John Churchill was in love. Sarah Jennings, the object of his affections, had been born on 5 June 1660, the week after Charles II returned from exile.1 Her father, Richard Jennings, came from a family of Somerset gentry which had moved up to Hertfordshire and lived at Holywell House near St Albans. Richard’s father had been high sheriff of the county and MP for St Albans. He himself sat for the same constituency, and had supported John Pym, one of the leaders of the opposition to Charles I in the early days of the Long Parliament, but had later, as a member of the Convention Parliament, backed the return of Charles II.
Although Richard Jennings was in theory a wealthy man, with perhaps £4,000 a year from property in Hertfordshire, Somerset and Kent, his estates were encumbered with debt and he had many younger siblings who had to be provided for. Sarah was the youngest of five children, with two brothers and two sisters, and it may have been the strains of a large family and hopeless debts that drove her parents to split. She moved to London with her mother Frances, who sought (unavailingly) to rescue her dowry from the shipwreck of Richard’s finances. In 1673 Sarah followed her sister Frances into the household of the Duchess of York. Frances had served James’s first wife Anne Hyde until her death in 1671, and soon became a maid of honour to Mary of Modena. The comte de Gramont called her ‘la belle Jenyns’, who was as lovely as ‘Aurora or the promise of spring’. It speaks volumes for her determination that she resisted the Duke of York’s roving eye and busy hands, but remained on sufficiently good terms to get her sister a place in the household.
In 1668 Richard Jennings died, and Sarah’s mother, who inherited little but his creditors, moved into an apartment in St James’s Palace with her daughters. The scurrilous Mrs Manley, author of The New Atlantis, a Tory scandal-sheet, was later to accuse her of witchcraft. She was like ‘the famous Mother Shipton, who by the power and influence of her magic art had placed her daughter in the Court’.2 There are too many contemporary complaints about Mrs Jennings for us to attribute them simply to political malice. She was certainly evil-tempered, may actually have been unhinged, and some suggested that she dabbled in the black arts and the procurement of that commodity most sought after by the court, pretty girls. In any case, the maids of honour were hardly above suspicion. Samuel Pepys grumbled that they bestowed their favours as they pleased without anyone taking any notice, and Frances and a friend once amused themselves by dressing up as orange sellers (a common cover for prostitution) and standing outside a playhouse to accost two gentlemen of their acquaintance. They were given away by their expensive shoes.
Sarah met John towards the end of 1675, and they began to dance together at balls and parties. Sarah had a blazing row with her mother at about this time, and eventually Mrs Jennings was ‘commanded to leave the court and her daughter in it, notwithstanding the mother’s petition, that she might have her girl with her, the girl saying she is a mad woman’. Theirs was a relationship which prospered only at a distance, and attempts at reunion regularly resulted in hot words. Some time after her marriage, after yet another furious argument in which she urged her mother to get into the coach and not freeze to death outside it, Sarah affirmed that ‘I will ever be your most dutiful daughter, whatever you are to me.’3
Just as John Churchill’s character was shaped by growing up in straitened circumstances, so Sarah’s was influenced by her own experience of poverty, genteel though it was, and by her inability to tolerate her mother’s company, however much both of them genuinely hoped that their next meeting would bury bad feelings for ever. We often pay out in adult life the coins we receive as children, and in Sarah’s tumultuous relationship with her mother we have a foretaste of her dealings with her own daughters. Sarah was certainly beautiful, not with the classical good looks of her sister Frances, but with that thin edge of imperfection that men often find even more attractive. She had long fair hair that she always made the most of, full, firm lips, a naturally pink complexion, and a nose that turned up, ever so slightly, at its tip.
Even at the age of sixteen she had unstoppable determination and a flaming temper. There is a great deal about Sarah Marlborough that is hard to admire, but the three centuries that separate us cannot dull the impact of this outspoken, uncontrollable and self-willed beauty. One can see why, once John Churchill had met her, he never thought seriously about marrying anybody else, and we can never practically separate John Churchill, soldier and politician, from John Churchill, husband and lover, nor usefully speculate on what he might or might not have become without Sarah. One incident throws their relationship into sharp perspective. When Marlborough was captain general of Queen Anne’s armies and one of the most important men in the kingdom, he entered Sarah’s dressing room to tell her that Sidney Godolphin, the lord treasurer, was going to dine with them. She was brushing a hank of her yellow hair over one shoulder and, furious at having her evening spoiled, seized a pair of scissors and cut it off, then flounced out in a fury. He picked up the severed tress, tied it up with ribbon, and kept it in his strongbox until he died. She found it there, and it broke her heart.
Some of the letters written during their courtship have survived. All are undated, most are from John to Sarah, and she herself assures us that the correspondence started when she was not more than fifteen. She told him to burn her letters, and he seems to have obeyed her, because the eight that survive are only copies. Sarah, in contrast, kept his letters and read them from time to time, and when she had only a year to live, wrote on one: ‘Read over in 1743 desiring to burn them, but I could not do it.’ His letters, in black ink and a slightly sloping hand, show all the symptoms of courtly love. ‘You are, and ever shall be, the dear object of my life,’ he tells her, ‘for by heavens I will never love anybody but yourself.’ In another he assures her:
If your happiness can depend upon the esteem and love I have for you, you ought to be the happiest thing breathing, for I have never loved anybody to the height I do you. I love you so well that your happiness I prefer much above my own; and if you think meeting me is what you ought not to do, or that it will disquiet you, I promise you I will never press you more to do it. As I prefer your happiness above my own, so I hope you will sometimes think how well I love you; and what you can do without doing yourself an injury, I hope you will be so kind as to do it – I mean in letting me see that you wish me better than the rest of mankind; and in return I swear to you that I never will love anything but your dear self, which has made so sure a conquest of me that, had I the will, I will not have the power ever to break my chains. Pray let me hear from you, and know if I shall be so happy as to see you tonight.4
He gave her presents. First she had a choice of two puppies, and then he sent her a waistcoat: ‘I do assure you there is not such another to be had in England.’5 From what we already know of Sarah we will not be surprised to hear that there were rows. ‘To show you how unreasonable you are in accusing me,’ he wrote, in a letter which still bears red seals and threads of green ribbon,
I dare swear you yourself will own that your going from me in the Duchess’s drawing-room did show as much contempt as was possible. I may grieve at it, but I will no more complain when you do it, for I suppose it is what pleases your humour … Could you see my heart you would not be so cruel to say I do not love you, for by all that is good I love you and only you. If I may have the pleasure of seeing you tonight, please let me know, and believe that I am never truly pleased but when I am with you.6
This correspondence dates from 1675–76, after John’s service under Turenne in Alsace and the Palatinate. However, it is hard to be sure of exact dates. Courtin, the French ambassador in London, had kept Louvois apprised of the goings-on at court, and when there was first talk of John Churchill commanding a French regiment, Louvois advised against it, arguing that Churchill’s real concern at that moment was ‘to give more satisfaction to a rich and faded mistress’ rather than to serve his own royal master, undoubtedly a reference to his relationship with Barbara Castlemaine. Some time later, Courtin reported that ‘Mr Churchill prefers to serve the very pretty sister of Lady Hamilton than to be lieutenant colonel of Monmouth’s regiment.’ In 1665 Frances Jennings had married Sir George Hamilton, Marlborough’s fellow colonel, who commanded the Irish Regiment until his death in action in 1676. Winston S. Churchill dates Courtin’s second letter to November 1676. It raises the question as to why Churchill might have been interested in being lieutenant colonel to Monmouth, at best a sideways move in the hierarchy, but it does suggest that he was now so heavily preoccupied with Sarah that he was unwilling to accept a full-time command appointment.7
Several things blocked the path of true love. First, John Churchill’s relationship with Barbara Castlemaine was common knowledge at court, and Courtin reported to Paris that Sarah’s parents had refused their consent to her marriage with John. This cannot be true, for Sarah’s father was long dead, but it may well reflect the opposition of Sarah’s mother. Next, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill were firmly against the union. They hoped that John would marry another of the maids of honour, Catherine Sedley, daughter and heiress to the wealthy Sir Charles Sedley. Her portrait suggests that she was by no means as attractive as Sarah (the attentive Courtin called her ‘very rich and very ugly’), and she certainly had a caustic wit. It may be that rumours linking her name with John’s were the reason for Sarah’s accusation in the last of his letters quoted above. Catherine eventually became yet another of James’s mistresses, though when Queen Mary reminded her of the fact after 1688 she riposted: ‘Remember, ma’am, if I broke one of the commandments with your father, you have broken another against him.’8
Mrs Manley, writing long after the event, with the intention of damaging the Marlboroughs’ reputation and making money, provided two alternative versions of how John ended his relationship with Barbara Castlemaine and married Sarah. The first has him provide a virile ‘body double’ who, his face concealed, tumbled the ever-ready Barbara, enabling a supposedly furious John to catch the lovers in flagrante. The second has Sarah replace Barbara in bed before one of John’s visits. This time the lovers are caught by Sarah’s mother, who insists upon marriage to save her daughter’s honour and promptly produces a priest. Both stories are wholly improbable. Barbara had enjoyed a long sexual relationship with John and borne him a child, so the story of the body double is scarcely convincing. The stage-managing of the second scenario would have been difficult: how did Sarah gain access to Barbara’s bed, and where were priest and mother concealed?
The truth of this blazing courtship may actually be gleaned from the surviving love letters. Sarah told John that: ‘If it were true that you have that passion for me which you say you have, you would find out some way to make yourself happy – it is in your power.’9 In other words, if he really loved her then he should marry her or end the relationship. This clearly failed to move him (perhaps his parents, at this very moment, were reminding him how Catherine Sedley’s fortune would secure his future), and in another letter Sarah warned him: ‘As for seeing you, I am resolved I never will in private nor in public if I could help it.’10 Things went from bad to worse, and the affronted colonel wrote to Elizabeth Mowdie, Sarah’s waiting woman:
Your mistress’s usage to me is so barbarous that sure she must be the worst woman in the world, or else she would not be thus ill-natured. I have sent a letter which I desire you will give her. It is very reasonable for her to take it, because it will then be in her power never to be troubled with me more, if she pleases. I do love her with all my soul, but will not trouble her, for if I cannot have her love, I shall despise her pity. For the sake of what she has already done, let her read my letter and answer it, and not use me thus like a footman.11
Sarah responded that she had done nothing to deserve the sort of letter he had written her, and told him that it was entirely up to him whether or not he saw her, though she would be ‘extremely pleased’ if he decided against it.
The correspondence thundered on like the most obdurate battle between resolute opponents, with Sarah yielding nothing and John returning to the attack with as much determination. Even when they seemed to have agreed on marriage, John feared that the sudden reappearance of Sarah’s sister Lady Hamilton would wreck his plans; but Sarah assured him that he had nothing to fear if his intentions were honourable, and he should not worry that her sister’s arrival could ‘make any change in me, or that it is in the power of anybody to alter me but yourself’.12 We know that John formally asked the Duchess of York to consent to the marriage, and we can presume that both Sarah’s mother and his own parents agreed.
Sir Winston had his own reasons for giving consent, just as he had for pressing the advantages of the Sedley connection. The old cavalier was broke again, and could survive only if John agreed to give up his inheritance so that Sir Winston could sell off some property to pay his debts. A Sedley marriage would have prevented the need for this, and if we need further evidence of the intensity of John’s love for Sarah it is that he was prepared to give up his family estate for her. Even Macaulay was reluctantly prepared to admit that he must have been ‘enamoured indeed’ to let so much money slip past him. True, their poverty was relative, for he had his army pay and the £500 a year interest on the ‘infamous wages’ he had received from Barbara. Moreover, Mary of Modena had been charmed by the couple, and with her interest firmly engaged they married, probably in her apartments, in the winter of 1677–78. Colonel and Mrs Churchill could not afford to buy a suitable house, so they stayed in his lodgings in Jermyn Street (five doors along from St James’s, not far from where Wilton’s restaurant now dispenses its matchless Dover Sole) when he was in London, and she spent a good deal of time in Dorset with Sir Winston and Lady Churchill. Although her circumstances were not precisely the same as those in which her husband had grown up, it is not hard to see how the episode helped sharpen her desire to make money.
John Churchill, a full colonel in the English army from early 1678, was now a senior liaison officer, his tasks part-military and part-diplomatic, negotiating with the Dutch about arrangements for accommodating the British troops who were now on their way to Flanders to fight against the French as a result of the English government’s political realignment. He was very much in the Duke of York’s mind, and enjoyed a measure of devolved authority. In April that year the Duke of York told William of Orange, concerned about a French attack on Bruges, held by four British battalions, that ‘Churchill will speak to you more at large about it.’ Churchill was well aware that although the majority of Englishmen, and indeed the Duke of York himself, were in favour of vigorous prosecution of the war, the king himself was not.
In September 1678 he was back in Flanders, this time as a brigadier of foot, his command consisting of two battalions of foot guards, and a battalion each of the Holland, the Duchess’s and Lord Arlington’s regiments. However, he knew that peace negotiations were under way at Nijmegen, and doubted if he would actually get into action. ‘You may rest satisfied that there will be certain peace in a very few days,’ he told Sarah.
The news I do assure you is true; therefore be not concerned when I tell you that I am ordered over and that tomorrow I go. You shall be sure by all opportunities to hear from me, for I do, if possible, love you better than I ever did. I believe it will be about the beginning of October before I shall get back, which time will appear like an age to me, since in all that time I shall not be made happy with the sight of you. Pray write constantly to me. Send your letters as you did before to my house, and there I will take order how they shall be sent off to me. So, dearest soul of my life, farewell.
My duty to my father and mother and remember me to everybody else. Tuesday night. My will I have here sent you for fear of accident.
Sarah later endorsed the letter: ‘Lord Marlborough to ease me when I might be frightened at his going into danger.’13 Her sister’s husband, George Hamilton, had been killed in action, and she knew that status was no guarantor of safety.
John was perfectly right about the peace. The Treaty of Nijmegen ended Louis’ Dutch War. If he fell short of his aim of ‘annihilating’ the Dutch, Louis had improved his position along the frontier with the Spanish Netherlands, annexed Franche-Comté, and made important gains in Lorraine. Moreover, although Europe was to remain at peace for the next ten years, during this time Louis strengthened his hand by a variety of means. Some territories were declared to be réunis à la couronne, often on flimsy legal pretext; others were purchased from local rulers anxious to deal soon rather than fight later, and still others were simply occupied. Of special importance were Strasbourg, and its bridgehead Kehl, just across the Rhine, gateway into the Empire, and Casale on the Po, bought from the Duke of Mantua, on the edge of the Spanish-held Duchy of Milan. The industrious Vauban busied himself remodelling captured fortresses, and laying out his pré carré, a double line of strongholds, on the northern frontier. Although the army was reduced after the peace, thirty-six battalions were ready for immediate service and cadres were kept in place to aid rapid expansion. Louis believed that his ambitions had been checked temporarily, not halted for ever, and at once began to use diplomacy in an effort to dismantle the hostile coalition before he tried again. His interventions in English politics were designed to break the link between England and Holland. Nijmegen was not really a peace, more a ten years’ truce.
The historian Keith Feiling affirmed that the Earl of Danby’s four years in office were ‘the most constructive of the reign, illustrating the forces which, beneath the surface of faction, were making a real advance’.14 Danby did wonders for the English royal finances, and helped lay the foundations of a civil service, with Samuel Pepys rebuilding the fleet and William Blathwayt bringing the beginnings of order to the administration of the army. The foundation of the Royal Hospitals at Chelsea and Kilmainham, in 1682 and 1684 respectively, showed that the nation was beginning to glimpse the debt it owed to its soldiers, though to this day it has never recognised it fully.
