Victoria's Cross (8 page)

To the chagrin of Raglan, target of much of the newspapers' bile, British reporters were allowed to roam the battlefield freely, reporting what they saw without official interference. According to
Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper
, ‘everybody knows that Lord Raglan commands in the Crimea because he is the son of a duke', a malicious quip that nevertheless rang true for many readers.
⁵²
Raglan was sixty-five years old, tired and frequently ill; had he the stamina of someone half his age, he would still have struggled with the muddle he faced. On 28 November 1854 Raglan sent an urgent request to London for 3,000 tents, 100 hospital marquees, 6,000 nosebags, and large numbers of spades, shovels, pickaxes and other essential items. At the end of April 1855 no ship had been allotted to carry these stores. On 5 May 1854,
The Times
referred to the Crimean conflict as ‘the people's war', signalling
a slightly alarming drift in the direction of republicanism.
The Times
's chief of foreign affairs, Henry Reeve, applauded the fact that the press was no longer the servant of lords and masters but had become instead ‘the instrument by means of which the aggregate intelligence of the nation criticises and controls them all'.
⁵³
Even
Punch
, always lagging behind the zeitgeist, published in April 1855 a Leech cartoon showing the Queen confronting a medicine bottle, representing the army medical service, with the inscription ‘ought to be well shaken'; an empty larder, representing the Commissariat; and a pig, intended to depict the military bureaucracy. The caption, an ironic reference to Victoria's hospital visits to the injured, ran: ‘The Queen Visiting the Imbeciles of the Crimea.'
⁵⁴

Such forthright press hostility made life in Whitehall, Horse Guards and Buckingham Palace deeply uncomfortable. Inevitably, the establishment saw the accusers as the villains and shrugged aside responsibility. Lord Clarendon, the British foreign secretary, wrote to the British ambassador at Constantinople in September 1854: ‘The press and the telegraph are enemies we had not taken into account but as they are invincible there is no use complaining to them.'
⁵⁵
Sympathy for the men who defended the realm was easily evoked; in previous times, when the other ranks had been largely absent from public attention, it had been relatively simple to dismiss them as ‘brutes', but now, under such intense scrutiny, the ordinary soldier and sailor became recognizable as fellow human beings. As the historian Orlando Figes writes: ‘If the British military hero had previously been a gentleman all “plumed and laced”, now he was a trooper, the “Private Smith” or “Tommy” (“Tommy Atkins”) of folklore, who fought courageously and won Britain's wars in spite of the blunders of his generals.'
⁵⁶
Without the British press, the VC might not have come into being – and the British press has feasted on the VC ever since.
⁵⁷
But the British press did not simply reveal the scandals;
it also delighted in identifying heroic acts. As the
Aberdeen Journal
commented:

We have heard many complaints of the evils of the presence of newspaper correspondents at the seat of war, but we humbly think that this at least is one advantage which they have conferred on the army, for it is not to any chance of system, but to the fact that every gallant action was chronicled and known at home, that the army owes this acknowledgement of individual services.
⁵⁸

All army officers owed their appointments and allegiance to the monarch. The failure to bring the conflict to a swift, smooth and satisfactory conclusion therefore reflected poorly on the monarchy.
⁵⁹
The revelation that senior officers were not just inept on the battlefield – the ambiguity of the order leading to the hopeless but magnificent charge of the Light Brigade was just one example – but also careless of the men's welfare away from the battlefield, threatened to damn the aristocratic regime that governed the military, including Victoria's husband. Much of the British press openly loathed Prince Albert; that he was born in the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld gave rise to xenophobic suspicions.
⁶⁰
At the height of the Crimean conflict, the monarchy seemed unable to repair its broken public reputation, instead lending its name to a series of blunders. In his memoir of the war, Douglas Reid, assistant surgeon with the 90th Light Infantry, found it particularly galling that, in the name of the Queen, a nationwide day of ‘solemn fast, humiliation and prayer' was declared for 21 March 1855. He quoted
The Examiner
of 18 March 1855: ‘We have starved the army – therefore let us fast; we have found our vaunted system worthless – therefore, let us humble ourselves; we have taken all measures to ensure disaster, disaster has attended our efforts – therefore let us pray!'
⁶¹
Victoria felt betrayed, and felt her army had been betrayed too. She began to insist that every message from Lord Raglan to Lord Panmure, Secretary of State for
War, and every instruction of any significance sent by Panmure to Raglan, should be shown to her – ‘if possible
before
they are sent.'
⁶²

