Royal Warriors

A Military History of the British Monarchy

Charles Carlton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317873761
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

"War is the trade of kings" John Dryden.

War and monarchy are two of the most important and resonant topics in British History. This exciting new book explores the role that kings and queens have played in war, and how war has shaped the monarchy. Aimed explicitly at the general reader, the book delves into the truth behind the myths, and uncovers some fascinating facts about our iconic soldier kings and queens.

chapter 1

THE TRADE OF KINGS

‘War is the Trade of Kings’. John Dryden, King Arthur, II (1691)

Every year on the second Saturday in June the sovereign takes the salute as her Guards troop her colour on the Horse Guards Parade at Whitehall. The custom of showing the standard before all of the regiment goes back to the seventeenth century, if not before, when the colours were a rallying point in battle [Plate 1.1]. Soldiers not only had to be able to recognise them in the smoke and chaos of combat, but on campaign had to gather around the colours every morning in case of sudden attack or, more often, to assemble on parade in their ranks to march off as a unit. While the first record of trooping the colour can be found in the order books of the Coldstream and Grenadier Guards for 1749, the modern practice dates from 1805 when the ceremonial was carried out to celebrate George III’s birthday. During Queen Victoria’s reign it was held on 24 May, her actual birthday, while today it is held in June to mark Queen Elizabeth’s official birthday.¹

For the tens of thousands who watch the trooping in person, and for the millions more who see it on television, the rousing music, the precise marching, colourful ceremonial, and martial discipline of this ritual are part of the pomp and circumstance which the British rightly claim to do so well. It is a reassuring link with a safe past, a constant custom in a changing world with an uncertain future. Yet the excellence with which the Queen and her soldiers perform this ritual hides three important points about the relationship between the monarch, her people and war.

‘Whether we like it or not,’ the journalist Gwynne Dyer observed, ‘War is a central institution in human civilization.’² The cliché that wars settle nothing is absurd. Men fight because they believe doing so will solve their problems. The Second World War, for instance, solved the problem of Hitler and Japanese militarism, although it did produce the new problems of the cold war and nuclear annihilation. Societies spend huge resources in men, material and money on wars, not only because they perceive there to be advantages in winning, but because the costs of losing may be horrendous. The vanquished may be killed, their property destroyed, their children abused, their women raped and consigned to concubinage. The Russian treatment of Germans in 1945 showed that the fate of the defeated has changed little over the centuries.

Plate 1.1 Trooping the colours © Tim Graham/Corbis

Gwynne Dyer also noted that war ‘has had a history practically as long as civilization’.³ Thus it is not surprising that the origins of kingship, the first form of hierarchical leadership, lie in war. Ancient societies chose as their chief the man best able to lead the tribe into battle.⁴ The earliest Anglo-Saxon kings had to be good at waging war because they spent much of their time fighting: nearly as many of them died in combat as did in their beds.⁵ Thus until she was sixty, the Queen would ride on a fine horse, the symbol of knightly courage, to lead her guards out onto Horse Guards Parade. ‘The characteristic of the English monarchy,’ observed William Bagehot, the Victorian historian who did more than anyone else to define the modern constitutional monarchy, ‘is that it retains the feeling by which the heroic kings governed in their rude age.’⁶

To make their age less rude later Anglo-Saxon monarchs added a patina of Christianity, which, as John Cannon has observed, ‘transformed the very nature of kingship’ by giving it a sacradotal quality.⁷ Thus the Queen not only stands at the head of her armed forces as the colours are trooped past, but in doing so reconsecrates the flags as sacred icons. The regimental colours are more than a convenient rallying point: they are symbols treated with more reverence than the union jack. The monarch – or members of her family – present each exquisitely embroidered colour, after priests of the church of which she is head have blessed it, making it sacred like the bread and wine of Holy Communion. This totem represents the spirit of the regiment – past, present and even future. The carefully stitched colour, bearing the names of battle honours the regiment has won over the centuries, links those who have died in the sovereign’s service to those who currently serve Her Majesty.