Danby was close to being a real prime minister, and based himself on support in a carefully-managed Parliament, where interest was slapped on with a trowel, and in the wider nation. But if he could usually push through the king’s business, he could not prevent politics from becoming rancorously factional, and the terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ date from about this period. The Whigs were named after the radical kirk faction in Scotland, the word itself deriving from the shout of whiggam used by drovers to hasten their horses. A Tory was an Irish outlaw, for it was alleged that the Duke of York relied for his support on Irish papists.
Louis may not have beaten the Dutch, but he certainly did for Danby. The ink was no sooner dry on the Treaty of Nijmegen than the Whigs, fearing that Charles would use his army to enforce Catholicism at home, demanded its disbandment. Danby’s opponents Shaftesbury and Russell were liberally provided with French gold and used it to buy votes, while the French ambassador helped them discredit Danby by demonstrating that, for all his anti-French and Protestant rhetoric, he had actually been receiving French subsidies. It was the end of Danby, at least for the moment: he was impeached for intriguing with foreign powers and imprisoned in the Tower, where he remained till 1684, when Charles granted him a pardon.
The fall of Danby was subsumed within a greater crisis. In September 1678 a clergyman turned adventurer named Titus Oates revealed details of a ‘Popish Plot’ to murder the king and install the Duke of York in his place. Some fragments of truth seemed to make the rest of the story credible, and a new Parliament met in 1679 in a mood of Protestant hysteria. Charles tried to govern through a council that now included Monmouth and the opposition leaders. It produced a plan designed to limit the powers of a Catholic monarch, but the Commons went further, and drew up a Bill to exclude James from the succession. Monmouth, ‘our beloved Protestant Duke’, was the darling of the opposition: he hinted that there was a ‘black box’ whose contents proved that Charles had married his mother in exile. Charles’s latest mistress, Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, was seen as further evidence of francophilia at court, and when Nell Gwyn was held up by the mob at Oxford in 1681 she went straight to the crowd’s heart by yelling: ‘Pray, good people, be civil. I am the Protestant whore.’
The Popish Plot and the Exclusion crisis dominated politics till 1683, and there were times when it did indeed seem as if ‘’41 is come again’. Charles weathered the storm because of his courage and sharp political acumen, so often cloaked in indolence or the pursuit of pleasure. The Earl of Ailesbury thought that the king ‘knew men better than any that hath reigned over us, and when he gave himself time to think, no man ever judged better of men and of things’.15 Although Charles may be censured for letting innocent men face a traitor’s death when he knew them to be guiltless, perhaps their lives were the price he paid for his throne. In 1681 he deftly summoned a new Parliament to the old royalist stronghold of Oxford, broke the back of the opposition, and dissolved Parliament: he did not summon another. A supportive public reaction enabled him to attack some of his most prominent opponents, and the fictitious Popish Plot was replaced, in 1683, by real attempts on his life. The Earl of Shaftesbury, the most dangerous of the opposition leaders, fled abroad, and the discovery of the Rye House conspiracy to murder Charles and his brother on their way back from Newmarket races saw the Earl of Essex kill himself in the Tower and Lord Russell leave it to be beheaded on Tower Hill.
None of this was comfortable for John Churchill, and we must now see how his own career flew in these gusty winds. He had been made gentleman of the bedchamber to the Duke of York in 1673, and master of his wardrobe in 1679. He and Sarah were too firmly linked to the Yorks not to share the battering they took, and in 1679 they joined James, judiciously exiled by his brother, first in The Hague and then in Brussels, where they lived in the same house that had been occupied by Charles before his restoration. James began to make plans to settle there indefinitely, first calling for his fox-hounds and then for his daughter, Princess Anne. When Charles fell ill that autumn his advisers felt that James should be on hand in case he died, and Churchill, in England at the time, was sent to bring him over. No sooner did they arrive than Charles recovered, and his advisers now determined that James should return to Brussels.
John, in the meantime, was sent to Paris to further negotiations for a subsidy from Louis, which would help Charles survive without calling another Parliament, and thus reduce the risk of an Exclusion Bill being passed. He was authorised to tell the French that his master would henceforth support the interests of Louis, and apologise for his support for William of Orange, not least for letting his daughter Mary marry the man. The negotiations failed because Louis would not offer sufficient money, for he was doing perfectly well in suborning the opposition, and John was soon back with his master in Brussels. But James had had enough of the place, and obtained his brother’s leave to live in Scotland. He travelled to London, and then went overland to Edinburgh, taking thirty-eight days for the journey. John accompanied him, but Sarah, heavily pregnant, stayed behind in their Jermyn Street apartment.
They corresponded fondly. John unsuccessfully begged Sarah not to let her sister Frances marry a former suitor, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Talbot, an Irish Roman Catholic gentleman who had the character-forming distinction of having escaped from Drogheda when Cromwell stormed the place in 1649, and was himself caught up on the fringes of the Popish Plot. James later made Dick Talbot Earl of Tyrconnell and his viceroy in Ireland, and with the defeat of the Jacobites the Tyrconnells went into exile.16 Lady Tyrconnell makes one more brief entry on history’s stage. When James was beaten by William of Orange on the Boyne in 1690 he rode hard for Dublin, where Frances congratulated him on arriving so well in advance of his men, and offered him food. He replied that after such a breakfast he had no stomach for his dinner.
When James was summoned south by his brother in early 1680 John went with him, and urged Sarah to:
Pray for fair winds, so that we may not stay here, nor be long at sea, for should we be long at sea, and very sick, I am afraid it would do me great hurt, for really I am not well, for in my whole lifetime I never had so long a fit of headaching as now: I hope the red spots of the child will be gone against I see her, and her nose straight, so that I may fancy it be like the mother, so I would have her be like you in all things else.17
They were destined for cruel disappointment, for little Harriet (or Hariote, as her delighted father spelt her name) died in infancy, whether because those red spots were harbingers of something sinister, or for one of a dozen other reasons we cannot say.
James spent the summer of 1680 in London, and Charles hoped that he might be able not to order his brother into exile again. The Duke of York’s uncertain future made it hard for him to secure an appointment for his young protégé. Although the governorship of Sheerness, command of the Lord Admiral’s Regiment, and even the post of ambassador to France or Holland were spoken of, James was determined not to be separated from Churchill if he went into exile again. He was right to be concerned, for Charles feared that a new Parliament, due to meet on 21 October, would prepare a second Exclusion Act, and might even impeach his brother. The council was divided in its opinion, and James himself was all for facing down the opposition, and blamed the Earl of Halifax and the Duchess of Portsmouth for recommending his departure, but he reluctantly heeded his brother’s command to go back to Scotland. This time the Churchills could go north together, and they reached Leith after five days’ voyage.
James was not simply exiled to Edinburgh but was, by virtue of letters patent which John Churchill brought up to him in June 1681, the king’s commissioner in Scotland and effectively its viceroy. He had arrived in the aftermath of a rising by Covenanters, Lowland opponents of the episcopacy which had returned to Scotland with the Restoration. Monmouth had beaten them decisively at Bothwell Bridge near Glasgow in June 1679, doing much for his own reputation south of the border, but not snuffing out their resistance, which remained especially strong in the south-west. Many leading Covenanters fled to Holland, where they joined English opposition leaders who had escaped Charles’s reassertion of his authority, and, ironically, were soon joined by Monmouth himself, exiled at last by his exasperated father.
James persevered in the persecution of the Covenanters, often using Catholic highlanders as his chosen instruments, and there are those who see in his policy in Scotland in 1681–82 a foretaste of what he would have done in England after 1685 had he been given the chance. Judicial torture was still legal in Scotland, although it had to be authorised by the council. Gilbert Burnet, no unbiased critic, suggested that while most members of the council would have avoided watching a man being ‘struck in the boots’, as wedges were hammered in between an iron boot and his foot, James observed the process with ‘unmoved indifference’. The martyrology inevitably generated by this sort of conflict inflated some of the atrocities committed by the government and its supporters, but there is no doubt that some of James’s adherents plied boot, thumbscrews and smouldering cord with inventive zeal.
Churchill’s attitude to James’s policy in Scotland at this time helps us understand the process which was to lead to his decisive breach with his patron in 1688. James was anxious to be permitted to return to England, and early in 1681 sent Churchill to London to urge Charles not to allow Parliament to sit, to make an alliance with France, whose resultant subsidy would enable him to rule without Parliament, and then to summon him homewards. Churchill did his best for his master, but made it clear that he did not support James’s blustering threats to raise Catholic Scots and Irish to support him, which, after all, was precisely what many of his English opponents expected him to do.
When she was an old woman, Sarah recalled how much she and her husband had hated the persecution of the Covenanters.
I have cried at some of these trials, to see the cruelty that was done to some of these men only for their choosing to die rather than tell a lie. How happy would this country be if we had more of these sort of men! I remember the Duke of Marlborough was mightily grieved one day at a conversation he had heard between the Earl of Argyll … and the Duke of York. The Duke of Marlborough told me he never heard a man speak more reason than he [i.e. Argyll] did to the Duke and after he had said what he at first resolved, the Duke would never make an answer to anything, but ‘You shall excuse me, my Lord, You shall excuse me, my Lord,’ and continued so for a long time … I remember the Duke of Marlborough told me when we were in Scotland, there came a letter from Lewis the Grand to the Duke of York, writ by himself; which put all the family [i.e. household] into a great disorder, for nobody could read it. But it was enough to show that there was a strict correspondence between the Duke and the King of France.18
We must be cautious about accepting Sarah’s recollections at face value, for she could see, just as well as we can, how evidence of John’s growing concern at James’s policy might mitigate his action in 1688.
Yet her words cannot be brushed aside as the mutterings of a partisan octogenarian, for they are corroborated by those of John himself. James’s chief advisers at this time were Churchill, George Legge, later Lord Dartmouth, and the Duke’s brother-in-law Laurence Hyde, later Earl of Rochester.19 All agreed that James’s position would be much improved if he would consent to attend Anglican service, and the Earl of Halifax, the most supple of Charles’s ministers, warned that unless James complied ‘his friends would be obliged to leave him like a garrison one could no longer defend’. In September 1681 Churchill told Legge that they had failed to persuade James. ‘You will find,’ he wrote glumly, ‘that nothing is done in what was so much desired, so that sooner or later we must all be undone … My heart is very full, so that should I write to you of the sad prospect I fear we have, I should try your patience.’20
James soon found himself in conflict with the Earl of Argyll, who made his feelings clear by opposing a clause in the Scottish Test Act which sought to exempt members of the royal household from taking the Protestant oath of allegiance. Argyll swore the oath of allegiance himself, but qualified it by adding ‘so far as is consistent with the Protestant religion’, and went on to put his objections to the Test in writing. In December 1681 he was tried for treason, and James helped ensure that he was condemned to death. Churchill wrote at once to James’s private secretary Sir John Werden, an old friend, urging that James should show mercy, and received a hopeful reply: ‘now (in regard to your old friendship, which you put me in mind of) I hope he will have the King’s pardon and the effects of his bounty, and hereafter in some measure deserve both’.21 Argyll escaped from Edinburgh Castle shortly afterwards, and Churchill wrote at once to George Legge, hoping that the escape would not be taken too seriously. It was certainly not in the government’s interest to execute Argyll, for a treason conviction meant that his lands and hereditary jurisdictions were already forfeit. But now, in the Low Countries with so many of the opposition leaders, he was another of James’s embittered opponents, and when Monmouth rose against James II in 1685 he led a rebellion in the western Highlands but was speedily captured and, this time, beheaded.
As early as 1681 Churchill grasped the essence of what would eventually ruin James. He was usually physically courageous and, as a recent biographer observes, ‘had high standards of honour and integrity, from which he deviated only rarely’.22 Yet the Earl of Ailesbury, who risked life and fortune for James, wrote that Charles II ‘was a great master of kingcraft and I wish to God that his royal father and brother had been endowed with the same talent and for the same motives’. James, he thought, ‘wanted for nothing but the talent of his royal brother’.23 His religious conviction hardened moral courage but dissolved pliability, and as king he was to display ‘political incompetence’ laced with ‘sheer bad luck’.24 Ultimately he lacked judgement, and those who, like John Churchill, owed their rise to his patronage, feared even before he ascended the throne that his fall would eventually encompass their own. James was impossible to steer, and much later, in the draft of a memoir ghosted by Gilbert Burnet, Sarah argued that he had been undone by flattery: ‘I saw poor K James ruined by this that nobody would honestly tell him of his danger till he was past recovery: and that for fear of displeasing him.’25
James was allowed to return to England in the spring of 1682, and set off from Leith for Yarmouth on 4 May, with Churchill among his entourage. Sarah remained in Edinburgh. On 19 July 1681 she had given birth to a daughter, Henrietta, who was baptised at St Martin-in-the-Fields on the twenty-ninth, and then left in Jermyn Street in the care of a nurse. John Churchill had not yet seen her. After a stormy four-day voyage they arrived in Yarmouth, and went by road to Norwich and thence to Newmarket, where Charles was enjoying the horseracing. While they were there John wrote to tell Sarah, still in Edinburgh, that he had just received a letter from London saying that Henrietta was very well. ‘Everybody seems to be very kind to the Duke,’ he added, hoping that his recall would be permanent, enabling the Churchills to move back to London. Indeed it was. Charles asked his brother to return to Scotland, wind up his affairs there and return with his wife and youngest daughter, Anne.
The ducal party sailed from Margate on the frigate Gloucester on 4 May accompanied by a small squadron, including the yacht Catherine with Samuel Pepys aboard: he had hoped to sail with the duke but the cramped conditions aboard Gloucester made this impossible. Early on the morning of their second day at sea, while most of the passengers were asleep, Gloucester struck the sandbank known as Lemon and Ore off Cromer on the Norfolk coast. After hanging on to the sandbank for some time she slipped off into deep water and sank almost immediately. The ship’s pilot, Captain Ayres, was court-martialled and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment for negligence, and Pepys told his old associate Will Hewer that Ayres was doubly guilty because ‘Sir John Berry, his master, mates, Col Legge, the Duke himself’ had all agreed that the squadron should stand out further from the land. Although the sea was calm and there were ships in close company, there may have been as few as forty survivors from perhaps three hundred passengers and crew.
The loss of the Gloucester was soon politicised. Some, of a Tory persuasion, maintained that James did his best to save the vessel, and Sir John Berry, the vessel’s captain, affirmed that his sailors were so devoted to the duke that ‘in the midst of their affliction and dying condition [they] did rejoice and thank God that his royal highness was preserved’. Others, of a more whiggish view, had James leading the rush for the only available lifeboat, shouting, ‘Save the dogs and Colonel Churchill.’ Gilbert Burnet, in this latter camp, wrote:
The Duke got into the boat: and took good care of his dogs and some unknown persons who were taken, from that earnest care of his, to be his priests: the long boat went off with very few in her, though she might have carried off above eighty persons more than she did. One hundred and fifty persons perished, some of them men of great quality.26
Lord Ailesbury, writing from the opposite viewpoint and with personal knowledge of many of the key players, also thought things were mishandled: ‘The Duke went into the shallop, calling out for Churchill, he being so greatly in favour.’ Ailesbury agreed that the boat could certainly have taken more passengers. Thomas Jermy, foot huntsman to the duke, managed to creep under the stern seat where he lay doggo and was mistaken for baggage. When the oarsmen discovered him they were so furious that they would have thrown him overboard had James not interceded.27
Samuel Pepys was an eyewitness, and saw that the one available boat, which had been taken astern below the windows of the duke’s cabin, was sent off with the duke and John Churchill in her ‘to prevent his being oppressed with men labouring their escapes’. George Legge told his son that there had certainly been avoidable delay. He had pressed the duke to get into the boat, but James first argued that he needed to stay to help save the ship, and then ordered his heavy strongbox to be loaded. The resolute Legge, who had been responsible for getting the boat round to the ship’s stern, bluntly asked James what the box might contain that could possibly be worth a man’s life, and James replied that he would rather hazard his own life than lose the box. Eventually only a few of the duke’s closest adherents got into the boat, and it is unlikely that there were many priests amongst them: Father Ronché, the queen’s almoner, swam for his life and found a plank to cling to. There may indeed have been dogs in the lifeboat, but we know that at least one went overboard, for the duke’s physician, Sir Charles Scarburgh, found himself earnestly disputing the possession of a plank with the creature Mumper (evidently not a King Charles spaniel, but something of a more martial stamp), who was eventually rescued.
