ABSTRACT
Whether, like Winston Churchill, he formally takes the title or not, Britain’s Prime Minister is inevitably her chief Minister of Defence in wartime. He must bear the final responsibility for the success or failure of the nation’s war effort; he must select the various members of his cabinet team who perform particular defence duties; and he must coordinate their work. His job is always vast and it has rarely been less enviable than in the age of Bonaparte. Then the stakes were as high and the nation’s defence organisation as intricately complicated as they had ever been. No fewer than four cabinet ministers had specific defence jobs to do - the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Secretary of State for War and Colonies, the Home Secretary and the Master General of the Ordnance; also one minister outside the cabinet - the Secretary-at-War; and a Commander-in-Chief, whose authority could be embarrassing to the cabinet because so much of it stemmed from the facts that he was a royal duke and that his strongest supporter was his father, the King. To the above we must add the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Until 1794, when Pitt created the office of the Secretary of State for War and Colonies, the Foreign Minister had been personally responsible for the planning of the army’s campaigns in Europe (while the Colonial Secretary commonly planned its operations in his sphere of interest). Even after 1794, however, the Foreign Minister could not help being interested in the army’s, and the navy’s, operations. His diplomacy was made easier by their successes or harder by their failures. It was his duty, also, to coordinate, if he could, the operations of Britain’s allies with her own and to gain secret intelligence about the enemy. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had, of course, to find money for the war; and, if he had no positive voice in deciding the nation’s strategy, he at least had a negative one. For the army and navy could only attempt operations which he could find money to pay for; and when he could find no money, there could be no operations. Often, however, as in the cases of Addington, 31Pitt and Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer were the same man. Finally, the land forces of Britain may be described as consisting, in effect, of four separate and ill-coordinated armies. So, all told, the Prime Minister had a very complicated team to handle; and he had besides a number of particular jobs of his own to do. In this chapter I shall deal in order, first, with all above-mentioned parts of the defence organisation which were directly concerned with war on land, and last with that very important matter, intelligence. The Admiralty and its duties are so large a subject as’ to require a separate chapter.
