A Life of Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany

The Grand Old Duke of York. A Life of Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, 1763-1827, Derek Winterbottom, Pen and Sword Books, Barnsley, 2016, hardback, £19.99, ISBN 9781473845770

This rehabilitation of the military career of Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, with which we were all acquainted from childhood through the enduring nursery rhyme ridiculing his apparent indecisive military leadership by first marching his men up the hill before immediately marching them down again, argues that he was ‘far from incompetent as a commander’. Indeed, the author, in this full-length, well-researched biography of the duke, the first to be published for over sixty years, identifies the source of the misrepresentation of the Duke’s military tactics as a reference to his manoeuvring the 10,000 troops under his command which he maintains effectively preserved them from potential destruction at Tourcoing resulting from the indecisiveness of Britain’s Austrian ally, for which he received a fulsome apology from the Austrian emperor. Winterbottom also eulogises his military reforms as commander-in-chief of the British army during the Napoleonic Wars. They included targeting the buying of commissions, improving tactics and training, organisation of the militia and recruitment, reducing corporal punishment, increasing soldiers’ pay, reforming military hospitals and disciplining inept officers, amounting to the transformation of ‘the British military machine which Wellington acknowledged contributed to the success of his armies in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo. He does not however exonerate the Duke for the accumulation of large debts through his gambling and ‘reckless spending on race horses and a palace’. Nor does he ignore his turbulent personal life, including the notorious scandal when his mistress was accused of ‘using her influence over him to obtain promotion for ambitious officers’.