1704 The bloody Battle of Blenheim (as the English spelled it) was fought on the banks of the Danube near the small Bavarian town. It was part of the long-running War of the Spanish Succession to prevent Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV of France, from becoming King of Spain and thus threatening a grand alliance between those two countries. The duke’s army included Austrians, Prussians, Hessians, Dutch and Danes, alongside the 12,000 English. After a long day’s fighting 20,000 French troops lay dead and another 14,000 had been captured, including their commander-in-chief, Marshal Tallard.
It was a famous victory. When Marlborough returned to England a grateful Queen Anne granted him extensive parkland at Woodstock, north-west of Oxford, along with £240,000 to build a country house there. That’s well over 30 million in today’s pounds. The result was the monumental and gargantuan Blenheim Palace, designed by Vanburgh in the mercifully short-lived style of the English baroque. It is still the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, and the only building not connected with monarchs or bishops to be called a palace. Winston Churchill was born there in 1874.
Poetic tributes were more modest in scale, though at first no less adulatory. Joseph Addison’s ‘The Campaign’ (1705) tells the story in 47 stanzas of decasyllabic couplets prefaced by a Latin epigram. Though not glossing over the scenes of razed villages and murderous conflict, the poem draws the national moral:
Such are th’ effects of Anna’s royal cares:
By her, Britannia, great in foreign wars, […]
By her th’unfetter’d Ister’s states are free,
And taste the sweets of English liberty:
Getting on for a hundred years later, when people had forgotten why the war had been fought in the first place, the literary establishment wasn’t so sure – not even the Poet Laureate Robert Southey. His ‘After Blenheim’ (1796) imagines little Peterkin coming across a smooth, round, hard object while playing in a field, and bringing it to his grandfather to be identified. ‘’Tis some poor fellow’s skull’, says his grandfather, adding that he often ploughs them up. Prompted by Peterkin, he tells the saga of the battle, his father’s house burnt to the ground, the women and children put to the sword, the bodies rotting in the sun after the battle.
‘And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win’—
‘But what good came of it at last?’
Quoth little Peterkin.
‘Why that I cannot tell,’ said he,
‘But ’twas a famous victory.’