On 5 November 1688 William of Orange landed at Torbay. His Declaration … Of the Reasons Inducing him to Appear in Arms in … England, issued at The Hague on 30 September, furnished the public justification for his invasion: it accused James’s advisers of seeking to overturn the laws and liberties of the three kingdoms, to introduce arbitrary government and an illegal religion. It affirmed that William did not seek the crown for himself, but sought only to have ‘free and lawful’ Parliaments elected in England and Scotland. He had sailed with a fleet of forty-nine warships and over four hundred transports, many of them very small, commanded by Sir Arthur Herbert, rear admiral of England until replaced earlier that year by the Catholic Roger Strickland.
James’s fleet was commanded by the Earl of Dartmouth, and the military conspiracy had done its best to erode the reliability of his captains. However, the conspiracy appears to have been a good deal less effective afloat than it was ashore, and it seems fair to conclude that James’s navy would have fought had it been given the chance. It was not, because the same Protestant wind that blew William’s fleet along the Channel kept Dartmouth’s warships in the Gunfleet, on the Essex side of the Thames estuary. James had specifically warned him that he risked being ‘surprised while there by the sudden coming of the Dutch fleet, as being a place he cannot well get out to sea from, while the wind remains easterly’, but the cautious Dartmouth stayed where he was. He actually saw the outer fringe of William’s fleet sailing southwards on 3 November, but they were directly to windward and, with the tide at low ebb, Dartmouth could not weather the nearby sandbanks. N.A.M. Rodger is right to attribute William’s success in the naval part of the operation to ‘wind and tide’ rather than to disaffection, although, of course, in the backwash of that success the naval conspiracy grew enormously.1
William was taking an extraordinary risk in invading at the season of equinoctal gales, and a rueful Dartmouth told his royal master, ‘’Tis strange that such mad proceedings should have success at this time of year.’2 The Prince of Orange knew that time was of the essence. That summer Louis XIV had invaded the archbishopric of Cologne and large tracts of the Rhineland, his armies trampling on with that brutal disregard for life and property which had become their hallmark. Louis had already put increasing pressure on the Dutch, seizing Dutch shipping in foreign ports in September, and he eventually issued a formal declaration of war on 26 November. This actually strengthened William’s hand, because even the anti-Orange faction in the States-General now rallied, as good Dutchmen, behind him.
Elsewhere French miscalculation helped ensure that a majority of European states were now opposed to Louis, while his Turkish allies were making heavy weather against the Imperialists. The autumn of 1688 found the major part of the French fleet in the Mediterranean ready to act against Pope Innocent XI (perhaps as odd an opponent for a Most Christian King as the Turks were a puzzling ally) and the French army committed in the Rhineland. This situation would not last, and William knew it. He did not simply need to invade before James had discovered the military conspiracy and proceeded against its leaders: he had to strike before the French had rebalanced so as to attack Holland, compelling him to devote his efforts to domestic defence, not foreign adventures.
William’s army consisted of Dutch regulars reinforced by English, Scots, Irish, Huguenot, German, Swiss, Finnish and Swedish regiments; there was even a two-hundred-strong black contingent of Dutch Surinamese soldiers. Nevertheless, with a maximum strength of perhaps 20,000, it was very small, and its cavalry would take some time to reach full efficiency as its horses recovered from the voyage. The royal army was at least one-third bigger, and as the events of 1685 had shown, a landing in the West Country could be effectively contained by troops marching in from the east. The great truth about William’s invasion is simple. It could not rely on seeking decision by battle: William, an experienced general, knew that he could scarcely hope to pull off some stunning masterstroke, with his small polyglot force, against a bigger professional army fighting on home ground. His manifesto to the British army argued that no ‘false notion of honour’ should prevent its members from considering ‘what you owe to Almighty God and your religion, to your country and to yourselves, and to your posterity, which you, as men of honour, ought to prefer to all private considerations and engagements whatsoever’.3
William must have been sure, well beyond the balance of probabilities, that the enemy army would disintegrate without fighting. Both Macaulay and Trevelyan argued that his victory was largely a matter of luck. In contrast, George Hilton Jones, writing in 1990, with much more evidence of the military conspiracy at his disposal, argued that James’s ‘religious and foreign policies had isolated him beyond hope of recovery … His nerve would break when he saw his position so unbalanced that a token expedition would suffice to topple it.’4
That was certainly what Captain Isaac Dupont de Bostaquet, a Huguenot cavalry officer with William’s army, thought. His fellow countrymen who had been dispossessed by Louis XIV saw this as a crusade. ‘Most of the refugees bore arms,’ he wrote, ‘and officers as well as others went to The Hague to give their names to be enrolled in this holy war.’ He found south-west England ‘the most inhospitable land in the world’, and was astonished, when he visited his first Anglican church, to see ‘that so much of the outward appearance of Popery had been retained’. However, ‘We had orders to pay wherever we went,’ which he knew from his own former service was not the French army’s way. In Exeter ‘the inhabitants received us with great cheers’, and there was real confidence that James would not intervene. ‘Rumour was that he was marching towards us,’ recalled Bostaquet, ‘but did not dare to attack because he did not trust his army which was deserting him.’ In contrast, on William’s side ‘every man hastened on as if to certain victory’.5
William arrived in Exeter on 9 November. Although the corporation tried to keep him out and the clergy refused to read his Declaration from the pulpit, as Bostaquet has told us, the townspeople greeted him rapturously. He remained there for nearly a fortnight, receiving a number of peers and gentlemen, and encircling Plymouth, whose garrison was to surrender without firing a shot. The Duke of Beaufort’s Gloucestershire militia, loyal to James, arrested Lord Lovelace and some of his supporters after a brief fracas, but elsewhere the mood of the West Country, angered but not cowed by the royal reaction to Monmouth’s rising, was very encouraging for William.
James ordered his army to concentrate on Salisbury Plain, with a cavalry screen under Sir John Lanier probing forward to find William’s outposts. By 15 November the Earl of Feversham, James’s captain general, was there with something over 20,000 men, and more still coming in. Many royal soldiers were already tired, for it was a long march for men from Scotland and Ireland, and it was scarcely encouraging to hear, long before the concentration was complete, that the first desertions had taken place: on 13 November Lord Cornbury and Colonel Thomas Langston, both close associates of Churchill, went over to William.
What was meant to be the mass desertion of an entire elite cavalry brigade of Lanier’s covering force misfired, partly because neither Cornbury of the Royal Dragoons nor Lieutenant Colonel Compton of the Blues got their men to follow them, although the more forceful Langston took most of the Duke of St Albans’ Horse into the Dutch lines. John Churchill’s nephew and James’s illegitimate son, the nineteen-year-old Duke of Berwick, had just arrived in Salisbury. He galloped after the brigade as soon as he heard that it had left for Warminster and claimed to have ‘rallied the fugitives, and brought the four regiments back to Salisbury, of which there were only about fifty troopers or dragoons, and a dozen officers missing’.6 Burnet calls Berwick ‘a soft and harmless young man … much beloved by the king’, but it is clear that had more of James’s commanders shown his spirit the campaign’s outcome might have been different.7
The fact that billets had been reserved for the entire brigade in William’s lines speaks volumes for the degree of coordination that existed. Even if the Williamites were disappointed by the actual number of deserters, the episode broke the ice, and there was a steady trickle of desertion thereafter, with officers and men slipping away to join William, each separate desertion contributing to the air of mistrust which overhung James’s army like a pestilential miasma. The Whig politician Sir Richard Onslow, whose annotations are printed in the 1833 edition of Burnet’s History of His Own Times, maintained that even at this early stage James’s personal morale was crushed by the desertions: ‘This ruined him, for I have been well assured that had he shown any courage and spirit upon the occasion his army would have fought the Prince of Orange.’8 Lord Ailesbury also reckoned that the rot spread from the top, and that the royal army could have fought: ‘Of both horse and foot the common men were well intended to the King’s service, and most of the lower rank of officers, some general officers, colonels, etc, the same.’9
One of the few flashes of resistance was sparked by a man with an abundance of fighting spirit. Patrick Sarsfield was an Irish Catholic Life Guards officer. Berwick called him ‘a man of an amazing stature, utterly void of sense, very good natured and very brave’. He met an Anglo-Dutch detachment at Wincanton on 20 November. When its officer declared that he was for the Prince of Orange, Sarsfield declared: ‘God damn you! I’ll prince you,’ and promptly pistolled him. He had the better of the fight, but pulled back when enemy reinforcements appeared.
