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

Restoration parliaments imposed no control over the army, provided the king was able to pay for it. The 1661 Militia Act gave Charles II command of ‘all forces by land and sea and all forts and places of strength’, and both Charles and his brother James II proceeded to run the army as what John Childs calls ‘a department of the royal household under the command of the king and his nominees’. 1It had no foundation in common or statute law, and its code of discipline, the Articles of War, stemmed from the royal prerogative. It was not until 1689 that discipline was given the force of statute.

The senior regiment of infantry of the line, the Royal Scots (in existence since 1633 but allowed to claim seniority only from 1661), had fought at Sedgemoor in 1685 as the Earl of Dumbarton’s Regiment. It had previously served under Monmouth on the continent, and a poignant story has him looking out from Bridgwater church towards the royal camp and seeing the regiment’s saltire colours in the gloaming. He would be sure of victory, he sighed, with Dumbarton’s drums behind him.

In 1689 the new government of William and Mary was shipping troops to the Low Countries to fight the French. The fact that the army had not fought for James II the previous year reflected the defection of senior officers and James’s failure of will rather than its affection for William. Scots troops were particularly concerned about being sent abroad while English and Dutch units remained in Britain. After serious unrest along the line of march, the Royal Scots mutinied when they reached Ipswich; over 600 of them set off northwards. The deserters were rounded up with little bloodshed, escorted back to London, and shipped thence to Holland. Nineteen officers were tried, and all but one, who was executed on Tower Green, were simply stripped of their commissions.

The Commons at once passed the first of the many mutiny acts. In theory all it allowed the army to do was to inflict capital or corporal punishment for serious offences, thus meeting the demands of the moment, and it was not conceived as a means of asserting parliamentary control. Indeed, there were times during William’s reign when it lapsed altogether without bringing about a collapse of discipline. From 1690 to 1878 Parliament passed mutiny acts annually, and as time went on both their scope and intent changed. As late as 1761 it was decided that neither the act nor articles of war deriving from it were binding on the army when engaged in war abroad, although discipline in such circumstances was preserved through similar articles issued under the royal prerogative. In 1803 the Act was extended to include the army within or without the Crown’s dominions in peace or war. It was replaced by the Army Discipline and Regulating Act of 1879, itself superseded by the Army Act of 1881 which, just like the old Mutiny Act, had to be passed annually. By this stage it was, as the Manual of Military Law announced, the essential means of ‘securing the constitutional principle of the control of parliament over the discipline requisite for the government of the army.’ 2This was in turn replaced by the Army Act of 1955, the current basis for military discipline, whose Section 69 – the catch-all ‘conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline’ – has been the bane of the scruffy, ill-disposed or unlucky ever since.

Alongside the assertion of parliamentary control came a gradual shift of power as the army became first a department of state in its own right, and eventually part of a unified Ministry of Defence. The detail does not concern us here, but the salient features are worth noting. ‘The Sovereign is Commander-in-Chief,’ affirmed the Manual of Military Law, ‘unless the office is granted away.’ Such was often the case. The Duke of Marlborough, the army’s captain-general under Queen Anne, commissioned officers on his own authority, telling a delighted Lady Oglethorpe that her boy could have his promised ensigncy in the Foot Guards: ‘If you please to send me the young gentleman’s Christian name, his commission shall be dispatched immediately.’ 3Sometimes the office was not filled, and sometimes its holders were ineffective, but as we have seen, the royal dukes of York and Cambridge both exercised substantial power.

The secretary at war was a civilian official, who had begun as the commander-in-chief’s secretary, based in the army’s headquarters which established itself at Horse Guards at Whitehall in 1722. The secretary at war became increasingly important, and in 1793 was made responsible for submitting the army estimates to parliament. Since the Restoration there had been two secretaries of state, peers or members of the House of Commons, initially for the northern and southern departments of Britain, but with their responsibility later refined to cover home and foreign affairs. A third secretary of state had been appointed from time to time. In 1794 the office became permanent, and its holder took charge of the army’s efforts in the war against revolutionary France. The secretary at war was now responsible to this secretary of state, a system which continued until 1855 when the Crimean reforms shifted all the former’s duties to the secretary of state for war. Although this minister’s effectiveness depended on many factors – not least hitting-power within a cabinet that might not have the army in the forefront of its thinking – he made steady inroads into the influence of the commander-in-chief, and in 1870 was made formally superior to him.

As part of the reforms that followed the Boer War, the office of commander-in-chief was abolished in 1904, and the Army Council came into being. It initially had seven members – the secretary of state, the chief of the imperial general staff, the adjutant general, the quartermaster general and the master general of the ordnance, as well as a finance member and a civil member. In 1906 the War Office crossed Whitehall from Horse Guards to the neo-baroque War Office Building. When the three service ministries merged to form the Ministry of Defence in 1963 the Army Council became the Army Board of the Defence Council, now established in the Ministry of Defence’s main building. This solid monolith was built in the 1930s, and Anthony Beevor surmises that the ‘muscular, large breasted women in stone’ surmounting the entrance date from the days when the Board of Trade had half-tenure. Although the style ‘falls short of the totalitarian architecture of that decade … it is still not a place calculated to lift the spirits.’ 4The Army Board’s membership now includes six ministers, one official and five senior generals. The board’s executive committee (ECAB in unlovely abbreviation) dictates the army’s immediate policy, and comprises its most senior generals under the chief of the general staff, whose office lost its ‘imperial’ designation in 1964.

This shift of power away from the military and into the hands of politicians was paralleled by changes in the Civil Service. The Northcote–Trevelyan report of 1854 recommended that this should be divided into ‘mechanical’ and ‘administrative’ classes, and instituted processes that led to entry by open competition into a service that, until its corrosion by politics over the past decade, was a source of impartial professional advice to ministers. The Fulton Committee’s 1968 report judged that the Civil Service was too close to the traditional sources of power within the British establishment, and though its recommendations did not succeed in creating a British equivalent of the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration the process of breaking down formal barriers within the Civil Service, and between it and outside agencies, has continued steadily.

A by-product of all this was the rise of senior Civil Servants within ministries, notably their permanent under secretaries. They tend to remain in post longer than military officers, who serve in the ministry for between two to three years at any one time, and their links with senior colleagues across Whitehall often give them a sense of collegiate expertise which serving soldiers lack. To this must be added the influence of a Treasury, which, long before the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, was both intrusive and pervasive. No balanced assessment of the Ministry of Defence in the first decade of this millennium should ignore the slurry of management-speak that washes across its decks from time to time, and the many officials who have come to regard defence as they might a commercial organisation with the receivers in. It is certainly not a case of ‘boots versus suits’, for if there are civil servants who believe in the commodification of defence, there are those who work purposefully towards the preservation of military capability in times of real stringency. Conversely, some military officers, especially those ‘Whitehall warriors’ on a second or third tour of duty, become so wise in ‘the ways of the building’ that they sometimes forget that men and women in uniform are much more than ‘line serials’ on a spreadsheet. Part of this book’s contention is that soldiers have, across the army’s history, been subjected to treatment that has fallen far short of that to which they have reasonably been entitled, and it is not enough to maintain that this all happened in a distant land where things were done differently. We have done it in recent memory and, given half a chance, would still do it today. 5