Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and Country

CHAPTER XXI
CROWN AND SWORD

The Monro-Fawcett duel turned the Prince Consort’s attention, as representing the Crown, to duelling, the abolition of which must begin with the army. Courts of Honour suggested as successful abroad. Why distrusted by English opinion. Views of the Duke and others. Hence the Court first occupied with army reforms to good results. Contrast between military resources 1837-97. Special attention of Court to military education. Old and new schools of officers compared. Duke of Wellington as Commander contrasted with his latest successors. Growth of rifle volunteers; special influences in military education, e. g. Edward Hamley. Military democracy. Why necessarily imperfect.

So plausible a case may theoretically be made out for the duel as a social institution that it is not surprising the custom should have died hard in a combatant nation like the English. The ordeal by arms furnishes a simple if barbaric mode of settling personal differences without the scandal and the weariness of law; in an age whose boast is freedom of speech not less than of thought, whose bane is the degeneration of that chartered liberty into the unlicensed malignity and curiosity of small-talk, there always will be ill-conditioned persons whom only fear of the horsewhip, the rapier, or the pistol, can teach to discipline their tongue; all these things have been said in favour of the duel as a mode of social discipline. In practice, however, it was never found that the fear of a challenge ensured social discretion of tongue, or a higher standard of personal courtesy. When these combats were not farcical, as the duel has generally become in France, where it still survives, they proved the instruments of the professional homicide, who, trained to artistic murder, went about society, seeking a feud with those whom he or his patrons desired to be put out of the way. Stung to the quick by the brutalities of O’Connell, Sir Robert Peel, during the early forties demanded, as the story runs, the satisfaction which was not then an anachronism. The great Irishman replied that yielding to the expostulations of his wife, he must forego the pleasure of the encounter for which he was ‘spoiling.’ A second invitation was declined on the ground that the entreaties of his offspring had subdued the spirit of the warrior. Hence the point in Theodore Hook’s epigram published in the John Bull of the period: —

 
Some men in their horror of slaughter,
Improve on the scriptural command;
They honour their wife and their daughter,
That their days may be long in the land.
 

The same statesman is known at a little later date to have been persuaded, not without difficulty, to abstain from sending a friend to his chief opponent⁶⁵ at the time of the latter’s onslaughts on the Conservative concession of Free Trade. Since then, Wimbledon Common or Wormwood Scrubbs has probably never for a moment seriously suggested itself to any honourable gentleman as a possible place to which to adjourn a controversy with a parliamentary opponent.

A duel was the incident which caused the first intervention of the Prince Consort in the social arrangements of English life. On the 1st of July 1843, Colonel Fawcett had been shot by his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Monro. The latter had accepted the challenge most reluctantly; he had been the grossly aggrieved party.⁶⁶ Under the then existing code, the survivor’s sole alternative to the certainty of being stigmatised as a coward had been to accept the risk of being hung for a felon. Eight years before the Queen’s accession, in 1829, however, the great Duke of Wellington had faced Lord Winchilsea’s pistol; the memories of the (1809) Canning-Castlereagh and other encounters did not then seem part of ancient history. The Prince Consort, with the military instincts of his race decided that the reform which he was bent on establishing must begin with the army. The authority of the Duke of Wellington was at this moment paramount equally in social, political, and military life. The great general was known himself seriously to have considered the subject. With him therefore, the Prince arranged an interview. Courts of Honour were suggested by the Prince as rational substitutes for the appeal to the sword. The Tribunals des Marechaux were said to have done good work in France; Courts of Honour had been followed with the best results in the Bavarian army. The Duke’s objection to the proposal was the English distrust of a secret tribunal; the authorities of the navy took the same view as the Commander-in-Chief. Sir George Murray, then Master of the Ordnance, a serious and accomplished man of the world, bluntly remarked that quarrels would not be made up, or differences composed by the arbitration of others; that the law as it already existed could do all which was practicable to repress the practice. The Prince persevered with his purpose. His suggestion was laid by the Secretary of State for War before his colleagues in the Cabinet. Though the scheme was not adopted in the form suggested by the Prince, his action in the matter led to an amendment in the Articles of War (April 1844). Henceforward it was declared to be suitable to the character of honourable men to apologize and offer redress for wrong or insult committed, and equally suitable for the aggrieved party frankly and cordially to accept the amende. Thus on the initiative of the Queen’s husband, there began the organization of public opinion on the lines that have long since made the ordeal by arms as practically obsolete in England as the ordeal by touch.

