There are reasons for traditions and arrangements. Sometimes they are good and sometimes not, but they are reasons, explanations grounded in some sort of experience. I had a conversation about this a few years ago with a young senior at Harvard who on graduation would go to work for a great consulting firm that studies the internal systems of business clients to see if they can be bettered. He asked if I had any advice, which I did not. Then I popped out, with an amount of feeling that surprised me because I didn’t know I had been thinking about it, that he should probably approach clients with the knowledge that systems and ways of operating almost always exist for a reason. Maybe the reason is antiquated or not applicable to current circumstances, but there are reasons for structures, and if you can tease them out they will help you better construct variations or new approaches. I can’t remember why but this opened up a nice conversation about how consultants walk into new jobs with a bias toward change—the recommendation of change proves their worth and justifies their fees—but one should be aware of that bias and replace it with a bias for improvement, which is different.
Connected to that, I’ve spent a lot of the past 10 years reading histories of war—how and why they came about, what happened within them, how it all ended, and what the ending produced. This led, somewhat to my surprise, to becoming engrossed in histories of battles, and discovering a natural and previously unplumbed interest in topography, artillery, logistics, generalship, the readiness of armies, transport, field communications, provisioning, etc.
One thing you find yourself interested in as you read histories of the British armed forces is why the army, the establishment and the people of the country put up with the purchase system, the tradition whereby England’s wealthy aristocrats and noblemen bought commissions in the army and paid lump-sum amounts for increases in rank.
The historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, a writer of magnificent ease, style and wit, addresses this in “The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade,” published in 1953.
“The purchase system . . . which enabled a rich man to buy the command of a regiment over the heads of more efficient officers, appears at first sight as so childishly unjust, so evidently certain to lead to disaster, that it is almost impossible to believe that sensible people ever tolerated much less supported it,” she observed. And yet, she wrote, the system expressed an important British principle; famous victories were won with it in place; and even the Duke of Wellington, that master of administration, backed it.
Why? For what were at the time good reasons.
“No sentiment is more firmly rooted in the English national character,” writes Woodham-Smith, “than a hatred of militarism and military dictatorship.” Edmund Burke reflected this when he declared, in Parliament: “An armed disciplined force is in its essence dangerous to liberty.” The attitude was pervasive and sprang from the 17th century experience of Cromwell’s Major-Generals. Woodham-Smith: “The people of England were then subjected to a military dictatorship, they were ruled by Army officers who were professional soldiers, and, who, though admittedly the finest soldiers in the world, usually had no stake in the country, and often were military adventurers. Their government was harsh and arbitrary, and the nation came to detest the very name of the Army.”
Restoration of the crown followed. So did a national determination never again to allow the army to be led by men who would lead a military revolution and impose military dictatorship.
And so the idea of the purchase system, introduced in 1683 when the standing army was formed. Men could become officers if they came up with enough money to buy a commission or make a significant down-payment. This, writes Woodham-Smith, meant officers would, by definition, be “men of property with a stake in the country, not military adventurers.” Additionally, the price of a commission functioned as a spur to good behavior: A man dismissed for bad actions lost what he had paid. Shallowly perhaps, but for the English not insignificantly, wealthy officers put on a good show: they dressed their regiments in colorful, well-tailored uniforms and saw they had the best horses.
From 1683, both Crown and Parliament agreed that officers of the British army would be drawn from “the class that had everything to lose and nothing to gain from a military revolution.”
This approach was very different from that of the other great powers of Europe, which used as officers professional soldiers who were dependent on their salaries, who used high military rank to enhance their social standing and often used it to build fortunes. The officers of the English system didn’t have to do that: They were already rich and titled.
The purchase system was adopted to help prevent revolutions and the rise of Napoleons; the system, existing within an army that was well-managed, well-led, properly administered and populated by troops with a fighting spirit, would in fact defeat Napoleon at Waterloo.
It worked, haphazardly and not without problems—some officers were fools or second raters, and some men of talent, vision and even military genius never rose because they lacked the money to buy the position that would give a stage to their gifts—for almost 200 years, being more or less abolished by 1870.
Why? Because even though the government by nature held a bias for the wealthy and aristocratic, the system in the end was recognized to be not only abusive of humble talent, but increasingly abused and rigged by the wealthy, some of whom bought captaincies, never bothered to show up, and started swanning around London calling themselves Captain. There were bribery scandals. The system was finally judged to be destructive to the operations, efficiency and spirit of the entire army.
So it was abolished.
But the system existed for a reason, as all structures, systems and ways of operating do.
Bonus information: Cecil Woodham-Smith was a woman. Cecil was really her first name. From the author page of “The Reason Why”: She was from an Irish family, the Fitzgeralds, with deep military ties: Her father served in the British Indian Army, her mother’s family included a general who fought under Wellington and was killed at Waterloo. She wrote a greatly admired biography of Florence Nightingale, bearing the name of its subject, published in 1950, and “The Great Hunger,” a history of the Irish famine of the 1840s, published in 1962. She was named a Commander of the British Empire in 1960. Did Woodham-Smith know most readers thought her a man? Probably. Certainly. But being a woman in her field and area of expertise wouldn’t have been seen by readers, critics or academics as a plus, so she was luckily named. Anyway, this too speaks of a system and tradition that had poor reasons.