Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes

Major to Brigadier equivalent’. At least one, Dr Julian Lewis, Conservative MP for New Forest East, spent some time at the Royal College of Defence Studies, writing a 10,000-word dissertation that was rated in the top ten for his year. In all about ninety MPs have participated in the scheme. The opinion of serving army officers on its usefulness is divided, with some contributors to the invaluable Army Rumour Service website arguing that anything that brings MPs into closer connection with the services can only do good. The facts that the scheme has flourished despite its lack of official funding, and attracts both peers and MPs who take it very seriously, underline the perceived need to remedy the progressive demilitarisation of parliament.

      Political allegiance and holding a senior military position have existed independently of each other at many points in history. Most military and naval MPs still sitting immediately after 1688 were Tories, although they were soon outweighed by Whigs. It was, by then, possible for an officer to be opposed to the government and to enjoy senior command. Major General James Webb won a useful little victory at Wynendaele in 1708, ensuring that a vital convoy got through to Marlborough who was besieging Lille. Webb was a Tory and the Tories were in opposition. His supporters in the Commons at once complained that he had been insufficiently rewarded for the Wynendaele exploit. The credit seemed to have gone to Marlborough’s chief of staff, William Cadogan, who sat in the Whig interest for Woodstock – the town adjacent to Marlborough’s country estate, Blenheim Palace.

      Ministers were assailed by those who shook the tree of patronage to get commissions, promotions, and appointments for family, friends, and clients. As time went on, ministers became more reluctant to intervene save where they could do so with probity. The papers of the hard-working William, Viscount Barrington, Whig secretary at war 1755–61 and 1765–78, show how patronage worked in the high eighteenth century. In 1760 George, Duke of Marlborough wrote asking for ‘a troop of Dragoons, or a company [captaincy] in an old regiment for a gentleman whose name is Travell: his father was a very zealous friend to us in the late Oxfordshire election … he may stick some time unless your Lordship will favour him with your interest to get promoted.’¹⁶ Marlborough’s insistence on an ‘old’ regiment was intended to ensure that Travell did not get appointed to a junior regiment that would be disbanded at the first opportunity, shoving him off onto half-pay. Barrington failed to oblige the duke, for Francis Travell soldiered on unpromoted, and the 1800 Army List has him as a half-pay lieutenant in the now-disbanded 21st Light Dragoons.

      Barrington was unusually scrupulous in refusing to break the army’s rules even when pressed hard. In 1771 he told Lord North, then Prime Minister, that although he valued the influential Scottish Whig Sir Gilbert Eliott just as much as North himself did:

      Yet I must not assist you in getting a company for his son.

      Two invariable and indispensable rules of the army are that every man shall begin military life with the lowest commission, and that he shall be at least 16 years of age till he shall obtain any …

      Mr. Elliot was not I believe ten years of age when he had a commission of lieutenant & soon after he was most irregularly made a captain. At the reduction [disbandment] of the corps, he was not kept on any list, or kept on half pay … What shall I say to the friends of Mr Stuart, or Price, or a great many others if Mr Elliot is a Captain before them? I shall be told with great truth that his former commission is a nullity though it still remains in his possession. The whole world will condemn me, and what is worst of all, I shall condemn myself.¹⁷

      There was a growing belief that an officer should not be penalised, in his military capacity, for opinions expressed as a Parliamentarian. Yet there were still some serious upsets. William Pitt the Elder was commissioned into Lord Cobham’s Dragoons, with Treasury approval, so that the government could expect the support of his brother, already an MP, and joined his regiment at Northampton. William himself soon became Whig member for that most addled of rotten boroughs, Old Sarum, which had no resident voters at all. He made strident attacks on government policy, causing Prime Minister Robert Walpole, always slow to turn the other cheek, to observe ‘We must muzzle this terrible cornet of horse.’ In 1736 Walpole duly secured the dismissal of Pitt and several other military and naval MPs who had opposed the government. The move was not popular in the house, but none of the dismissed officers was reinstated. In 1764 Lieutenant General Henry Conway, who enjoyed the prestigious colonelcy of the 1st Royal Dragoons, voted against the government and was stripped of his colonelcy. The opposition at once protested that this was military punishment for political offence, and although George III did not restore Conway ‘he never again breached the principle enunciated by Conway’s supporters’, and Conway himself went on to be commander-in-chief.¹⁸

      By the 1780s it was clear that the espousal of firm political views was not necessarily a bar to either high rank or employment in sensitive posts. Three of the most senior generals in North America, William Howe (C-in-C 1775–78), Henry Clinton (C-in-C 1778–82) and John Burgoyne, who surrendered at Saratoga in 1777, were serving MPs. Both Howe and Burgoyne were Whigs, and had spoken in Parliament against the American war. Howe had assured his Nottingham constituents that he would not serve against the colonists. When he agreed to do so one told him that: ‘I don’t wish you to fall, as many do, but I cannot say I wish success to the undertaking.’ Howe replied that ‘I was ordered, and could not refuse, without incurring the odious name of backwardness to serve my country in distress.’¹⁹

      The social unrest that followed the Napoleonic wars saw the clearest example of politically-engaged officers attaining high rank despite firmly held opinions. Charles James Napier was a scion of a military family: his father Colonel George Napier and brothers George and William were soldiers, and another brother was a sailor. He earned a brilliant reputation as an infantry officer in the Peninsula. The Napiers were all radicals, and in George senior’s case experience of revolt in America, Ireland, and France had given him much sympathy for the rebels. For Charles, the process owed much to his wide reading while at the Senior Division of the Royal Military College. In 1839 the government appointed him to command Northern District as a major general. It was a courageous choice, for he was known to sympathise with the Chartists, who constituted the greatest threat to the order he was sworn to preserve, to hate the Corn Laws that kept the price of bread artificially high, and to tell the government precisely what its errors were.

      Charles Napier was able to distinguish between personal sympathy with the Chartists and professional determination to keep the peace. He was inclined to the view that ‘the best way of treating a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards’, and a notion of responsibility to the Crown rather than its ministers also helped him deal with the inconsistencies in his own position. He made it clear that if the ‘physical force’ Chartists rose, then he would crush them. ‘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 tales among them, roaring, scorching, tearing all they came near.’²⁰ This combination of genuine sympathy and absolute firmness made him a notable success in the post.

      He went to India, where his sense of natural justice (laced with a good slug of ambition) encouraged him to beat the Amirs of Sindh at Miani, going on to rule the newly annexed province with benevolent despotism. He returned home in 1847 after much bickering with the East India Company’s hierarchy. In 1849 that arch-conservative the Duke of Wellington was sure that Napier was the only general capable of rescuing the Sikh War from the head-on enthusiasm of the commander-in-chief in India, Sir Hugh Gough. By the time Napier arrived Gough had sledge-hammered his way to victory, and his subsequent trial of strength with the viceroy, Lord Dalhousie, saw Napier return home under a cloud.

      Charles Napier died a general and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, an achievement not prevented by his political views or notorious scruffiness. His brother William, who had also fought with distinction in the Peninsula, was no less radical. When on half-pay in the 1830s, he declined suggestions that he should stand as an MP, and even more wisely refused command of the Chartists’ projected ‘National Guard’. He was a regular speaker at political meetings, and argued that while the army as an institution might indeed be politically neutral, ‘if a soldier does not know and love the social happiness springing from equal and just laws, how, in God’s name,