[[File:Viscount_Garnet_Joseph_Wolseley.jpeg | thumb | right]]The '''Wolseley ring''' was a group of 19th century [[British army]] officers loyal to [[Garnet Wolseley]] and considered by him to be clever, brave, experienced and hard-working.
After the [[Crimean War]] Wolseley started to keep a note of the best officers he met, and began gathering a network of able military men loyal to him. There were other circles around other military leaders; later these would dwindle as more formal selection and promotion procedures became established.
The 'ring' itself was rooted in Wolseley's appointments for the [[Ashanti Campaign]] of 1873-4, in which he led British troops to take control of the [[Gold Coast (British colony)|Gold Coast]]. He chose officers he had got to know during his [[Wolseley Expedition|Red River Campaign]] in [[Canada]] in 1870: *[[John Carstairs McNeill]] *[[William Francis Butler]] *[[Redvers Henry Buller]] *[[Hugh McCalmont]] as well as other key figures: *[[Henry Brackenbury]] *[[John Frederick Maurice]] *[[George Pomeroy Colley]] *[[Baker Russell|Baker Creed Russell]] *[[Evelyn Wood (British Army officer)|Henry Evelyn Wood]] *[[John Plumptre Carr Glyn]]
Men from this group accompanied Wolseley on his various projects for about a decade. They are sometimes called the Ashanti Ring, or, in a [[pun]]ning reference to Wolseley's first name, the [[Garnet]] Ring.
Later they were the "Africans", against the "Indians" of the rival '''Roberts Ring''' of [[Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts|Lord Roberts]] and [[Herbert Kitchener]] during the [[Second Boer War|Boer War]]. The Secretary for War [[Henry Petty-FitzMaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne|Lord Lansdowne]] had worked with Roberts in India, so was alienated from Wolseley and most of the War Office. The Cabinet made Wolseley Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and Roberts was fobbed off as the Commander-in-Chief in Ireland. But during the Boer War, Roberts and then Kitchener replaced [[Redvers Henry Buller|Buller]] of the Wolseley Ring.
==See also== *[[Anglo-Asante Wars]] *[[Ashanti Kingdom]] *[[Cardwell Reforms]]
==Further reading== *{{cite book|author=Hew Strachan|title=The Politics of the British Army|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=AD5HXrCoMKkC|accessdate=29 June 2013|year=1997|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-820670-5}} *{{cite book|author=Byron Farwell|title=Queen Victoria's Little Wars|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BqTYr-Gb8ngC|accessdate=29 June 2013|date=June 1985|publisher=W W Norton & Company Incorporated|isbn=978-0-393-30235-6}} *{{cite book|author=Leigh Maxwell|title=The Ashanti Ring: Sir Garnet Wolseley's campaigns, 1870-1882|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WE9nAAAAMAAJ|accessdate=29 June 2013|year=1985|publisher=L. Cooper in association with Secker & Warburg}} *{{cite book|author=Thomas Pakenham|title=The Boer War|url=https://archive.org/details/boerwar00pake|url-access=registration|accessdate=29 June 2013|year=1979|publisher=Random House|isbn=978-0-394-42742-3}} (indexed under ''Roberts and Wolseley Rings'').
[[Category:19th-century history of the British Army]]