Sarah, commenting on Thomas Lediard’s biography of her late husband, recalled that John had
blamed the Duke to me excessively for his obstinacy and cruelty. For if he would have been persuaded to go off himself at first, when it was certain the ship could not be saved, the Duke of Marlborough was of the opinion that there would not have been a man lost. For though there was not enough boats to carry them all away, all those he mentions were drowned by the Duke’s obstinacy in not coming away sooner.28
Sarah remembered that John had told her that the duke had given him his sword to prevent the boat from being stormed by panic-stricken men, and Sir John Berry agreed that Churchill had kept the boat free from intruders.
James himself told William of Orange that ‘considering the little time the ship was above water after she struck first’, the loss of life might reasonably have been greater, and if he had known that Ayres had survived the wreck he would ‘have been hanged up immediately, according to the custom of the sea’. Some other accounts emphasise that there was a delay between first impact and sinking, and if this is so one might conclude that James’s hesitation prevented more passengers from getting aboard the lifeboat, and his insistence that the ship might yet be saved probably delayed the issuing of an early order to abandon her. However, we cannot be certain how long Gloucester remained on the sandbank before slipping to her doom. Winston S. Churchill, with his own reasons for emphasising the delay, suggests that it was ‘about an hour’, but Sir John Berry, an eyewitness, though with a reputation at risk, recalled how ‘for a moment or two she beat upon the sands; then a terrible blow knocked off her rudder and tore her side open’.29
The loss of life was certainly not all James’s fault: more seamen and passengers might have survived had they been able to swim. The tubby Sir John stayed on his quarterdeck until the vessel sank, and then swam to the Happy Return, which had anchored just short of the sands. The duke’s equerry Edward Griffin saved himself by clinging to a chicken-coop, and the Marquis of Montrose was hauled from the sea into James’s boat. Among those lost were Lords Roxborough and O’Brien and a number of gentlemen, including Laurence Hyde’s brother James, the ship’s lieutenant, and it was this loss of genteel life (almost like a microcosm of the Titanic) that struck contemporaries. Pepys was ‘sensible of God’s infinite mercy’, for he had no doubt that he would have drowned had he been aboard Gloucester: ‘For many will … be found lost as well or better qualified to save themselves by swimming than I might have been.’30 James ordered donations to the widows and orphans of the drowned seamen, but there can be no doubt that the episode had done little to enhance his status in the eyes of many of those close to him.
The duke and his party set off for England aboard the aptly named Happy Return on 15 May. The journey was an unpleasant one for Mary of Modena, so heavily pregnant that she had to be hoisted aboard in a chair-lift. The homeward voyage took twelve days, and it may be that its discomfort contributed to the premature birth of Charlotte Mary, who lived only till October. Just over a month after her death, on 21 December 1682, John was rewarded for his services with the barony of Churchill of Aynmouth in the peerage of Scotland. This made him a Member of the Edinburgh Parliament, which then sat in the great hall known as the Parliament House off the High Street. There the three estates, nobles, barons and burgesses, debated and voted together as a single chamber.31 In view of Churchill’s work over the past three years the grant of a Scots peerage was not as puzzling as it might seem. Although it was not of as much practical value as a seat in the English House of Lords, it was certainly more dignified than an Irish peerage, proverbially the cheapest coinage available to reward supporters of the government.
Lord and Lady Churchill settled in Holywell House, Sarah’s family home near St Albans. John’s income – now increased by his appointment to the virtual sinecure of command of the Third Troop of Life Guards on £1 a day – had been sufficient to enable him to buy Frances Tyrconnell’s share of the Jennings family home in 1681, and three years later the Churchills demolished the old house and built a new one, with elegant gardens and fish ponds. It was their favourite home. Sarah said in 1714 that however ordinary it might be, she would not part with it for any she had seen on her travels, and on St George’s Day 1703 John wrote whimsically to her that: ‘This being the season I hear the nightingales as I lie in my bed I have wished them with all my heart with you, knowing how you love them.’32
Churchill resumed court life with enthusiasm. Charles had long forgiven him for his affair with Barbara Castlemaine, and he was now one of the king’s regular tennis partners. He shared this honour with Louis de Duras, his comrade in arms from the Alsace campaign, who had now inherited his father-in-law’s peerage and become Earl of Feversham, and Sidney Godolphin: they were ‘all so excellent players that if one beat the other ’tis alternatively’. Godolphin, born on the family estate at Helston in Cornwall in 1645, was a short, ungainly and rather taciturn man. His poet grandfather had died fighting for the king in a West Country skirmish, and his father Francis – who sired no fewer than sixteen children – had raised a regiment of royalist foot.33 Like Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Francis Godolphin was rewarded after the Restoration, and in 1662 young Sidney became a royal page. He had married Margaret Blagge in 1675, though he lost her, all too early, to puerperal fever. John Evelyn wrote that ‘She was the best wife, the best friend, the best mistress, that husband ever had,’ and he saw how Sidney, ‘struck with unspeakable affliction, fell down as dead’.34 Their surviving child, Francis, was to marry the Marlboroughs’ daughter Henrietta in 1698.
Godolphin became MP for the family borough of Helston in 1668, and cut his teeth on a variety of diplomatic missions over the next decade. He was at once unobtrusive and indispensable: Charles II quipped that he was ‘never in the way and never out of the way’. In 1679 he joined Sunderland and Laurence Hyde in the short-lived governing group unkindly known as ‘the chits’ for the youth and inexperience of its members, but he managed to retain royal favour during the Exclusion crisis, possibly because he was ill at several crucial moments. Hyde, holding the important post of lord treasurer, became Earl of Rochester in 1682, and two years later he was, as Halifax put it, ‘kicked upstairs’ to the less demanding job of lord president of the council. Godolphin, raised to the peerage as Baron Godolphin of Rialton, replaced him. With the accession of James II in 1685 he became lord chamberlain to the queen, and when she attended chapel was ‘accustomed … to give her his arm as far as the door’. He sided with James in 1688 but soon made his peace with William and Mary.
Godolphin was to become Churchill’s principal political ally, and the Marlborough – Godolphin correspondence, so painstakingly transcribed by Henry L. Snyder, remains ‘one of the most famous and important in English history’.35 Snyder’s work corrects most of the errors in dating and transcription which, initially made by Archdeacon Coxe, were sometimes perpetuated by Winston S. Churchill. The letters illuminate several non-martial aspects of Churchill’s career, not least in his dealings with the Dutch, and reveal what Snyder calls his ‘essential timidity and the extreme care he took to obtain authority for his every action’.36 This correspondence did not begin in earnest till 1701, when both Churchill and Godolphin were in positions of substantial influence, but it is surely right to see in the correspondence of prime minister and commander-in-chief a reflection of a much earlier friendship.37
A measure of Churchill’s favour was his appointment, on 19 November 1683, as colonel of a regiment which had begun its life as the Tangier Horse and was now known as the King’s Own Regiment of Dragoons. The post, held in plurality with command of the Life Guards troop and the colonelcy of foot, was worth another fifteen shillings a day in pay and allowances. Dragoons derived their name from the fact that they originally carried a ‘fire and cock’ musket – a weapon, like its users, called dragon in French – which was a primitive form of flintlock, rather than the matchlock musket of Civil War infantry. They were mounted, though traditionally on cheaper steeds than cavalry proper: the New Model’s cavalry horses cost £8–£10 apiece, but half that sum would buy a dragoon nag.
Dragoons originally fought on foot, with their horses simply providing them with tactical mobility or, as their enemies alleged, enabling them ‘to be fitter to rob and to pillage’.38 They sometimes fought on horseback even during the Civil War, and after it they gradually ascended to be cavalry proper, although the whole process was to take them at least a century. The Military Dictionary of 1702 described them as:
Musketeers mounted, who sometimes serve a-foot, and sometimes a-horseback, being always ready upon anything that requires expedition, as being able to keep pace with the horse, and do the service of foot. In battle, or upon attacks, they are commonly the Enfants Perdus, or Forlorn [Hope], being the first that fall on. In the field they commonly encamp either at the head of the army, or on the wings, to cover the others, and be the first at their arms.39
Churchill was an infantry officer, and his appointment as a colonel of dragoons was seen by his enemies almost as a breach of natural law. There was some whinnying:
Let’s cut our meat with spoons!
The sense is as good
As that Churchill should
Be put to command the Dragoons.40
He made a good start with his regiment, however, issuing the men with new red coats faced with blue, and keeping the annual cost of each troop down to £2,200, evidence of his ‘careful administration’. Churchill’s lieutenant colonel was Lord Cornbury, grandson of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Charles’s first chancellor, and so nephew to the Duke of York’s deceased wife Anne Hyde. It was to prove a portentous connection.
There were limits to royal benevolence. When somebody suggested that Churchill might make a good ministerial colleague for Sunderland, Charles replied bluntly that ‘he was resolved not to have two idle Secretaries of State’. Churchill was certainly much preoccupied with rebuilding Holywell House, and with his growing family. Another daughter, Anne, was born in 1684, John (a son at last) followed in 1686, Elizabeth in 1687, Mary in 1689 and Charles, who lived for only two years, in 1690. There is no evidence, during the early 1680s, of a man eaten up by ambition. He had his peerage and a colonelcy, stood high in royal favour, and perhaps Charles’s suggestion of temporary indolence is not unfair, for he was still a young man but not now in much of a hurry. Indeed, if anyone in the family was making the running at this period it was not John, but Sarah.
Sarah Jennings had first met Lady Anne, youngest daughter of James, Duke of York and Anne Hyde, at Whitehall when Sarah was ten and Anne only six, and they appeared together in a court production of the masque Calisto in December 1674. They had seen a good deal of one another in Scotland, and in 1680 Sarah was on hand when Anne was involved in a controversial relationship with John Sheffield, Lord Mulgrave, a great favourite of the king’s but, at thirty-five, almost twice her age. Although London gossips suggested that Mulgrave had seduced her ‘so far as to spoil her marrying to anyone else’, Mulgrave had probably done no more than write letters ‘intimating too near an address to her’. He was exiled to Tangier, but went on to hold high office under James II, William III, who made him Marquess of Normanby, and Queen Anne herself, who created him Duke of Buckingham.41
The Mulgrave affair both accelerated efforts to get Anne suitably married, and, as the historian Edward Gregg is right to suggest, ‘underlined – and perhaps contributed to’ a growing divergence between Anne and her elder sister Mary, whose hints of displeasure at Anne risking her reputation were not welcomed by someone who did not believe that she had done anything at all to contribute to the scandal. Bruised by her sister’s priggishness, and thrust on inexorably towards an arranged marriage, Anne became increasingly attracted to the beautiful, intelligent and witty Sarah. Their friendship was to be so closely interwoven with John Churchill’s own rise that we cannot hope to tease the strands apart. Nor can we be certain of the precise nature of the relationship, because Sarah, who wrote most about it, did so mainly after the burning affection of its early years had frozen into mutual contempt.
We have two main difficulties. The first is that it is never easy for men to grasp the depth and intensity of the love that can exist between women. Even the most heterosexual of men usually know that they have bonds of affection with other men that are indeed ‘passing the love of women’, even if they are not always comfortable in talking about them. Yet it is hard for them to acknowledge that women can have relationships which are as profound, partly because of men’s fear that women’s affection is in some way finite, and that the emotion which binds them to other women must necessarily limit that available for commitment to men.
Our second problem is that the relationship between Anne and Sarah has now become part of the battlefield of sexual politics. Some lesbian authors have suggested that the relationship was indeed lesbian, and that it is only the gender-centric perversity of the historical establishment that has prevented a proper acknowledgement of the fact that European courts at this time were full of girls and women in loving physical relationships, and historians who deny it are simply revealing their inherent homophobia.
It is important to understand that correspondence may mislead us. In a letter whose sheer nobility mists one’s eyes even today, Margaret Godolphin told Jael Boscawen, her sister-in-law, ‘My dear, believe me, that of all earthly things you were and are most dear to me.’ She evidently did not mean that she loved Jael more than she loved Sidney, for ‘Nobody ever had a better or half so good a husband.’ Yet her affection for Jael went beyond this happiest of marriages. So: ‘Not knowing how God Almighty may deal with me … as in case I be to leave the world, no earthly thing may take up my thoughts,’ it was to Jael she wrote just before her confinement, bidding farewell to mortality and putting her affairs in order.42 When Anne’s sister Mary wrote breathlessly, ‘What can I say more to persuade you that I love you with more zeal than any lover and I love you with a love that was never known by man I have for you an excess of friendship more of love than woman can for woman and more love ever than the constant lover had for his mistress …’ she was in fact writing to Frances Apsley, daughter of the Duke of York’s treasurer.43 Both women enjoyed happy marriages. Just before her own marriage Anne also wrote to Frances, in a letter veiled in classical allegory: ‘Your Ziphares [Anne] changes his condition yet nothing shall ever alter him from being the same to his dear Semandra [Frances] as he ever was.’
Women often wrote passionately to one another, even if there was nothing physical in their relationship. One of Sarah’s biographers, Ophelia Field, declares that ‘it can never be certain what unlabelled feelings – feelings which Sarah would manipulate skilfully in later life – existed between the two. For now, it is enough to emphasise that Sarah and Anne were not entirely innocent of what their words might mean if history happened to eavesdrop.’44 When we do listen at history’s keyholes, let us do so as honestly as we can, neither making the easy assumptions that such whispers might imply today, nor putting our characters on a political stage which is our creation, not theirs.
There can be no doubting Anne’s need for female affection. Sarah became her lady of the bedchamber in 1683 on Anne’s marriage to Prince George of Denmark, replacing Mary Cornwallis, of whom Charles II said that ‘No man ever loved his mistress as his niece Anne did Mrs Cornwallis.’45 When Sarah lost her hold on Anne’s affection she did not simply alienate Anne by her filthy temper and overbearing behaviour, but because she was insidiously outmanoeuvred by Abigail Masham.
Sarah’s own account of her friendship with Anne is best encapsulated in An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough from her first coming to court …, although so much of what she wrote in later life, on her own account or in collaboration with associates like Bishop Burnet, in some way reflects the catastrophic end of that relationship. She claimed that she wrote the book knowing that ‘I am coming near my end, and very soon there will be nothing of me but a name’, and wanted to comment on ‘the successful artifice of Mr Harley and Mrs Masham in taking advantage of the Queen’s passion for what she called the church to undermine me in her affections’.46
Sarah made much of her early friendship with Anne: ‘We used to play together when she was a child, and even then she expressed a particular fondness for me.’ This gave her an important advantage, accentuated by the fact that the manners of the Countess of Clarendon, first lady of the bedchamber, ‘could not possibly recommend her to so young a mistress: for she looked like a mad-woman, and talked like a scholar’.47 Sarah maintained that flattery was ‘falsehood to my trust, and ingratitude to my greatest friend; and that I did not deserve so much favour, if I could not venture the loss of it by speaking the truth’. Kings and princes, she believed, generally thought that the dignity of their position would be eroded by friendship with an inferior. ‘The Princess had a different taste,’ she wrote. ‘A friend was what she most coveted: and for the sake of friendship (a relation which she did not disdain to have with me) she was fond even of that equality which she thought belonged to it.’ They eventually decided to address one another by assumed names.
