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

The increase of political control over the army, the diminution of the power of its senior officers, and the growing authority of the Civil Service were all products of wider developments. The two great wars of the twentieth century added their own weight to the process, emphasising that what happened on battlefields was only an index of a much broader national effort. Interwoven with all this has been the increasing professionalisation of the officer corps, a process that has ensured that officers are now educated for longer than ever before. The period spent at Sandhurst is now half the length it was in the 1960s, but many more officers are now recruited as graduates.

In the process the army has become estranged from the political nation. From the army’s birth until 1945 serving officers sat in both Houses of Parliament. Retired officers, and gentlemen holding commissions in the auxiliary forces, were added, to make a substantial military voice. The close association between officers and legislature had begun under Charles II and accelerated under James II, who saw officers as convenient placemen, deployable either to Westminster or to local councils. James encouraged officers to seek election not because he valued their opinions, but because he wanted their votes. Those elected in 1685 were told to ‘give their attendance to the House of Commons as soon as possible’, and James made it clear that they were not to simply to turn up as ordered, but to vote for the court party. 6

Crossing the inflexible James II was fatal to a man’s career. That year Charles Bertie lamented that

My nephew Willoughby, my brother Dick, and brother Harry – the three battering rams of our family – are all turned out of their employment as captains … and I am also told that my nephew Peregrine Bertie – who is cornet [the most junior commissioned officer in a troop of horse] to his brother Willoughby – is also dismissed, so they have cleared the army of our whole family, which proving so unlucky a trade I would not have us bend our heads much to for the future. 7

The precedent established by the later Stuarts proved durable. Army and navy officers regularly sat in parliament thereafter. Between 1660 and 1715 up to 18 per cent of MPs were serving officers, and subsequent general elections regularly returned at least 10 per cent. There were 60 military officers in the 558 members elected to the English House of Commons in 1761. Sixty-five were elected to the century’s last parliament in 1796. Gwyn Harries Jenkins argues that ‘from the late eighteenth century the military formed the largest single occupational group in the unreformed House.’ 8Of the 5,134 MPs who sat in the period 1734–1832, 847 held commissions and of these two-thirds seem to have been career officers. The reform acts of the nineteenth century helped reduce the number of military MPs by making it harder for interest to procure a man’s election, at the same time that the army’s growing use as an imperial police force made it more difficult for officers to carry out duties that their constituents were now coming to expect of them. Traditionally the Foot Guards had furnished a disproportionately high number of MPs, pointing not simply to ‘a close link between wealth, birth and military-cum-parliamentary activity’, but to the fact that it was easier for officers quartered in London to get in to the House than it was for their comrades in the marching regiments, scattered across realm and empire. 9In 1853 the military, with its 71 sitting MPs, had been eclipsed by the law and their 107 solicitors or barristers – the largest profession in the house. By 1898 there were still 41 officers in the house (all but four of them Conservatives) and 165 lawyers.

From 1660 until 1945, when the serving military were no longer allowed to sit in parliament, most military MPs were officers, though there were a handful of exceptions, like Sergeant W. R. Perkins MP, called up for service with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1939. So too were the huge majority of former members of the armed forces who were elected to the Commons. There was one remarkable exception. William Cobbett, born in 1762 to an‘honest, industrious and frugal’ labouring family, joined the 54th Regiment in 1784. He had trudged all the way to Chatham to enlist in the Marines, only to be assured by the recruiting sergeant that they were full up. His literacy and steady ways soon brought promotion to corporal, and he went on to be a regimental clerk, using his spare time to study ‘Dr Louth’s Grammar, Dr Watt’s Logic … Vauban’s Fortifications and the former Duke of York’s Military Exercises and Evolutions’. Promoted to sergeant major, at a time where there was only one in each battalion, he took on much of the day-to-day work of running his unit, for the adjutant was ‘a keen fellow, but wholly illiterate’ and the other officers were distinguished by ‘their gross ignorance and vanity’. 10

Cobbett was discharged on his battalion’s return from Nova Scotia in 1791, and at once set about the prosecution of some of his former officers for corruption. The attempt misfired, and he fled abroad to avoid retribution: while in America he wrote pro-British articles under the name of Peter Porcupine. Soon after his return he started the news-sheet Weekly Political Register, and in 1802 began publishing Parliamentary Debates, forerunner of the modern Hansard. Refusal to bribe voters lost him the Honiton election in 1806 and accelerated his shift from Tory to radical. In 1810 the Register’s furious condemnation of the flogging of militiamen by German soldiers saw him sentenced to two years imprisonment for treasonous libel. On his release he was honoured by a huge dinner presided over by Sir Francis Burdett, a leading champion of reform.

Cobbett deftly changed the format of the Political Register from newspaper to pamphlet to avoid tax, and it was soon selling 40,000 copies a week. In 1817 he left for America to avoid prosecution for sedition. After his return repeated attacks on the government culminated, in 1831, in prosecution for an article supporting the machine-breaking and rick-burning of the Captain Swing rioters. Cobbett conducted his own defence and was triumphantly acquitted. He was a major political figure and author. His Rural Rides was an affectionate description of an old, honest countryside progressively corrupted by the seepage of poison from the towns. It was first serialised in the Register and then published as a book in 1830. Despite repeated attempts to get into Parliament, he would have to wait until the 1832 Reform Act, when he was elected for Oldham. By now he was a confirmed radical, though his beliefs were shot through with a profoundly conservative yearning for a pre-industrial world of honest toil, interlaced with duty, and for political dispute across the class divide to be undertaken ‘with good humour, over a pot or two of ale’. 11

A conflict soon developed between the constitutional theory that an officer-MP required no permission to attend to his parliamentary duties and could express an opinion freely, and the awkwardness of giving military pay to non-serving men who might make statements of which the government or army might disapprove. In December 1880 Major John Nolan, MP for Galway North, was appointed a Conservative whip, although he was on full pay and commanding a battery on its way to India. The Speaker thought that the best solution was for officers to be seconded from the service on election, but, given the fact that MPs were not then paid, this smacked of penalising the peoples’ choice. It was felt safest to let the matter run on unresolved, and Nolan left the army in 1881.

The number of military MPs would have doubtless continued to decline had not the two world wars reversed the trend. Members of both houses volunteered on a huge scale in 1914. Twenty-two MPs died: Arthur O’Neill, Unionist member for Mid-Antrim and a captain in the Life Guards was the first MP to die, at Ypres in 1914. They ranged in rank from lieutenant, with 39-year-old Viscount Quennington (Michael Hicks-Beach MP) dying of wounds in 1916 as a subaltern in the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars, to lieutenant colonel, with Guy Baring (elected for Winchester in 1906 while still a serving officer) killed at the head of his Coldstream battalion on the Somme. In the field, a man’s politics could be ignored. Willie Redmond, an Irish Nationalist MP since 1884, joined the attack on Messines Ridge in 1917 (at 56, he was too old for front line infantry service). Hard hit, he was carried from the field by two Ulster Division stretcher-bearers who disapproved of his politics but would not leave him to die alone.