The Queen’s devotion to her army has always been that of a mother for her children; the Queen’s gratitude evinced upon all possible occasions to her soldiers for what they have done in the field has ever resembled that of a woman to the protector of the weak against the strong. It was natural therefore that, amid his civilian duties, the new representative of the Throne, himself nurtured in a land that from being the Mark of Brandenburg was growing into a great military monarchy, should actively show his interest in the whole field of military reform. Later, when the post became vacant, the Prince Consort, after consulting with the Ministers of the day, declined more than once the Commandership-in-Chief. His suggestions for army reform, and for national defence during the period of the Crimean War, of the Indian Mutiny, and again during the Franco-Austrian wars were made with a sense of responsibility which the tenure of office could not have deepened as well as with a shrewd perception of the needs and possibilities of the time that no statesman of English birth could surpass. He had already been among the first to recognize the brilliant merits of the Duke of Wellington’s plan for the defence of London, during the Chartist disturbances of 1848. To the Prince’s discrimination it is largely due that this domestic exploit of the hero of Waterloo, not less memorable in its way than Waterloo itself,⁶⁷ came properly to be appreciated by the country. To this day the mighty fortresses which protect the shores of the Solent and Southampton Water, and which make that part of the previously too vulnerable South coast practically safe are to a great extent the memorials of the wisdom and exertion of the Prince Consort. He had already, while our soldiers were before Sebastopol, urged upon the Government of the day the establishment of militia depôts in place of the regulars should they be withdrawn by an emergency, at Malta and elsewhere, along the line of our Mediterranean possessions. When therefore, the national alarm caused by the words and actions of our French ally found its expression in Lord Palmerston’s scheme of coast defences, the memorandum on which these measures were based had been drawn up by the Prince Consort at the wish of the Cabinet, and practically formed the basis of the action of Ministers.

Nor of all the army reformers who have lived and worked since the Prince’s day, is there one who has failed to testify his indebtedness to the suggestions of the husband of the Queen. In his many talks on this subject with the military advisers of the Government of the day, the Prince often anticipated those improvements in the administration of the land forces of the Crown which since his time have been carried out. As the Prince Consort correctly inferred from the character of the English people as well as from the pace of official movements in England, must be the case, the progressive changes in the English army have been effected piecemeal by slow or minute instalments. The method pursued here has differed not less from that followed in the reorganization of Continental armies than the composition of the army of England differs from that of the great fighting machines of the rest of Europe. In Prussia, after the defeat of Jena (1806); in Austria after France had triumphed for Italy on the field of Solferino (1859) the organic reconstruction of armies was possible. Nothing of the same sort has taken place in England. Nothing, as the Prince Consort perceived, of this kind could be effected here, unless under the conscription. That system the Queen’s husband once observed was not likely to be established in England without a revolution.

The changes which the Prince suggested in able memoranda to successive Ministers, which indeed he partly foresaw as coming, may in their general results briefly be glanced at now. The mere enumeration of the military resources of the country on the Queen’s accession and on the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of that event needs few words to deepen the contrast. In 1837 the total military strength (regular army) of the country was 101,000. Sixty years later these figures were 147,105.⁶⁸ In 1837 India was garrisoned by the Company’s army of 26,500. In 1897 the Indian military strength was 74,299 British, 129,963 Native. The increase has been therefore, nearly threefold. In 1837 the Irish troops were 20,000. In 1897 these were between 26,000 and 27,000. As against the 26,000 troops in the Channel Islands and Great Britain in 1837, there were in 1897, 81,516. The entire strength of the horsed-field artillery in the accession year was 72 guns – all at home. On New Year’s Day 1897 the artillery total of all kinds at home and abroad was 219 batteries or companies. In 1837 the Horse Artillery batteries were armed with 12-pounder howitzers, and 6-pounder guns; the Field batteries had 9-pounder guns, 24-pounder howitzers. The infantry still used the old flint ‘Brown Bess,’ which in the cant phrase of the time was warranted at 200 yards to miss a haystack. The Rifle regiments used the Brunswick rifle which at 400 yards, according to Lord Wolseley, could not implicitly be trusted. To-day, the equipping of our troops with the latest weapons of precision which contemporary science designs is of itself a great department of English artificership. Jealousy of the army is as much a bequest from Puritan times to the House of Commons, as jealousy of the Church. Under the two first Georges, bitter and tedious debates on the maintenance of the Hanoverian soldiers were of constant recurrence. As a consequence, the standing troops which in the Napoleonic wars had been 220,000 men were gradually reduced till in three years after the peace (1818), they were only 80,000 strong.