Morley and Freeman were the names her fancy hit upon; and she left me to choose by which of these I would be called. My frank, open temperament naturally led me to pitch upon Freeman, and the Princess took the other; and from time to time Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman began to converse as equals, made so by affection and friendship.48
There were other nicknames too: William of Orange, whom neither much liked, was ‘Mr Caliban’.
An unpublished account of this period written in the third person by Sarah much later tells us how:
she now began to employ all her wit and all her vivacity and almost all her time to divert, entertain and serve the Princess; and to fix that favour, which one might now easily observe to be increasing more towards her each day. This favour quickly became a passion; and a passion which possessed the heart of the Princess too much to be hid. They were shut up together for many hours daily. Every moment of absence was counted a sort of tedious, lifeless state. To see the Duchess was a constant joy; and to part with her for never so short a time, a constant uneasiness; as the Princess’s own frequent expressions were. This worked even to the jealousy of a lover. She used to say that she desired to possess her wholly: and could hardly bear that she could escape, from this confinement, into other company.49
In another account, this time part of Sarah’s published campaign to defend her reputation, she maintains that all Anne’s friendships ‘were flames of extravagant passion, ending in indifference or aversion’. She ‘seemed to inherit a good deal of her father’s moroseness’, thought Sarah, ‘which naturally produced in her the same sort of stubborn positiveness in many cases, both ordinary and extraordinary, as well as the same sort of bigotry in religion’.50
In July 1683 the eighteen-year-old Anne was married to Prince George of Denmark. John Evelyn thought that ‘He had the Danish countenance, blonde, of few words, spoke French but ill, seemed somewhat heavy, but reported to be valiant, and indeed he had bravely rescued and brought off his brother the King of Denmark in a battle against the Swedes.’51 The arrangement suited Louis XIV, who hoped to see the two naval powers united against the Dutch, as well as James, who was trying to limit the influence of his other son-in-law, William of Orange. Negotiations were handled by Anne’s uncle Laurence, now Earl of Rochester, and secretary of state Sunderland. They drove a hard bargain: James gave the couple £40,000 in capital and £5,000 a year. Anything else had to come from Prince George’s personal estates, and he was expected to reside in England. The Danish ambassador suggested to his French colleague that it would suit them all if Anne and George could be given precedence in the succession over William and Mary, but the Frenchman replied that hereditary right could not be brushed aside like this.
Charles II deftly summed up George, saying: ‘I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober and there is nothing in him.’ He was indolent and good-natured, devoutly Protestant (a Lutheran, and so, in English terms, a dissenter rather than an Anglican, which made him an ‘occasional conformist’ to the services of the established Church), wholly free from scandal, and as wholly devoted to Anne, who bore him child after stillborn child in an almost annual succession of perhaps as many as seventeen pregnancies, although Anne’s predisposition towards false pregnancies make it impossible to be sure. The best estimate is probably twelve miscarriages, one stillbirth and four children who died young. Only one of their children, William, Duke of Gloucester (1689–1700), survived early childhood. Notwithstanding Anne’s relationship with Sarah this was a happy marriage, and Anne always acknowledged that though she might be queen, George was head of the household. In 1708 she nursed him through his last illness, and his death
flung the queen into an unspeakable grief. She never left him till he was dead, but continued kissing him till the very moment the breath went out of his body, and ’twas with a very great deal of difficulty my Lady Marlborough prevailed upon her to leave him.52
Just as there is no reason to doubt Anne’s affection for her husband, so too we can see why Anne expected more emotional engagement than he was able to offer, and understand how Sarah fitted into this relationship. Ophelia Field’s suggestion that ‘the marriage contained many of the qualities of a friendship while Sarah’s relationship with Anne was developing into a fraught romance’ seems exactly right.53
It is an index of the Churchills’ position that John had been sent to Denmark to bring George to England for his wedding, and when it was decided that the prince’s prickly private secretary, Christian Siegfried von Plessen, should be sent back to Denmark, it was John who made the arrangements and Sarah’s brother-in-law Colonel Edward Griffith who replaced Plessen. Anne and her husband were given apartments known as the Cockpit in the Palace of Whitehall, across King Street from the Privy Garden, just to the west of Horse Guards. Adjacent parts of the palace were occupied by the secretaries of state, and it is no coincidence that Downing Street, so close to the Cockpit, has now assumed its importance. With King Street acting as a firebreak the Cockpit survived successive fires, and Anne remained there until ordered to quit by her sister.
A Cockpit circle was quickly scribed out. Near its centre were John and Sarah Churchill, with John’s brothers, Captain George Churchill of the Royal Navy and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Churchill (who had once served as a page to Prince George’s brother King Christian), Colonel John Berkeley, of Anne’s dragoon regiment, and his wife Barbara, daughter of Lady Villiers, who had been the princess’s governess. Sir Benjamin Bathurst, comptroller of the household, was now married to Frances Apsley. The Duke of Grafton, one of Charles’s bastards by Barbara Castlemaine, was a regular visitor, as were the Marquess of Ossory (who succeeded as Duke of Ormonde in 1688) and the Earl of Drumlanrig (Marquess of Queensberry in 1695). Robert and Anne Spencer, Earl and Countess of Sunderland, were on the outer edge of the circle. They were close to the Churchills, and Anne Churchill was to marry their eldest son Charles, but, because of Sunderland’s support for the Exclusion Bill, Anne never really trusted him.54 Sarah was promoted to first lady of the bedchamber when Lady Clarendon went off to Ireland with her husband, who had been made its lord lieutenant.
Because Sarah travelled with Anne, and John with the Duke of York, they were often separated, and some of their letters survive. In a note which seems to predate the birth of their daughter Anne on 27 February 1684 by perhaps six months, sent by an ‘express’ courier rather than a regular post, John wrote:
I had writ to you by the post, but that I was persuaded this would be with you sooner. You see I am very just in writing, and I hope that I shall find by the daily receiving of yours that you are so. I hope in God you are out of all danger of any miscarrying, for I swear to you I love you better than all the rest of the world put together, wherefore you ought to be so just as to make me a kind return, which will make me much happier than aught else in this world can do. If I can get a passage a Sunday I will come, but if I cannot I shall be with you a Monday morning by nine of the clock; for the Duke will leave this place by six. Pray [give] my most humble respects to your fair daughter, and believe me what I am with all my heart and soul,
Yours … 55
The Churchills’ settled world was rocked by the king’s unexpected death. In the winter of 1684–85 Charles had been troubled with the gout and could not take his usual exercise, but spent a good deal of time in his laboratory, trying to find a process for the fixing of mercury. He ate less than he once had and ‘drank only for his thirst’, but still took a turn to the Duchess of Portsmouth’s apartments after his supper. On the morning of 2 February 1685 he rose after a restless night, and sat down to the barber, ‘it being shaving day’ – even monarchs were shaved only two or three times a week. He had scarcely sat down when he had ‘an apoplectic fit’ and fell into Lord Ailesbury’s arms. Dr Edmund King, on hand to deal with a sore heel, bled him at once. Charles endured the ministrations of his doctors, which almost certainly accelerated his death, for five days.
On 5 February, when it was clear that his brother was dying, James asked him if he wished to be reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church, and Charles eagerly assented. Finding an English-speaking priest was not easy, for all Queen Catherine’s priests were Portuguese. Quite fortuitously, Father John Huddlestone, who had helped Charles escape after the battle of Worcester in 1651, was in the palace and was brought into Charles’s bedchamber by a secret door which, in its time, had doubtless fulfilled less noble purposes.56
Charles died well. He apologised to the crowd of assembled courtiers and functionaries for being such an unconscionably long time about it, begged the queen’s forgiveness, commended the Duchess of Portsmouth to James’s care and urged his listeners: ‘Let not poor Nelly starve.’ Early on the morning of 6 February he asked for his curtains to be drawn so that he might see one more dawn, and he died at noon. ‘He was ever kind to me,’ lamented John Evelyn, ‘and very gracious upon all occasions, and therefore I cannot, without ingratitude, but deplore his loss, which for many respects as well as duty I do with all my soul.’57
The Churchills stood high in the favour of the new king, James II. John was confirmed in his appointments and sent off to Paris, ostensibly to formally notify Louis XIV of the succession but actually to ask for money. In fact Paul Barillon, the French ambassador, had already presented James with 500,000 livres (perhaps £10 million), so John’s instructions were changed while he was on his way, and he was simply to thank Louis for this handsome gift. Gilbert Burnet maintains that while he was in France John Churchill met the Protestant soldier and diplomat Henri de Massue, marquis de Ruvigny, whom he already knew from Charles’s negotiations with the French in 1678, and warned him that ‘If the King was ever prevailed upon to alter our religion he would serve him no longer, but would withdraw from him.’58
We must be as cautious about Burnet’s assertions, made from the Whig standpoint, as we should be about Lord Ailesbury’s, imbued as they are with Jacobite sympathies. However, it is evident that religion was already an issue dividing the Cockpit circle from James’s court. Sarah maintains that James had tried to shift Anne from her firm Anglicanism ‘by putting into her hands some books and papers’, and in 1679 Dick Talbot, now her brother-in-law, ‘took pains with me, but without any effect, to persuade me to bring over the Princess to their Catholic purpose’.59 A secret French report of 1687 was to suggest that Anne was heavily influenced by Sarah, ‘whom she loves tenderly’, and this helped keep her away from court so that her father could not speak to her about religion.60
Even if there was palpable tension between court and Cockpit in early 1685, it did not prevent James from settling old debts. On 14 May that year John Churchill was created Baron Churchill of Sandridge in Hertfordshire, and so had a seat in the House of Lords, which was to meet later that month for the first time in the new reign. He also became a governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The first session of the new, staunchly Tory-Anglican English Parliament was overshadowed by rebellion, led in Scotland by the Earl of Argyll, who had lived in the Low Countries since his escape from Edinburgh Castle, and in England by the Duke of Monmouth, also in exile, but likely to have been allowed back home had Charles not died. Monmouth, born in Rotterdam in April 1649, was an experienced soldier, handsome and staunchly Protestant. He maintained that Charles had actually been married to his mother, Lucy Walter, but he had never been the Whigs’ candidate to supplant James at the time of the Exclusion Crisis: they preferred his niece Mary. Exiled following his involvement in the Rye House plot of 1683, Monmouth had been at the centre of a web of radical discontent in the Low Countries, and his invasion in 1685 was widely expected. Argyll and Monmouth might have had a better chance had they been able to coordinate their activities, but even so neither insurrection attracted the widespread popular support that might have posed a serious challenge to the government. Argyll may have assembled as many as 2,500 men, and Monmouth perhaps 7,000 at the peak of his success.
When we are considering John Churchill’s motivation in 1685 and 1688 it is important to recognise some simple truths. In 1685 James had not attracted the suspicion which dogged him by 1688. The army was loyal to its leaders, and they were loyal to James. Neither Argyll’s nor Monmouth’s expedition was a well-planned military invasion with reserves of arms to equip supporters, or serious external support. In 1685 neither invasion had a realistic prospect of success, and men like John Churchill, who lived their lives on the basis of rational calculation, would not support Monmouth or Argyll. Furthermore, Churchill had served under Monmouth, and this experience, far from increasing his regard for ‘the Protestant duke’, had demonstrated some of Monmouth’s frightening unsteadiness.
Monmouth arrived in Lyme Bay on 11 June, to be told that the Somerset militia were already in arms and the Duke of Albemarle (George Monck’s son), lord lieutenant of Devon, was calling out his militiamen. An attempt to fire a warning shot from the guns protecting Lyme Regis had failed ridiculously when it transpired that neither powder nor shot was available. Soon Monmouth himself landed on the beach that now bears his name, thanked God for his safe arrival, and ordered his banner – with the words Fear nothing but GOD on a background of Leveller green – to be unfurled. The town’s mayor set off for Honiton, whence he wrote to the king to say that he thought Monmouth was ashore with three hundred men, and went on to report to Albemarle. Two local royalists saw what had happened and rode hard for London, where they sought out their MP.
By a remarkable coincidence Sir Winston Churchill was Member for Lyme, and so it was that James was roused at four on the morning of 13 June by John Churchill, who, as a lord of the bedchamber, had ready access to the royal bedroom, accompanied by his father and the two loyalists. The latter were rewarded with £20 apiece, and even before he had taken any formal advice, James ordered Churchill to ride westwards with four troops of the Oxford Blues and four of his own regiment of dragoons. Percy Kirke, of Tangier fame, was to join him with five companies of the Queen Dowager’s Regiment of Foot as soon as he could.
Whatever his personal failings, Monmouth was a competent soldier. He realised that he needed to raise troops as quickly as he could, and spent the first few days issuing the weapons he had landed with and procuring more locally. There was a clash with some militia horse in Bridport, but the militia proved less aggressive than Monmouth had feared. This gave him the opportunity to form his infantry into five regiments, known (like the regiments of the London Trained Bands) as Red (the Duke of Monmouth’s own), White, Blue, Green and Yellow, with an independent company of Lyme men. The horse formed a single body under Lord Grey, who had been handicapped by having his second in command, Andrew Fletcher, arrested for murder after pistolling Monmouth’s treasurer, Thomas Dare, in a squabble over a requisitioned charger.
Although the insurrection is now locally described as ‘the Pitchfork Rebellion’, many of the rebels were decently armed with matchlock muskets brought across from Holland, or seized from militia armouries and private houses. Scythe blades were requisitioned and mounted on eight-foot poles, and James himself believed that each of the rebel regiments had a company of scythe-men taking the place of grenadiers. The historian Peter Earle points out that the rank and file of Monmouth’s army tended to be ‘tradesmen, such as shopkeepers or artisans’, solid West Country dissenting folk, rather than general or farm labourers. Most were well established in their professions, and it was rare for father and son to enlist together, or for brothers to serve side by side: wise families insured against failure.
There were exceptions. Abraham Holmes, a former officer of the New Model Army, commanded the Green Regiment. He was to lose his son, a captain in his own regiment, in a skirmish at Norton St Philip, and was badly wounded at Sedgemoor, where he cut off his own mangled arm. He scorned to plead for his life, telling his judges: ‘I am an aged man, and what remains to me of life is not worth a falsehood or a baseness. I have always been a republican, and I am one still.’ When the horses which were to have dragged him to the place of execution would not budge (Holmes thought that an angel was blocking their way) he walked to his death with a firm step. He apologised to the spectators, whose mood quickly changed from derision to admiration, for his slowness in mounting the scaffold. ‘You see,’ said the old warrior, ‘I have but one arm.’
Cobbling together an army, however promising some of its raw material, is never an easy task. One of Monmouth’s colonels, Nathaniel Wade, tells us just how hard things were even when his opponents were simply those good-natured countryfolk of the Dorset militia. On 14 June he took about five hundred infantry, notionally supported by Lord Grey with forty horse, to attack Bridport.
We advanced to the attack of the bridge, to the defence of which, the [militia] officers had with much ado prevailed with their soldiers to stand. Our foot fired one volley upon them, which they answered with another, and killed us two men of the foot; at which my Lord Grey and the horse ran till they came to Lyme, where they reported me to be slain, and all the foot to be cut off. This flight of Lord Grey so discouraged the vanguard of the foot, that they threw down their arms and began to run; but I bringing up another body to their succour, they were persuaded to take up their arms again … [The enemy] contented themselves to repossess the town, and shout at us out of musket-shot; and we answered them alike, and by this bravo having a little established the staggering courage of our soldiers we retreated in pretty good order with 12 or 14 prisoners and about 30 horses.61
The first clash of a campaign often sets the tone of what follows, and here we see in microcosm the story of Monmouth’s defeat. His cavalry was poor, which tells us more about the difficulty of getting untrained horses to fight in rank and file than it does about the courage of the rebel troopers or the quality of some of their officers. His infantry was better, but only massed formation and brave leadership would nerve it to its task. Monmouth must have recognised that his men could not face regular troops in open field in broad daylight. Like a powerful but clumsy fighter facing a more skilled opponent, his only chance was to move fast and get in close: inaction would ruin him.
