Throughout the whole of The Cornwallis Correspondence, there is no single hint of stinted means for the defence of the country, there is no single doubt cast upon the personal bravery of our officers and our men; but there are many out-spoken complaints of utter incompetence and reckless extravagance on the part of those who had the chief conduct of our military affairs. From 1795 to 1805—that time of fear—we have now incontrovertible testimony that both England and Ireland were in an indefensible condition, had an invader landed with a very moderate body of such soldiers as Humbert led; and that that condition was owing in no degree to any want of manliness or liberality on the part of the British nation, but solely and entirely to the want of capacity of the men whom it pleased the court, in spite of repeated disgrace and defeat, perversely to maintain in the management and command of the army.[13]
Mr. Pitt survived Lord Cornwallis but a few months, dying early in 1806, and Lord Grenville, when invited by George III. to succeed him, positively declined to do so, unless the army was placed under ministerial control. To this innovation the poor crazy king demurred. It had been an amusement and an occupation to him in his lucid intervals, “to transact military business with Frederick,” with what deplorable results to the resources and credit of the nation we now know.[14] His Majesty objected, that ever since the time of the first Duke of Cumberland, the army had been considered as under the exclusive control of the sovereign, without any right of interference on the part of his ministers, save in matters relating to levying, clothing, feeding, and paying it; and he expressed a strong disinclination to make any concession which should fetter himself, and the Duke of York, in doing as they pleased with their own.
Lord Grenville, however, remained firm; for, in the opinion of himself and his friends, the safety of the kingdom required that he should be so, and, ultimately, the king gave way, on condition that no changes should be carried into effect at the Horse Guards without his knowledge and approval.
But other and more complaisant advisers soon replaced Lord Grenville, and circumstances, entirely corroborative of the estimate which Grenville and Cornwallis had formed of his character, rendered it advisable that the Duke of York should retire from public life.[15] Sir David Dundas, notoriously one of the most incapable and unfit general officers in the service, was selected by the court as H. R. H.’s successor; and, about two years afterwards, George III. finally disappeared from the scene, and the Regency commenced.[16] Then the duke, in spite of all that had transpired, was instantly recalled by his royal brother to Whitehall, where he remained until his death. The Regent was not the man to waive one iota of what he held to be his prerogative. During his reign, the right of the Crown to the irresponsible direction of the British army was fully asserted; and, in spite of five years of almost unvaried success in the Peninsula, and of the crowning glory of Waterloo, a fantastically dressed, luxurious, and unpopular body it became under the royal auspices. To the present day, regimental officers, fond of their glass, bless his Majesty for what is called “the Prince Regent’s allowance,” a boon which daily ensures to them a cheap after-dinner bottle of wine, at a cost to their more abstemious brother officers, and to taxpayers in general, of 27,000l. a year.
Happily for the present generation, matters have changed since those corrupt times, in many—many respects for the better. The British army is no longer looked upon by the people as a costly and not very useful toy, chiefly maintained for the diversion of royalty; we now recognize and respect in it an important national engine, for the proper condition and conduct of which—as for that of the navy—a Secretary of State is directly responsible to Parliament. But a change of such magnitude has not been carried out without much peevish remonstrance and factious opposition on the part of the many whose patronage it has diminished, and whose power it has curtailed; and there are still not a few who offer what opposition they dare to its harmonious consummation.
It is to be feared that a slight leaven of the same spirit which, sixty years ago, wasted the resources and paralyzed the energies of this powerful nation, may, perchance, still linger around the precincts of Whitehall and St. James’s,—and it is not impossible that when the Smith and Elder of the twentieth century present to the public their first editions of the Panmure Papers and the Herbert Memoirs, facts, bearing on the disasters of the Crimean war, and on the invasion panic of 1859–60, may for the first time be made known—not entirely different from those with which we have recently become acquainted through The Cornwallis Correspondence.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] “The duke has very unwisely taken over three or four boys of the Guards as his aides-de-camp: which will be of great disservice to him, and can be of no use to them.”—Lord Cornwallis to Lt.-Col. Ross, 1784.
[6] Three or four of the Prince of Wales’s letters are given at length. They all prove “the first gentleman and scholar of his day” to have been a very illiterate and unscrupulous jobber. In one of them he proposed to the Governor-General to displace “a black, named Alii Cann,” who was chief criminal judge of Benares, in order that a youth, named Pellegrine Treves, the son of a notorious London money-lender, might be appointed to that office.
Lord Cornwallis replied, that Ali Ibrahim Khan, though a native, was one of the most able and respected public servants in India, and that it would be a most difficult and unpopular step to remove him; and that even if his post were vacant, the youth and inexperience of the money-lender’s son rendered him utterly ineligible for such an important trust. One of the causes of complaint which H. R. H. urged against his royal parent was, that he, also, was not intrusted with high military command.