Field Marshal Sir Henry Hughes Wilson, 1st Baronet was one of the most senior British Army staff officers of the First World War who was later also engaged into an Irish unionist movement.
Background
Henry Wilson was born in Edgeworthstown, county Longford, Ireland, on March 5, 1864. Wilson and his family had long been active in Unionist politics. His father had stood for Parliament for Longford South in 1885, whilst his older brother James Mackay (“Jemmy”) had stood against Justin McCarthy for Longford North in 1885 and 1892, being defeated by a margin of over 10:1 each time.
As far back as 1893, during the passage of Gladstone’s Second Home Rule Bill, Wilson had been party to a proposal to raise 2,000–4,000 men, to drill as soldiers in Ulster, although he wanted Catholics also to be recruited. In February 1895 Henry and Cecil listened to and “enjoyed immensely” a “very fine” speech by Joseph Chamberlain about London municipal questions in Stepney, and Wilson listened to another speech by Chamberlain in May. In 1903 Wilson’s father was part of the Landowners’ Convention deputation to observe the passage of Irish land legislation through Parliament. In 1906 his younger brother Tono was Tory agent in Swindon.
Education
After failing twice to gain admission into Woolwich and three times into Sandhurst, Wilson in 1882 obtained a commission without examination into the Longford Militia. After a brief tour in Burma, he attended the Staff College in 1892/1893, and was promoted captain.
Career
In 1899 he took the Third Infantry Brigade to Natal and later served on Lord Roberts' staff until 1901. Wilson was assigned to the War Office in 1903 and four years later as brigadier general became commandant at Camberley. For three years at the Staff College he advocated close ties with France and established friendly relations with Ferdinand Foch, head of the French Ecole supérieure de guerre. It was also here that Wilson developed the notion that the British army be at the disposal of France in case of war. In 1910 he returned to the War Office as director of military operations and drew up plans for the deployment of a British Expeditionary Force on the left wing of the French army in the event of war with Germany; three years later he was promoted major general. But in the spring of 1914 Wilson became deeply embroiled in the Curragh incident. When British cavalry officers outside Dublin declared that they would rather resign than compel Ulster to accept home rule, Wilson, a Protestant Irishman, supported the mutiny, but, unlike Sir John French, chief of the Imperial General Staff, suffered no consequences as a result of this notorious incident.
When Lord H. H. Kitchener became secretary of state for war in August 1914, Wilson receded into the background as he adamantly opposed Kitchener's independent stance for the British Expeditionary Force in France; indeed, Wilson had been so Francophilie that Paris referred to Sir John French's troops as "L'armee W'." Wilson accompanied French to the Continent as deputy chief of the General Staff, and as the fighting around Mons increased and as French's chief of staff, Sir Archibald Murray, broke down, Wilson virtually directed the British Expeditionary Force. He lost his nerve after Mons, ordering his soldiers to burn their baggage and to retreat at full speed, but the situation was saved by the calm displayed by the two corps commanders, Sir Douglas Haig and H. L. Smith-Dorrien, as well as by Kitchener. And when the French turned the tide at the River Marne on September 6, Wilson grew so optimistic as to predict that the British would enter Germany within four weeks.
In November 1914, it was debated whether Wilson should replace Murray as French's chief of staff, but on January 25, 1915, Sir William Robertson received this assignment. Wilson became chief liaison officer with French headquarters and was promoted lieutenant general. He denounced Kitchener's "ridiculous and preposterous army of twenty-five corps," depicting it as "the laughingstock of every soldier in Europe." Wilson believed fully in the infallibility of French military judgment.
In December 1915, Wilson was given command of the IV Army Corps, but saw little action throughout 1916 as the IV Corps was denuded of troops for the Somme offensive. Wilson was sent to Russia on December 1 as head of a mission to discuss the supply of war materials; he returned, in March 1917, to his old post as liaison officer with the French, but their new commander in chief, General Henri Pétain, loathed Wilson and had him sent home. After a period on half pay, Wilson in September was given the Eastern Command. He used this opportunity to cultivate David Lloyd George and after the Italian collapse at Caporetto in October, Wilson quite unofficially accompanied the prime minister to Rapallo on November 7. There, to the dismay of Robertson, then chief of the Imperial General Staff, it was agreed by prior accord to create a Supreme War Council to coordinate the various Allied war strategies; on December 1, 1917, the glib, voluble Wilson assembled his staff at Versailles as British military representative. The fourteenth, and last, note of the Supreme War Council called for the creation of a general reserve of troops for the entire western front; it had been drafted by Wilson, but foundered on the combined opposition of the various Allied commanders, most notably Haig.
On February 18, 1918, Robertson yielded to Wilson as chief of the Imperial General Staff at the express desire of Lloyd George. Almost immediately, the great German Michael offensive in France on March 21 drove the British back and broke their point of contact with the French at Amiens. Wilson departed for France at once and at an Allied conference at Doullens on March 26 agreed to confer overall military command of the combined Allied armies on his old friend General Foch. The tide was turned by July 18, and the Germans accepted an armistice on November 11, 1918. Ironically, Wilson favored a continuation of the war in the belief that it might finally prompt the prime minister to impose conscription upon Ireland.