John Churchill had been promoted lieutenant general on 7 November, two days after the landing. He joined the king, who had already been dismayed by the news of the first desertions, at Windsor, and on the seventeenth the royal party set off for Salisbury. Princess Anne was poised to play her own part in the betrayal, and on the eighteenth she told William:
I shall not trouble you with many compliments, only in short assure you, that you have my wishes for your good success in this so just an undertaking; and I hope the Prince [George] will soon be with you to let you see his readiness to join with you … He went yesterday with the King towards Salisbury, intending to go from thence to you as soon as his friends thought it proper. I am not certain if I shall continue here, or remove into the City; that shall depend upon the advice my friends will give me; but wherever I am, I shall be ready to show you how very much I am your humble servant.10
Both Prince George and John Churchill expected that their wives would escape from Whitehall before they themselves abandoned James, but events moved on more quickly than they expected. That autumn James was suffering from repeated nosebleeds, so copious and severe that some saw them as a sign of divine displeasure. Charles II had been similarly afflicted in moments of stress, and they may have been a family weakness. One eyewitness admitted:
I can never forget the confusion the court was in … The king knew not whom to trust and the flight was so great that they were apt to believe an impossible report just brought in that the Prince of Orange was come with twelve thousand horse between Warminster and Salisbury … Everybody in this hurly-burly was thinking of himself and nobody minded the king, who came up to Dr Radcliffe and asked him what he thought was good for the bleeding of the nose.
James was ‘much out of order, looks yellow and takes no natural rest’.11 A visitor to Salisbury
saw King James ride backwards and forward continually with a languishing look, his hat hanging over his eyes and a handkerchief continually in one hand to dry the blood of his nose for he continually bled. If he and the soldiers did chance to hear a trumpet or even a post-horn they were always upon a surprise, and all fit to run away, and at last they did so. All the nights there was nothing but tumult and every question that was asked ‘Where are the enemy?’ ‘How far off are they? ‘Which way are they going?’ and such like.12
At a council of war on 23 November Churchill and Grafton both recommended an advance, while Feversham spoke in favour of retreat, and James agreed. However, James seems to have accepted Churchill’s offer to go and inspect the outposts that night. Both James and the Duke of Berwick were later to maintain that this was simply an excuse to hand over James to the Williamites, or even to murder him: ‘A scheme was laid, and the measures taken up by Churchill and Kirke, to deliver the king up to the Prince of Orange.’13 We cannot tell whether this is true, although if so it would have required very slick coordination. More seriously, it would have involved Churchill in the face-to-face betrayal of his patron, which would have been wholly out of character.
There was no precedent for such confrontation in his past career, and indeed, he did his best to remain on terms of a kind with James and his son for the rest of his life. Early that December, when Clarendon told Churchill that James had informed his supporters in the House of Lords that a kidnap had been intended, he ‘denied it with many protestations, saying that he would venture his life in defence of his person; that he would never be ungrateful to the King; and that he had never left him, but that he saw our religion and country were in danger of being destroyed’.14 It is easy to dismiss this as the self-exculpatory whining of a successful traitor, but it goes straight to the heart of Churchill’s dreadful dilemma.
There was to be no kidnap, for no sooner had James agreed to the visit than he was overwhelmed by another nosebleed, and muttered, through his bloody handkerchief, that he was going back to London. Until that moment Churchill, for all his treasonable correspondence with William, may still have suspected that the royal army would receive the forceful leadership which might even now have enabled it to shake off its malaise. But it was now abundantly clear that James could not provide that leadership. He had abandoned his only reasonable war plan, and was about to abandon his army.
Yet even in his despair James could still lash out. When Percy Kirke, commanding a mixed brigade of horse and foot at Warminster, refused, with a temporising excuse, to obey an order to fall back on Devizes, James had him arrested and sent back under escort to Andover. Many of the brigade’s officers, including Lieutenant Colonel Charles Churchill and his colonel, Charles Trelawney, deserted anyway. There was now no doubt that James was going to lose, and with Kirke under suspicion and his own brother gone, John Churchill cannot have hoped to escape arrest much longer. Early on the morning of Sunday, 24 November, Churchill, the Duke of Grafton and Colonel John Berkeley, with perhaps four hundred officers and men, set off for Crewkerne, some fifty miles away. It was about twelve miles from William’s headquarters at Axminster, so close to Churchill’s birthplace. Prince George and the Duke of Ormonde joined them the following night. Although James bravely quipped that the loss of a stout trooper would have hurt him more than the defection of Prince George, the Danish envoy reported that when he interrupted mass to give James the bad news he was profoundly shocked.
Churchill left a letter for James trying to explain his decision.
Sir,
Since men are seldom suspected of sincerity, when they act contrary to their interests, and though my dutiful behaviour to Your Majesty in the worst of times (for which I acknowledge my service is much overpaid) may not be sufficient to incline you to charitable interpretation of my actions, yet I hope the great advantage I enjoy under Your Majesty, which I own I would never expect in any other change of government, may reasonably convince your majesty and the world that I am actuated by a higher principle, when I offer that violence to my inclination and interest as to desert Your Majesty at a time when your affairs seem to challenge the strictest obedience from all your subjects, much more from one who lies under the greatest personal obligations to Your Majesty. This, sir, could proceed from nothing but the inviolable dictates of my conscience, and a necessary concern for my religion, (which no good man can oppose), and with which I am instructed nothing can come in competition. Heaven knows with what partiality my dutiful opinion of Your Majesty has hitherto represented those unhappy designs which inconsiderate and self-interested men have framed against Your Majesty’s true interest and the Protestant religion; but as I can no longer join with such to give a pretence of conquest to bring them to effect, so I will always with the hazard of my life and fortune (so much Your Majesty’s due) to preserve your royal person and lawful rights, with all the tender concerns and dutiful respect that becomes, sir, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and most obliged subject and servant,
CHURCHILL15
It must, by any standards, have been an agonising letter to write. In it Churchill acknowledged that he was James’s creature, and surmised that he could not expect to prosper as well under any future government, although at the time nobody can have been sure what that might be. It was then perfectly possible that James might have remained king, though with sharply circumscribed powers, and in that case Churchill’s desertion must have been fatal to his prospects, as he himself implied: had he been certain that William and Mary would indeed succeed James then the first part of the letter would have been palpably absurd. His supporters would maintain that he was sincere in stressing the inviolable dictates of conscience and a necessary concern for religion, while his critics saw the whole document as transparent cover for self-seeking treason. ‘Churchill, as if to add something ideal to his imitation of Iscariot,’ thundered G.K. Chesterton (who, as a Roman Catholic, was parti pris in this debate), ‘went to James with wanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth in arms as if to defend the country from invasion, and then calmly handed the country over to the invader.’16
A middle course might be fairer. All Churchill’s life, both before and after the events of that rainy autumn, shows us a man whose experience of being on the losing side convinced him that it should not be repeated. In this he had much in common with many contemporaries who, like the vicar of Bray, would trim their sails to suit the wind. We have already seen that his suspicions of James’s maladroitness went back at least ten years, and that, whatever we may make of the commitment to Protestantism expressed in his letter, he was not prepared, as some of his countrymen were, to become a Roman Catholic. He thought that James, a winner in 1685, had become a loser by 1688, and was probably close to what Matthew Glozier identified as the bedrock of the army of his age, those ‘professional gentlemen officers in search of a livelihood, in conditions which did not unduly compromise their religious and social consciences’, who thought much the same.17 John Childs has a similar view of the bonds of professional identity which linked the wider army conspirators. Without the contribution made by the deserters in 1688, he suggests, ‘unconscious and vaguely dishonourable though it was, William might very well have been without any English army at all in the spring of 1689’.18
Churchill remained in treasonous contact with the Jacobites for the rest of his life. This is not because he was ideologically Jacobite (had he been so, then surely the moment to show his zeal would have been in 1688) but because he was never a man to burn his bridges. Yet we cannot doubt the contact. For instance, in February 1716, not long before Churchill suffered the first of his disabling strokes, an agent wrote to the Earl of Mar, leader of the 1715 Jacobite rebellion, to say that Captain David Lloyd, another agent, had delivered a letter from the Old Pretender, James II’s eldest son, to Churchill,
to whom Davie downright forced his way. Mark [Marlborough] read the letter with respect. Davie urged and enforced the argument with tears, and drew tears from the other, who protested before God that he intended to serve Mr Keith [the Old Pretender] and would do it, and that his nephew [the Duke of Berwick] knew he intended it and in what manner. But that at present he cannot help some things. That he expects his nephew himself will come ere long, and that in the meantime Mr Keith should handsomely parry a little, and avoid a decision, till matters can be prepared.19
The Duke of Berwick later confirmed to Mar that: ‘Mark has been, it’s true, for these many years in correspondence with his nephew, and has always given assurances of his zeal for Mr Keith, but to this hour has never explained in what manner he intends it.’20 Berwick has it in a nutshell. It was never quite the right time, and the manner in which Churchill was to offer assistance to exiled king and pretender was never clear: but he was to go to his grave without ever wholly disowning the Jacobites.
