Popular officer and respected military ethicist.
At six feet and seven inches, Major-General Sir Sebastian Roberts, who died on March 9 aged 69, towered over his brother officers and the soldiers in his command. Nevertheless an imposing physical presence – made even taller in full-dress uniform by his ceremonial plumed cocked hat – belay a gentle character who radiated genuine interest in the lives of others, most of all in the wellbeing of his men.
He was a frequent feature on ceremonial occasions – not least amid the pageantry of Queen Elizabeth II’s birthday parades – but had ill health not dogged him he would almost certainly have risen to become a distinguished battlefield commander. He was intelligent, well-spoken and organised, and able to handle both the demands of Whitehall and a not always sympathetic media.
Born into a military family in Aldershot in 1954, Roberts was the eldest of 10 children. His father was a brigadier in the Welsh Guards; three of his six brothers and both his sons would follow similar routes. After Ampleforth and Balliol College, Oxford, he was commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1977.
Service in Southern Rhodesia followed, where during Operation Agila in 1979-80 he took responsibility for collecting the weapons of Patriotic Front guerrillas after their ceasefire with the Rhodesian security forces. Afterwards he served with the 4th Armoured Brigade in Germany, and later in Belize and Berlin as a company commander. His qualities were soon noticed at the highest level by Sir Peter Inge.
Roberts became General (now Lord) Inge’s military assistant in 1991; his considerable diplomatic skills and ability to cool a heated situation were of immense value to Inge, who was by then Chief of the General Staff. The same gifts led him to the command of 1st Battalion Irish Guards in time for their inaugural tour of Northern Ireland: a delicate, challenging and important deployment.
Returning to England, Roberts served in Wiltshire with the striking title of “Colonel Land Warfare 2 (Doctrine)”. There he made perhaps his most important contribution to the British Army, the doctrine Soldiering: the Military Covenant. It amply demonstrated not only the quality of his mind but also the depth of his thought, and it stands as a lasting reflection on the morality of war in the modern age.
“Military effectiveness cannot be based on functional output alone,” Roberts argued, “and unless it is focused on higher external ethics, an army risks the moral bankruptcy of the Waffen SS. Soldiers must know that what they do is right, and that they have the support of their nation, their society, and their government.” In 1999 he was called to serve as the Army’s director of public relations.
It was a busy time; the army was deployed in Iraq, Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Afghanistan, and someone was needed who spoke like a soldier but could at the same time build positive relations with the media. There was so much scrutiny that, as he later observed, the army was “front-page news every day”.
He would have served as commander of the UN peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone had he not suddenly required major heart surgery. A gentler future beckoned, and in 2003 he received the command of London District and the Household Division. He also became colonel of his own regiment, the Irish Guards.
On July 7 2005 Roberts was in Wiltshire when the news broke of lethal terrorist attacks in London. He jumped into a helicopter and returned to base, to coordinate the local military response to the immediate situation: supporting the emergency services and helping to take some of the strain in the aftermath.
Every inch the solider, he was seen by many as having nearly single-handedly saved the independence of the five Foot Guards regiments – Grenadier, Coldstream, Scots, Welsh and Irish – when they were threatened by bureaucratic reorganisation. Roberts’s charm and diplomacy brought the pen-pushers into line, but it was a close-run thing.
Roberts’s life of service was informed in no small part by his fervent and consistent Catholicism; his late mother had been a protégée of Ronald Knox. He was chairman of governors at St Mary’s School, Shaftesbury, and as his parents’ eldest son was also effectively the patriarch of an enormous Catholic family.
In Wiltshire, Roberts preferred to worship quietly at Sacred Heart, Tisbury, rather than in the grander setting of nearby Wardour; when asked to pinpoint his greatest achievement, he named his marriage to his wife, Elizabeth, with whom he had four children.
More worldly distinctions inevitably also accrued. Roberts was Master of the Girdlers’ Company from 2020 until his death. He was also the monarch’s representative on the trustees of the Royal Armouries. In retirement he filled his time with travel, books, painting – at Oxford he had gained a reputation as a prodigious caricaturist – and prayer.
Roberts was appointed OBE in 1993 and KCVO in 2007. At his packed requiem at the Brompton Oratory, celebrated by Dom Ambrose Henley of Ampleforth Abbey, his flag-draped coffin was carried into the church by soldiers from his beloved Irish Guards, in their scarlet tunics with brass buttons and golden shamrocks at their collars. Quis separabit?
Major-General Sir Sebastian Roberts KCVO OBE, January 7 1954 – March 9 2023.
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