High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  This would be controversial, not least in imposing Gladstone’s moral framework on a group of men who did not entirely share it. He was determined there had to be ‘an accurate and close adjustment between work, pay and privileges’. This was how things were for NCOs and other ranks; he could not see why it should not be the same for the officer class. The most expensive commissions were, inevitably, those that brought the largest element of sinecure. Together with the abolition of purchase, sinecures should be cut down, and holders who survived should be on reduced rates of pay. ‘As this country has a vast leisured and wealthy class,’ he wrote, ‘and as it derives advantage therefrom in an unpaid magistracy and Parliament, so the same constitution of our society should be borne in mind when we proceed to readjust the system of officering for the army. That description of labour, important as it is, should not be dear but cheap.’

  He worried that young men went into the Army too young. ‘That portion of our youth who go into the army, are certainly and must be on the whole below the average in avidity for knowledge,’ he observed, crushingly. ‘Yet they have hitherto when mere boys been separated from their schoolfellows, prematurely installed in the privileges of manhood, and surrounded with all the dangers of idleness.’ Happily, Britain attempted to avoid war: ‘The greatest difficulty of all in truth is this: to redeem the officer’s life from idleness in time of peace . . . this profession is, in time of peace, apt to fall as much below the ordinary standard of need for continuous energetic exertion, as in war it rise above that standard.’ To do this Gladstone wanted a European-style cadetship, in which youths would learn the art of soldiering as the ordinary soldier did. This would become the routine at Sandhurst, which had been on the Berkshire/Surrey border since 1813 and trained ‘gentlemen cadets’ for the cavalry, infantry and Indian Army, and in other officer training schools.

  The Prime Minister was under no illusion that this reform would be ‘an enormous business’, and that a detailed alternative system had to be in place before proceeding.45 He was also clear that nothing could be done to disturb the equilibrium of the Army until after peace was made between France and Prussia, in case it had to go into action. Lowe, the Chancellor, threw up an obstacle in January 1871, just before Parliament met for the new session. He told Gladstone that the sum required to compensate officers whose commissions represented one of their main assets, but who would no longer be allowed to sell them on, was so huge that the country would need to go into debt to pay it.

  Gladstone told Cardwell this news was ‘a perfect bombshell’, and constituted ‘a measure the most destructive to our finance that has been either adopted or suggested in my time.’46 He continued: ‘To have been for near ten years the finance minister of this country, and to end my career with a loan in aid of the annual expenditure for the redemption of Commissions is not possible.’ He said it was ‘impossible’ for him to assent to the proposal as it stood. The next day Cabinet discussed it, and agreed a potential £3 million increase in the Army estimates, so important was it agreed that abolition of purchase had become. In the mid-nineteenth century, to buy the rank of lieutenant colonel in a guards regiment would cost about £7,250: but the officer could sell his majority for £5,350, so he had to find £1,900 to fund his promotion. A major at the time earned £315 a year, rising to £427 as a lieutenant colonel.47

  Cardwell, summoned to Osborne, asked the Queen on 22 January 1871 to approve in principle the abolition of purchase and changes in the conditions of employment of officers on the reserve: and this necessitated making the office of Military Secretary a public one, removing it from the personal staff of the Duke.48 He told the Queen that it ‘was not possible to defend the absolute exception of his office from the 5 years rule’. The Queen told Cardwell that ‘she hopes to be able to give her assent to the proposals’ but would write to him about it, presumably after further discussions with the Duke, who would also be expected to move his office from Horse Guards to the War Office, where Cardwell could keep a closer eye on him. The Duke agreed to this last point under duress, according to the Queen, who with the aid of the random and aggressive underlining that characterised her moments of emotion in her letters, said it was ‘on condition that it is clearly understood and stated that he does so temporarily to facilitate the transaction of business and that it is intended to build a new War Office in connection with the present Horse Guards as soon as possible and further the Commander in Chief must have a distinct and separate entrance into that portion of building allotted to him in Pall Mall, which must be called ‘the Horse Guards’.49

  The matter came to the Commons on 16 February 1871. The Cabinet had decided that entry to the commissioned ranks of the Army would in future be from: Sandhurst, ‘admission to which shall be obtained by competitive examination’; from subalterns in the militia with more than two years’ service who had passed an examination and been recommended by their district staff officer; from the ranks of NCOs, by open competition; and from Cadets.50 Promotion thereafter would be founded upon ‘a principle of selection’. Regiments would decide promotions from subaltern to captain, the Army would decide the rest. Control of the militia passed from the Lords Lieutenant to the Secretary of State.