In one sense it is not certain that Churchill was so very different to many of the senior army officers of our own generation. Few of these thought that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a good idea, and many went much further in private, arguing that it was possibly illegal and unlikely to be successful in the long term. But soldiering was their job, and there was certainly ample short-term satisfaction to be had from doing what they were paid to do, deposing a monstrous tyrant, and genuinely trying to make their bit of Iraq a better place in the process. Never underestimate the professional soldier’s desire to be exactly that, and do not expect that he will emerge with more credit from his moral contradictions than John Churchill did from his. It may not be easy to admire Churchill’s desertion of James, but it is less hard to understand it, and many, in all soul and conscience, would not have acted differently.
On 25 November James issued orders that Sarah Churchill should be put under house arrest in the Tyrconnells’ lodgings in St James’s Palace, while the wife of Colonel Berkeley, who had also abandoned James, should be confined to her father’s London house. Happily for the conspirators, news that James was on his way back to London reached the capital before the arrest orders. This ‘put the Princess into a great fright’, said Sarah. ‘She sent for me, told me her distress, and declared, that rather than see her father she would jump out of a window.’ Sarah went to Bishop Compton, who was hiding in Suffolk Street, and they arranged an escape plan. The princess retired to bed as usual on the evening of the twenty-fifth, locking the door of her chamber and telling her staff that she was not to be disturbed.
Early on the morning of 26 November Anne, accompanied by Sarah and Mrs Berkeley, slipped down some newly-built back stairs and walked through the mud of Piccadilly (in which the princess lost a shoe) to a carriage containing that unlikely pair, Bishop Compton and Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset. Dorset had been one of the most notorious rakes at Charles II’s court but remained curiously popular: ‘My Lord Dorset might do anything,’ complained the Earl of Rochester, ‘and is never to blame.’ He had never enjoyed James’s favour, largely because of a vicious lampoon on Catherine Sedley, the girl John Churchill’s parents had so wanted him to marry. Dorset was committed to the plot against James, and the fugitives spent their first day at his house, Copt Hall, near Epping in Essex. They then moved on to Castle Ashby, near Northampton, ancestral home of Compton’s nephew the Earl of Northampton, another of the plotters. They had originally planned to hurry on to York, now secured for William by the Earl of Danby, but by now felt that they had outrun any pursuit, and proceeded to Nottingham by easy stages.21
When James reached London he was shocked to find Anne gone. ‘God help me!’ he cried. ‘Even my children have forsaken me.’ Lord Mulgrave, his chamberlain, argued that even the desertion of James’s officers was as nothing when compared to the evidence of common purpose between Anne, Mary and William. He did not simply nurse a particular grievance against John Churchill, but believed that Anne’s escape had been organised by Sarah. By now it was evident that there would be no real campaign. Orders telling the garrison of Portsmouth to stock up for a siege simply increased the flow of desertions, and James had lost the war he never fought.
Most historians take the view that Feversham, useless from the start, was paralysed by James’s departure. It is, though, possible that Feversham had sniffed the way the wind was blowing. He was a Huguenot, and although he had left France long before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes he could never return there. If he wished to enjoy his English estates, he would need to make his peace with whoever sat on the throne after 1688, and like Churchill, he could not be sure who this might be. When Percy Kirke arrived at his headquarters under arrest, Feversham at once released him and allowed him to join William. This was not the act of an officer who thought that he might yet be on the winning side, but rather of someone anxious to make his peace with the victor, whoever he was.
The campaign ended more in farce than tragedy, with cities, towns and garrisons declaring for William, and marching parties of loyal troops finding themselves swamped in a hostile countryside. By mid-December the remains of James’s army, thoroughly disheartened, was cooped up around Windsor and Uxbridge. Shortly before fleeing to France, James sent Feversham a badly-worded letter which included the sentence, ‘I do not expect you should expose yourselves by resisting a foreign army and a poisoned nation.’ Feversham saw this as an instruction to disband the army, and set about doing so, although his orders reached only a small proportion of the soldiers still loyal to James. Elsewhere there were murderous attacks on Catholic officers and men, and the Protestant residue of Lord Forbes’s Regiment, left behind in Colnbrook after the departure of the disbanded Catholics, averted a large-scale attack by fiercely anti-Catholic local people only by demonstrating, to a helpful local minister, how well the men could recite the responses of the Anglican liturgy. Disintegration was not what William wanted, for he hoped to use the English army in his struggle against Louis XIV, and when Feversham went to Windsor on 18 December to invite William to make his formal entry into London he found himself arrested. William soon forgave him and made him master of the Royal Hospital of St Catherine, near the Tower of London.
James made one attempt to flee to France on 10 November, but was caught by some Faversham fishermen, who, taking him for an escaping Jesuit, behaved with such effrontery that they were later specifically exempted from the general pardons promised by the exiled king. Lord Ailesbury found him with several days’ growth of beard, looking, he thought, like Charles I at his trial. He had James shaved and gave him a clean shirt, and for a moment it seemed that he might just re-establish himself. But most of his former supporters had now abandoned him, William wanted him out of the country, and James himself was anxious to join his queen in France. He repeatedly inveighed against the traitorous Churchill as he travelled from Ambleteuse, on the Channel coast, to St Germain en Laye, which was to house his exiled court.
A Convention Parliament met in January 1689. The Commons eventually concluded that James had effectively abdicated, while some of the Lords maintained that he had deserted, and that Mary was already queen by hereditary right. William and Mary were eventually declared joint monarchs, with succession going to whichever of them survived. Thereafter the crown would pass to their children, though it was most unlikely that they would have any, and then to Anne and her children. Anne later referred to this agreement as her ‘abdication’, and Churchill and Dorset carried word of it to the Lords on 6 February. In conversation with Halifax, now one of his most trusted advisers, William acknowledged that he had depended upon the Churchills to secure this agreement.