Threats to the monarchy's assumed right to control the army; appalling examples of maladministration in the army's supply; terrible battlefield and front-line conditions for the troops; plentiful examples of individual courage daily served up by an eager national press; generous distribution of individual medals by the French – all these factors called for a dramatic response by Britain's governing class and, more particularly, the Crown. That response was the creation of the VC.

Just how radical a step this was has been rather lost sight of today. The common soldiery prior to the Crimean War had little incentive to exceed their duties. What military honours that existed were
ad hoc
affairs, dependent on the whimsicalities of political influence, and usually (the Bath, for example) for officers only. Campaign medals, such as the Military General Service Medal (MGSM), which was distributed retroactively to all officers and men who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, were notable precisely because they were so unusual. The MGSM was indiscriminate; all that was required was merely to have been present on one of the battlefields.
⁶³
After the final victory over Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Prince Regent, the future George IV, had struck a silver medal in celebration. From the humblest drummer boy to the Duke of Wellington, all were eligible for the first medal since 1650 to be authorized by the government for general distribution.
⁶⁴
Wellington considered the Prince Regent ‘the worst man he ever fell in with his whole life, the most selfish, the most false, the most ill-natured, the most entirely without one redeeming quality' and suffered the royal hijacking of his glory.
⁶⁵
The prince, safely tucked up in London during Waterloo, commanded that the medal's entire obverse should be occupied by his own profile; the reverse grudgingly acknowledged the true victor with a single word – ‘Wellington' – above the seated figure of Victory.

Such indiscriminate medal distributions rankled, as
The Times
pointed out when the VC was first mooted:

Many men who never heard the pealing of the artillery at Waterloo . . . received the Waterloo medal, in common with the bleeding survivors of the diminished squares. The same principle has been observed in the Crimea. Medals and clasps have been given for particular actions to men who took no further part in those actions than the troops now encamped at Aldershott.
⁶⁶

Away from the battlefield, the typical redcoat was assumed to be drunk, debauched, dirty and disreputable; during combat his only duty was to stand his ground and unquestioningly obey orders. Nor was this image a vast distortion: ‘In the British army . . . a staggering 5,546 men (roughly one in eight of the entire army in the field) behaved so badly that they were court-martialled for various acts of drunkenness during the Crimean War.'
⁶⁷
While the rank and file could expect no individual recognition for any act of exceptional courage, officers might hope for a CB, KCB or even a GCB, the Knight Grand Cross. In 1815 the Prince Regent decided that the Order of the Bath, hitherto a purely civilian title, should also have a military version, for officers only.

But in general, money, not medals, was what the victorious British soldier or sailor looked for. This might come through private enterprise – corpse-robbing
⁶⁸
– or state-distributed prize money.
⁶⁹
Two years after Waterloo, Parliament sanctioned a financial grant to all surviving veterans, which was paid on a sliding scale. The Duke of Wellington received £61,000 (almost £4 million in 2014, using the retail price index, and more than £60 million if we consider it on the basis of economic status);
⁷⁰
lesser generals more than £1,274
⁷¹
(more than £81,000 or £1,322,000 respectively). Corporals, drummers and privates were awarded £2 11s 4d (£164 or £2,665). A silver medal
was better than nothing – but for the majority, no doubt, cash was better still.
⁷²