  The Army Regulation Bill itself mentioned that the buying and selling of offices had technically been abolished under Edward VI, and again in 1809 under George III, with an exemption for the ‘sales or exchanges of any commission in Our Forces’. It proposed now to ‘render illegal’ all sales.51 There would be compensation on retirement for those who had bought something they now could not sell on. In the three years 1868–70 the officer class had had 330 new recruits by promotion and 932 by purchase. Of the 330, Sandhurst had provided 268, and sixty-two had come from the ranks, though that number had dropped from thirty-six in 1868 to eight in 1870.52 A system of gradual retirement would be imposed, so the large sums of money required – possibly £7.5 million to £8.5 million – would not all have to be paid out at once: but there would still be huge objections to it being paid at all. Since first commissions could no longer be bought, Cardwell announced that they would be awarded to men who completed the course at Sandhurst and showed they were fit to be officers; and admission to Sandhurst would be by competitive examination. Thus officers would still be gentlemen; but they would not be able to buy their way to a commission by affording to be educated at Sandhurst and to maintain the dignity of an officer once commissioned. University graduates would be eligible for commissions too, and members of the public could apply for one by competitive examination. Promotion would be on merit, and on the basis of detailed reports of the officer’s conduct and abilities.

  This statement of intent also opened a hornet’s nest in the shape of the continued rule of the Duke of Cambridge; but since the man opening it was George Trevelyan, it did not entirely dismay the Liberal leadership: though having aired the matter Trevelyan was urged by Cardwell not to press the question to a vote. He moved a resolution in the Commons on 21 February that no military reorganisation could be considered complete unless it altered the tenure of the Commander-in-Chief ‘in such a manner as to enable the Secretary of State to avail himself freely of the best administrative talent and the most recent military experience from time to time existing in the British Army’.53 No one could pretend such a definition included the Duke. The joke then got better, for the second part of Trevelyan’s resolution urged that ‘the consideration of the cost involved in the abolition of the Purchase system urgently calls for the immediate removal of obsolete and antiquated sources of military expenditure.’

  The problem was a system of dual government: the Duke running the Army from his desk in Horse Guards, and Cardwell trying to run it too from his desk in the War Office. Trevelyan observed it was impossible to remove the Commander-in-Chief ‘without some stigma being inflicted’, and claimed the Duke had done nothing in his service to deserve that.54 However, he suggested the job ought to go to an active senior officer, and be held in rotation among the
best in the Army, so that the Secretary of State’s principal military adviser would be someone with very recent experience of the sharp end of soldiering. What Trevelyan was suggesting was remarkably similar to how the administration of the service evolved in the twentieth century, with a Chief of the General Staff holding his position usually for three years. Not wishing to insult the Duke of Cambridge too directly, Trevelyan referred instead to the obstinacy of the Duke of Wellington, who until 1852 ran the Army as it had been during the Peninsular Wars, with a regard for obsolete weaponry (the musket being preferred to the rifle), a wilful detestation of all modern advances and practices, and retaining a fanaticism for excessive and savage corporal punishment that made the Army seem more like a prison than a decent fighting force. Permanent tenure for the incumbent of the post was a disaster for the Army, and leaving control of promotion in the hands of the Duke utterly undesirable, given his opposition to selection on merit.

  Trevelyan was concerned that, with purchase likely to be abolished, great power would remain vested in the Duke to advance or retard the careers of young officers. Open competition was essential: it had operated in the Civil Service since the Northcote–Trevelyan reforms, it had operated in the public schools since the Clarendon reforms, and there was no reason at all why it should not operate in an institution so vital as the Army. Part of his purpose was to highlight the Duke’s resistance to the abolition of purchase: the Commander-in-Chief, manifestly not understanding the government-controlled way in which commissions would be obtained in future, had said abolition would not work because it would be replaced by under-the-counter purchase.