[William] said that Lord Churchill could not govern him nor my lady, the Princess his wife, as they did the Prince and Princess of Denmark.
This showed 1. that Lord Churchill was very assuming, which he did not like; 2. It showed a jealous side of the Princess, and that side of the house.
… The foregoing discourse happened upon the occasion of its being said that Lord Churchill might perhaps prevail with the Princess of Denmark to give her consent [for William to precede her in the succession]. That made the sharpness; it seems that there was not compliance, etc.22
Sarah, for her part, believed that William, now safely on the throne, thought that ‘the Prince and Princess were more use than they ever were likely to be again’.23
The Churchills, on the winning side in the autumn of 1688, were beginning to drift slowly towards uncomfortable middle ground by the following spring, and soon passed beyond it to more wintry headlands. Quite possibly the tension between William and Churchill was founded in the very act of Churchill’s betrayal of James, for however much it suited William, it was not an encouraging precedent. Ailesbury thought that although ‘the king was in a manner necessitated to make use of [Churchill’s] services … at heart he never esteemed him’.24 Some myths, though, can be jettisoned easily enough. The Jacobite Life of James II has Churchill greeted, on his arrival at the Williamite camp in October 1688, by William’s second in command, Frederick Schomberg, soon to be Duke of Schomberg in the English peerage, with the words that ‘He was the first lieutenant general he had ever heard that had deserted from his colours.’ Schomberg was a professional soldier who had been a marshal of France until the Revocation, and who would soon die in battle fighting French and Irish soldiers on the Boyne. He was unlikely to criticise another officer for changing sides because of religious scruple. Moreover, Churchill had a portrait of Schomberg painted to hang at Holywell, an improbable act had Schomberg offered him such an insult.
However, Churchill’s conduct in the House of Lords during the succession debate cannot have pleased William. Although he signed the Act of Association, by which seventy peers bound themselves to support the principles of William’s declaration, in January 1689, he voted for the extreme Tory solution to the constitutional puzzle, a regency which would govern on behalf of James, who, as lawful king, could not be deposed. This was certainly the solution then favoured by Princess Anne, who was pregnant again, and who was, so Clarendon thought, worried about ‘anything that should be of prejudice to her and her children’. The following month, when the Lords voted in favour of having a monarch rather than a regent, Churchill was absent, pleading sickness.
However, once the settlement had been agreed, Princess Anne made it clear that she supported it. Her friends were rewarded. Prince George was made Duke of Cumberland, which gave him a seat in the House of Lords. Churchill was elevated to the earldom of Marlborough on 9 April 1689, two days before the coronation of William and Mary, in recognition of the part he had played in undermining the morale of James’s army and in helping persuade Anne to agree to the constitutional settlement. He was also sworn of the Privy Council, and made a gentleman of the king’s bedchamber.
Marlborough, as we can at last call him, carried out his first official acts for his new sovereigns by assisting in the remodelling of the army, an urgent task if the damage done by Feversham’s disbandment was to be rectified, diehard Jacobites removed and reliable officers promoted. There was a measure of urgency, as regiments were already being shipped abroad for the opening of the 1689 campaigning season, though there was no formal declaration of war between England and France in May. There was one major mutiny, tragically amongst the Scots veterans of Dumbarton’s Regiment, who at first refused to go abroad. Other regiments trailed such a comet’s tail of deserters as they marched for ports of embarkation that they were disbanded and their remaining soldiers posted to more reliable units.
Some officers resigned, either because they remained loyal to James or because they had simply had their fill of soldiering. Others were fingered as unreliable by resolute Williamites in their regiments. Major James Maitland of the Scots Guards kept his battalion well in hand as it marched to Ipswich, where secretary Blathwayt ordered him to ‘send an account in writing of what may concern the regiment and of what officers are removing and fit to be preferred’. Old loyalties were rewarded: the Earl of Oxford became colonel of the Blues again, and Lieutenant Colonel John Coy (a Tangier veteran whom we last saw as a dragoon captain at Sedgemoor, covering the Parrett bridges) was promoted to the vacancy created when his Irish Catholic colonel, Richard Hamilton, was imprisoned in the Tower. William courted some senior professionals who had the experience to help the army through its travails. Our old acquaintance Colonel Theophilus Oglethorpe was pressed to declare for William and Mary, but retired coolly to his house at Godalming in Surrey, and soon added to the growing number of officers and ex-officers arrested later that year on suspicion of Jacobitism.
Ailesbury, with his own axe to grind, tells us that he asked Schomberg for a commission, but Schomberg sent his secretary to tell him that ‘The army is new modelling, and all is done in the Prince’s closet … My Lord Churchill proposes all, I am sent for to say the General consents, and Monsieur Bentinck is the secretary for to write all.’25 John Childs devotes the whole of an illuminating chapter to this process, and argues that Marlborough and the king were pushing in the same direction: ‘William desired a professional and loyal officer corps while Churchill wanted to build up his own circle of clientage by drawing on his contacts among the professionals.’26 Neither William nor Schomberg knew the personalities involved, and as the senior serving officer of James’s old army, Marlborough had a key role to play.
Ailesbury predictably goes on to say that Marlborough was primarily interested in making money. ‘The harvest my Lord Churchill made by this was vast,’ he writes, ‘for all was sold.’27 This must be treated with some caution, not least because Marlborough himself was ordered to the Continent on active service that spring, and much of the practical work of remodelling was completed by a commission ‘for reforming abuses within the army’, whose military members included Major General Sir John Lanier, Major General Percy Kirke and Brigadier General Charles Trelawney. Moreover, while Marlborough knew the army’s senior officers, so great an influx of junior officers was required that much of the work was done by busy regimental colonels: the Earl of Meath found forty-one new officers for the future Royal Regiment of Foot of Ireland.
However, even by 1689 the image of the Marlboroughs as unfailingly rapacious was already firmly established. Ailesbury walked round the garden at Holywell with Sarah Marlborough a year later. ‘Lord,’ said Sarah, with her favourite beginning-of-sentence emphasis, ‘they keep such a noise at our wealth. I do assure you that it doth not exceed seventy thousand pounds, and what will that come to when laid out in land, and besides we have a son and five daughters to provide for.’28 She and John were now thinking far beyond the modest accomplishments of the early years of their marriage: their ambitions were fast becoming dynastic.
Marlborough was a natural choice to command the British force of 8,000 men sent to the Low Countries in the spring of 1689. He was senior and experienced, and William might have thought it safer to send him to the Continent rather than to Ireland, where James had arrived in March, in case his newly professed loyalty became strained. Marlborough’s contingent formed part of the small army commanded by Georg Friedrich, Prince of Waldeck, intended to hold in check a French army of around 40,000 under Marshal d’Humières, which had moved into the southern portion of the Spanish Netherlands at the beginning of May. The main French effort was to be made on the Rhine, and d’Humières was simply bidden to remain where he was. Waldeck, with roughly the same number of men, felt unable to dislodge him.
Marlborough had made his mark even before his men had fired a shot in anger. The events of the past six months had left the army confused and humiliated. In many regiments officers and men had not yet got to know one another; William’s preference for all things Dutch was especially galling to the foot guards, who saw the Dutch Blue Guards replace them on duty in London, and there were still some Jacobites in the army who, usually when in drink, noisily aired their affection for James II. Desertion, that running sore of the armies of the age, was a major problem, and was not helped by the ease with which an agile man could slip between allied or even enemy contingents, scooping an enlistment bonus every time he did so. Many observers believed that the débâcle of 1688 was a fair comment on the British army, and we cannot blame them. Even Waldeck, not history’s liveliest general, thought that Marlborough’s soldiers suffered from ‘sickness, slackness, wretched clothing and the worst of shoes’.
