Having become a lieutenant colonel at last, Bagshawe could expect promotion by seniority. His health was ruined by service in India, he fell out with his colonel, and on his return to England he found himself on half-pay, living the life of a country gentleman, but he was still anxious for advancement. In 1758 he told Lord Barrington, Secretary at War, that he believed that he had been unfairly passed over when new regiments were being raised:
I have done my duty punctually, I have been as ready to serve and I have run as great hazards and I have suffered as much as any lieutenant colonel in the service … I think there are only eight lieutenant colonels who are seniors and there has been eleven junior officers … promoted to the rank of colonel …27
Barrington replied that he had indeed considered Bagshawe when ‘the regiments were disposed of,’ and ‘I do not see that any one here has been put over your head, except the Duke of Richmond’s and the King’s aides de camp, whom his Majesty has always chose without a strict regard for rank.’28 In 1759, with more troops being enlisted, Bagshawe wrote to the Duke of Bedford, lord lieutenant of Ireland, offering ‘to raise a regiment of infantry at his own expense.’ By this procedure, known as ‘raising for rank’, Bagshawe would recruit the regiment and furnish its swords and accoutrements at his own expense, although if the regiment was disbanded in less than three years the public purse would refund the cost of these items. The government accepted the offer, and his commission as colonel was dated 17 January 1760.
No sooner had Colonel Bagshawe set about raising his regiment, the 93rd Foot, than he found himself the target of just the sort of pleas that powerful men had once made on his behalf. Lieutenant Francis Flood was the nephew of Warden Flood, attorney general for Ireland, and Bagshawe thought that part of the agreement for Flood’s commission was that his uncle would provide sufficient money for Flood to raise ten men. The attorney general loudly denied that any such agreement existed, and young Flood was soon in financial difficulties, for he could not balance his recruiting account. ‘My family is in distress,’ he lamented, ‘being concerned with a contested election’, so no money was to be had there.29 Financial embarrassment did not stand in the way of young Flood’s desire for promotion. When Captain Alexander Joass decided to sell his captaincy to buy the fort major’s place at Stirling Castle he quite properly offered it for £1,000, to Captain Lieutenant Woolocombe, the regiment’s senior subaltern, who could not afford it. Joass announced that Flood had put in for it, and ‘the young man says that his father will give the cash, this I very much doubt’.30 Flood assured Bagshawe that ‘all my senior officers have declined’ to buy the captaincy, ‘there is no delay on my side, my money being lodged six weeks ago, and my lieutenancy is disposed to Ensign Watts,’ and he would be very glad if the commission could be sent along forthwith.31
It soon transpired that to Flood’s ‘inexpressible disappointment’ the deal had fallen through, and Lieutenant Ellis, his senior, had bought the captaincy. Almost immediately Flood blithely told Bagshawe that: ‘I have been lately married to a young lady in the County of Clare … and have got a pretty good fortune,’ though he would need a little leave to sort out his affairs.32 There was evidently a misunderstanding over this leave, and Flood was put under arrest by the regiment’s unsmiling lieutenant colonel for arriving at the next garrison a trifling six days after his company. He promptly penned a plea to the lord lieutenant, protesting that he had been deprived of Joass’s company by the colonel’s unreasonable behaviour, and hoped that
your Excellency will not suffer such an infringement of that regulation which has so long governed in the sale and purchase of commissions to be made in prejudice to your memorialist who without the interposition of your Excellency’s authority is strongly apprehensive of being severely injured in this affair.33
This was no help. Flood went onto half-pay when the regiment was disbanded in 1763, came back onto full pay in a newly raised independent company in 1781, joined the 102nd Foot soon afterwards when it was created by the amalgamation of several such companies, and exchanged into the 49th Foot a few months later. So far so good, for he was now in an ‘old corps’ and safe from disbandment. But he neither managed to buy a captaincy nor to gain one by seniority, and eventually sold out in 1784, a very old lieutenant. Alas for that ‘pretty good fortune’ from the lady from County Clare.