On 15 June Monmouth pounced on Axminster, dispersing the Devon and Somerset militia who were trying to rendezvous there before moving on to attack Lyme. He then marched north to Chard and Ilminster, his ranks swelled by local volunteers and disenchanted militiamen, reaching Taunton, where he was proclaimed king in the marketplace, on the eighteenth. Optimistically signing himself ‘James R’, he asked both Albemarle and Churchill to join him. Monmouth and Albemarle were old drinking companions, but Albemarle’s dignified reply informed Monmouth that ‘I never was, nor ever will be, a rebel to my lawful King, who is James the second.’62 John Churchill did not enter into a correspondence which, one way or another, might have been misconstrued, but sent Monmouth’s letter on to London.
Churchill had reached Bridport with his weary cavalry and dragoons on the seventeenth. His first report, written that day, warned James very frankly that:
we are likely to lose this country [i.e. the West Country] to the rebels, for we have those two [Devon and Somerset militia] regiments run away a second time … there is not any relying on these regiments that are left unless we had some of your Majesty’s standing forces to lead them on and encourage them; for at this unfortunate news I never saw people so much daunted in my life.63
He also drafted a letter to the Duke of Somerset, lord lieutenant of that county, urging him to send 4,000 men to Chard and Crewkerne, and saying that he would do his best to support them if Monmouth took advantage of the collapse of the militia by marching straight for London. The government was already doing its best to guard against a sudden thrust at the capital, concentrating the militia of Surrey, Oxfordshire and Berkshire at Reading to cover the Great West Road, and ordering the Duke of Beaufort to assemble the militia of Gloucestershire, Hereford and Monmouthshire to protect Bristol, which was believed to be Monmouth’s preferred target.
None of this would beat Monmouth, but it would give the royal army time to concentrate. The Earl of Dumbarton’s Regiment set off with a train of artillery from the Tower of London, and Colonel Charles Trelawney’s Regiment, commanded by its lieutenant colonel, Charles Churchill, accompanied a smaller train from Portsmouth. James recalled the English and Scots regiments in Dutch service: William of Orange was not only happy to release them but, possibly fearing that his own prospects in England would be compromised if Monmouth succeeded, volunteered to command them himself, an offer James felt able to decline.
Churchill, with his advance guard, hung on to the rebels like a terrier locked on to a burglar’s ankle. He reached Chard on 19 June, and sent out a strong patrol of the Blues under Lieutenant Philip Munnocks. Near Ashill, three miles from Ilminster, it met ‘about the like number of sturdy rebels, well armed, between whom there happened a very brisk encounter’. Churchill’s men had the best of the first clash, but the rebel patrol was supported by a stronger force and the Blues fell back, leaving their officer ‘upon the place, shot in the head and killed on the first charge’.64 Churchill told the Duke of Somerset that he intended to follow Monmouth ‘so close as I can upon his marches’, and suggested that the duke should get Albemarle to join him because the latter’s militiamen would not be able to keep pace with Churchill’s horse.
This advance guard of cavalry was ‘to be commanded by our trusty and wellbeloved John Lord Churchill in all things according to the rules and discipline of war’, and Churchill had been appointed brigadier general for the purpose.65 However, he was not entitled to give orders to the lords lieutenant, magnates like the Dukes of Somerset and Albemarle who were responsible for the county militias and commissioned their officers. He may have had a professional soldier’s grasp of tactics, but as the most junior baron in the House of Lords he was simply not in their league. On or about the eighteenth James decided to appoint Louis de Duras, Earl of Feversham, his lieutenant general for the campaign. Feversham was ‘to command in chief wherever he is, the militia as well as the King’s forces’.66
There is no foundation for suggestions that this reflected a sudden loss of confidence in Churchill on James’s part. Churchill had only been appointed to head the advance guard, and command of the whole royal army evidently required a more senior officer. Not only has Winston S. Churchill’s assertion that Churchill ‘resented his supersession, and he knew it could only come from mistrust’ little contemporary foundation, but to maintain that ‘this snub … eventually turned Churchill from loyalty to the Stuart kings’ stretches the evidence to breaking point.67 It was only later in the campaign, when he thought that Feversham was inclined to favour Colonel Theophilus Oglethorpe and to ignore his own contribution to the early stages of the campaign, that Churchill’s irritation can be detected.
On 21 June Percy Kirke joined a wholly unsnubbed Churchill at Chard with five companies of his regiment, having marched 140 miles in eight days. This now gave Churchill a small combined-arms brigade, and he told the Duke of Somerset that ‘I have enough forces not to apprehend [fear] the Duke of Monmouth, but on the contrary should be glad to meet with him and my men are in so good heart.’68 Although Churchill was not to know it at the time, Feversham was making good speed into the West Country, travelling with the remaining troops of the Life Guards and Royals, as well as the Horse Grenadiers, who looked ‘very fierce and fantastical’ with their moustaches and grenadier caps, even if their complicated drill made experienced officers grumble that no good would come from combining grenade-throwing with galloping about on horseback.
Feversham marched from London to Maidenhead on 20 June, reached Newbury the next day and joined the Dukes of Beaufort and Somerset at Bristol on the twenty-third. He had slipped Colonel Oglethorpe, with a party of Life Guards and Horse Grenadiers, off to his left flank by way of Andover and Warminster in case Monmouth tried to break eastwards between Churchill and his own force. There can be no faulting Feversham’s performance in the early stages of the campaign. He reached Bristol in time to thwart Monmouth, and screened his open flank as he marched. We cannot say for certain how close the militia were to total collapse, but a fragmentary undated letter from the Duke of Somerset to either Albemarle or Churchill shows the state he was in:
I do desire your Lordship to come away towards me with what forces you have, for I have only one regiment and one troop of horse which I am afraid will hardly stand because the others have showed them the way to run, the enemy is now at Bridgwater, which is ten miles of where I am, and that if your Lordship does not march to Somerton … 69
Monmouth might conceivably have beaten Feversham to Bristol, but he was raising troops as he advanced, so could not achieve Feversham’s turn of speed. As generations of holiday-makers know to their cost, the dryness of West Country summers cannot be guaranteed, and now the weather conspired against the soldiers on both sides. Nathaniel Wade recorded that on 22 June the rebels marched to Glastonbury on ‘an exceeding rainy day’ and quartered their infantry in the abbey and churches, making ‘very great fires’ to dry them out. On that day a patrol of the Oxford Blues, scouting out from Langport, met a stronger party of rebel horse and ‘beat them into their camp’, and the Portsmouth train of artillery, which had reached Sherborne with its escorting infantry of Trelawney’s Regiment, was ordered forward to Somerton by Churchill. This further increased the strength of his brigade, and on 23 June he told the nervous Duke of Somerset that he hoped to persuade Feversham to join him at Wells and fight Monmouth before he reached Bristol.
Feversham, however, had decided to head straight for Bristol, and reached it with his leading horse on the twenty-third, leaving the bulk of his infantry slogging out behind him along the Great West Road. Then, on the twenty-fourth, still before Bristol was firmly secured, the leading cavalry troop of Monmouth’s advance guard rushed the Avon bridge at Keynsham, only five miles away, and drove off the party of militia horse protecting civilian workmen who were damaging the bridge so as to prevent the rebels from crossing. It took Monmouth’s inexperienced officers the best part of twenty-four hours to get their men across the river and formed up in Sydenham Mead on the far bank. Monmouth decided to attack Bristol that night, and we cannot tell how its defenders, the Duke of Beaufort’s Gloucester militia, would have performed if put to the test. But the filthy weather induced Monmouth’s men to recross the river: a local royalist heard shouts of ‘Horse and away’ as they broke for cover. Those who could took shelter in the houses of Keynsham, and others were in the nearby fields ‘refreshing themselves’. The posting of sentries was not accorded high priority.
Feversham had spent much of the twenty-fourth at Bath, and when he heard that Monmouth had seized Keynsham bridge he sent Oglethorpe, who had commanded his flank-guard on the march west, to investigate. The Horse Grenadiers, at the head of Oglethorpe’s detachment, were as poor at their scouting as Monmouth’s men were at their sentry duty, and had actually reached the centre of Keynsham before the rebels turned out of the houses and opened fire. The royalists eventually had the better of the skirmish, with an anonymous rebel reporting: ‘They did us mischief, killed and wounded about twenty men, whereas we killed none of theirs, only took four prisoners and their horses, and wounded my Lord Newburgh, that it was thought mortal.’70 Oglethorpe, who had immediately charged to rescue the beleaguered Horse Grenadiers, actually lost two men killed and four wounded, and was in no position to force the issue. However, one of the captured troopers told Monmouth that Feversham’s main body was not far behind, and Monmouth resolved to fall back, along the south bank of the Avon, to Bath.
Monmouth reached Bath on the twenty-fifth, but the militia garrison refused to open the gates, and shot his messenger. He then headed south, for Frome, and on the evening of the twenty-sixth the royal army, now lacking only the guns from the Tower of London and their escorting companies of Dumbarton’s Regiment, linked up in the city. Churchill had marched in from the west, pausing briefly near Pensford to hang ‘Jarvis the feltmaker’, a Yeovil radical whose commission as a captain in the rebel army did not save him, though he died ‘obstinately and impenitently’, and we should remember him for that.
The astute historian John Tincey complains that Churchill had not managed to stop Monmouth’s march on Keynsham, and that had Bristol fallen its loss might have been laid at his door. Yet from the start of the campaign it had been Churchill’s plan to hang on to Monmouth’s flanks and rear: his getting ahead of the rebels only made sense if Feversham joined him, which is precisely what he had hoped for on 23 June. When Feversham decided instead to head straight for Bristol it was reasonable for Churchill to assume that the earl would watch his own front. The fact that Feversham had indeed begun to break down Keynsham bridge shows that he understood its importance, even if those hapless lads of the Gloucester militia did not.
The campaign was now reaching its climax. Monmouth’s first option had been to march straight for London, sustained as he hoped by a vast and unstoppable popular rising. When, disobligingly, this support failed to materialise, he sought to base himself on Bristol (whence he could communicate with supporters elsewhere in the country), strengthen and train his army, and only then head for the capital. With the swing away from Bristol his campaign had teetered beyond its culminating point, and he was fast running out of options. Feversham, for his part, had never planned to fight until his army was complete, and time was now on his side.
Poor scouting led the royal army, heading south on Monmouth’s heels, into an unplanned clash at Norton St Philip on 27 June. Its advance guard received a bloody nose, staunched only by the arrival of Churchill, who ‘secured the mouth of the lane with his dragoons and lined the hedges on each side with foot’, providing a secure base which enabled Feversham to extricate himself. Despite this brief setback, Feversham remained determined to maintain close contact with Monmouth, whose army, suffering the effects of repeated bad weather and evident failure, was haemorrhaging deserters. Monmouth briefly considered trying to sidestep Feversham by making for Warminster and then heading for London, but Feversham got wind of this from sympathisers and deserters, and marched from Bradford on Avon early on 29 June to block the rebels’ route at ‘Westbury under the Plain’.
The train of artillery at last arrived on the thirtieth, and Feversham then edged south-westwards, gently shadowing Monmouth, whose numbers shrank daily. On 4 July Churchill wrote to Lord Clarendon from Somerton. He was now evidently as anxious about his career as he was about the outcome of the campaign. He told Clarendon that:
nobody living can have been more observant than I have been to my Lord Feversham … in so much that he did tell me he would write to the King, to let him know how diligent I was, and I should be glad if you would let me know if he has done me that justice. I find, by the enemy’s warrant to the constables, that they have more mind to get horses and saddles than anything else, which looks as if he has a mind to break away with his horse to some other place and leave his foot entrenched at Bridgwater, but of this and all other things you will have it more at large from my Lord Feversham, who has the sole command here, so that I know nothing but what it is in his pleasure to tell me, so that I am afraid of giving my opinion freely, for fear it should not agree with what is the King’s intentions, and so expose myself. But as to the taking care of the men and all other things that is my duty, I am sure nobody can be more careful than I am; and as for my obedience, I am sure Mr Oglethorpe is not more dutiful than I am … 71
Oglethorpe, scion of a Yorkshire royalist family, also enjoyed the personal favour of James II. His conduct so far had kept him in Feversham’s eye, and at this juncture there was every chance that he would emerge with at least as much credit as Churchill. In the event Oglethorpe made significant mistakes at Sedgemoor but did indeed prosper. He stayed loyal to James in 1688 and refused to swear allegiance to William till 1696, thus destroying his military and political career. One of his sons, James Edward, went on to found the American state of Georgia; another, Lewis, was mortally wounded when Marlborough stormed the Schellenberg in 1704.
However, in 1685 all this lay in the future. When Churchill told Clarendon, ‘I see plainly that the trouble is all mine and the honour will be another’s,’ he was at least as suspicious of Oglethorpe as he was of Feversham. He was Feversham’s second in command, but was kept in the dark as to his plans, while the cavalry pursuit was entrusted to Oglethorpe, leaving Churchill with command of the foot. He was actually promoted major general in July, though he probably did not know of his good fortune till after Sedgemoor had been fought.
It was to Sedgemoor that Churchill’s steps now turned. While the royal army was at Somerton news arrived that the rebels were fortifying Bridgwater, where they had arrived on 3 July, as if they proposed to make their stand there. One of Feversham’s officers had ridden over the moor, and suggested that there was a good campsite on its edge, near the village of Westonzoyland. The royal army arrived there on Sunday, 5 July, and William Sparke, a local farmer, climbed the tower of Chedzoy church to see it moving into camp. He dispatched his herdsman, Benjamin Godfrey, to tell the Duke of Monmouth what had happened.72 The citizens of Taunton had firmly informed Monmouth that he would not now be welcome to return, and he had decided to march northwards once more, heading yet again for Keynsham bridge and Bristol. However, Godfrey’s news induced him to change his mind. He determined to mount a night attack on the royal army, interviewed Godfrey, and may well have spoken to William Sparke and climbed Chedzoy tower to see the ground for himself. So much of what happened that busy afternoon has become the stuff of legend, but one credible story has Monmouth spot the colours of Dumbarton’s Regiment, which had fought under his command in France and ‘by which he had been extremely beloved’. He told one of his officers, ‘I know these men will fight and if I had them I would not doubt of success.’73
The field of Sedgemoor is a squarish slab of tussocky lowland, each of its sides roughly three miles long. The Bussex Rhine, marking its south-east border, oozed into the River Parrett, its south-west edge, two miles from Westonzoyland. North-east of the village the Bussex Rhine joined the Black Ditch, the north-eastern boundary of the battlefield. The smaller Langport Rhine curled out like a comma from the Black Ditch just south of the cornfields bordering Chedzoy. The main road to Bristol from Bridgwater, marking the north-west edge of the field, ran across the moor via the ‘Long Causeway’. Just over two miles from the town the ‘Short Causeway’ carried a track to Chedzoy, out on the moor. Another metalled road curled from Westonzoyland to Bridgwater by way of Panzoy Farm.
On 4 July Captain Coy’s troop of the Royal Dragoons flicked forward towards Bridgwater, met a strong body of Monmouth’s horse and got off ‘without any considerable damage on either side’. Feversham seems to have believed that the main body of the rebels would stand siege in Bridgwater, for he sent word to Bath to hasten the arrival of his ‘mortar piece’, no real use to him in the field but able to pitch its explosive shells over walls. His men went into camp just north of Westonzoyland, with the Bussex Rhine between them and Bridgwater, a little over three miles away. Recent research suggests that the Bussex Rhine was perhaps eight and a half metres wide but, in the area of the battlefield, only thirty centimetres deep. Much bigger rivers have had less momentous consequences.