Second, soldiers serve the sovereign, not the democratically elected government of the day. Like airmen and marines (although not sailors), on enlisting they must take an oath of allegiance to the Queen and to her heirs and successors. While the government may pay them, and pass the legislation that compels their obedience, the sovereign is the focus of their loyalty. When at the end of the ceremony, riding in her coach, Elizabeth II leads her soldiers back into barracks, she is making the point that as titular commander-in-chief of the armed forces her job is to make sure politicians (as did Oliver Cromwell) never again use them to take over the legally elected government. The Royal Navy does not take a personal oath of allegiance to the monarch, not because – as they would have us believe – sailors are especially loyal to the crown. Mutiny has been as common on water as on land. Being confined to the sea or coastal depots, sailors cannot readily take over landlocked seats of government.

Plate 1.2 Prince Harry in a light tank © PA Photos

That the Royal Navy is an exception is in many ways ironic because the personal links between the senior service and the monarchy are extremely close. As members of the Royal Family stand in their various military uniforms to salute the colour as it is trooped past, they make a third point about the relationship between the monarchy and war. The Windsors are a military family. The Queen’s husband, her two eldest sons, father, grandfather and great-grandfather were active naval officers. She served as an army officer in the Second World War. The first official duty of her eight-year-old grandson, Prince Harry, was to ride in a Scimitar tank, proudly watched by his mother and hordes of journalists and cameramen⁸ [Plate 1.2].

It is, of course, easy to confuse the public relations aspect of soldiering with the reality. War is about courage, duty and honour, all values which the royal family would like to symbolise, even though they have (except for Prince Andrew in the Falklands), of late failed spectacularly to do so. For centuries the sovereign was expected to be a heroic leader. ‘The English will never love or honour their sovereign unless he be successful and a lover of arms,’ observed Jean Froissart, the French historian, nearly seven hundred years ago.⁹ In 1745, two years after the king stopped leading his troops personally into battle, the national anthem asked God to ‘send him victorious, happy and glorious’. The sovereign is still the fount of honour: she recognises bravery, the highest martial virtue, with the award of the crosses named after Queen Victoria and King George VI. She, or a member of her family, personally confer them, as they do other medals for courage.

Yet during such investitures, usually held in the gilded throne room of Buckingham Palace, as a band plays selections from Gilbert and Sullivan, the reality of war seems as far away as it does on a fine June day, after the colour has been trooped and the crowds head for home. Some will follow the sound of marching bands up the Mall to Buckingham Palace, to glimpse once more the symbols of power. Others may stroll down Whitehall past 10 Downing Street, where executive power resides, and then on to Houses of Parliament, the locus of constitutional sovereignty. If they look across the road, they can see on the Embankment along the Thames the statue of Boadicea, the first of Britain’s great royal warriors [Plate 1.3].

Cassius Dio, the third-century Roman historian, described Boadicea as ‘a woman of the royal family, possessed of greater intelligence than often belongs to women.’¹⁰ She was married to Prasutagus, the king of the Iceni, a tribe that occupied modern Norfolk and Suffolk. When he died in 60 AD, he left half his property to his two children, and the other half to the emperor Nero in order to appease the Romans who had just conquered Britain. Catus Decianus, the Roman procurator, however, decided to seize the lot, sending a gang of thugs to Boadicea’s palace near Norwich. When she protested they flogged her, and gang-raped her fourteen- and sixteen-year-old daughters.

The atrocity drove the Iceni and the neighbouring Trinovantes into revolt. A huge army assembled near Caistor St Edmund, Norfolk, where Boadicea addressed them. According to Dio:¹¹

She was huge of frame, terrifying of aspect, and with a harsh voice. A mass of bright red hair fell to her knees, she had a great twisted golden necklace, and a tunic of many colours, over which was a thick mantle fastened by a broach. Now she grasped a spear to strike fear into all who watched her.

