The middle class ideal of selection by merit and education was found only in the artillery and engineers, with the other branches in the hands of the rich landed gentry.

The main obstacle had been objections by the defunct East India Company and its directors, who wished to maintain their own military establishment, and by the "die-hards", senior officers who opposed almost any reform on principle.

The arch-conservatives among the Army's officers were led by the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, who was Queen Victoria's cousin, and, in the opinion of historian William McElwee: ... almost the last of the typically Hanoverian characters thrown up by the English ruling dynasty, and derived his ideas on drill and discipline from Butcher Cumberland and the Prussian school of Frederick the Great.

Written by Colonel (later General) Sir George Tomkyns Chesney, head of the Indian Civil Engineering College, it raised the idea that, despite the acts of Parliament during the previous year in regard to the military, Britain faced the possibility of a German invasion.

The lesson of the Franco-Prussian War was the absolute necessity of a trustworthy army reserve of well trained men in good health and vigour.

The Army Enlistment Act 1870 allowed a soldier to choose to spend time in the reserves rather than the regulars and be paid fourpence a day, in return for a short period of training each year and an obligation to serve when called up.

The Queen is said to have signed the act into law "most reluctantly",[27] but the system worked, producing an immediate increase in the army's strength.

While a number of long-service NCOs still chose to remain with the colours for the maximum service permitted of twenty-one years, the great majority of soldiers passed into the reserve at the end of their initial enlistments.

By 1900 the reservists numbered about 80,000 trained men, still relatively young and available to be recalled to their units at short notice in the event of general mobilisation.

There is a preference frequently on the part of the people for one regiment as opposed to another, and I should think there would be found a great disinclination in men to enlist for general service, and to be liable to be drafted and sent to any corps or station.

Equally, thinly populated rural areas in some English counties or the Scottish Highlands could not always provide the numbers needed.

In addition to his two major pieces of legislation, Cardwell also introduced a number of reforms through Orders in Council or other statutory instruments.

[31] Then-Colonel (later Field Marshal Lord) Garnet Wolseley was appointed assistant adjutant-general at the War Office in 1871, and was regarded by Cardwell as his principal military adviser and protégé.

[34][35] As he rose rapidly through the ranks, Wolseley continued to battle for what he saw as the main pillar of the reforms: providing a double framework for large scale expansion in war, namely regular reserves, generated by short service, together with revitalised militia integrated into the new geographic regimental structure.

[40] Long after Cardwell's departure, on his appointment back at the War Office as Quartermaster-General to the Forces in July 1880,[41] he found that there was still great resistance to the short service system and used his growing public persona to return to the fight, including making a speech at a banquet in Mansion House in which he commented: '...how an Army raised under the long service system totally disappeared in a few months under the walls of Sevastopol'.

[39] The unexpectedly large force required for the initial phase of the Second Boer War in 1899 was mainly furnished by means of the system of reserves Cardwell had designed and Wolseley had built.

A change of government put Cardwell out of office in 1874, but his reforms remained despite attempts from the Regular Army to abolish them and return to the comfortable and familiar old post-1815 situation.

They point out that the Duke of Cambridge blocked many other reforms, such as the adoption of a general staff system as pioneered by the successful Prussian army.

Theodore Hoppen says these reforms were at best partial, at worst ineffective.... No planning department was established and no chief of staff appointed to set out the purpose and strategy of the army as a whole because politicians, Civil Servants, and soldiers all proved reluctant to take seriously the idea that Britain could ever again be involved in a large scale European war.