The campaign that follows is Marlborough in miniature. He had three months to train and discipline his army before exposing it to the test of battle. He drilled it hard, worked tirelessly at getting uniforms, arms and equipment into order, and by July Waldeck was reporting to William that he could not ‘sufficiently praise the English’, and that he found ‘the whole so well ordered that I have admired it, and I can say that Monsieur Milord Marlbrouck and the Colonels have shown that their application has had a good effect’.29
On 26 August Waldeck crossed the Sambre near Charleroi and camped, some ten miles further south, just north of the small walled town of Walcourt. He probably did so simply to give a fresh opportunity to his foraging parties. These were not small groups of soldiers striving to buy or steal food for themselves (although some men seized any opportunity to take extra rations or even to desert), but organised parties bent on collecting hay for the cavalry. At this time of the year hay had already been mown, but earlier in the season they would have been compelled to cut grass themselves. The armies of the age usually contained two horses (mounts for the cavalry and officers as well as draught animals for guns and wagons) for every three men. A force the size of Waldeck’s needed to find some 25,000 pounds of hay a day during the campaigning season, and it was impractical to carry it long distances. Like sharks, constantly on the move to keep water passing through their gills, the armies of the era needed to amble across the landscape to bring fresh forage within their reach.
Armies engaged in foraging were axiomatically vulnerable. D’Humières had, in any case, recently been reinforced, and as soon as he saw that Waldeck had his foragers out he attacked them. On 27 August a single British battalion under Colonel Hodges was posted in the valley about two miles south of Walcourt to act as a rallying point for the foragers, and there were Dutch horse and dragoons further south. As the French advanced northwards the Allied cavalry patrols fell back in contact with them, giving the foragers time to get away. Marlborough rode forward at about 10 a.m. to find Hodges’ men, who had ‘lined some convenient hedges’, in good order but under growing pressure, though happily the ground did not allow the French to hook round on either side of the battalion. With the aid of some cavalry of his own, he brought Hodges back, first to a watermill halfway to Walcourt, and then right back to join the rest of his force, on the high ground just east of Walcourt itself, though not before Lieutenant Colonel Graham and Captain Davison had been mortally wounded and about thirty men killed.
At this stage d’Humières could quite well have broken off the action without discredit: if he had failed to catch the foraging parties he had at least brought the process to a premature halt. But, inflamed by the clash so far and unaware that Waldeck had now concentrated his whole army in and around Walcourt (the great hill on the town’s east not only offered excellent fields of fire to Marlborough’s guns, but screened from view the troops behind it), he pressed his attack. It is possible that the poor reputation then enjoyed by British troops induced him to take risks he might have deemed inappropriate with others. The defences of Walcourt itself were old and ramshackle, and the place was held by a single Luneburg regiment. A determined party of Gardes Français piled faggots against the town’s gates and tried to set them alight, but Waldeck reported that ‘most of them were killed’. At about 2 p.m., Brigadier General Thomas Tollemache took his own Coldstream Guards and a German battalion into the town to strengthen its garrison, and further French assaults were beaten off with heavy loss.
Marlborough was to become a master of feeling the balance of a battle, and Walcourt helped him develop this quality. When d’Humières’ men were played out by successive attacks on the town, Waldeck ordered a counterattack. At about 6 p.m. Major General Slangenberg’s Dutch infantry went forward on his right, and on his left Marlborough personally led the Life Guards and the Blues in a charge that broke the leading French infantry (the French acknowledged six guards battalions ‘for the most part ruined’) and decided the battle at a stroke. He would have done even more damage had d’Humières’ cavalry commander, Claude de Villars (a veteran of the siege of Maastricht, where he and Marlborough had been on the same side), not led his own horsemen into the battle to help the beaten infantry limp away. The French lost perhaps as many as 2,000 men (including a brigadier general and the colonel of the Royal-Champagne infantry regiment) and six guns to no more than three hundred Allied casualties.
Although Waldeck was not able to mint any larger currency from this little victory, and the campaign ended with inconclusive countermarching and cannonading, he praised Marlborough to William in the most glowing terms, adding: ‘I would never have believed that so many of the English would show such a joie de combattre.’30 His formal report to the States-General noted: ‘All our troops showed a great courage and desire to come to a battle; and particularly the English, who were engaged in this action, behaved themselves very well.’31 A delighted William told Marlborough: ‘It is to you that this advantage is principally owing,’ and gave him the colonelcy of an infantry regiment (later the Royal Fusiliers) as a reward. D’Humières, in contrast, dubbed le maréchal sans lumière by his unhappy subordinates, never again enjoyed operational command. When the tide of war lapped across the same region in 1690 that frail but energetic warrior Marshal Luxembourg was in charge. He first trounced Waldeck at Fleurus, and went on to win a string of victories which did much for flagging French morale.
While Marlborough was winning laurels abroad, at home Sarah was in the eye of a rising storm, whipped up by the personal rivalry which was characteristic of court life. In this case it involved the children of Sir Edward and Lady Villiers. They were distant relatives of the Marlboroughs, and the children had been playmates of Queen Mary. In 1685 Willem Bentinck, William’s closest adviser, had been sent to England to congratulate James on his succession. Anne had warned him to ‘check the insolence’ of one of the Villiers girls, Elizabeth, now William’s mistress, to her royal sister Mary. As Bentinck was then married to Elizabeth’s sister Anne he did not much appreciate the mission, and there was thereafter friction between Anne and Bentinck, created Earl of Portland in 1689.
Anne Bentinck died in 1688, but her sister Barbara was married to the Colonel Berkeley who had deserted with Marlborough in 1688, and who inherited the barony of Fitzharding two years later. The Fitzhardings moved away from Anne’s sphere of influence into the Villiers camp, and had become a conduit of confidential leaks from the Cockpit by early 1692. Sir Edward Villiers, brother of Barbara and Anne, was created Earl of Jersey and given a series of jobs which his ‘very ordinary talents’ did not warrant.32 Marlborough, in turn, got on badly with Portland: whether he simply fell into a line of battle already drawn up by Anne or had more personal causes for dislike it is hard to say.
William resented the fact that he was essentially an elected king, and that Anne’s claim to the throne was better than his own. Moreover, though the conspiracies of the 1680s had drawn Anne and Mary together, they were actually very dissimilar, as Sarah Marlborough tells us:
It was indeed impossible that they should be very agreeable companions to each other because Queen Mary grew weary of anybody who would not talk a great deal; and the Princess was so silent that she rarely spoke more than was necessary to answer a question.33
Anne was happily married, while Mary’s relationship with William (who had not only had mistresses but was so close to male favourites that there were suggestions of homosexuality) was less idyllic. Small wonder, as Sarah said, that there was ‘visible coldness’ between the sisters by mid-1689.
First there was a dispute over accommodation at court. The Cockpit had been settled on Anne and her heirs by Charles II, and in early 1688 she had also been given the Duchess of Portsmouth’s elegant apartment nearby. She hoped to extend into lodgings close at hand which had, however, been promised to the Earl of Devonshire, who refused to give them up. Anne also hoped that she would be allowed Richmond Place, where she had spent much of her childhood, but this had been allocated to another Villiers sister, Catherine, marquise de Puissiers, who would not budge. In September 1689 the young Duke of Gloucester came close to death with what may have been an asthma attack, and Anne, fearing for her son’s health if he remained in grimy Whitehall, rented Lord Craven’s house in Kensington, near Kensington Palace, which was being remodelled as the London residence of William and Mary: William’s creaky lungs could not abide Whitehall. In 1690 Anne and George also took on Campden House in Kensington, and the burden of these properties told heavily on their limited income.
