Wilson, Sir Henry Hughes, Baronet

▪ British field marshal

born May 5, 1864, near Edgeworthstown, County Longford, Ire.

died June 22, 1922, London, Eng.

      British field marshal, chief of the British imperial general staff, and main military adviser to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in the last year of World War I. While in the War Office as director of military operations (1910–14), he determined that Great Britain should support France in a war against Germany on the basis of French requirements, a policy not favoured by many British leaders.

      A soldier from the early 1880s, Wilson rose to the command of the Staff College at Camberley, Surrey (1907–10). During this period he cultivated the friendship of his counterpart at the French war college, General (afterward Marshal) Ferdinand Foch—an association that may account for Wilson's readiness to involve Great Britain in French strategy. He played a dubious part in the Curragh incident (March 1914), surreptitiously encouraging some British army officers who refused to lead troops against Ulster opponents of Irish Home Rule.

      On the outbreak of World War I, the British government chose Wilson's policy of fighting in France alongside French armies in preference to attacking the German invaders in Belgium, the strategy of the commander in chief, Field Marshal Earl Roberts. Wilson agreed with Roberts, however, on the necessity of military conscription (not instituted until 1916). The smooth mobilization of the standing army and its rapid movement to France in August 1914 may be credited largely to Wilson's prewar planning.

      Wilson himself soon went to France as assistant chief of the general staff. His only field command in the war (December 1915–December 1916) was marked by the loss to the Germans of a sector of Vimy Ridge, near Arras, by his IV Corps. In September 1917 he took over the Eastern Command, a position that enabled him to live in London and ingratiate himself with Lloyd George. As chief of the imperial general staff (from Feb. 18, 1918), he aided the prime minister in securing Foch's appointment as supreme commander of the Allied armies on the Western Front.

      Disagreeing with the government's postwar Irish policy, Wilson, who had been promoted to field marshal and created a baronet (1919), was refused reappointment as chief of staff by Lloyd George. Wilson thereupon left the army and entered the House of Commons as a Conservative member for an Ulster constituency (all in February 1922). A flamboyant personage and an eloquent speaker on behalf of Anglo-Irish Unionism, he evoked the hatred of his nationalist countrymen and was assassinated on his doorstep by two members of the revolutionary Irish Republican Army. Wilson left no child, and the baronetcy became extinct upon his death.

Additional Reading

A biography by C.E. Callwell, Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson . . . , 2 vol. (1927), contained extracts from Wilson's diaries—extreme denunciations of individuals and erroneous military ideas—that damaged his professional reputation. A more recent biography is Basil Collier, Brasshat (1961).

* * *