Not without much pressure had Parliament during the earliest infancy of the Colonies provided a handful of soldiers for the protection of settlers in the lands beyond the sea as well as for the maintenance of civil order at home. It was the paucity of the numbers available for his orders which rendered the Duke of Wellington’s scheme of London defence against Chartist attack so memorable a piece of strategy. Even the influence and popularity of this great soldier only secured the existence of a small army at home on condition that it did not flaunt itself ostentatiously before the civilian population. To keep up any fighting strength at all the non-combatant portion of the army was reduced to an ineffective minimum. Without exception, regiments were weak in men and horses. The four chief company depôts at home consisted of veterans waiting their discharge, of invalids, and of ineffective, or imperfectly effective, recruits.

Sometimes, as during the Canadian and Jamaica troubles in the earlier years of the reign, additional troops were required for the Colonies. These were composed of volunteers from other regiments and of casual recruits. The personnel of our army may be inferred from the Duke of Wellington’s oft-quoted remark that the man who enlisted was the worst and most drunken inhabitant of the village. This was the scum of the earth which under officers trained on the playing fields of Eton, the Duke had led to victory in his Peninsular campaigns and in the Low Countries against the consummate veterans of the French army. To win the affection of his men; to make them feel that their commander was also their friend, and of the same flesh and blood as themselves never occurred to the great Duke. His latter-day successor, Lord Wolseley, on the Christmas day of 1896, visited the Wellington Barracks to taste the pudding and test the comforts of the men. That was not the great Duke’s way.

The moral and social improvement in the private soldier since the era of humaner treatment began is shown by a progressive decrease in the number of Courts Martial. In 1876 they were 12,187, in 1895, 8,211, a reduction of about one-third. The treatment of soldiers by their superiors was admirably adapted to demoralize them as men without improving them as soldiers. When the recruit took the Queen’s shilling, he ceased to be a free citizen. He had said farewell to the world outside the barrack yard. He became a nameless piece of martial machinery; sometimes he was indulged; more often he was flogged. Nothing that could extinguish respect for himself or his officers, was left undone. It had been the Duke of Wellington’s business to win victories not to conciliate men. The moral and personal influence of such men as Lord Roberts and others which since the Duke’s day has been exercised for the moral and physical advantage of the soldier is not an instrument that the hero of Waterloo often employed; he did not believe in it. Nor was it a soldier, but a schoolmaster, Dr Arnold of Rugby, who formulated the truth, that the best way of improving character is to treat persons on the assumption of their becoming what you wish them to be.

To pass to other details in the military contrast between the sixtieth and the first years of the Queen’s reign the short service system which has proved admittedly so effective had occurred as a possibility only to a few reformers of whom the Prince Consort was one, and Sir Charles Napier another. In 1837 enlistment was for life or twenty-one years; the seven years’ term had been urged already by Napier. It was not however till 1847 that the reduction to ten years was sanctioned and then only by way of special inducement for recruits when they were exceptionally few. Those who can recall the scenes witnessed outside public houses in the country, in the purlieus of Westminster or Trafalgar Square in London will not consider the term ‘crimping’ too strong an expression to apply to the process of forcing the Queen’s shilling into the hands of half tipsy yokels, and entirely intoxicated or desperate roughs. Nor is it surprising that the Sergeant Kites of the period found all their arts of inventive persuasion, all their largesses of drink necessary to induce the gallant fellows whom they addressed to serve the Queen. Without the stimulating allurement of drums and fifes playing, of banners flying, and unless the future had been seen through a haze of beery or spirituous splendour, the tale of recruits would have fallen lamentably short.