  For good measure, he pointed out how, thanks to the Duke’s lassitude and indulgence, a number of senior officers received enormous pensions for doing nothing, and a number of serving officers, notably in the Brigade of Guards, did nothing in return for their handsome remunerations either. Trevelyan, on behalf of numerous Liberal MPs, said the time had come for control of the Army to pass from the Court to the elected government. On the other side, as became apparent during the subsequent debate, the Tories still liked the Duke and claimed in their defence that he had the backing of the Army. He also, of course, fulfilled the function when the Liberals were in power of obstructing them in what might be considered the Tory interest. Cardwell attempted to soothe matters. He announced that dual government was over, an Order in Council having settled the Secretary of State’s authority over the Army: and, for good measure, as agreed with the Queen, the Duke would be moving into the War Office, to work more closely with Cardwell. He also, perhaps less sincerely, defended the present tenure of the Duke’s office by raising the fear that a rotating appointment would become politicised. Nonetheless, Trevelyan forced a vote; and although he lost by 83 to 201, he showed a substantial minority were unhappy with the status quo.

  When the Army Regulation Bill had its second reading some former officers in the Commons vigorously defended privilege and assaulted the proposed meritocracy. Although some disclosed their inherent snobbery – the Nightingale point that someone who was not a gentleman might slip through – the principal excuse was the expense of compensating those nearing retirement. Europe was tense because of the Franco-Prussian war and the unification of Germany, which had happened just six weeks earlier: if, one former officer argued, there was all this money (and the figure discussed varied between £8 million and £14 million, an inexactitude seized on by supporters of reform), would it not be better used to defend the nation? The MP concerned, Colonel Charles White, dismissed the advantages of selection on merit. The present system, he said, had ‘much to be urged in its favour’.55 ‘Denounce it as hon. Gentlemen may at Birmingham, Manchester, and elsewhere, it has officered our Army for centuries with a class of men who have made the term “an English officer” and “a gentleman” to be synonymous, and to be understood all over the world. It has officered our armies for centuries with a class of men, whom, though you will not believe it—we soldiers know it—the British soldier as at present constituted prefers to obey willingly, to serve cheerfully, and to follow devotedly. The British officer belongs to a class who have led the armies of England—as I very much doubt their successors will lead them—to a class whose memory defies you to dare to detract either from their character or efficiency.’

  White ridiculed the notion that selection or promotion on merit could be carried out fairly or satisfactorily, because it would be based on a system of ‘secret reporting’, which was ‘un-English’. It would change officers from what they were then – ‘manly, generous and open’ – into ‘sycophants, fawners, and time-servers.’56 He pointed to ‘the case of a subaltern who got all his hunting leave because he scrupulously supplied his colonel’s wife every morning with hot-house flowers’. His final harrumph was to assert that the government was legislating on the whim of one man – a dig at Trevelyan, and an absurd one, given the determination across the Liberal benches to abolish purchase.

  The debate lasted five days: and when Cardwell eventually spoke on the fourth he summed up the opposition he was facing in addressing one of his military critics: ‘the right time will never come for abolishing purchase when the hon Gentleman does not wish purchase to be abolished at all’.57 He maintained that ‘my impression is that if we pass this Bill into a law, its effect will be to attract to the Army the aristocracy of merit and professional talent, which is after all the true aristocracy.’58 Gladstone, closing the debate, argued that the abolition of purchase was not ‘in itself a great reform’, but was ‘the removal of what we believe an insurmountable impediment to essential reform’.59 The bill received its second reading, Disraeli understanding the system could not continue as it was, though promising to offer amendments to the bill when it went into committee: the fight had only really started. In a memo of 8 March 1871 Gladstone had expressed his ‘fear that the heavy cost of abolition of purchase would cause many of the liberals to hesitate as to giving it . . . support when they connect it with the large increase in the estimates.’60 A few days later he noted that ‘the expectations which were fostered in the country by members of the present Government previously to their attainment of office are not sustained by the proposals with respect to military expenditure which they have laid before Parliament.’61

