Field Marshal Sir Henry Hughes Wilson, 1st Baronet, (5 May 1864 – 22 June 1922) was one of the most senior British Army staff officers of the First World War and was briefly an Irish unionist politician.
Wilson served as Commandant of the Staff College, Camberley, and then as Director of Military Operations at the War Office, in which post he played a vital role in drawing up plans to deploy an Expeditionary Force to France in the event of war. During these years Wilson acquired a reputation as a political intriguer for his role in agitating for the introduction of conscription and in the Curragh incident of 1914, when he encouraged senior officers to resign rather than move against the Ulster Volunteers (UVF).
As Sub Chief of Staff to the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), Wilson was Sir John French's most important advisor during the 1914 campaign, but his poor relations with Haig and Robertson saw him sidelined from top decision-making in the middle years of the war. He played an important role inAnglo-French military relations in 1915 and – after his only experience of field command as a corps commander in 1916 – again as an ally of the controversial French General Robert Nivelle in early 1917. Later in 1917 he was informal military advisor to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and then British Permanent Military Representative at the Supreme War Council at Versailles.
In 1918 Wilson served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (the professional head of the British Army). He continued to hold this position after the war, a time when the Army was being sharply reduced in size whilst attempting to contain industrial unrest in the UK and nationalist unrest in Mesopotamia and Egypt. He also played an important role in the Irish War of Independence.
After retiring from the army Wilson served briefly as a Member of Parliament, and as security advisor to the Northern Ireland government. He was assassinated on his own doorstep by two IRA gunmen in 1922 whilst returning home from unveiling a war memorial at Liverpool Street station.
Family background
The Wilson family claimed to have arrived in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, with William of Orange in 1690, but may well have lived in the area prior to that. They prospered, as Ulster Protestants, in the Belfast shipping business in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and, following the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849, became landowners in Counties Dublin, Westmeath and Longford. Wilson's father James, the youngest of four sons, inherited Currygrane in Ballinalee, County Longford (1,200 acres, worth £835 in 1878), making him a middle-ranking landowner, more than a large farmer but not a "Big House" Ascendancy landlord; by 1901 the Currygrane Estate had 49 Catholic and 13 Protestant (10 of them the Wilson family) inhabitants. James Wilson served as a High sheriff, a Justice of the peace and Deputy Lieutenant for Longford, there being no elected local government in Ireland until the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898, and he and his oldest son Jemmy attended Trinity College Dublin. There is no record of Land League activity on the estate, and as late as the 1960s the IRA leader Seán Mac Eoin remembered the Wilsons as having been fair landlords and employers. The Wilsons also owned Frascati, an eighteenth century house at Blackrock, near Dublin.
Born at Currygrane, Henry Wilson was the second of James and Constant Wilson's four sons (he also had three sisters). He attended Marlborough public school between September 1877 and Easter 1880, before leaving for a crammer to prepare for the Army. One of Wilson's younger brothers also became an army officer and the other a land agent.
Wilson spoke with an Irish accent and at times regarded himself as British, Irish or an Ulsterman. Like many of his era, including Anglo-Irish or Ulster-Scots, he often referred to Britain as "England". His biographer Keith Jeffery suggests that he may well, like many Anglo-Irish, have played up his "Irishness" in England and regarded himself as more "Anglo-" while in Ireland, and may well also have agreed with his brother Jemmy's view that Ireland was not "homogenous" enough to be "a Nation." Wilson was a devout member of the Church of Ireland, and on occasion attended Catholic services, but disliked "Romish" ritual, especially when practised by Anglican clergymen. He enjoyed good personal relations with Catholics, although there are unsubstantiated claims that he disliked George Macdonogh, and tried to block the promotion of William Hickie, as both men were Catholics.