Anne had hoped for some of the private estate owned by her father, but William managed this himself and kept the income, though he thoughtfully gave almost 88,000 acres in Ireland to Elizabeth Villiers. Prince George was no less disgruntled. In July 1689, at William’s behest, he had relinquished some of his Danish properties to help bring about peace between Denmark and Sweden, and was promised that England and Holland, between them, would pay him. However, he had to wait ten years for his money. Anne, meanwhile, argued that as heir to the throne she should be given a parliamentary grant, and a motion for this had been introduced in the Commons in March.
Anne’s friends argued that she deserved £70,000 a year, her more moderate supporters thought that £50,000 would do, while William’s adherents maintained that it was a thoroughly dangerous precedent, and that Anne should rely on William’s generosity. In mid-December William did his best to scotch the debate, and sent Shrewsbury and Wharton, two of his ministers, to persuade Anne to withdraw. Marlborough had returned to England at the end of the campaigning season, and Shrewsbury called on him first. Marlborough ‘begged he would not own [i.e. admit] he found him, his wife would by no means hear of it, but was like a mad woman and said the Princess would retire if her friends would not assist her’.34 On 18 December Anne was duly voted £50,000 a year. Sarah visited Lord Rochester to ask him whether he thought Anne should press for more, but Rochester replied that she should be satisfied with her £50,000 and, moreover, should take it any way William and Mary wished to pay her. In a memorandum of 3 March 1690 Queen Mary suggested that their government was opposed not only by a republican party and a Jacobite party, but ‘I have reason to fear that my sister is forming a third.’35
Things got steadily worse. When William set off for Ireland in June 1690 to deal with James, Prince George went on campaign with him as a private gentleman at his own expense. Although George was an experienced soldier, William took no notice of him, refused to let him ride in his coach and, as Sarah put it, treated him as if he were a page of the back stairs. When William and George returned to London that autumn, not long before Anne gave birth to another short-lived child, George decided that since he could not endure William’s snubs on another land campaign, he would join the fleet as a gentleman volunteer. William went off to the Continent in early 1691, leaving orders with Mary that George was not to serve. Mary first tried to get Sarah to use her influence with Anne to torpedo the project, but eventually she had to send formal instructions via Lord Nottingham that George should not be allowed to proceed. His baggage, already loaded aboard St Andrew, had to be disembarked.
All of this helped drive Anne closer to Sarah. Although Sarah suggests that they took to calling one another ‘Mrs Morley’ (the queen) and ‘Mrs Freeman’ (Sarah) before 1685, one of Sarah’s biographers points out that it was not until 1691 that there is evidence of these names being used in letters.36 In June that year Anne pressed Sarah to accept from her a pension of £1,000 a year, and Sarah, having first consulted Godolphin, accepted. Godolphin (‘Mr Montgomery’ in Anne/Sarah cant), who had been Marlborough’s tennis partner when both were rising young courtiers, was now in favour with William, who made him first a commissioner of the Treasury and then its first lord. William wrote to him in the franglais which was his lingua franca: ‘Je vous asseure que je shrink aussi bien que vous quandt je considere l’etat ou est le Treusuri et les fachesues affairs que nous aurons aparement cette hyver …’37 However, while Godolphin worked tirelessly at the Treasury on William’s behalf, he was also close to the Cockpit circle. To make assurance doubly sure, he was in contact with the Jacobites too: and so was Marlborough.
In January 1691 Marlborough and Godolphin were walking together in St James’s Park when they were approached by Henry Bulkeley, an Irish peer’s son who had been master of the household to both Charles II and James II, and whose daughter Anne was to marry Marlborough’s nephew the Duke of Berwick in 1700. They would have known Bulkeley well, and can have had little doubt of his sympathies. He invited them to dinner at his lodgings, where he found Godolphin uncommunicative. Marlborough, in contrast, was loquacious, and Bulkeley
was hugely surprised to find him in appearance the greatest penitent imaginable; he begged him to go to the king and acquaint him with his sincere repentance, and to intercede for mercy, that he was ready to redeem his apostasy with the hazard of his utter ruin, his crimes appearing so horrid to him that he could neither sleep nor eat but in continual anguish … 38
Godolphin’s biographer is right to observe that this is based on the Jacobite Life of James II, and that any original papers that might have supported it would have been lost, with the rest of James’s documents, at the time of the French Revolution. However, for him to argue that the incident is improbable because ‘nothing could be less in keeping’ with all that we know of the characters of Godolphin and Marlborough is no real defence, because we have evidence from other sources that both did indeed have dealings with the Jacobites. We may challenge the detail of words reported, for which there is indeed no corroboration, but neither the incident itself nor the general tone of Marlborough’s speech is inherently improbable.
His actions in 1688 make it unlikely that Marlborough was a convinced Jacobite, and his long history of relations with Jacobite agents may, at one level, be seen simply as evidence of the desire (which he shared with a large proportion of the political nation) not to finish up on the wrong side if there was another change of regime. The prospect of such a change seemed far greater at the time than we might think now, aware as we are of the personal unpopularity of James II, the limited appeal of Jacobitism in Britain and the wholesale penetration of James’s apparatus by William’s agents. There were suggestions (which came to nought because James and his wife would never countenance them) that if their son the Prince of Wales was brought up as a Protestant he might eventually succeed, for in logic his claim to the throne would trump Anne’s.
A deep level of subtlety certainly applied to Marlborough’s dealings with the Jacobites in the 1690s. Not only did he go some way towards insuring himself against a possible Stuart restoration, but he helped give James and his advisers the impression that it would be better to deal with Anne than with William. In July 1692 the Jacobite agent David Lloyd delivered a letter from Anne to her father. It was dated December 1691, and embodied ‘a sincere and humble offer of my duty and submission to you’, and concluded not simply by asking pardon, but by speaking generously of Mary of Modena, so recently the wicked stepmother.39 James was not disposed to believe Anne in any event, and the apparent change of heart towards his wife can scarcely have been likely to allay his suspicions. Moreover, some English Jacobites took the view that Marlborough’s own opposition to some of William’s policies, most notably his use of foreign generals, sprang from self-interest and the desire to support Anne, not from any deeply-held Jacobitism.
All this took place against a backcloth of war. James had landed at Kinsale on the southern coast of Ireland on 12 March 1689 with some British supporters and a contingent of French troops, and marched straight to Dublin, where he summoned a Parliament. Most of the country had already been secured by Tyrconnell, but James was unable to take the two northern strongholds of Londonderry and Enniskillen, and his supporter Lord Mountcashel (once, as Colonel Justin McCarthy, Marlborough’s comrade in arms in France) was beaten and captured at Newtownbutler. In August Schomberg arrived with a Williamite army, and landed at Carrickfergus, where, so Isaac Bostaquet tells us, the first officer killed, by a cannon-shot, was a Roman Catholic lieutenant in the Dutch Guards. Schomberg took Carrickfergus Castle and then moved southwards as far as Dundalk, facing James’s main army, which had pushed up to Drogheda. A filthy autumn and sickness in camp may have killed as many as a quarter of Schomberg’s men, and in October both sides fell back to winter quarters.
William was not pleased with the progress of events. His wider responsibilities meant that he was reluctant to go to Ireland himself, but he concluded that ‘nothing worthwhile would be done’ unless he was there to do it. He left the government in the hands of Mary and a council of nine, of whom Marlborough, appointed commander-in-chief in England on 3 June, was one. William arrived at Carrickfergus in June 1690, and on 1 July he forced the crossing of the Boyne just upstream of Drogheda.