Wilson drifted away from Lloyd George after the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, opposing British participation in the League of Nations and the British pro-Greek stance in the Mediterranean. At home Wilson clamored for rigorous measures against Ireland. He was created a baronet, promoted field marshal, given the thanks of Parliament, and a grant of £10,000 for his war services. He retired from the army in 1922 as a staunch foe of the Sinn Fein in Ireland and the Bolsheviks in Russia. In February 1922, he was elected Conservative member of Parliament for North Dawn, Ireland, but on June 22 two Sinn Feiners shot down the mutineer of 1914 on his doorstep at Eaton Place, London. He received a public funeral and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.
Henry Wilson was not a great captain, much less a great field commander. Instead, his love of intrigue turned him into a politician rather than a soldier. It was said of him during the Great War that "he got into a state of sexual excitement whenever he saw a politician." Wilson's diary, published in 1927, revealed him to have been full of prejudice and mistaken opinions.
Politics
Jeffery comments that for all Wilson’s reputation for intrigue he was mainly an inveterate gossip (a feature which endeared him to some politicians), whose closeness to the French alienated Robertson, and whose behaviour was no worse than the intrigues of Robertson, Haig, Rawlinson and Gough to remove Sir John French. His reputation for political intrigue was acquired for his involvement in the arguments over conscription and Ireland in 1912–14. Esher (in his life of Kitchener) later blamed Wilson’s “Irish blood, exuberant with combative malice” for having drawn him into the latter quarrel, which had earned him the reputation of “a pestilential fellow”.
Sir Charles Deedes later (in September 1968) wrote that Wilson’s energy and foresight in 1910–14 had ensured that Britain would take her place alongside France when war came. An alternative view, aired as early as the 1920s, is that Wilson locked Britain into a continental commitment which Kitchener would rather have avoided or minimised. Jeffrey is critical of some historians – e.g. Zara Steiner in Britain and the Origins of the First World War, Gerhard Ritter in The Sword and the Sceptre – who take an oversimplified view of Wilson as a supporter of the French position. Although Wilson’s verbal fluency and charm brought him great influence, his position was also supported by most of his military colleagues and by the most influential members of the Cabinet. Furthermore, this ignores Wilson’s interest in reaching a military agreement with Belgium.
Personality
Wilson was a man of great charm. Contemporaries described him as a “delightful whirlwind” and wrote that “there was something spectacular and theatrical about him”. Politicians enjoyed his levity, e.g referring to Haig as “Sir Haig” – Kiggell said he was the only general who could talk to the “Frocks” on level terms – as did the French, who called him “General Dooble-Vay”. Some senior British officers genuinely believed that his sympathy for the French amounted almost to treason.
Wilson's popularity was not universal. Sir Sam Fay, a railway official who worked at the War Office 1917–19, enjoyed cordial face-to-face relations with Wilson but wrote that he could argue with total conviction that a horse chestnut was the same thing as a chestnut horse, and that an unnamed senior general said he suffered a “sexual disturbance” whenever he came within a mile of a politician (Fay recorded that the general had in fact used “vulgar and obscene” language – Walter Reid simply writes that exposure to politicians gave Wilson an erection). Edward Spears also a senior Anglo-French liaison officer, but junior to Wilson loathed him and compared him to Quint, the sinister and evil valet in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.
For much of the war Wilson had a poor relationship with Haig, although relations eased somewhat when Wilson became CIGS. Esher said that he was always loyal to the man he was serving, and Walter Reid believes Wilson did not actively plot against Haig. When French asked Wilson, late in 1915, if he had heard of Haig, Rawlinson and Gough intriguing against him, Wilson replied, perhaps somewhat naively, that “Haig was too good a fellow” for that kind of thing. Wilson wrote of Haig (21 December 1915, when appointing him to a corps command) “He was quite nice but he is always foreign to me”. After the disaster of 1 July 1916 Wilson wrote (5 July) that Haig was “a good stout hearted defensive soldier with no imagination & very little brains & very little sympathy”. That same day Foch, who had declined an invitation from Haig to lunch with Wilson, thought Haig “was stupid & lacked stomach for the fight” which Wilson thought “not quite fair”.
Haig's private views of Wilson were less cordial: he thought him (August 1914) “a politician, and not a soldier”, and a "humbug". After a meeting on 23 June 1916, following the failed counterattack at Vimy Ridge, Haig wrote that Wilson “seems to acquire a more evil look each time I see him”.
Connections
Whilst in Ireland Wilson began courting Cecil Mary Wray, who was two years his senior. Her family, who had come over to Ireland late in Elizabeth I’s reign, had owned an estate called Ardamona near Lough Eske, Donegal, the profitability of which had never recovered from the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. On 26 December 1849 two kegs of explosive were set off outside the house, after which the family only ever spent one more winter there. From 1850 Cecil‘s father George Wray had worked as a land agent, latterly for Lord Drogheda’s estates in Kildare, until his death in 1878. Cecil grew up in straitened circumstances, and her views on Irish politics appear to have been rather more hardline than her husband’s. They were married on 3 October 1891.
The Wilsons were childless. Wilson lavished affection on their pets (including a dog “Paddles”) and other people’s children. They gave a home to young Lord Guilford in 1895-6 and Cecil’s niece Leonora (“Little Trench”) from December 1902.