Bagshawe’s career overlapped that of Viscount Barrington, who did much to enforce the existing rules and to make them more stringent. In February 1759 he made it clear that no purchase could take place without the consent of the War Office, and in 1765 a memorandum for the king’s use encapsulated the regulations as they then stood. Only commissions that had been bought could be sold; regimental commanders made the crucial recommendation for an appointment in their regiment; officers could not retire on full pay; new vacancies should be filled, if possible, from officers on half-pay; officers on full and half-pay could only exchange with one another if they were of the same rank, and exchanges between officers of different units could only be between men of the same rank, with colonels’ consent, and only then if both officers signed to say no ‘sweetener’ had been given or received. Barrington must have known that the latter condition was widely flouted. Indeed, the unofficial ‘non-regulation’ additions to the price of commissions remained illegal as long as commissions were bought and sold, and officers all cheerfully signed to certify what all knew to be untrue. At least Barrington, while admitting that George II was ‘in general very much averse to a practice injurious to officers of merit who have no money’, managed to establish a comprehensive tariff in 1765.
We can also see the importance of half-pay. In the reign of William III it had become a device for putting officers who had been made redundant by the disbandment of their unit or who wished to quit the service temporarily, to move onto what was in effect a reserve list, available for re-employment when another war beckoned. It was a device that helped make it possible for the army to cope with those great fluctuations in size that characterised it during the eighteenth century. Half-pay also came to play an important part in the manipulation of the careers of the well-connected, for an officer on full pay in a sought-after regiment with no promotion vacancies might exchange with a half-pay officer in a less fashionable corps, buy a promotion in it, and then exchange back to his original regiment in his new rank. A good regimental agent could manage the business so slickly that our upwardly mobile hero might not even be put to the trivial necessity of buying a new uniform as he zig-zagged his remorseless way up the Army List, but he needed money or influence to ensure a smooth ascent.
Let us see how influence operated for the future Duke of Wellington, the Hon Arthur Wesley, as his family then spelt its name, left cash-poor but interest-rich by the early death of his father, the Earl of Mornington. The tuneful Earl had combined spending more money than his estates brought in (in the great tradition of Anglo-Irish gentlemen) with being professor of music at Trinity College, Dublin. Arthur was commissioned to the 73rd Foot in March 1787, into a vacancy left by the death of an officer in India, where the regiment was then stationed. That December he was promoted lieutenant, another free vacancy, in the new-raised 76th Foot, then slipped sideways into the more senior 41st a month later, and hopped to a lieutenancy in the 12th Light Dragoons just six months after that. He was bought a captaincy in the 58th Foot in June 1791, moved on to a free death-vacancy in the 18th Light Dragoons in October 1793, became a major in the 33rd Foot in the summer of 1793, before being advanced enough money by his elder brother Richard to purchase the 33rd’s lieutenant colonelcy in September that year. He spent 1787–1793 serving as aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, earning a useful 10/-a day in addition to the pay of his rank. As he also sat for the family seat of Trim in the Irish parliament for part of this time, he cannot have done much in the way of regimental duty. Indeed, we cannot even be sure what uniforms he bothered to buy. We have a portrait of him as a shock-headed 26-year-old battalion comm
ander with the 33rd’s red facings on his coat, but he was certainly a very atypical regimental officer. In 1813 the less well-connected Lieutenant Charles Kinloch of the crack 52nd Light Infantry found himself six steps from a captaincy and there had been no sales for four years. He did have the money to buy a captaincy in the less desirable 99th Foot, then exchanged with an elderly captain in the 52nd who was on the point of leaving the army, no doubt adding to the old gentleman’s pension pot in the process, thus vaulting back into his old regiment as its junior captain without having really ever left it.
