Source.—Sir Theodore Martin’s Life of the Prince Consort, 4th edit., vol. iv., pp. 78–80. (London: Smith, Elder and Co.)

Letter from Queen Victoria to Lord Palmerston.

Osborne,
July 19, 1857.

The Queen is anxious to impress in the most earnest manner upon her Government the necessity of our taking a comprehensive view of our military position at the present momentous crisis, instead of going on without a plan, living from hand to mouth, and taking small isolated measures without reference to each other. Contrary to the Queen’s hopes and expectations, immediately after the late war the army was cut down to a state even below the Peace Establishment recognised by the Government and Parliament in their own estimates, to meet the Parliamentary pressure for economy, and this in spite of the fearful lesson just taught by the late war, and with two wars on hand—one with Persia, and the other with China! Out of this miserably reduced Peace Establishment, already drawn upon for the service in China, we are now to meet the exigencies of the Indian crisis, and the Government, as it always has done on such occasions, has up to this time contented itself with sending out the few regiments left at home, putting off the day for reorganising its forces. When the regiments ordered out shall have gone, we shall be left with 18 battalions out of 105, of which the army is composed, to meet all home duty, to protect our own shores, to act as the reserves and reliefs for the regiments abroad, and to meet all possible emergencies! The regiments in India are allowed one company, raised by the last decision of the Cabinet, to 100 men as their depot and reserve!

A serious contemplation of such a state of things must strike everybody with the conviction, that some comprehensive and immediate measure must be taken by the Government—its principle settled by the Cabinet, and its details left to the unfettered execution of the military authorities, instead of which the Cabinet have as yet agreed only upon recruiting certain battalions up to a certain strength, to get back some of the men recently discharged and have measured the extent of their plans by a probable estimate of the amount of recruits to be obtained in a given time, declaring at the same time to Parliament that the militia will not be called out, which would probably have given the force required.

The Commander-in-Chief has laid a plan before the Government which the Queen thinks upon the whole very moderate, inexpensive, and efficient. The principle which the Queen thinks ought to be adopted is this: That the force which has been absorbed by the Indian demand be replaced to its full extent and in the same kind, not whole battalions by a mere handful of recruits added to the remaining ones. This will not only cost the Government nothing because the East India Company will pay the battalions transferred, and the money voted for them by Parliament will be applicable to the new ones, but it will give a considerable saving, as all the officers reduced from the War Establishment and receiving half-pay will be thus absorbed and no longer be a burden upon the Exchequer. Keeping these new battalions on a low establishment, which will naturally be the case at first, the depots and reserves should be raised in men, the Indian depots keeping at least two companies of one hundred men each. [The Crimean battalions of eight companies had eight others in reserve, which, with the aid of the militiamen, could not keep up the strength of the Service companies. In India there are eleven to be kept up by one in reserve!]

No possible objection can be urged against this plan except two:

1. That we shall not get the men. This is an hypothesis and not an argument. Try and you will see. If you do not succeed and the measure is necessary, you will have to adopt means to make it succeed. If you conjure up the difficulties yourself, you cannot of course succeed.

2. That the East India Company will demur to keeping permanently so large an addition to the Queen’s army in India. The Company is empowered, it is true, to refuse to take any Queen’s troops whom it has not asked for, and to send back any it may no longer want. But the Company has asked for the troops now sent at great inconvenience to the Home Government, and the commonest foresight will show that for at least three years to come this force cannot possibly be dispensed with—if at all. Should the time, however, arrive, the Government will simply have to reduce the additional battalions, and the officers will return to the half-pay list from which they were taken, the country having had the advantage of the saving in the meantime. But the Queen thinks it next to impossible that the European force could again be decreased in India. After the present fearful experience, the Company could only send back Queen’s regiments, in order to raise new European ones of their own. This they cannot do without the Queen’s sanction, and she must at once make her most solemn protest against such a measure. It would be dangerous and unconstitutional to allow private individuals to raise an army of Queen’s subjects larger than her own in any part of the British dominions. The force would be inferior to one continually renewed from the Mother Country, and would form no link in the general military system of England all over the globe of which the largest force will always be in India. The raising of new troops for the Company in England would most materially interfere with the recruiting of the Queen’s army, which meets already with such great difficulties. The Company could not complain that it was put to expense by the Home Government in having to keep so many more Queen’s regiments; for as it cannot be so insane as to wish to reform the old Bengal army of Sepoys, for every two of these regiments now disbanded and one of the Queen’s substituted it would save £4,000 (a regiment of Sepoys costing £27,000, and a Queen’s regiment £50,000). The ten battalions to be transferred to the Company for twenty Sepoy regiments disbanded would therefore save £40,000, instead of costing anything; but in reality the saving to the Company would be greater, because the half-pay and superannuation of the officers, and therefore the whole dead weight, would fall upon the Mother Country. The only motive, therefore, which could actuate the Company would be a palpable love of power and patronage to which the most sacred interests of the country ought not to be sacrificed. The present position of the Queen’s army is a pitiable one. The Queen has just seen, in the camp at Aldershot, regiments, which, after eighteen years’ foreign service in most trying climates, had come back to England to be sent out after seven months to the Crimea. Having passed through this destructive campaign, they have not been home for a year before they are to go to India for perhaps twenty years! This is most cruel and unfair to the gallant men who devote their services to the country, and the Government is in duty and humanity bound to alleviate their position.

“The Queen wishes Lord Palmerston to communicate this memorandum to the Cabinet.”