Feversham’s infantry pitched their tents in a single line behind the Bussex Rhine, leaving enough ground between camp and ditch for them to form up in line of battle. The cannon were on the infantry’s left, ‘fronting the great road’ to make it easier to get them on the move again next morning, and the horse and dragoons were quartered in Westonzoyland. The official account of the battle emphasises the trouble that Feversham took to guard against surprise. Captain Coy’s dragoons watched the crossings of the River Parrett at Barrow Bridge and Langport to the army’s left rear. The road to Bridgwater was soundly
picketed. Captain Upcott of the Oxford Blues had a ‘grand guard’ of forty troopers, essentially a stationary sentry-party, out on the moor beyond Panzoy Farm. There were forty musketeers of the Foot Guards behind the walls of a sheep fold (‘walled man-high’) further towards Bridgwater, with plenty of sheep ticks and few opportunities for tow-row-rowing. Finally, a party of a hundred men of the Blues and fifty dragoons under Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Compton was further forward still, providing sentries and small patrols to screen the moor and able to fall back onto the musketeers and the cavalry grand guard if they came under pressure.
Given Feversham’s assumption, shared by Churchill, that the rebels might try to get their horse away, probably to the north, Theophilus Oglethorpe had put a small patrol out onto the Bridgwater – Bristol road, and posted another party on the Langmoor Rhine, and then rode up to the top of Knowle Hill. Feversham visited ‘his sentries, together with his grand and out guards’, at about eleven and then retired to his quarters in Westonzoyland, where he was to sleep on a camp bed set up in the parlour at Weston Court. He had every reason to turn in with confidence: perhaps 250 of his seven hundred horse and dragoons were now on duty, and he had taken all reasonable precautions against surprise.
His infantry battalions were camped in order of seniority. Dumbarton’s was the senior line regiment in the field but junior to the guards regiments present, two battalions of 1st Foot Guards and a single battalion of the Coldstream.74 However, Dumbarton’s took station at the post of honour on the right of the line, almost certainly because it furnished the infantry grand guard, with perhaps a hundred of its soldiers standing to their arms all night. This party would provide the little force’s right markers if the infantry had to assemble during the night. The vicar of Chedzoy maintained that one of Dumbarton’s company commanders was sure that the rebels would attack, and had paced out the ground between tents and Bussex Rhine and warned his men to be ready.
There seems, however, to have been little sense that there was any real danger. Edward Dummer, a gunner in the artillery train, recorded that ‘a preposterous confidence of ourselves with an undervaluing of the rebels that many days before had made us make such tedious marches had put us into the worst circumstances of surprise’. Writing in 1718, an officer of the Blues declared that ‘On Sunday night most of the officers were drunk and had no manner of apprehension of the enemy.’75 We may doubt whether a tiny village like Westonzoyland actually contained sufficient alcohol to induce widespread drunkenness, even if the royal army was unfamiliar with the foot-tangling attributes of the local cider. But it is safe to assume that, apart from the occasional edgy Scot, most of Feversham’s officers yawned confidently to their beds.
Monmouth’s army moved out of Bridgwater on the Long Causeway at about eleven o’clock that night. It did not take the Short Causeway out to Chedzoy, the easiest route onto the moor, but turned eastwards in the direction of Peasy Farm to march parallel with the Black Ditch towards the royal army’s right flank. Theophilus Oglethorpe, up on Knowle Hill and preoccupied with the Bristol road, saw nothing of this. To make matters worse, after dark he had pulled in his standing patrol from the Langmoor Rhine, leaving a gap through which Monmouth slipped. He discovered what had happened some time later, when he took a patrol towards Bridgwater to satisfy himself that the rebels were still there. He just missed the tail end of Monmouth’s marching army, and only when he reached Bridgwater did he learn that the rebels had left the town.
At about the same time that Oglethorpe realised the scale of his failure, Monmouth was getting his men across the Langmoor Rhine, and confirming his plan with his senior commanders. Lord Grey was to take the cavalry over the northern plungeon (ford) over the Bussex Rhine, swing round into Westonzoyland and spread havoc through the royal camp. The infantry, marching onwards in column, would halt opposite the royalist foot, turn left into line, and attack a camp already rocked by the irruption of the rebel horse. It was not a bad plan, and even in the small hours of 6 July it might still have worked. However, as the rebels picked their way over the Langmoor Rhine in the misty half-light, a shot rang out.
We cannot be sure who fired it. Captain John Hucker of Monmouth’s horse maintained at his trial that he shot deliberately, to betray the attack, but his tale was as unconvincing then as it is now, and they hanged him anyway. It was probably one of Compton’s troopers, out creasing the moor, who fired his pistol in the air the minute he saw columns of rebel infantry on the move, and then rode towards Chedzoy to find Compton himself. Compton sent at least one trooper to camp to raise the alarm, and as he spurred towards Westonzoyland he collided with part of the rebel horse. Lord Grey had predictably missed the northern plungeon and had turned north of the Bussex Rhine rather than south of it, so was now separated from the royal camp by a belt of water which was effectively impassable to poorly trained cavalry in the dark.76 There was an inconclusive scuffle in which Compton was shot in the chest, but the damage was done.
Behind the Bussex Rhine the king’s infantry had turned out of their tents to form up on the open ground south of the ditch. Their drums were now beating. Some regiments had been issued with new flintlock fusil, but others had the older matchlock, and the glow of match-cord flickered out along the line as the corporals, whose job it was to keep a light handy, lit their men’s matches. The official account tells of ‘my Lord Churchill having command of the foot and seeing every man at his post doing his duty’, and the infantry’s swift response to the alarm speaks loudly for its training and discipline, and his precautions. All chance of surprise, and with it Monmouth’s battle, was now lost.
Most of Grey’s horsemen crossed Dumbarton’s front unengaged by yelling out that they were militia horse under Albemarle. But when challenged by 1st Foot Guards (commanded by Monmouth’s half-brother the Duke of Grafton), some replied with the rebel field-word ‘Monmouth and God with us,’ and both battalions of 1st Foot Guards in turn replied with a volley, as did the right-hand companies of the Coldstream. This was too much for Grey’s men, who broke back across the moor, some of them colliding with the two rearmost regiments of foot, the Blue and the White, which were forming up after crossing the Langmoor Rhine. The three remaining regiments, Red, Yellow and Green, managed to get into line ‘but not in good order’, just across the Bussex Rhine from the royal army’s right flank.
The rebel gunners had trundled three small field guns all the way from Bridgwater, and now swung them into action between the Yellow and Green regiments towards the left of Monmouth’s line. The rebels got to within ‘half musket shot’ of their enemies (Nathaniel Wade thought that the Red Regiment was within thirty or forty paces of the Bussex Rhine), stood their ground, and fired. Monmouth’s cannon, manned by Dutch professionals, made better practice than his infantry, most of whom, like many soldiers in battle for the first time, shot too high. Sending blasts of case-shot across the Bussex Rhine, the guns were soon doing serious damage to Dumbarton’s men and the right-hand battalion of 1st Foot Guards. Churchill, having satisfied himself that his line was properly drawn up, sent one troop of the Royal Dragoons across to the southern plungeon, and directed Lord Cornbury to take two more across to the right to support Dumbarton’s. He also ordered three light field guns to take station on the right of Dumbarton’s and pushed another three forward to join the first battalion of 1st Foot Guards. There is a pleasing story that Dr Peter Mews, Bishop of Winchester, a Dorset man who was accompanying the army, used his carriage horses to tug at least one of the guns into action. He had been a royalist captain during the Civil War and had fought in Holland after it, and was just the sort of prelate who saw no harm in praising God and passing the ammunition, but it is impossible to confirm the tale.
Cornbury’s dragoons, probably dismounted, were in action against the Green regiment on Monmouth’s left. They hit its colonel, Abraham Holmes, killing his horse beneath him and leaving him badly wounded on the ground. Churchill crossed the ditch nearby when the infantry eventually moved forward and asked Holmes, ‘Who art thou?’ Holmes replied glumly that he was not in a condition to tell. By this time some of the royal horse had mounted and ridden out of Westonzoyland to attack the right flank of Monmouth’s infantry. There is a possibility that they missed their way in the dark, swung back too close to the royal line and were duly shot at by their own infantry, but we cannot be sure.
When Feversham reached the field he divided his horse into two groups, and sent them out across the two plungeons to threaten the rebel flanks, probably ordering them not to charge until it was light enough for them to see what they were doing. Oglethorpe, on the right, spurred on anyhow, collided with a party of rebel horse and was then beaten off with loss when he charged one of the rebel foot regiments. While the horse were getting out onto the moor, Churchill shifted Trelawney’s and Kirke’s, who had nothing to shoot at, across to the right, although by the time they came up with Dumbarton’s the sun was beginning to rise and the battle was entering its last phase. With daylight reducing the risk of further ‘friendly fire’ incidents the royalist horse charged the retreating rebel infantry. The guns were swiftly overrun, and the rebel foot, struggling off as best it could, was soon swamped. Churchill quickly pushed the grenadier companies of his infantry across the Bussex Rhine to support the horse. The grenadiers of Dumbarton’s took Monmouth’s own banner, whose motto Fear nothing but GOD might have seemed ironic to the rebel survivors now running for their lives to escape the broadswords of the pursuing horsemen.
Oglethorpe was sent post-haste to London with news of the victory: his mistakes had not cost him Feversham’s favour. Churchill rode straight for Bridgwater, which opened its gates at once. The settling of accounts began early: on 7 July a Dutch gunner and a deserter who had fought for the rebels were hanged in front of the whole army. That hard man Percy Kirke, now appointed brigadier to command both his own regiment and Trelawney’s, was left behind to secure prisoners and ensure that the dead were properly buried. Sedgemoor had cost the royal army about thirty killed, and another 206, most of them from Dumbarton’s and 1st Foot Guards, were to receive pensions for wounds received. At least 1,400 rebels had been killed in the fighting and pursuit.
Monmouth was captured, dressed in shepherd’s clothes, on 8 July. He had already been condemned by Act of Attainder, but cravenly begged the king for his life: James observed that he ‘did not behave himself so well as I expected nor as one ought who had taken upon him to be king’.77 He had recovered his courage by the time he was taken to Tower Hill for execution the next day but, despite a substantial tip of six guineas, with the promise of another six from a servant after the job was done, Jack Ketch, the executioner, failed to kill him with his first three hacks. He then threw down his axe and declared that he could not go on, but the furious crowd urged him to put Monmouth out of his misery. Another two blows failed to sever the duke’s head, and the executioner eventually worried it off with his knife. Ketch had to be escorted from the scene to protect him from the mob.
The trials of captured rebels began at Winchester in late August, and thereafter the ‘Bloody Assizes’, supervised by George, Lord Jeffreys, the lord chief justice, worked its sanguinary way across the West Country. Something over three hundred rebels were hanged, drawn and quartered, their executions taking place across the region and their quartered bodies distributed even more widely. Almost nine hundred were sentenced to transportation to the West Indies as unpaid labourers for four years, a term of exile soon increased to ten years. Churchill’s biographers whisk him back to London immediately after the battle, but in late September Jeffreys wrote to tell the king that Churchill, ‘who was upon the place’, would tell him what had been done to snuff out rebellion in Taunton, a comment that makes sense only if Churchill had first witnessed Jeffreys’ bloody handiwork and then returned to London.78 The property of traitors was forfeit to the crown, and some of it was passed on as reward to the victors of Sedgemoor. Feversham, made a Knight of the Garter, received the estates of the executed Alice Lisle, and Churchill was given the very considerable property of John Hacker, captain of rebel horse and prosperous Taunton businessman.
Churchill emerged from the campaign with great credit. Of his possible rivals, Theophilus Oglethorpe had not fulfilled his promise as a cavalry leader, and Percy Kirke was to establish an unpleasant (though probably exaggerated) reputation for casual brutality as he snuffed out the embers of the rebellion with his tough Tangier veterans, known ironically, from their paschal lamb emblem, as Kirke’s Lambs. However, Churchill’s role in the battle became politicised almost immediately, and too many of his biographers have taken contemporary polemic for historical fact. Feversham, a royal favourite and a Frenchman by birth, was not popular at a time when the French were seen as natural enemies. His depiction in the Duke of Buckingham’s play The Battle of Sedgemoor (which manages to combine both anti-French and anti-Irish prejudice) is valuable only as evidence of perennial English suspicion of Johnny Foreigner.
A pox take de Towna vid de hard Name: How you call de Towna, De Breeche? … Ay begarra, Breechwater; so Madama we have intelegenta dat de Rebel go to Breechwater; me say to my Mena, Match you Rogua; so we marsha de greata Fielda, beggar, de brave Contra where dey killa de Hare vid de Hawk, beggar, de brav Sport in de Varld.79
Feversham was a naturalised Englishman, had lived in England for over twenty years, and spoke the language well.
Thomas Lediard’s whiggish biography of Marlborough (1736) quotes an unknown author who affirms that Feversham ‘had no parties abroad, he got no intelligence, and was almost surprised, and like to be defeated, when he seemed under no apprehension, but was abed without any care or order’. We have already seen how Feversham’s precautions were wholly professional. Had Oglethorpe not shifted the crucial picket Monmouth’s advance would have been detected sooner, but as it was Compton’s screen did precisely what was expected of it. The Reverend Andrew Paschall heard from a church official in Westonzoyland that an unnamed lord sought a local guide to take him away from the battle, but it is impossible to link this firmly to Feversham, though some have tried. There were repeated suggestions that Feversham, a Frenchman and thus by definition a fop, took a long time to dress after the alarm was given and insisted on breakfasting before leaving his quarters. The most that we can say is that he had been injured by a falling timber in one of the Whitehall fires and had subsequently been trepanned: this might have made it harder for his servants to wake him.
Winston S. Churchill claimed that:
Nothing could free the public mind from the fact that Churchill had saved and won the battle. The whole Army knew the facts. The officers included the Household troops, the Guards, and all the most fashionable soldiers about the court. They all said what they thought. Feversham’s martial achievements became a laughing-stock … The impression that this slothful foreigner was slumbering on his couch and that the vigilant Englishman saved the situation had more truth in it than the popular version of many historical events.80
If these well-placed officers did indeed know discreditable facts about Feversham, and trailed them about court, we may wonder why James appointed him to command his army in 1688 when the threat was infinitely more serious.