Barrington realised that very few officers could play the game like this. In February 1766, in the tone of a man weary of repeatedly listening to the same argument, he told regimental commanders that they were to stop making heart-felt pleas for officers to be allowed to sell commissions they had not bought, because the system depended on a supply of free commissions. It was always maintained that:
Long and faithful service has worn them out, they have families, the eldest in each rank are willing and able to purchase, they all deserve preferment, which in time of peace can scarcely be obtained in any other way … It is no wonder that these arguments have so frequently succeeded, when any one of them would be sufficient inducement, if there were not another side to the question.
Officers who buy are permitted to sell; men who find themselves growing old or infirm dispose of their commissions which are purchased by the young and healthy; and thus what has been once bought continues for ever at sale, especially in time of peace, except now and then in a case of sudden or unexpected death. The consequence often is, that men who come into the army with the warmest dispositions to the service, whose business becomes their pleasure, who distinguish themselves on every occasion that offers, are kept all their lives in the lowest ranks because they are poor.
Barrington did not blame regimental commanders for arguing as they did, but ‘their care is extended no farther than to their own corps’. With the army’s broader welfare in mind, it was his duty to ensure that there was a reasonable supply of free commissions, accessible by seniority, so that poor but worthy men were not always bought over ‘perhaps by the youngest, least steady and least experienced of that corps, and to the great scandal and detriment of the service.’ Of course there would be times when the rule would be broken, but ‘the poor, though deserving officer should always find at the War Office, a constant assertor of his rights, and the faithful guardian of his interests.’34
Barrington’s rules applied thereafter. When Captain John Orrock was retiring in 1813 he was delighted that the Duke of York had given him leave to sell:
But as I only purchased my Ensigncy and my Company the Duke will only allow me to sell what I purchased. Therefore I shall only receive £1350 instead of £1500 as I expected, but I am very well content, having got [a non-regulation] £300 for the exchange makes it up and one year’s economy will bring up the remainder.
He began saving money by asking for his gun-dog Ponto to be sent up to town accompanied by a good supply of oat-meal, ‘as dog’s meat is expensive in London’.35
All rules had exceptions. At the battle of White Plains in 1776 the British 2nd Brigade assaulted a steep hill in the face of ‘a severe and well supported fire, Lieutenant Colonel Carr of the 35th was hard hit on the way up, and Major Cockburne took over, rallying the men and leading them on to carry the position. His bravery was witnessed by General Howe, who ensured that he received the vacant lieutenant-colonelcy, although he was not next in line, and ‘that instance of spirited conduct, as having occasioned the promotion, was a frequent topic of conversation amongst the officers.’36
The Duke of York bolted extra armour onto the regulations, decreeing that no officer could be commissioned before he was 16, must serve as a subaltern for two years before becoming a captain, and could not become a major until he had six years commissioned service. There were still abuses. When, in 1804, John Orrock hoped to slip from his ensigncy in the 65th Foot to a free lieutenancy in the 33rd, where vacancies had been opened up by service in India, he knew it was
A matter of favour, because it prevents the senior ensign of the 33rd getting promotion. The only thing that may induce the commander in chief to do it, is that the eldest ensign of the 33rd is a boy at school in England, consequently not any hardship on him.