In the eyes of sober citizens of the industrial class, the life of the soldier seemed only one degree less dismal and shameful than the career of the hulks. As a fact the soldier’s lot was perhaps half a century ago not much more tolerable than that of the convict shipped for his offences beyond seas. A prison with a chance of being killed in it represented in the popular eye the existence of the private soldier. It involved transportation with hard labour as a matter of course. One battalion first raised in 1700 had been the whole of those 137 years abroad on active service. When his destiny was less severe than this, a life insufferably tedious was led by him in barracks pestilently unhealthy. To-day, upon a different plane of comfort, and on a reduced scale of luxury, the private soldiers may be said to enjoy the same recreations and opportunities of improvement as his officer. He is the master of his own time during several of the best hours in every day. He has no more difficulty in obtaining leave up to midnight for a theatre visit than a Woolwich cadet in getting a Sunday exeat from the Academy. Rooms for study and pastime are provided within his barracks.

Domestic life is no longer incompatible with his military service. But in 1837 married quarters did not exist. Those who had wives and children herded with their unmarried comrades in scandalous confusion. Whatever, with a view of completely brutalizing if possible the men who fought their country’s battles, could in addition to these things be devised, was not wanting. Punishments were meted out with indiscriminating severity. The Queen had been on her throne some years before the lash was limited to time of war. Among the officers brought up in the school of Wellington a prejudice in favour of flogging as a simple, efficacious sort of British punishment lingered perhaps till 1880, when on a memorable occasion after an exciting debate that had signalized the opening of a new era of parliamentary obstruction, the House of Commons decreed its entire abolition. As has been already said, the policy to which the Duke of Wellington had from political exigencies been as he thought compelled, was to sacrifice to the maintenance of a small and often invisible body of regulars every other branch of the Service.

Thus sixty years ago the Militia force of the country was declared by the Adjutant-General of the day practically to be non-existent. Before 1815 this force had been a considerable body. After the Peace it dwindled down to less than 70,000; when the Queen mounted her throne, it was seldom or never regularly drilled. There had been no ballot for it since 1831. Twenty-eight years later, December 1895, the strength of an annually trained Militia was 107,742. The Militia, too, in 1837 was administered not as it now is by the War Office, but by the Home Secretary in conjunction with the Lords Lieutenant of Counties; its payment was provided for in the civil not the military estimates; in 1837 its expense was £192,115. The Yeomanry, then called Volunteers, comprised 18,000 men of all ranks, at a cost in round numbers of £105,400. In 1897 the Yeomanry, instructed not less systematically than the Militia, were a force of 11,678 men.

Important additions to the permanent strength of the country against an emergency were made, largely on the Prince Consort’s initiative, during the first decade of the reign. In 1842 the military pensioners already enrolled and liable to service were regularly organized, less however as a military power than as an aid to the civil Government, to the number of 7,000 men. This, too, was the period in which (1846) Sir John Burgoyne submitted to Lord John Russell a State paper on that subject of coast defences which had already engaged the Duke of Wellington and had been taken up warmly as mentioned above by the Queen’s husband. The Channel Tunnel scheme was then unborn in the brains of future projectors. Our military experts held England sufficiently to be weakened as it was by the isthmus of steam which bridged the Straits of Dover. Sir John Burgoyne’s estimate in 1846 was that after providing for Ireland and for home fortifications, only a maximum of 10,000 men could be placed in the field; that the entire United Kingdom did not possess field guns enough for 20,000 men; that there were no reserves of muskets or military stores; that the dockyards were defenceless against any sudden attack. In 1847 the apprehensions caused by these expert disclosures moved Lord Palmerston, when Foreign Secretary in the Russell Cabinet, to suggest a loan for military works along the Hampshire and Dorsetshire coast. Nothing, however, was actually done until the Prince Consort in May 1859 secured the issue of instructions to Lords Lieutenant of Counties by the War Secretary. These resulted in the raising of the Volunteers. Lord Palmerston was himself Prime Minister then. The attitude of Napoleon III. towards England and the Austrian war scare of 1859 supplied the Government with the leverage for the vote needed to strengthen the coast protection of England in accordance with the Prince Consort’s proposal of twelve years earlier. On June 23, 1860, the earliest Volunteer Review was held in Hyde Park. A week or so later, on July 2, the Volunteers first met on Wimbledon Common; the competition was opened by Her Majesty discharging her rifle and scoring the inaugural bull’s eye.