Feversham does not have to be a villain for Churchill to be a hero. Whatever the rumours of drunkenness or lack of vigilance, the royal infantry, his prime responsibility as the army’s second in command, was camped in good order with well-understood alarm drills, and Dumbarton’s provided an alert grand guard which established the right marker for its battle line. Once the fight was joined, Churchill shifted dragoons to both flanks, and paid special attention to his right, where Dumbarton’s Scots were under pressure. He moved his two left-hand regiments off to the right some time afterwards, but by this time the rebel attack was broken. John Tincey, whose recent scholarly account of Sedgemoor comes as close as we can hope to being definitive, reckons that: ‘By the time Feversham arrived the battle was won and he had little to do but, with the dawn, to organise the pursuit of a beaten enemy … Sedgemoor may not have been John Churchill’s most spectacular victory, but it must rightfully be considered to be his first.’81
Any historian surveying the next three years must account for the fact that the nations which applauded the defeat of Monmouth and Argyll in 1685 offered remarkably little support for James II in 1688. For Churchill’s biographers the task is even more specific: what made a man who acknowledged himself to owe everything to James, and who had helped keep him on the throne in 1685, betray him in his hour of need? We have the usual clash of polemics. James II’s many critics see him as a monster bent on imposing Roman Catholicism on his three kingdoms and obliterating those legal defences which stood in his way. In contrast, the Jacobite Life of James II, based partly on his own memoirs, maintained that James was a benevolent and paternalistic figure who
had given all the marks of love, care and tenderness of his subjects, that could be expected from a true father of his people: he had … encouraged and increased their trade, preserved them from taxes, supported their credit, [and] made them a rich, happy and more powerful people than they had ever appeared in the world.82
It is perhaps easiest to see 1685–88 as a sequence of interlinked royal miscalculations, in which maladroitness and bad luck loomed larger than malice or cruelty; and though James won most of the individual legal battles he lost the war. The Bloody Assizes had the effect (not wholly unlike the Dublin executions of 1916) of alarming many moderate men who had never wished the rebels well but did not relish the severities meted out to them. James’s own overt Roman Catholicism, the arrival in London of a papal nuncio and the apparent influence of James’s Jesuit confessor Father Petre created tension in themselves. They were, though, made far more disturbing to Protestants by the fact that in 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given religious toleration to his Protestant subjects, and embarked upon a policy of forced conversion which drove tens of thousands of Huguenots into exile with dreadful stories to tell.
John Evelyn was shocked by what he heard.
The French persecution of the Protestants raging with the utmost barbarity, exceeded even what the very heathens used; innumerable persons of the greatest birth and riches leaving all their earthly substance and barely escaping with their lives, dispersed through all the countries of Europe. The French tyrant abrogated the Edict of Nantes … on a sudden demolishing all their churches, banishing, imprisoning and sending to the galleys all the ministers; plundering all the common people, and exposing them to all sorts of barbarous usages by soldiers sent to ruin and prey upon them; taking away their children; forcing people to mass, and then executing them as relapsers … 83
In the spring of 1686 English congregations were asked to contribute to a fund for the exiles. This ‘was long expected, and was at last with difficulty procured to be published, the interest of the French ambassador obstructing it’. The government ordered a book detailing the outrages inflicted on the Huguenots to be burnt by the common hangman, but even Evelyn, a committed royalist, thought that this was ‘no refutation of any facts therein’ but simply showed the French ambassador’s ‘great indignation at the pious and truly generous charity of all the nation’.84
Between 50,000 and 80,000 Huguenots arrived in England, where they were generally welcomed as fellow Protestants, even by the constrictive guilds of the City of London, for the skills they brought. The tales they told confirmed the worst English fears of an absolute monarchy with the stink of incense in its nostrils. Martha Guiscard of Fleet Street ‘came out of France, because Jean Guiscard, her father, was burnt at Nérac, accused of having irreverently received the host’. A wealthy gentleman who had to ‘abandon a great estate [was] condemned to be hanged: and his house demolished, and his woods destroyed’.85 Gilbert Burnet saw all this as ‘a real argument against the cruel and persecuting spirit of popery, wherever it prevailed … the French persecution came very seasonably to awaken the nation’.86 Another contemporary observer thought that: ‘The whole of Europe … is inundated with the enemies of Louis XIV since the expulsion of the Huguenots,’ and even Marshal Vauban lamented that France’s loss included ‘sixty millions of money, nine thousand sailors, twelve thousand tried soldiers, six hundred officers, and its most flourishing manufacturers’.87
English concern at the persecution of the Huguenots had two specific aspects. First, it was carried out without regard to class or wealth: indeed, it was the threat to ‘their property, rights or privileges’ that persuaded many Huguenot noblemen to give up their religion. To nervous Protestant gentlemen across the Channel, the process posed a revolutionary threat to the established social as well as religious order. Second, the regular army was the chosen instrument of terror. Dragoons were often quartered on Huguenot villages with licence to behave abominably, giving the process the name of the dragonnades and founding the verb ‘to dragoon’ in the English language. Armed resistance was crushed remorselessly: the marquis de Louvois told a military commander to ‘cause such destruction in the area’ that the example would teach other Huguenots ‘how dangerous it is to rise against the King’.88
Just as the abused often go on to be abusers, Huguenot exiles were not slow to take vengeance on those they believed responsible for their plight. At the Boyne in 1690 the Duke of Schomberg, himself a Huguenot, and a marshal of France before his exile, shouted to a shaky Huguenot regiment: ‘Allons, messieurs, voilà vos persecuteurs’ – ‘Come, gentlemen, there are your persecutors’ – and it immediately rallied. Conversely, some of the Wild Geese, Irish soldiers who left to serve in France after the collapse of the Jacobite cause in Ireland, behaved just as badly to French Protestants as English Protestants had to them. James’s illegitimate son the Duke of Berwick played a prominent part in suppressing a Protestant insurrection in Languedoc, and assures us that he had a brisk way with prisoners: ‘Revarelle and Catinat, who had been grenadiers in the troop, were burnt alive, on account of the horrid sacrileges they had been guilty of. Villar and Jonquet were broken on the wheel …’89
James quickly dissolved Parliament. He then proceeded to use the royal prerogative to dispense Roman Catholics from the Test Act, with a packed bench of judges finding in his favour in the collusive test case of Godden v. Hales in 1686.* He broke the Anglican monopoly of education by enabling Oxford fellows who became Catholics to retain their posts, and then imposed a Catholic president on Magdalen, the richest of Oxford’s colleges. County lieutenancies and magistrates’ benches were disproportionately reinforced by Catholics, and City livery companies and town councils across England saw the government’s opponents ejected. When the Duke of Somerset refused to conduct the public ceremonial for the reception of the papal nuncio on the ground that it was illegal, James replied: ‘I am above the law.’ ‘Your Majesty is so,’ replied the duke, ‘but I am not.’ He was dismissed from all his offices. Although the process worked almost as much to the advantage of Dissenters as it did to that of Catholics, it affronted Tory Anglicans in England and Protestants of the established Church in both Scotland and Ireland.90 James was alienating the very people who had backed his brother.
In May 1688 James found himself in a direct confrontation with Archbishop Sancroft and six bishops who refused to have an Indulgence, suspending the Test Act and allowing public Catholic worship, read from every pulpit. Tellingly, they would have been joined by Peter Mews, once a captain of royalist horse and a Sedgemoor veteran, had he been well enough to attend the crucial meeting. The bishops were arrested for seditious libel, and when they refused to give bail, arguing that, as peers, they did not need to do so, they were sent to the Tower. It gave the worst possible impression, and even the soldiers on guard there shouted ‘God bless the bishops.’ At their trial they argued that the Indulgence violated the law, which could only be changed by Parliament, and were acquitted. That night there were bonfires and fireworks across London, and even a number of symbolic pope-burnings. It was a substantial public rebuff for James.
Although James’s approach to his armed forces was but one aspect of his general policy, the importance of the army as a means of repression in both interregnum England and Louis XIV’s France gave it particular prominence. Monmouth’s rebellion had illustrated the frailty of county militias, and James allowed the militia to wither on the vine during his reign, a fact which may actually have worked to his disadvantage in 1688. He maintained his regular English military establishment at just short of 20,000, the figure it had risen to as a result of the rising. He did not substantially raise it till the spring of 1688, when he recalled the Anglo-Dutch brigade, sending one each of its regiments to England, Ireland and Scotland. With the fear of Dutch invasion that autumn he added extra troops to existing establishments and raised new regiments, giving his English army a theoretical strength of something over 34,000 men. Even this was not an unreasonably large force for a country the size of England: the French had some 100,000 regulars at the same time, and even little Hesse-Cassel had more than 10,000.91 Such comparisons, however, were not uppermost in the minds of James’s parliamentary critics, who were reluctant to maintain the army even at its October 1685 size: this hostility led James to prorogue and eventually to dissolve Parliament.
The establishment of a Roman Catholic troop of Life Guards accorded with James’s policy of assisting his Catholic subjects as best he could, although the Earl of Ailesbury maintained that its captain was so venal that he would gladly have enlisted a Turk if he had the £40 entrance fee to hand. What caused more concern was James’s use of the prerogative to enable Catholic officers to serve, and indeed Sir Edward Hales, defendant in Godden v. Hales, was a colonel of infantry. Modern research has not identified that swelling torrent of Catholic officers described by some contemporaries, and even the 1688 expansion did not take the proportion above 11 per cent. There were, naturally enough, regimental exceptions: Sir Edward Hales’s Regiment had sixteen Catholics out of thirty-seven officers.
Perhaps more serious was James’s practice of depriving officers who opposed him in Parliament in 1685, or who subsequently crossed him, of their commissions. They were not always replaced with Catholics, but lost the money they had paid for their commissions, and he was thus ‘attacking the sanctity of property and acting without tact’.92 Overall, between the spring of 1685 and the autumn of 1688 James had increased the size of the English army and done much to improve its efficiency. Yet in the process he had ‘disobliged’ many Protestant career officers. This might not, in and of itself, have turned them into rebels. But as they glanced across St George’s Channel, as Englishmen so often have, they saw a truly alarming process at work: the wholesale purging of the Irish army and its replacement by a Catholic force.
The Irish army was theoretically distinct from its English and Scots cousins. It was not only smaller and far worse equipped than the English army, but traditionally reflected the ascendancy of the Protestant minority over the Roman Catholic majority. James sought to reform it for two reasons: it urgently needed bringing up to date, and it was only fair, as he put it, ‘that the roman catholics, who had tasted so deeply of his sufferings, should now, in his prosperity, have at least a share of his protection’.93 It would have been a dangerous enough task in the first place, and for James to entrust it to Dick Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell and Sarah Churchill’s brother-in-law, made it explosive.
Tyrconnell, appointed lieutenant general in Ireland in 1685, and then lord lieutenant in place of Clarendon in January 1687, was the scion of an ‘old English’ family that had been settled in Ireland for centuries. Proud, prickly and presumptuous, he quickly set about dismissing Protestant officers from the militia and regular army alike and replacing them with ‘old English’ Catholic officers, and jettisoning Protestant rank and file in favour of Catholics. Robert Parker, one of the best witnesses for Marlborough’s campaigns, was a Protestant from Kilkenny who had joined the Irish army as a private in 1683, but in the summer of 1687 Tyrconnell held a great review on the Curragh of Kildare and young Parker found himself dismissed. He was on his way to join the Dutch army in 1688, but a chance encounter with his old company commander in London saw him back in the army after the Glorious Revolution, in Lord Forbes’ Regiment of Foot, later the Royal Regiment of Ireland.94
We can be sure that it was never Tyrconnell’s plan to create an Irish Catholic army which could be shipped across to coerce the English. He was far more interested in redistributing power in Ireland, and it is even possible that, after the death of James II, he wished to declare Ireland an independent state. Although his ‘new modelling’ drew in a few experienced professional officers, it had little time to take effect, and so the Irish army of 1688 was in fact far worse trained than the force that Tyrconnell had begun to reform three years before. Moreover, even if James and Tyrconnell never intended to use the Irish Catholic army in England, Protestant Englishmen were wholly unconvinced. Yet again, as they saw it, property rights and religious sensibilities were trampled upon, and God alone knew where the business would stop. Even the London Gazette, the government’s own information organ, became infected by the prevailing sense of near-panic:
Bristol, March 6 [1688]. There are arrived in all these Western parts great multitudes of disaffected English protestants from Ireland, whose condition is most deplorable; from whom we have an account that at Dublin the Protestants were all disarmed. And their horses taken from them, and many of them plundered and cruelly treated by the soldiers, who had likewise seized both the cathedrals and the college; and all ships and passengers bound for England were stopped, and their goods and plate that was found on board taken away. In Munster, Leinster and Connaught the protestants are disseized of their inheritances, as well as plundered of their arms, horses and goods, and many of the chiefest amongst them imprisoned … 95
Just as Tyrconnell’s camps on the Curragh were intended to bring his army together for training (as well as to expel Protestants), so James’s annual military camps on Hounslow Heath had a purpose that was in part innocent. The heath, conveniently midway between Windsor and Whitehall, stood at the intersection of the Great West, Great North and Portsmouth roads, and an army based there could respond to landings in any direction. The camp also represented an opportunity to draw regiments together from individual garrisons and carry out standardised drill and some large-scale training. There was a mock fort, stormed regularly to the delight of spectators, and a chance for officers, when they could drag themselves away from London (captains were only expected to inspect their men every three days or so), to grasp the rudiments of An Abridgement of the English Military Discipline, a 1686 update of a drill-book first issued under Charles II. Simply getting regiments from across the land into camp on the right day showed the growing maturity of the army’s fledgling central administration, with William Blathwayt and his clerks coordinating arrivals. Once the troops were in camp, James personally took a close interest in their dress, drill and training.
There was more to Hounslow Heath than solid military preparation. The camp also served to show the City of London that there were troops near at hand, and there were, as John Evelyn tells us, ‘many jealousies and discourses of what was the meaning of this encampment’.96 James saw the camp, at least in part, as a means of rattling the coercive power at his disposal in its scabbard. There were certainly times when he was prepared to use his army to dragoon opposition, and we should not be surprised that Londoners feared that they would be next. Trelawney’s Regiment was quartered in Bristol in 1685 and 1686 because of the city’s whiggish sympathy, and dragoons were posted to Lancaster, Warrington, Liverpool and Preston, though not in ‘the honest town of Wigan’. There were cases when soldiers arrived to help towns elect the right Members of Parliament, and were sometimes given voting rights to help the process along.97
A combination of factors – amongst them the replacement of some officers of the English army, the purging of the Irish army, fears about the army’s role as a political instrument, and mistrust of James’s policy overall – helped focus a military conspiracy against him. In the case of some officers, like Churchill and the Earl of Craven, colonel of the Coldstream Guards and Carolina proprietor, opposition to the king was sharpened by fears that his policies were damaging their interests in North America. In February 1687 Churchill, as a governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, delivered to the king the company’s formal complaint that nothing was being done to protect the North American colonies from French encroachments. The historian Stephen Saunders Webb may overstate the case when he declares that Churchill was ‘the leading exponent of English imperial expansion’. There is, though, no doubt that his belief that English interests in North America were not well served by royal policy was another significant difference between himself and James, and that his views were shared by the influential, efficient and upwardly mobile Blathwayt.98
Those involved in the conspiracies against James II risked their lives and fortunes, and so took good care to minimise written evidence of their deeds, thus complicating the historian’s task. We can easily enough say what the conspiracy was not. There was no attempt to subvert the majority of the army’s officer corps, still less its rank and file. There was never any hope of using the army in a military coup to overthrow the king. In fact the bulk of James’s army never directly opposed him, but the military conspiracy ensured that it was unable to fight against William of Orange because of the paralysing defection of its leaders. This defection, organised by men close to James, who knew his failings, fatally loosened his grip on power. It is possible that a stronger character would have withstood the repeated hammer blows of personal betrayal, but James did not. The flaws in his character, so clearly revealed during his brief reign, would destroy him.
Bishop Burnet, who had close connections to some of those involved, believed that at the heart of what he called ‘the design’ were ‘three of the chief officers of the army, Trelawney, Kirke and the Lord Churchill. They all went into it, and Trelawney engaged his brother, the bishop.’99 Ailesbury, on the other side of the fence, agreed with this. He tells us that he and Feversham went to the king, and begged him
to clap up seven or eight of the heads of them and with the most humble submission I ventured to name the Prince of Denmark, the Dukes of Ormonde and Grafton, Lord Churchill, Mr Kirke, Mr Trelawney &c., but as it was found, and fatally, that the king could not resolve and, if he had, in all probability the army would have stood by him.100
There were two nerve centres of conspiracy. The ‘Treason Club’, whose members met at the Rose Tavern on Russell Street in Covent Garden to smoke, drink and mutter, included a number of whiggish professional soldiers and politicians like Richard Savage, Viscount Colchester, Thomas Wharton (later to inherit his father’s peerage and emerge as a Whig grandee) and Thomas Langston, sometime major of Churchill’s Royal Dragoons and now commanding Princess Anne’s Horse. Charles Godfrey, who had served with Churchill in France and later married his sister Arabella, kept Churchill abreast of movements in the Rose.