The argument worked in Orrock’s favour, and in his next letter he reported that ‘It is now near 11 months since I have been gazetted a Lieut in the 33rd Regiment, which makes it very pleasant as Colonel Gore is exceedingly kind to me and Mrs Gore and Betsy [Orrock’s wife] are on the most intimate terms possible, indeed they are just like sisters.’37 In 1809, the time limits were increased to three years for captain and nine for major, and a major needed eleven years’ service before he could become a lieutenant colonel. Promotion examinations were introduced in 1850, and were rigidly enforced after the Crimean War had highlighted failings in training and leadership. In 1858 Hugh Pearson’s comrade, Lieutenant Harry Crohan, was prevented from moving into a vacant captaincy for ‘not having passed the necessary examination for his company’, though he did so soon enough.38
Now for a Victorian example of purchase in action. Lieutenant Colonel Edward Cooper Hodge commanded the 4th Dragoon Guards throughout the Crimean War, and in November 1854 he reflected on the cost of his commissions. His was a relatively smart regiment, though not as ruinous as the sharper end of light cavalry, and it demanded substantial non-regulation additions to the official cost of each rank, and commissions in the cavalry were in any case always more costly than those in the infantry. Hodge’s cornetcy had been free, thanks to the Duke of York’s influence, but it would have cost him £840 had he bought it. His lieutenancy had been £350 on top of the value of the cornetcy, and he had added a non-regulation £250. His captaincy had been £2,035 more than his lieutenancy, with a non-regulation £1,200; his majority another £1,350, with £1,435 extra; and his lieutenant colonelcy £1,600 with another non-regulation £1,400. He calculated that he had paid out £9,620 to become a lieutenant colonel, £4,285 of it in non-regulation payments. Musing, as a man might at the beginning of a war, on the prospect of wounds and death, he was happy to note that a month earlier on 23 October, the rules had at last changed, so if he was killed in action or died within six months of receiving wounds, his mother and sisters would receive the full regulation price of his rank – £6,175. He calculated, by a process that remains a trifle unclear, that the potential loss was £4,445, ‘which I shall have paid the country for graciously allowing me to serve her’.39
Officers had an obsessive interest in seniority, because as they edged their way up to become most senior of their rank within the regiment, so promotion, with or without purchase, might come within their grasp. The editor of Lieutenant Pearson’s ‘Indian Mutiny’ letters noted that one-third of them contain some reference to his promotion prospects and the way the death or departure of brother officers affected them. News of an officer’s death was welcome to some, and Pearson ruefully acknowledged that he owed his lieutenancy to the sudden death from cholera of ‘my friend, my chum’, Lieutenant Henry Kenny.40 In 1808 John Orrock was in the process of buying a captaincy in the 33rd Foot and was delighted to report that he had a better than expected bargain because ‘Our eldest captain died the other day which makes me ninth captain and I shall get rank from 1st March last.’41 When Captain Rowland Lewis of the 39th sailed from Ireland for England in the stormy October of 1752 his ship was late in arriving. His colonel, John Adlercron, was relieved to hear that it had eventually reached port, but admitted that it was ‘a disappointment to some, who took it for granted that it was lost and, I was informed, were applying for the company.’42 One officer who kept a copy of the Army List to hand and struck off brother officers as they were knocked over was, however, reckoned to be going too far.
Nevertheless, a sensible officer kept an eye on his progress through the regiment, ready to lend a helping hand to a senior who might be contemplating
selling out. John Peebles was the senior lieutenant of the 42nd Royal Highlanders in May 1777, when he was told by his commanding officer that the sickly Captain Lieutenant Valentine Chisholm, next above him on the list, might sell out if a non-regulation £50 was added to the price of his commission:
I thought it was too much. And of the opinion that Mr Chisholm should either sell or serve, that he was no longer able to serve he should not accept promotion, if he sold the regulation price was as much as he could expect in the current state of affairs, however to facilitate the matter and make it as well for poor Chisholm as we could, I agreed to give the £50, 20 of which Lts [John] Rutherford and [Robert] Potts agreed to make up equally betwixt them on the above conditions and Ensign [Gavin] Drummond gives £30, which with the regulation price from Ens Campbell makes up the 600 guineas to Chisholm if I succeed to this captaincy.
Peebles was promoted captain lieutenant on 31 October, Rutherford became senior lieutenant, Campbell bought the vacant lieutenancy and Drummond moved up on the ensign’s list. In September 1778 he was promoted captain without purchase, but complained that another captain – ‘one Campbell from the 57th’ – had been moved into the regiment, ‘which I think a great injustice to Rutherford’ who might, because there were two captains’ vacancies, have expected a double promotion but ‘has only got the captain lieutenancy.’43
Each promotion above ensign created a chain reaction, as Sir William Howe’s North American order book demonstrates. In 1775 Captain Heptune of the 49th Regiment died, and so there was a welcome step up for all: