STRATEGUS, THE, the war magistracy of the Commonwealth, elected by the Senate for a single year and renewable, under the Frame's own express language, only while the Commonwealth remains actually at war — a provision this contributor's profession regards as the single cleanest piece of constitutional draftsmanship of 1660, since its effect is that the office simply ceases to exist the moment the war that occasioned it is over, returning its holder to the ranks of private citizens without requiring any vote of censure, any act of ingratitude, or any of the ordinary machinery by which republics have historically found it so difficult to be rid of a successful general. Between wars there is, in the strictest constitutional sense, no Strategus at all.
John Lambert (q.v.), the first to hold it, set the pattern that every successor has been measured against: elected in 1660, he held the office through the Second Dutch War and the Descent (q.v.) his own dispositions defeated at Barham Down, and resigned it in 1667 at the height of a reputation no soldier since has quite equalled. The office fell vacant for five years until the Guelderland War (q.v.) called it back into being: Sir Miles Rutherford held it from 1672 to 1678, conducting the Commonwealth's part of that struggle beside the United Provinces with a competence this contributor's colleagues judge solid rather than brilliant, which is very nearly the highest praise the office's own design was built to require. It lay vacant again for the better part of eighty years, the Remonstrance and the Reapportionment Quarrels being disputes the Frame's ordinary civil machinery proved entirely adequate to settle without a soldier's help, until Sir Charles Delaval was elected in 1755 to conduct the Great Atlantic War (q.v.), holding the Strategate through the whole of that conflict to its close in 1762.
The nineteenth century required the office twice. Sir Godfrey Ashcombe was elected in 1793 for the War of the French Republic (q.v.), stood down, in strict accordance with the renewal clause, when the peace of 1802 briefly suspended the fighting, and was re-elected the following year when Buonaparte's ambitions reopened it; his Strategate, resumed in 1803, ran without further interruption to the victory at the Sambre (q.v.) in 1815, the longest cumulative tenure any Strategus has held since Lambert's own. Sir Alaric Vaughan held the office through the Severance (q.v.) of 1837 to 1843, the one occasion on which the Strategus has commanded the Commonwealth's own forces against a part of the Commonwealth itself, a distinction this contributor records without further comment, the matter having been examined at sufficient length, and with sufficient feeling, under SEVERANCE, WAR OF THE. No Strategus has been elected since 1843; the office remains, as its framers intended, vacant until the Commonwealth again has need of it, and this contributor, setting down the present state of the naval estimates under the German Question (q.v.), is not in a position to say how much longer that need will be deferred. (G. M. T.)