The ‘Tangerines’ were the other main group, although the term strictly speaking comprised all Tangier veterans, given to musing on old times over their tokay and damning the government. Key conspirators included Percy Kirke and Charles Trelawney, as well as Langston, a Tangier veteran and intermediary with the Treason Club. Another Tangerine was John Cutts, a veteran of the Imperial service, where he had been the first man to plant a standard on the walls of Buda, a wholly characteristic act for a man soon to be known as ‘Salamander’, after the mythical creature which lives in fire. He had just published a book of Poetical Exercises and was a lieutenant colonel in the Anglo-Dutch Brigade, providing useful contact with disaffected officers in that body.
Some regiments were, naturally, more disaffected than others. The officers of 1st Foot Guards, who might have been expected to provide a mainstay for the regime, seem to have followed the lead of their colonel, the Duke of Grafton, who was not simply a member of the Cockpit circle but Barbara Villiers’ son, and who felt that his performance in 1685 had been poorly rewarded. He was governor of the Isle of Wight, and one of his captains, Lionel Copley, was deputy governor of the important port and arsenal of Hull.101 There were a number of naval officers like George Byng, Mathew Aylmer and Arthur Herbert in the conspiracy, but it was naturally more difficult to get naval plotters together.
Neither of these groups turned its attention to practical treason till the summer of 1688, as they could do little until they knew that William was indeed planning to invade. Events moved fast that summer. On 10 June 1688 James’s queen gave birth to a son, rendering the temporising policies of men like Halifax irrelevant, for there was now a good chance that James would have a successor who would not reverse his policies. Churchill, we are told, ‘was summoned to attend’ the birth as a witness, but although he was ‘sent for in a very particular manner … he had received some intimations before, and was purposely out of the way’.102 The bishops were acquitted on 30 June, and on that very day the Earls of Devonshire, Danby and Shrewsbury, Bishop Compton, Edward Russell and Henry Sidney, sent a letter to William of Orange assuring him that ‘nineteen parts of twenty’ throughout the kingdom wanted a change in government, and ‘much the greatest part of the nobility and gentry’ were ‘as much dissatisfied’. If William acted quickly, they were confident that the army would not fight because its members were ‘so discontented’.103
The army was in camp on Hounslow Heath, and conditions for spreading discontent amongst selected officers could scarcely have been better. Indeed, James’s own policy of canvassing officers for their support for repeal of the Test Acts actually worked against his own interests. The majority of army officers, then as now, were apolitical, and resented being invited to make political choices either way. When James asked Captain Sandys of the Blues, who had fought bravely at Sedgemoor, what he thought of the repeal, the captain replied gruffly: ‘I understand Your Majesty well enough. I fear God and honour the king, as I ought, but I am not a man that is given to change.’104
By mid-1688 the fact that the Prince of Orange was considering an invasion was an open secret. On 19 August Dr Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, warned John Evelyn that ‘there would suddenly be some great thing discovered. This was the Prince of Orange intending to come over.’105 On 18 September Evelyn reported that ‘the Dutch make extraordinary preparations both at sea and land’, and on 7 October he declared that:
To such a strange temper, and unheard of in former times, was this poor nation reduced, and of which I was an eyewitness. The apprehension was (and with reason) that His Majesty’s forces would neither at land or at sea oppose them with that vigour requisite to repel the invader.106
John Churchill was at the very centre of the plot, and this is not a comfortable admission for some biographers. Winston S. Churchill, indeed, described the conspiracy against James as ‘The National Counter-Plot’ so as to stress both its national and its reactive character. Like most of the professional soldiers involved in it, Churchill relied primarily upon his army pay, and so the much-feared purge of the English army after the Irish model would strike at his fundamental interests. He had already seen loyal men who obstructed James have their careers blasted. Then, in early 1688 the Earl of Oxford, ‘the noblest subject in England and, as Englishmen loved to say, in Europe’, refused, as lord lieutenant of Essex, to appoint Catholics to public office. ‘I will stand by your Majesty against all enemies to the last drop of my blood,’ he declared. ‘But this is a matter of conscience and I cannot comply.’ He was deprived of his county lieutenancy and of the colonelcy of the Blues, where the Duke of Berwick replaced him.
In the fate of men like Somerset and Oxford, grandees who could survive well enough without royal favour, Churchill sensed a foretaste of his own. He was not willing to become a Catholic, and had told James so, though in less jocular terms than Percy Kirke, who warned the surprised monarch that he had given the Emperor of Morocco first refusal, and so if he was going to convert to anything it would be to Islam. One evening before dinner in the autumn of 1685, we are told, James and Churchill walked round the Deanery Garden at Winchester. James had that day been carrying out the traditional ceremony of touching those afflicted by scrofula, known as the King’s Evil, and at Winchester he had performed the ceremony attended by Catholic priests.
James asked Churchill what he thought people made of his carrying out the ceremony in this way. Churchill replied that they feared it might be paving the way for the restoration of Catholicism. The angry James snapped back that he had given his word that all he sought was religious toleration. Churchill then said:
What I spoke, sir, proceeded purely from my zeal for your majesty’s service, which I prefer above all things next to that of God, and I humbly beseech your majesty to believe no subject in all your three kingdoms would venture further than I would to purchase your favour and good liking; but I have been bred a Protestant, and intend to live and die in that communion; above nine parts of ten of the whole people are of that persuasion, and I fear (which excess of duty makes me say) from the genius of the English nation, and their natural aversion to the Roman Catholic worship, some consequences which I dare not name, and which it creates in me a horror to think of.
James then said deliberately:
I tell you, Churchill, I will exercise my own religion in such a manner as I shall think fitting. I will show favour to my Catholic subjects, and be a common father to all my Protestants of what religion soever: but I am to remember that I am King, and to be obeyed by them. As for the consequences, I shall leave them to Providence, and make use of the power God has put into my hands to prevent anything that shall be injurious to my honour, or derogatory to the duty that is owing to me.
James did not speak to Churchill again that night, but during dinner he had a long conversation with Dr Maggot, the dean of Winchester, about Passive Obedience. ‘I myself,’ wrote the anonymous author of this source, ‘was a stander by and heard it; without knowing the occasion of it at the time, till the Lord Churchill told me what words had happened between the King and him.’107
It is as difficult for us now as it was for contemporaries to judge precisely where, in these matters, conscience left off and self-interest began. Amongst the conspirators were some men who were devout, and others (with Percy Kirke as the most notable example) who were not. If the evidence of his abundant correspondence is any guide, Churchill was sincere in his commitment to Anglicanism. In accordance with the spirit of the age, he tried not to march or fight on Sundays, repeatedly affirmed his trust in God and the need to thank Him publicly for His mercies. Twenty years later, in a dark moment before Oudenarde, ill and at a tactical disadvantage, he was discovered by Sicco van Goslinga earnestly at prayer at one o’clock in the morning. In December 1687 Sarah told Mary of Orange that ‘Though he [Churchill] will always obey the King in all things that are consistent with religion – yet, rather than change that, I daresay that he will lose all his places and all that he has.’108 Churchill did not only believe that James was wrong: he thought that the monarch’s policy would either wreck his own career or generate a wider insurrection. In the latter event he did not wish to be on the losing side, for he had seen, in his own father’s case, just what that involved.
He was certainly anxious not to break cover too soon. In February 1688 James decreed that the Duke of Berwick’s Regiment of Foot, in garrison at Portsmouth, was to enlist some Irish recruits who were surplus to requirements elsewhere. The regiment’s lieutenant colonel and five of the twelve company commanders begged instead that ‘we may have leave to fill up our companies with such men of our nation as we judge most suitable to the king’s service and to support our honours’. The officers were tried by court-martial at Windsor Castle, and all lost their commissions. Seven of their brother officers resigned in sympathy, and over a hundred private soldiers seized the opportunity to desert. The incident was not in fact a sign of James’s intention to pack English regiments with Irish recruits, but to an army that was already suspicious of royal intentions it looked very much that way.
Churchill sat on the court-martial and voted for the death penalty. By doing so he gave a public affirmation of his loyalty to James, but because courts-martial voted in reverse seniority, with the most junior voting first, he knew that his apparent severity would not actually imperil the lives of the accused. However, he was aware that one of the officers on trial, John Beaumont, was an active plotter and must have been worried that his premature action would risk wider disclosures. Churchill, as we shall see, was responsible for remodelling the army after the Revolution of 1688, and saw that Beaumont was promoted to colonel while at least three of the cashiered captains became lieutenant colonels.
In all this dangerous work Churchill was aided and abetted by his wife. There is a very close correlation between the predominantly Tory Cockpit circle and the often whiggish army conspirators. Henry Compton, the suspended Bishop of London, was not only a signatory of the invitation to William of Orange but a confidant of the Cockpit. In the late summer of 1688 he travelled widely, winning over his nephew the Earl of Northampton, the Earl of Dorset, Lord Grey de Ruthin and the Earl of Manchester.109 At the very heart of the Cockpit was Princess Anne, who assured her elder sister Mary, William of Orange’s wife:
I hope you don’t doubt that I will ever be firm to my religion whatever happens … I must tell you that I abhor the principles of the Church of Rome as much as it is possible for any to do, and I as much value the doctrine of the Church of England. And certainly there is the greatest reason in the world to do so, for the doctrine of the Church of Rome is wicked and dangerous, and directly contrary to the Scriptures, and their ceremonies – most of them – plain, downright idolatry.110
Anne was already as close to Sarah Churchill as she was distant from her father, and the events of the mid-1680s strengthened the former tie as they further unravelled the latter. Anne’s two young daughters, Anne and Mary, died from smallpox early in 1687, and for some weeks Prince George hovered on the brink of following them. The Catholic faction at court began to discuss her remarriage to a suitable Catholic prince, and when the distraught Anne asked her father for permission to visit Mary at The Hague, James, with a typical show of paternal firmness which emerged as intolerance, refused it. Anne immediately warned her sister, in just the tone used by the army conspirators, that if things went on like this no Protestant would be able to live in England. Anne had also come to hate her stepmother, not least because of her evangelising zeal for her religion, and in May 1697 she told Mary: ‘She pretends to have a good deal of kindness to me but I doubt it is not real, for I never see proofs of it, but rather the contrary.’111
Suspecting that their father’s agents would interfere with their letters, the royal sisters took to corresponding through the Dutch ambassador Everaarde van Weede, Heer van Dijkveld, who was himself hard at work gleaning news of English political opinion for his master, and who maintained contact with Princess Anne through the medium of John Churchill. By now James suspected both Anne’s increasing political influence and the strength of her affection, which he called ‘a boundless passion’, for Sarah. In mid-1687 Louis XIV’s special envoy reported that Anne’s main advisers were now working for William, and Churchill, in his opinion, ‘exerts himself more than anyone for the Prince of Orange. Lord Godolphin, who is in all the secret councils, opposes nothing, but plays the good Protestant and always keeps a back door open for access to the Prince of Orange.’112
Her stepmother’s successful pregnancy, which came to term on 10 June, infuriated Anne, who had by now lost her own two daughters and suffered two miscarriages, and she saw in the infant Prince James Francis Edward an heir who would not only supplant the claims of Mary and herself, but who might also continue James’s policy. She complained to Mary that simply being in London was an agony, because ‘The Papists are all so very insolent that it is insupportable living with them.’113 By this time Anne’s resentment of her father’s policies had gone beyond mere criticism, and the Cockpit circle had a conspiracy of its own, aimed at ensuring that Anne escaped from London to join one of the provincial risings planned to accompany a Dutch invasion.
Although Sarah Churchill was later to argue in The Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough that the princess’s hurried departure from London in the middle of the 1688 campaign was ‘a thing sudden and unconcerted’, it is clear that she and her husband had thrown their hands in with the plotters some time before.114 Sarah admitted that John ‘made settlements to secure his family in case of misfortunes’, and in a letter he sent to the Prince of Orange by way of Henry Sidney on 27 July 1688 he formally bound himself to William:
Mr Sidney will let you know how I intend to behave myself: I think it is what I owe to God and my country. My honour I take leave to put into your Royal Highness’s hands, in which I think it safe. If you think there is anything else that I ought to do, you have but to command me, and I shall pay an entire obedience to it, being resolved to die in that religion that it has pleased God to give you both the will and power to protect.115
There are times when a nation holds its breath. In the autumn of 1688 England was gripped by rumour and counter-rumour. The French, hands imbued with the blood of Huguenots, were on their way; the Irish were poised to invade. There would be a general massacre of Protestants, and the Church and the constitution would be toppled. Only the arrival of that Protestant hero, William of Orange, could avert catastrophe. On 7 October John Evelyn inhaled the stink of panic:
Hourly expectation of the Prince of Orange’s invasion heightened to that degree that his Majesty saw fit to abrogate the commissions for the dispensing power (but retaining his right still to dispense with all laws) and restore the ejected Fellows of Magdalen College. In the mean time he called over 5000 Irish, and 4000 Scots, and continued to remove Protestants and put in Papists at Portsmouth and other places of trust, and retained the Jesuits about him, increasing the universal discontent. It brought people to so desperate a pass, that they seemed passionately to long for and desire the landing of that Prince whom they looked on to be their deliverer, praying incessantly for an east wind, which was said to be the only hindrance of his expedition … 116
A popular song honed the edge of unrest. Its snappy little tune is often ascribed, without evidence, to Henry Purcell, and the lyrics are attributed, with as little solid basis, to Lords Wharton and Dorset. If we imagine Tom Wharton scratching a quill in the fug of the Rose Tavern, trying out the couplets on his cronies, then we are stretching history, though not conjecture, too far. The words, which come in many versions, are in cod-Irish, and are meant to be those of a Catholic welcoming recent changes. The doggerel Lillibulero bullen a la was repeated after each line, and the refrain Lero, lero, lillibulero/lillibulero bullen a la/Lero, lero, lillibulero/lillibelero bullen a la followed each couplet.
Ho! Brother Teague, dost hear the decree?
Dat we shall have a new deputy?
Ho! By my shoul, it is de Talbot,
And he will cut all de Englishmen’s throats …
And de good Talbot is made a Lord,
And with brave lads is coming abroad.
Who all in France have taken a sware,
Dat day will have no Protestant heir.
Arragh! But why does he stay behind?
Ho! By my shoul, ’tis a Protestant wind!
But see, de Tyrconnell is now come ashore,
And we shall have commissions galore.
And he dat will not go to mass,
Shall be turned out, and look like an ass.
But now de heretics all go down,
By Creish and St Patrick, the nation’s our own.
Dare was an old prophesy found in a bog,
Dat we shall be ruled by an ass and a dog.
And now dis prophesy is come to pass,
For Talbot’s de dog, and James is de ass.
‘Lillibulero’ was sung in taverns, brayed tunelessly in the street, and whistled by folk with time on their hands. Two and a half centuries later, when the BBC World Service wanted a signature tune it chose ‘Lillibulero’. It is said that James really knew that there was a military conspiracy when he heard the sentry at his door quietly whistling the song which was to sing him out of three kingdoms. In this atmosphere of incipient panic and growing military preparation John, Lord Churchill, prepared to roll fate’s dice, and knew that anything but a six would ruin him.
* Colonel Sir Edward Hales, a Roman Catholic, was accused by his coachman, Arthur Godden, of holding a commission without taking the oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance. Convicted at Rochester assizes, Hales was successful in his appeal to the King’s Bench, which agreed that the king could legally dispense him from these requirements.