Duke Stephen Mortaine

Secretary of State for War and head of House Mortaine, the Black Gate. Methodical rather than flamboyant, he has placed one of the realm’s most severe Great Houses directly over the machinery of mobilisation, magazines and fortification.

Duke Stephen Mortaine directs the civilian machinery of war from the War Office in Westminster: policy, mobilisation, magazines, fortification, military contracts, the defence of Crown lands and the civilian terms on which force is raised. His house, the Black Gate, has long been associated with custody, secure entry, prisons and fortified compounds, and with the belief that an unlocked door is a political opinion expressed badly. The Prime Minister depends upon him for military obedience, and his presence at the War Office changes how every rival reads a new fortification.

He is methodical rather than flamboyant, and has made himself unpopular with officers by insisting that ammunition returns, burial provision, road capacity and hospital movement belong in the same planning book as guns and manoeuvre. His opponents fear the concentration of Black Gate influence in the ministry and the old suspicion that his house is too comfortable wherever confinement becomes policy. He answers them by publishing accounts more complete than any predecessor’s and by declining to apologise for locks that hold. Sir Alured Marchmont’s defence of the appointment is that a minister feared by generals and contractors in equal measure may be exactly the man the office requires. With General George Ashcroft, the Captain-General, he has a relationship of steady mutual respect and constant disagreement; any mobilisation puts the two of them on opposite sides of the same table.

Companies rarely meet the duke. They meet his ministry: a contract to guard a magazine, escort military stores or secure a compound, drawn up by clerks who expect the account to balance to the last cartridge. Contracts issued under Mortaine are said to specify what must be returned as carefully as what is to be delivered, and a company that treats the paperwork as a formality will find that the War Office does not.

In person

Stephen Mortaine is lean, controlled and formal, with iron-grey hair swept back from a gaunt, severe, hard-lined face. He is clean-shaven and wears dark black and deep red, with black gloves that seldom come off. He has the air of a man who has checked the locks before entering the room and will check them again on the way out.