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

by T. H. S. Escott

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 opponent[65] 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.