A quarter of a century later the Volunteers had risen from 119,000 in 1860 to 226,752 in 1886, of whom 220,000 were efficients. At the number then reached subject to fluctuations of some thousands periodically they seem disposed to remain. In Great Britain 800,000 men of military age have passed through the Volunteers. Thus, not counting our natural rampart of sea, and a navy which public opinion, if not official patriotism, insists on maintaining at a high point, the coast fortresses bristling in nearly continuous array from Dover to the Land’s End mask behind them little less than 1,000,000 citizen soldiers, who with some help from their brethren of the Royal Artillery could effectively man our coast batteries.

Military education under teachers of the new school and the class of officers thus produced are the immediate outcome of the interest taken in the army by the Court at, and subsequently to, the time of the Prince Consort. The whole scheme of education under which the commanders of the future are trained and a general anxiety for the most beneficent use of the Queen’s prerogative, were much in the thoughts of the Queen’s husband. The council of military education was largely the work of the Prince, as also was the formation of the Aldershot camp. When a ‘governor’ was to be chosen for the Prince of Wales, the selection made was the first Commander at Aldershot and one of the chief members of the education council, Sir William Knollys, who, on the Prince reaching his majority became chief of his household. When that veteran was appointed Usher of the Black Rod he was succeeded as Private Secretary to the Heir Apparent by one so thoroughly trained to his administrative methods as his son, Sir Francis Knollys; – a man in whom common sense attains as nearly as is conceivable to the calibre of absolute genius. It was at the period now mentioned and under these influences that officers in the scientific corps began to get their proper share of army staff appointments and commands. So entirely have the old disabilities of that corps disappeared that to-day, in striking contrast to the earlier experience, an officer of Royal Artillery or Royal Engineers who in general respects shows the necessary aptitude enjoys the same chance as anyone else of staff employment in peace. When he has reached the grade of General officer, he will not be at any disadvantage in the process of selection for a command. Here merit alone tells now. Whatever arm of the Service to which he belongs the best candidate practically never fails to be chosen. Generally, in the opinion of the best professional judges, the young officer finds the army a self-supporting profession. The exact experience seems to be that a young man obtaining a commission in the infantry of the Line or in the Artillery can look forward at no distant date to marrying in fair comfort, and that as a bachelor he requires no larger allowance or private means than he would need in any other branch of the public employ, that, for example, of the Colonial Service.

In cavalry regiments, or in the Household Brigade, life is more costly. In these cases, the young officer could scarcely subsist in comfort without private resources equal to those on which young men entering the diplomatic service must at the outset of their career be able to count. Obviously if the army is to be made a career sufficiently attractive for young Englishmen of first-rate abilities as well as of gentle birth, the prizes of the profession must not, for the sake of an unwise national economy, be too severely diminished in value. The complaint is general and just that the emoluments of those who win their way to the top are already unattractively small and few. It cannot be a satisfactory state of things under which no General officer can afford, without private fortune of his own, to take a command. Impolitic retrenchment has touched other positions than these. Thus, quite recently the salary of the Military Secretary to the Commander-in-Chief has been cut down from £2,100 to £1,500; that of Adjutant-General to the Forces from £2,700 to £2,100; that of Governor of the Royal Military Academy from £2,000 to £1,500. The unwisdom of these reductions and the comparative smallness of the highest army stipends, become the more apparent when it is remembered that all military appointments, unlike civil appointments from the Primacy of Canterbury down to a junior Treasury lordship, are for five years only, that the installation in these posts, and the establishment they require are necessarily costly; thus the choice is practically limited to men of means. Nor does a timocratic⁶⁹ scheme of military preferment accord well with the democratic ideal of careers unrestrictedly open to all talents.