  The committee stage started on 8 May, with Colonel the Hon. Augustus Anson, the son of an earl, describing promotion on merit as ‘a system antagonistic to the instincts of a soldier, and consequently hateful to him’.62 He said the exchange of commissions between officers was vital for the social lives and professional prospects of many soldiers, and the reforms had complete disregard for this. He accused Trevelyan of having misled public opinion, and the government of ignoring how it made money out of selling commissions: sixty-six colonelcies had been sold in the preceding nine years for a total of £276,000, or an average of almost £4,500 each. Yet all the abuse was being directed at the officers who had supposedly been sole beneficiaries of the system, and were now, he claimed, being accused by the Prime Minister of bearing the responsibility for the present difficulties. They had had – he said – enough.

  This was too much for Gladstone, who intervened and told Anson that he, and the government, had done nothing of the sort. Anson disputed this, saying Gladstone had described the government’s role as being that of ‘steward’ between one officer and another when transactions took place. Anson also asked what would become of the ensign who had just paid £450 for his commission, and would lose every penny unless he retired at once? And what about the non-purchase officers – of whom there were many in the less smart regiments – who had been told they would be paid the full value of their commissions after twenty years’ service? And wasn’t it, he suggested, unfair that officers who had purchased seniority above those of the same rank should, if merit were to start to come into it, find their seniority reversed by the promotion of others? ‘Infinite jealousies and heart-burnings’ would result, he predicted, ‘tending to the utter extinction of the existin
g discipline and morale of the Army.’63

  Although some senior and progressive Conservatives questioned the bill – Richard Cross, the great reforming force of the Disraeli administration after 1874, conceded it would improve the Army, but at the cost of impoverishing it because of the huge sums required for compensation – it was left to the military old guard to mount the main defence. Cardwell goaded them: he suggested to Anson that he cared not a jot for privates, non-commissioned officers or poor officers, but only for the value of the assets of rich men. On 27/28 May 1871, in the middle of committee stage, Gladstone and Cardwell exchanged letters about the state of play. Gladstone found it hard to understand why a young man of eighteen receiving a commission – whether by purchase or otherwise – should effectively have a job for life, when he might turn out to be a useless officer. ‘I suggest that we should attach to commissions of first entry into the army a temporary character. A great number of temporary or term-officers you have now, & you must have hereafter. Why are they to be such at their own pleasure only?’64 He argued that in years to come the admission of new officers on a temporary basis would allow many to be shown the door, and would reinforce the principle of selection on which both he and Cardwell hoped to make the Army proceed.

  Cardwell replied the next day: ‘The abolition of purchase is a clear gain to both rich and poor. The outcry against it is unreal and as Vivian [a Liberal MP] truly said they are only trying “what more can we get?” But the abolition of the practice of selling exchanges is the exclusion of the indolent and self-indulgent from the service, and the prohibition to the others of a gain which they now enjoy from ministering to the indolence and self-indulgence of men whom the service can very well spare.’65 He concluded, rousingly, ‘In short our principle is that the officers shall be made for the Army. Their principle is that the Army is made for the officers.’ The argument about money overrode all others as the discussions wore on, though Cardwell did separately promise that more detailed reports would be made by their superiors on all officers in future, so the Commander-in-Chief could have the most complete understanding of an officer’s character and abilities before recommending him for promotion. This, though Cardwell was too tactful to say it, would obviate the problem of the Duke having to judge the merits of a gentleman whom he did not know socially. The diehard Tories against the bill in the Commons, seeing no hope of success there, started to threaten that it might never get through the Lords, where their party commanded a majority and where it had a history of blinkered recalcitrance. They claimed the imposition on taxpayers was too high, even though public opinion, they conceded, supported the abolition of purchase, and even though the numbers of officers who would be allowed to sell out in any one year was to be strictly regulated by law, to avoid breaking the Treasury.