officer of his choice. Technically the commander could promote anyone, provided he was qualified by time and recommendation, but in practice it usually went to the next senior. The more senior the deceased officer was, of course, the more free promotions flowed from his death, hence the regular toast in officers’ messes was ‘here’s to a sudden plague and a bloody war’. While such promotions had to be approved by the Horse Guards, approval was hardly ever withheld. After a successful battle the Commander-in-Chief would write a detailed report of the action, which would be taken back to England and delivered to the government and the king. By tradition the officer bearing the despatch received a promotion of one rank, free of purchase, and commanders would usually select a promising officer who lacked the cash to buy his next rank.
Once an officer reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, there was no more purchase and promotion was strictly by seniority. Provided a man lived long enough, he would become a general, although this is not as serious as it might appear for while he might achieve high rank, he was not necessarily employed, and if he was not employed, he did not draw the pay. Before Wellesley’s first foray to the Peninsula in 1808 he was a major general. The government, and the Horse Guards, considered that the expedition merited an officer of a more senior rank, that of lieutenant general. There were however, twenty-eight major generals senior to Wellesley. The seniority principle was sacred, in that it removed any possibility of patronage or corruption. The answer was to promote them all, which happened, and to employ but a few – indeed only Henry Lord Paget, a cavalry officer and later the Marquis of Anglesey, was to play any major part in the war [*]. The important thing was to get to lieutenant colonel as fast as possible, which with luck and ability would ensure employment as a more senior officer when young enough to exercise it.
Again, contrary to modern popular opinion, the officers of King George’s army were not drawn from the aristocracy. With the exception of the Guards and a few of the smarter cavalry regiments, the bulk of the officers were of the middle classes. They were not the products of the public schools (that comes in the Victorian era) nor of the universities, rather they were educated in grammar schools and were the sons of professional men: doctors, lawyers, clerks in holy orders[†], minor landed gentry. Around 20 per cent of all officers in the period 1790 to 1830 were Scottish, which had very little do with the martial qualities of the Scots – great though those may well be – but a great deal to do with education in Scotland being much better than that in England[‡]. A survey conducted in 1818 looked inter alia at the occupations of army officers’ fathers, and found that the largest of the groups of occupations featured was that of army officer, so in a sense army officers were members of a self-perpetuating oligarchy.
A cursory look at the Army List for 1815 appears to negate the statement that officers were not of the nobility. Many generals are peers, most colonels are knights, but with a few exceptions peerages and knighthoods were earned by military service, rather as Junker status originally was in Prussia. A colonel would often be knighted or awarded the Commander of the Order of the Bath (CB), a major general would certainly be knighted and a successful general elevated to the peerage. Colonel Wellesley became Colonel Sir Arthur Wellesley KB (Knight of the Order of the Bath) in September 1804; Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Wellesley became Viscount Wellington of Talavera in August 1809; as a general he became Earl Wellington in February 1812 and Marquis Wellington in September of the same year, and as a field marshal he became the Duke of Wellington in May 1814.
Many officers were Roman Catholics. While Catholics had been permitted to join the army as Other Ranks since 1741 (and did join long before that), they were still debarred by law from holding any ‘office of profit under the crown’, which meant that they could not hold commissions in the Royal Navy or the army, and could not become members of parliament nor civil servants, nor could they be admitted to Oxford or Cambridge universities. These laws had been in force since the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Catholic king, James II, had been deposed and replaced by his daughter Mary and son-in-law William of Orange, who were Protestant. It is this author’s view that despite the restrictions flowing from the Test Acts and the Act of Succession, England was not anti-Catholic, but anti-foreign, which is not the same thing. The Reformation of the 1530s was much more to do with control – who ruled England, the king or the pope? – than theology and was only the culmination of English suspicion of a French-dominated papacy, that was already two centuries old. What did for James was not his Catholicism. His daughters, Mary and Anne, the next two in line to the succession, were Protestant and married to Protestants (Anne to George of Denmark). It was his production of a son late in life out of his Catholic second wife, Mary of Modena, from a French client state and whose dowry had been paid by the king of France, that gave rise to a fear of a foreign-dominated succession.