The reform in the system of officers’ education which the Prince Consort launched his eldest son has already lived to see practically accomplished. At the beginning of the reign the average military officer at his best was a keen sportsman or a well-bred London club-man; at his worst, and as not very unfrequently witnessed, the original of him may be recognised to-day in Thackeray’s Sketches of Ensigns Rag and Famish; before some Becky Sharpe of the period had taken them in charge, and had developed them into Captains Rawdon Crawley, to become in due course candidates for the Governorship of Coventry Island. The officer of to-day, naval as well as military, is not less keen a sportsman, is as good a shot, can take and hold a line of his own across country equally well. But he is a soldier first, eager to add to his knowledge from the facts of history, or from contemporary examples of professional achievement. There are to-day no better read men than those who serve their Sovereign ashore or afloat. The training of our sailors of whatever rank leaves perhaps something to be wished for. Scientific seamanship, however, is not merely an ideal, but a familiar experience. Jack Tars or flag officers, – the school wherein respectively they are trained is, as Nelson himself was, and wished to see his sailors, above all things scientific too.

The man-of-war’s-man of to-day has educated himself so well from books, with occasional hints from his commanding officer, as to be often a better informed person than the average undergraduate or Admiralty clerk. To speak now only of the soldier. It is not only that like the sailor he has felt the intellectually quickening influences which are part of the atmosphere of his epoch. The military officer of to-day has passed through the curriculum which the Prince Consort was among the earliest to mark out; he has already acquired nearly all that learning which thirty years ago it was predicted would prove the ruin of the Service. Between what he is and what he was, the contrast is not less great than between a future Moltke and Corinthian Tom; yet has he not developed into the spectacled professor with head too big for any busby to fit, to which some looked forward should the British subaltern fail to model himself after Albert Smith’s medical student.

Almost till the beginning of the present decade there might be seen any afternoon issuing from the Athenæum Club in Pall Mall, a well-set-up gentleman, scarcely middle-aged, soldierly indeed of figure, but chiefly noticeable for his commandingly intellectual brow. This was Edward Hamley. Should the time now spoken of happen to have been that of the opening of the Franco-Prussian War, Hamley was perhaps demonstrating to a civilian friend the justification of his prediction of a French triumph afforded by the slight advantage gained by French troops at the early affair of Saarbruck; then came the French reverses. Hamley was not cast down. These were tactical moves, only the preludes of decisive triumph; so things went on till the day of Sedan arrived, when even General Hamley was constrained to acknowledge a French failure. If, however, like most of his cloth, this able and upright soldier was sometimes opinionated, he had earned almost a right to be so by having done more than any other man of his generation for the intellectual formation of the new order of English officer who stands in such marked contrast to his predecessor. That young Aldershot, Woolwich, or Sandhurst does not find time hang heavily on his hands when there is no cricket match on, no race-meeting whither to drive his dogcart, no afternoon train to town to catch, is chiefly due to the intellectual habits which Hamley did more by example and writing than anyone else to generate. The most competent critics, by no mean personal partizans of the author, have testified the impossibility of over-estimating the good done by his book on the Operations of War. This was the first readable work in the English language on strategy and tactics; in the opinion of experts it is far ahead of any book on those subjects previously written in any language. Hamley took the art of war out of the dull and dreary region of technical diagram, of skeleton charts of battle; he dealt with it as a living theme. Thus Hamley’s great treatise, even to those who have been students of Jomini, Clausewitz, and M’Dougall, is a revelation. Its author, not by innate genius alone, but by years of careful practice, had acquired an excellent literary style; the clear and forcible language of this book first taught professional readers how to study all military history, and how to apply the lessons of the past to the campaigns of the future. Such a volume then may, if any, claim to belong to what De Quincey called the literature of power as distinct from that of mere information.