By the time the eighteen-year-old Victoria became queen in 1837, it was a largely unquestioned assumption that, constitutionally, the army was subject to a system of ‘dual control': raising the money to finance the army was a matter for Parliament, while its command, the way in which that money was spent, was in the hands of the Crown. This division was blurry, not least because Parliament provided a home for many senior officers on half-pay, all of them regarding their allegiance as being first and foremost to the monarchy that had appointed them: between 1790 and 1820 almost 20 per cent of MPs had spent time in the regular army.
⁷³
Nevertheless, there was an accepted division of control between monarchy and Parliament, consolidated by a royal warrant of 1812, which stipulated that while the Secretary at War – a civilian minister – was responsible to Parliament for the financial control of army expenditures, the commander-in-chief was answerable to the Crown for discipline and army administration. This was thought to ensure that the tendency of monarchs to use military power for their own ends would be counterbalanced by a penny-pinching parliament, which would keep a close eye on the cost (and therefore the size) of the army. At the same time, by giving the Crown ultimate authority over military appointments, the army was believed secure against the undue influence of parliamentary factions. In reality, this distinction ensured that succeeding monarchs felt themselves to have the right of a royal veto over not just senior army appointments but
all
military affairs – and Victoria exercised this supposed authority to the fullest extent possible.

The bonds that knitted together monarchy and army were consolidated by the appointment of trusted friends and relations to the most senior military posts. In 1795, for instance, George III appointed his son, Prince Frederick, the Duke of York and Albany and a career soldier,
as commander-in-chief of the army. The erosion of the military and civilian division of authority reached its acme in 1828, when the Duke of Wellington became prime minister while simultaneously occupying the post of commander-in-chief. Wellington was determined to ensure that ‘the command of the army should remain in the hands of the Sovereign, and not fall into those of the House of Commons'
⁷⁴
Henry Hardinge, who succeeded Wellington, was no less a defender of the royal prerogative. In Hardinge's view:

The
King
, and
not
that
House
, was the disposer of grace, favour, and reward to
the Army
. . . It was of the utmost importance that the army should look up to
no authority but that of the King
. It was by his Majesty's direction that punishments were inflicted, and by him alone should rewards be conferred. This was the constitutional doctrine.
⁷⁵

In the opinion of Victoria, a soldier pledged an oath of fidelity not to Parliament but ‘to defend Her Majesty, her heirs and successors, Crown and dignity, against all enemies' and ‘to observe and obey all orders of Her Majesty, her heirs and successors, and of all Generals and Officers set over him'.
⁷⁶
In January 1855, when, under pressure from both Parliament and the public, the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for War in the Aberdeen administration, sent a despatch to Lord Raglan seeking explanations for the poor management of the war, Victoria chided him:

The Queen has only one remark to make, viz. the entire omission of her name throughout the document. It speaks simply in the name of the
People
of England, and of
their
sympathy, whilst the Queen feels it to be one of her highest prerogatives and dearest duties to care for the welfare and success of
her
Army.

Victoria was conscious of the fact that her father, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, had been a soldier, and that she had been taken by him as a
baby to a military review on Hounslow Heath. Although he died when she was just eight months old, in 1876 she presented new colours to her father's old regiment, the Royal Scots, saying: ‘He was proud of his profession, and I was always told to consider myself a soldier's child.'
⁷⁷
In 1838, her coronation year, she supervised a large review of the army in Hyde Park and such reviews became a regular feature of her reign. She even formally approved army uniforms; during the Crimean War Panmure informed Victoria that he understood and respected her ‘sole right to determine . . . all patterns for the arms, clothing, and accoutrements and equipment of the Army'.
⁷⁸

Victoria had no desire to dissolve the innate conservatism of the army, yet the introduction of an inherently democratic military honour flouted the established order. For her, the VC was no more than an extension of
noblesse oblige
into military affairs; for many senior officers, it threatened a dangerous erosion of their status, for which they had often paid large sums of money out of their own pocket. In retrospect they had much and nothing to fear: the creation of the VC certainly helped open the way for more profound army reform, including the abolition of the commission purchase system, but the preservation of the officer class as an elite, separate from and socially superior to the other ranks, was left intact.