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

enclave of Dunkirk, where life was complicated by the fact that the garrison included both royal troops, like Lord Wentworth’s regiment of foot guards, and former Cromwellian soldiers. The guards were brought back to England, and most of the rest were posted off to be part of the garrison of Tangier, which came to the English Crown in 1661 as part of the dowry of Charles’s wife, the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, or sent to Portugal to support Charles’s father-in-law, John IV. A smattering of plots culminating, in January 1661, in a rising in London led by the cooper Thomas Venner, encouraged Charles to proceed with earlier plans for the formalisation of a royal guard.

      A new regiment of foot guards was raised by John Russell. He had commanded Prince Rupert’s guards in the Civil War; Wentworth’s regiment, at first dispersed amongst garrison towns, was soon amalgamated with it. In February 1661 Albemarle’s regiment of foot was mustered on Tower Hill and formally disbanded before being immediately re-engaged. The two senior regiments of foot guards, today the Grenadier Guards and the Coldstream Guards, both claim histories which pre-date the regular army’s formation: Monck’s regiment had been raised in 1650 and the royal guards in 1656. However, the peculiar circumstances of the Coldstream’s transfer to royal service made it junior to Russell’s 1st Guards. One would be pressed to notice the fact, however, for the Coldstream motto is ‘Nulli Secundus’ (‘Second to None’) and, despite Grenadier mutterings about ‘Second to One’ or ‘Better than Nothing’, the Coldstream has never been known as 2nd Guards.⁹

      Charles’s little army had cavalry too, with three troops of Life Guards, and a single New Model regiment of horse, Colonel Unton Crooke’s, that had somehow escaped disbandment. This moved to London, where it became the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards. It is generally known, from the colour of its coats, as the Horse Guards Blue or more simply The Blues. In addition, there were twenty-eight garrisons elsewhere, larger ones at seaports like Portsmouth and Hull and smaller outposts like the castles of St Mawes and Pendennis, their Cromwellian officers now replaced by reliable royalist gentlemen with local interests. The cost of guards and garrisons exceeded Charles’s total income. Parliament was reluctant to fund a standing army, and there were fears that the soldiery would soon become, as Lord Treasurer Southampton put it, ‘insolent and ungovernable’.

      Charles’s motives in raising the army were threefold. First, at a time when monarchs were on the move a good deal, he would be personally vulnerable without reliable troops for close protection. Second, it was evident that an army, however small, was needed to underpin his foreign policy. Furnishing overseas garrisons is a recurrent theme in the army’s history. It is no accident that the Dunkirk garrison predated the Restoration, and it was run down partly by the direct dispatch of units to the new garrison of Tangier. Third, the army created jobs, and Charles had been restored to a throne resting on the shoulders of men who felt entitled to them. Some royalists had accompanied Charles into exile, and far more had endured life under the Protectorate, often ruined by having to ‘compound’ with the new authorities for their ‘delinquency’.

      In 1662, when Parliament decided to raise money to pension royalist ex-officers, it found that no less than 5,353 gentlemen, mostly former captains and subalterns, were entitled to a share. Ex-NCOs and men petitioned local magistrates for pensions, supporting their claims, where they could, by fulsome testimonials from former commanding officers, setting out the ‘many dangerous hurts’ they had received. Those who could manage it got jobs not just for themselves, but for their children too. Winston Churchill, father of the future Duke of Marlborough, was a West Country gentleman and lawyer turned captain of horse. He spent the 1650s living, with his growing brood, in the genteel poverty of his Parliamentarian mother-in-law’s house. But in 1660 he found himself the delighted recipient of royal favour, with an augmentation (‘Faithful but Unfortunate’, announced his new motto) to his coat of arms, a knighthood, a series of sinecures and a seat in Parliament. His daughter Arabella and his son John both obtained minor posts at court, and after the former had attracted the roving eye of James, Duke of York (she went on to bear him four children), young John was given an ensign’s commission in 1st Guards.

      Charles’s little army survived, and by his death in 1685 had taken on some of the characteristics which still define it. It was the monarch’s own, its officers ‘trusty and well-beloved’ gentlemen bearing royal commissions whose wording has changed little over the centuries, with a fresh document marking successive promotions.

      CHAPTER 2

      KING’S ARMY

      MANY OFFICERS AND men have felt comfortable in vesting the moral responsibility for their actions in the monarch’s person. Waterloo veteran Colonel Francis Skelly Tidy told his daughter: ‘I am a soldier and one of His Majesty’s most devoted servants, bound to defend the Crown with my life against either faction as necessary.’¹ Sergeant Sam Ancell, who fought in the 58th Regiment in the 1779– 83 siege of Gibraltar, announced:

      Our king is answerable to God for us. I fight for him. My religion consists in a firelock, open touch-hole, good flint, well-rammed charge, and seventy rounds of powder and ball. This is the military creed. Come, comrades, drink success to British arms.²

      In 1914 Dora Foljambe, married to a keen Territorial, with a brother in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, a brother-in-law in the same battalion and two sons in the regular army, was delighted to see that the government had apparently shrunk from using the army to enforce Home Rule in Ireland. She told her daughter, married to yet another rifleman, that

      I am very glad this did happen as it shows the feeling in the army against being used as a political tool – for one party against another – if there is to be civil war the army must break up or stand in a body for the King, it is impossible they should fight side by side with the [Irish] Nationalists who cheered every Boer victory in the South African war. Our army is not made up of paid levies.³

      Writing in 1972, Lieutenant Colonel John Baynes affirmed that the monarch’s

      immense significance to the armed forces must first be strongly emphasised … This link with the Head of State is not merely symbolic, but reflects a close loyalty to the person of the Queen as well as to her office. No firmer guarantee of the British soldier’s exclusion from politics exists than his personal dependence on the authority of Her Majesty.⁴

      Robert William Lowry’s commissions lie before me. His appointment as ensign in the 47th Foot, dated 7 June 1841, is signed by Queen Victoria (black ink over a pencil cross reminding the young monarch where she should put her name), though by the time he became a lieutenant colonel on 18 February 1863 the queen entrusted such work to the army’s commander-in-chief, her uncle, George, Duke of Cambridge. He later became the epitome of conservatism, telling the officers of Aldershot garrison, assembled to hear a lecture on cavalry, ‘Why should we want to know anything about foreign cavalry? … We have better cavalry of our own. I fear, gentlemen, that the army is in danger of becoming a mere debating society.’⁵ But he had commanded a division in the Crimea, fighting bravely in the shocking bludgeon-match at Inkerman, and was, as William Robertson recalled, ‘a good friend of the soldier and extremely popular with all ranks of the army.’⁶ When he signed Robert Lowry’s new commission he was interested not only in military reform, but in maintaining (though with diminishing success) that he was directly subordinate to the monarch rather than to the secretary of state of war.

      His rather deliberate ‘George’, with a curlicue swinging round from the last letter to encircle his name, looks restrained on a document rich in stamps and seals. Both commissions are made of robust parchment, folded in four, with the holder’s name on an outer fold, and fit neatly in the inside pocket of an officer’s tunic. Lowry’s second commission is almost exactly the same size as my own – though that was produced almost a century later. When Cambridge was eventually prised out of office in 1895, after a tenure just short of forty years, Victoria resumed signing commissions on her own behalf. Declining health and the flood of new commissions necessitated by the army’s expansion for the Boer war (1899–1902) made things difficult but, borne on by a powerful sense of duty, she struggled