William’s Dutch Guards marched to the river’s edge with their fifes and drums playing ‘Lillibulero’, and the Huguenots and Enniskilleners attacking alongside them had personal reasons for wanting to win that day. Although the Jacobites fought back hard, killing Schomberg in a mélêe on the far bank, once the Williamites were across in strength, both near Drogheda and further upstream at Rossnaree, the defence collapsed. One Jacobite officer described how his men ‘took to their heels, no officer ever being able to stop the men after they were broken … some throwing away their arms, others even their coats and shoes to run lighter’. James himself made commendably rapid progress to Dublin, where on 2 July he gave another display of those qualities that made him such a hard man to love. He blamed his defeat on the Irish. ‘When it came to a trial,’ he lamented, ‘they basely fled the field and left the spoil to the enemy … henceforth I never determine to head an Irish army, and do now resolve to shift for myself and so, gentlemen, must you.’40 He left Ireland, never to return, and we may forgive the Irishmen who continued to fight with him with more courage than he deserved for calling him Seamus an Chaca, James the Shithead.
Although the battle of the Boyne has now attained iconic status, it was not then decisive. Indeed, although it had advanced William’s cause in Ireland, a naval battle off Beachy Head, fought the day before, had seen Admiral Herbert (now Viscount Torrington) and his Dutch comrades beaten by the French. The balance of power at sea was not reversed until the Anglo-Dutch naval victory off La Hougue in May 1692 rendered any French-backed Jacobite invasion of England unlikely for the moment. In June William, writing in his usual execrable French, told Marlborough that he did not fear a landing because his intelligence had told him that there were no troops embarked on the French fleet, but expected that French frigates would snap up his transports. The fact that the French had burned the pretty little town of Teignmouth but dared not attempt a major landing seemed to confirm this.
In August 1690, with William bogged down in the siege of Limerick, Marlborough suggested a project which, he believed, would win the war in Ireland. He asked the Council to be allowed to take most of the regular troops out of the country and attack the main Jacobite ports of Cork and Kinsale, thus cutting off Tyrconnell from further French reinforcements. Marlborough had already fallen out with Danby, the Council’s leading member, who opposed his attempt to get his sailor brother George promoted to rear admiral. ‘If Churchill have a flag,’ he said, ‘it will be called flag by favour, as his brother is called the general of favour.’41 The Council turned down his plan, but the queen forwarded it to William, who on 14 August approved the scheme, authorising Marlborough to take 4,900 infantry. He would have to take his own supply of ammunition and use the ships’ guns, for none could be spared from Limerick, although sufficient cavalry would be sent down. The weather, William emphasised, was the thing to watch.
Mary was deeply concerned, telling her husband that although she hoped the expedition would succeed, ‘I find, if it do not, those who have advised it will have an ill time, all except Lord Nottingham being very much against it.’42 Marlborough left on 17 September, reached Cork on the twenty-first and, after his ship’s guns had silenced a battery, landed safely at West Passage, seven miles east of the city. He quickly pushed on to encircle it.
He now found that the operation’s complexion had darkened. William had abandoned the siege of Limerick after the enterprising Patrick Sarsfield raided his artillery park, and returned to England. Marlborough had asked particularly to be reinforced by English troops under Kirke, and there were plenty available. However the Dutch general Godert de Ginkel, left in command, sent 5,000 Danish, Dutch and Huguenot troops, and with the Danes came their commander, Prince Ferdinand William of Württemberg, junior to Marlborough as a lieutenant general but claiming, by virtue of his birth, to take command. Marlborough (or perhaps a Huguenot brigadier) suggested a compromise whereby the two generals would command on alternate days, and on his first day in command courteously gave ‘Württemberg’ as the password.
Winston S. Churchill maintains that the arrival of foreign troops was simply a ploy to prevent the English from carrying off the glory. The historian Matthew Glozier, however, with better access to the documents, goes further. The presence of the foreign troops, he argues, ‘was as much political as strategic. William’s cabinet had resolved to ruin Churchill if the Irish campaign failed, and it was partly the result of this antipathy which demanded the presence of foreign troops.’43 Either way, Marlborough was engaged upon his first independent command with an Irish winter on its way, the French fleet at sea, and grudging political support.
With Württemberg duly mollified the siege of Cork went on apace. A breaching battery was speedily established, and it soon knocked a hole in the eastern wall. Early on the afternoon of 27 September, when the tide had receded, enabling his forlorn hope to cross the south branch of the River Lee with its fast-flowing water up to their armpits, Marlborough ordered an attack. The attackers reached a ditch close under the city walls, and were at once reinforced by the bulk of the English foot. The Danes, attacking across the north branch of the Lee, also made good progress. Cannon pecked away at the walls, mortars on bomb-vessels lobbed their shells into the town, and the defenders knew that an assault could not be far away. The city’s governor, Roger Macelligott, mindful of the fate of Drogheda a generation before, surrendered on terms which left his 4,000-man garrison prisoners of war but guaranteed the safety of the Roman Catholic clergy in Cork and ensured that most of the Williamite army would not enter the city. There was an echo of the past. The forlorn hope had been commanded by the Duke of Grafton, and his officers included Lord Colchester, Charles Churchill, Colonel John Greville and Captain Stafford Fairburne, all army conspirators in 1688. Grafton was mortally wounded, and died eleven days later.
Kinsale was a different matter. Marlborough arrived there on 29 September, and by 15 October his breaching batteries had done good work. But the place was very much stronger than he had expected, winter was closing in, and there were rumours that Sarsfield was on his way with a relieving force. By mid-October Marlborough had successfully stormed a ‘weak old fort’ across the River Bandon from the main defences, and breached the walls of Fort Charles; he was, though, happy enough to let the garrison of 11,000 men march out with the honours of war, and to proceed unmolested to Limerick, before he attempted a storm. The governor, Sir Edward Scott, who had been governor of Portsmouth in 1688, was driven through the breach in his carriage to make the point that the gap was indeed practicable and his surrender was not in the least premature.
Although Marlborough’s capture of Cork and Kinsale did serious damage to Jacobite ambitions in Ireland, it did not end the war. Tyrconnell returned in May 1691 with a new French commander, the marquis de St Ruth. It was ‘like pouring brandy down the throat of a dying man’, and the Jacobite cause flared back into life. On 12 July St Ruth, with the whole Jacobite army of 20,000 men, took up a well-chosen position at Aughrim, where he faced Ginkel with about 17,400 men.
Aughrim was no easy victory. Ginkel’s frontal attack bogged down in the face of dogged resistance, for the Jacobite infantry, holding a line of ditches, ‘would maintain one side until our men put their pieces over the other, and then, having lines of communication from one ditch to another, they would presently post themselves again and flank us’. When a counterattack rolled Ginkel’s centre right back to his gun-line the exuberant St Ruth yelled, ‘Le jour est à nous, mes enfants,’ words of encouragement which might have cheered his Irish peasant infantry less than he expected. The Williamites then staked everything on an attack on St Ruth’s right, and as he was galloping across the peat to meet it a cannonball clipped off his head. His lifeguard wheeled about and left the field at once, followed by the rest of the horse: it may be no accident that their commander later received a pension from William. ‘And so,’ wrote a bitter infantryman, ‘let them keep their priding cavalry to stop bottles with.’ The Jacobites were cut to pieces as they fled: one Williamite saw their dead lying ‘like a great flock of sheep scattered up and down the country for almost four miles round’.44
The Jacobite survivors fell back to Limerick, where Tyrconnell was felled by a stroke. Early in October Ginkel gave them generous terms, allowing the French to go home, accompanied by Irish Jacobites who wished to serve King Louis. He agreed that Jacobite estates would not be confiscated, and that Roman Catholics would endure ‘not less toleration’ than they had enjoyed under Charles II. The Treaty of Limerick was not ratified: a million and a half acres were confiscated, and penal laws were to bear down harshly on Catholics and Protestant dissenters alike.
