Army and Society in England 1870-1900: A Reassessment of the Cardwell Reforms*

Abstract

Between 1870 and 1900 British military organization was extensively revised by act of Parliament. The reforms went further than any previous changes in the history of the British army. They were so enduring that the modem British army has its foundation in these years, particularly in the legislation associated with the name of Edward Cardwell, Gladstone's Secretary of State for War in the Whig-Liberal Ministry of 1868-74. The Cardwell reforms were a vital part of that ministry's legislation to diminish the influence of privilege and acknowledge the place of merit and efficiency in the professions, the civil service, education, and the army. Cardwell's legislation for the army, however, was not so beneficial as historians have implied. Too much of the existent knowledge of British military organization in the late nineteenth century is based on a sympathy with those reforms which glosses over their weaknesses and makes alternative schemes seem reactionary. The Cardwell reforms were neither so new nor so radical in their effects as many reformers intended. A detailed study of army organization between the Crimean and the Boer Wars leads to the conclusion that much of the old continued while many of the changes made under Cardwell failed to take hold. It is time that more emphasis was placed on this conservative aspect of British military history rather than on the liberal and novel features of army reform in the late Victorian period. Why was it, for example, that the country which was the first to experience technological and industrial change on a national scale, and which extended its colonial empire farther than any power in Europe, was also the last among European powers to transform an eighteenth-century army into an instrument of modern warfare?