The army, however, was a pragmatic organisation that wanted men who could do the business, and if they happened to be Catholics, well, that was fine provided that they did not make it too obvious. Every few years an act of indemnity would be passed through parliament indemnifying the army for breaking the law by commissioning Catholics, usually put through in the dead of night when not many MPs were about, and tacked onto some piece of legislation that nobody was very interested in. Thus, as one of the few outlets for a Catholic gentleman was the army, there developed in Catholic families and Catholic schools a tradition of finding officers for the army, a tradition that continues to this day, although there is now, of course, no bar to Catholics holding any office although the monarch may not be[§]. In 2022, Roman Catholics made up just over 8 per cent of the population of the United Kingdom, but 20 per cent of the officers of the army, with Downside, Douai, Ampleforth, Stoneyhurst and other Catholic schools providing a steady stream of Sandhurst entrants[**].
Anachronistic although it seems to us now – as it did to some even then – the British system did produce an effective officer corps. Of course there were idle officers, incompetent officers, even cowardly officers, but they were very few and by the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 had mostly been weeded out, either by peer pressure, persuasion, movement to non-operational theatres or – rarely – outright sacking[††]. In the early days of the Peninsular War there had even been cases of officers who were not trusted being found dead with a musket ball in the back after a battle. The men who became officers had been brought up to believe that they were destined to lead – in society, in politics, in the church, in the management of estates, or in the army – and it would never have occurred to them that they were not meant to do so. They had an inbuilt self-belief, and in an age when very few Jacks considered themselves as good as their masters, the social class system was replicated in the officer/man relationship in the army. British general officers were more able to think strategically than their French equivalents because their mental horizons were not constrained by time spent in the ranks nor, at least in the early days, by fear of execution if they got things wrong. Similarly, Wellington’s junior officers were less dependent upon the army to make a living than were their French opposite numbers, and were thus more prepared to use their initiative, even if this often merited a stern rebuke from the Duke.
An examination of the origins and backgrounds of British army officers in the years running up to Waterloo shows that they are exactly the same people who join as officers now, the difference being that today’s officers get there after rigorous selection and intensive training, and at a much older age, and do not get knighted unless they are very senior indeed[‡‡] .
[*] He wrote an excellent history of the British cavalry, a task repeated by his descendant, the seventh marquis, Paget, George Charles Henry Victor (1922 - 2013), Marquess of Anglesey, A History of the British Cavalry, 1816–1919, 8 Vols, Leo Cooper, London, 1973–1996.
[†] This author has always been puzzled by the number of sons of the clergy who became officers then and still do so today – perhaps it is a reaction to turning the other cheek and not swearing. He seems to remember that in his days as a single subaltern, vicars’ daughters were rather good news, but that is another story…
[‡] Some things don’t change.
[§] Contrary to popular belief the Prime Minister can be a Roman Catholic, but under the Catholic Relief Act of 1829 no Roman Catholic can have any involvement in the selection of Church of England bishops. As the monarch choses bishops on the advice of the prime minister, should the prime minister be a Roman Catholic (none yet) an alternative method of selection would doubtless be employed. Boris Johnston was born a Roman Catholic but converted to Anglicanism, Disraeli converted from Judaism to Anglicanism aged 12 and the present PM is a Hindu.
[**] At one time this author was the only C of E British officer in his (Gurkha) battalion. All the others (eleven) were Roman Catholics. It mattered not a jot.
[††] Sacking was difficulty because a commission was personal property that could not easily be taken away. In Spain even Wellington was reluctant to dismiss senior officers he considered incompetent, often asking the Duke of York to find them another job in Britain or Ireland.
[‡‡] Today around one in three of lieutenant generals (of whom there are few) receives a knighthood. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars In 1815 all active lieutenant generals in the Army List were knights of one sort or another.