She reminded her audience how the Romans (whom they greatly outnumbered) had reduced the British to slavery, thus shaming them before their ancestors. Then she released a hare that she had secreted in the folds of her dress, to run free in full view of the Celtic warriors. The omen convinced the host to march on Colchester.

Plate 1.3 Boadicea and her daughters © Boadicea by Thomas Thorneycroft (1815–85), Victoria Embankment, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library

Colchester, or to use its Latin name Camulodunum, was a colonia, a settlement of Roman army veterans. Not content with the land they had been given for their military service, they had stolen all they could from the native Britons, whom, the Roman historian Tacitus observed, they treated no better than ‘prisoners and slaves’. In doing so they had neglected to complete the city’s defences, leaving it wide open for Boadicea’s forces. In a desperate attempt to save the city Petilius Cerialis set out from near Peterborough with three thousand men from the Ninth Legion. He was ambushed near Godmanchester, losing most of his infantry; only his cavalry escaped.

Inspired by this victory the British took Colchester within two days. The sack of the city was as brutal as it was thorough. No one was spared: many were tortured to death; their looted homes were burnt to the ground.

The news of the disaster persuaded Catus Decianus to flee to the continent, leaving his military counterpart, Paulinus Suetonius, to clean up the mess. Suetonius was a distinguished Roman general, who had earned a reputation in the Alps as a mountain fighter. When the revolt broke out he was in Anglesey dealing with the Druids, who had risen against the Roman occupation. His initial reaction was to gather his cavalry and march south east down Watling Street to London, telling the rest of the Fourteenth and elements of the Twentieth Legions to follow as soon as they could. He also ordered the Second Legion based in Exeter to join him in London.

The relief forces arrived too late. So Suetonius had to withdraw leaving London, the largest and most prosperous city in the province, to its fate. The destruction of Londinium, a metropolis of perhaps 30 acres with a population of 90,000, was complete and merciless. Boadicea’s troops burned, slashed, crucified, hung and disembowelled all they could find. Women had their breasts cut off and sewn into their mouths; others were impaled on stakes. So thorough was the destruction that archaeologists have discovered a 15-inch red layer of burned debris 13 feet below the ground: so intense was the fire storm that temperatures reached 1,000°C, as extreme as those experienced in the blitz.¹² While Tacitus’ estimate that 70,000 people, Romans and Romanised Britons, perished may be an exaggeration, the loss of life was truly appalling. It grew even greater a few days later when the Britons took and sacked St Albans, 30 miles to the north.

The atrocities strengthened the Romans’ resolve while diverting British attention away from preparing for the inevitable denouement. The two sides eventually met, most modern authorities agree, at Mancetter, just off Watling Street, about ten miles north of Coventry.¹³ Suetonius drew his forces up before a forest to protect his rear, with his legionnaires in the centre, auxiliaries on either side and cavalry on the flanks. The British arrayed in an uncoordinated horde of foot soldiers, interspersed with charioteers. Behind them in a half moon were the British wagons, piled high with wives and children, who surely cheered as their menfolk advanced upon the Romans. Just before they reached his lines Suetonius ordered his men to throw two volleys of javelins, and charge. The hail of 12–14,000 javelins decimated the British horde. In the mêlée the short Roman swords jabbed and cut, wreaking a terrible revenge among the British who, jam-packed together in a milling crowd, had no room to use their longer weapons. As the Roman cavalry charged, Boadicea’s forces broke, but their baggage wagons prevented most from escaping. Trapped, the Romans cut them down with as little quarter as they gave the women and children who ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• chapter one THE TRADE OF KINGS
• chapter two A FATAL DAY TO ENGLAND
• chapter three WITH GRACE AND MIGHT OF CHIVALRY
• chapter four NO OTHER AIM OR THOUGHT THAN WAR
• chapter five TO THREATEN BOLD PRESUMPTUOUS KINGS WITH WAR
• chapter six AND HE MARCHED THEM DOWN AGAIN
• chapter seven LOOKING THEM IN THE FACE
• Index