The Making Of The British Army by Allan Mallinson

palace its name, that the most illustrious of Marlborough’s descendants was born – Winston Churchill. The victory at Blenheim did indeed bear fruits for more than one century.
Baroque did not live long in England, however. Its exaggerated style was altogether un-English, a thing of the Continent; and the Hanoverians, when they succeeded to the throne on Queen Anne’s death in 1714, were duller even than their native subjects when it came to public art. That Blenheim had been built in such a style was a statement that Marlborough had come of age – and, through its captain-general, that the British army had come of age too. George Monck and John Churchill were both sons of West Country gentry; both were raised from penury to ducal dignity by loyal and capable military service to the Crown (only one other English soldier, Wellington, would reach such heights after them). But George Monck, duke of Albemarle, with his pension of £500 a year, had lived at the ‘Cockpit lodgings’ in the old palace of Whitehall. The British army had come a long way, from an affair of the country gentry to one of the great institutions of state – and in the space of just fifty years.
But before the palace was built, before even the battle was fought, the business of the army’s legal status and its control had had to be settled. The ‘Glorious Revolution’, as James’s dethroning became known, gave Parliament its chance to resolve the matter more or less for good.Hitherto the army had functioned as a department of the royal household, funded by indirect and opaque means. After Monck’s death in 1670 the army’s day-to-day affairs had been run by a lower tier of secretaries, each managing a sub-department such as pay, medical services and judge-advocacy, of whom the secretary at war was the most important. This quaint title (as opposed to the secretary of state
for
war, the later cabinet post) derived from the original function of the appointment – that of secretary to the commander-in-chief when on campaign. And since after Monck’s death neither Charles nor James had appointed a commander-in-chief except when the army took to the field, these civilian secretaries had acquired both experience and increasing power. Through the various legislative instruments of the Glorious Revolution, notably the Bill of Rights of 1689 (and ultimately the Act of Settlement of 1701), and by an annual Mutiny Act for the disciplining of the army, Parliament at last established both de facto and de jure control. Thereafter, to keep more men under arms than Parliament actually voted ‘supply’ (funding) for was unequivocally illegal.
Having sorted out the ‘ownership’ of the army, Parliament was now more or less content to concede its ‘government and command’ to the prerogative of the Crown. Thus although the army’s strength – indeed its very existence – depended on the consent of Parliament, exercised through the annual estimates and the Mutiny Act, all promotions, commands, honours and awards, organization and training, and the maintenance of discipline, were the business of the King, who in the usual course of things was his own commander-in-chief. Even today, an officer is promoted to major-general and above with the express approval of the Queen as commander-in-chief.
The decade and a half that followed the Glorious Revolution was a time of deeper modernization, however. Every act of the King, including but by no means only military acts, was taken on the advice of a minister who was personally responsible both to the Crown and to Parliament. Marlborough made the army what it was in the field, but without William Blathwayt, secretary at war from 1683 to 1717, described by the diarist John Evelyn as ‘very dexterous in business … [having] raised himself by his industry from very moderate circumstance’, he could scarcely have achieved what he did. Just as Pepys had earlier served the navy as Secretary to the Admiralty, so