Marlborough hoped that his successes at Cork and Kinsale would bring him the office of master general of the ordnance, left vacant by Schomberg’s death, but it went instead, for no clearly discernible reason, to the civilian Henry Sidney. There was talk of a dukedom, although at this stage Marlborough felt that he lacked sufficient estate to support the title. He certainly hoped to receive the Garter, for Anne begged it on his behalf, though without success. William maintained that ‘No officer now living who has seen so little service as my Lord Marlborough is so fit for great commands,’ but there was no visible sign of royal favour. C.T. Atkinson argues that Marlborough ‘bitterly resented’ the lack of additional tangible reward as ‘a further proof of ingratitude, if not jealousy’, and that it was this that drove him ‘to make his peace with the man to whose overthrow he had contributed so largely’.45
Like many other senior officers, Marlborough resented the preeminence of foreign generals, just as English peers complained at the influx of foreigners into the Lords: Bentinck became Earl of Portland; Ginkel, Earl of Athlone; Ruvigny, Viscount Galway; and Zulestein, Earl of Rochford. ‘Under James,’ maintains Winston S. Churchill, ‘he saw his path blocked by Papists: under William by Dutchmen.’46 William only really trusted British officers who had served under him in the Anglo-Dutch Brigade. Thus he was prepared to appoint Hugh Mackay – ‘the most pious man that I ever knew in a military way’, says Burnet – commander-in-chief in Scotland. Mackay was beaten by Viscount Dundee’s Jacobites at Killiekrankie in July 1689. This mishap occurred partly because the plug bayonet then in use had to be rammed into the musket’s muzzle, and a government foot soldier thus armed was no match for a charging Highlander with broadsword and targe. Happily for Mackay, Dundee was killed in the moment of victory, and with his death the rebellion lost direction: Mackay subdued the Highlands that summer, and went on to distinguish himself at Aughrim.
However, there was no peerage for Mackay, not even an Irish one, and when he commanded the British vanguard against the French at Steenkirk in 1692 he was killed and his men badly mauled because, it was said, Count Solms, a Dutch lieutenant general and William’s greatuncle, failed to support him. William had some regard for Thomas Tollemache, a veteran of Walcourt and Aughrim, but there was a nasty scene when Tollemache told William that he was favouring foreigners, and threatened to resign both his major general’s post and the colonelcy of the Coldstream. William made him a lieutenant general but never forgave him. In November 1692 there was an acrimonious debate on the subject in the Commons, which revealed that around half the generals for the campaign of 1693 were to be British. The dispute showed Englishmen’s suspicions of foreigners and emphasised the way that William was failing to ‘oblige’ the political nation. Marlborough may have been unusually forward in his resentment at the way foreign generals were preferred to British, but he certainly spoke for a substantial constituency which suspected that William saw Britain simply as another stick with which to beat the French.
There can be no doubting William’s need for sticks. That untidy conflict known to historians as the War of the League of Augsburg rumbled on, with occasional naval clashes, skirmishes in North America (where it was called King William’s War) and the Caribbean, much marching and countermarching in the Low Countries, the war’s main theatre, and rather less in Italy and Spain, subsidiary areas of operations. In many respects it was a forerunner to the War of Spanish Succession, in which Marlborough was to make his reputation, with the French enjoying the advantage of a central position, interior lines of communication, and military reputation, and with William holding together a disparate alliance whose members were always vulnerable to defeat in detail. England’s most significant contribution was her navy, but she also furnished a contingent to the main Allied army, usually under William’s personal command, in the Low Countries.
The 1691 campaign began early with a French attack on the fortress of Mons in March, while William was busy with an Allied conference at The Hague. Marlborough had been left behind in England to raise recruits, and on 17 February he had written William a grumpy letter which went to the very edge of politeness. ‘I here send your majesty a copy of what we have done concerning the recruits,’ he wrote.
I must at the same time take leave to tell your Majesty that I am tired out of my life with the unreasonable way of proceeding of Lord President [Danby], for he is very ignorant of what is fit for an officer, both as to recruits and everything else as to a soldier; so that when I have given such as I think necessary orders, he does what he thinks fit, and enters into the business of tents, arms and the off-reckonings, which were all settled before your Majesty left England, so at this rate business is never done; but I think this all proceeds from, I hope, the unreasonable prejudice he has taken against me, which makes me incapable of doing you that service which I do with all my heart, and should wish to do, for I do with much truth wish both your person and Government to prosper. I hope it will not be long before your majesty will be here, after which I shall beg never to be in England when you are not.47
In May William ordered him to the Continent to command the British contingent, sending Tollemache to Ireland to create the vacancy. It was a thoroughly unsatisfactory campaign, for Marshal Luxembourg was more than a match for William. In September, just after William had given command to Waldeck and retired to Het Loo, Luxembourg unleashed Villars’ cavalry against the Allied rearguard, trudging along from Leuze to Grammont, cutting it up badly. Marlborough deftly swung the British contingent back to deal with the attack, but the dextrous Luxembourg had disengaged before it could come into action.
This mongrel campaign is noteworthy only because during it William asked Charles Thomas, Prince of Vaudemont, son of the Duke of Lorraine and an experienced Imperialist general, what he made of British commanders. ‘Kirke has fire,’ said Vaudemont,
Lanier thought, Mackay skill, and Colchester bravery; but there is something inexpressible in the Earl of Marlborough. All their virtues seem to be united in his single person. I have lost my wonted skill in physiognomy if any subject of your Majesty can ever attain such a height of military glory as that to which this combination of sublime perfections must raise him.
‘Cousin,’ responded William, ‘you have done your part in answering my question, and I believe the Earl of Marlborough will do his to verify your prediction.’48
At this time, as William must have known, it would have been dangerous to make predictions about Marlborough. William told Gilbert Burnet, a trusted adviser who had landed with him in 1688, that ‘he had very good reason to believe that he [Marlborough] had made his peace with King James and was in correspondence with France’.49 Marlborough was one of the prime movers in the army’s opposition to foreign generals, and without the Marlboroughs’ support it would have been hard for Anne to maintain her divergent political line. William was fast concluding that Marlborough was a loose cannon who would be safest rolled overboard. Marlborough pressed him to ensure that British troops were commanded only by British officers. On the night of 9 January 1692 Marlborough told Godolphin and Russell that if the king refused he intended to move two resolutions in the Lords. One would deny all foreign officers the right to hold English commissions, and the other would demand the removal of Dutch troops from England.
On the morning of 20 January Marlborough, in his role as a gentleman of the bedchamber, attended the king’s rising as usual. Two hours later Nottingham told him, on behalf of the king, that he was dismissed from all his appointments and forbidden the court. Tollemache replaced him on the generals’ list, Lord Colchester took over the Royal Dragoons, and George Hamilton, later Earl of Orkney, became colonel of the Royal Fusiliers. The reversal cost Marlborough up to £11,000 a year, and though it did not leave him destitute, it was a shattering blow: the spectre of his father’s fate must have grinned impishly through the coal-fuelled smog of Whitehall.
It may be that William had decided, some time previously, to dispose of Marlborough, and that 20 January simply happened to be the chosen day. Marlborough was, after all, not simply prominent in his complaints about the over-use of foreign officers, but isolated, with Russell and Godolphin as his only really close friends. William told Nottingham that he had disgraced Marlborough for fomenting dissension in the army, but added, ‘He has rendered such valuable services that I have no wish to press him too hard.’50 He assured the Elector of Brandenburg’s representative that it was a matter of honour which, had the two of them been private gentlemen, could only have been settled by a duel. The historian Stephen Saunders Webb maintains that Marlborough’s opposition to foreign generals was the cause of his disgrace: ‘He pursued his xenophobic, patriotic programme to immediate disgrace and to ultimate success.’51
Alternatively, William might have received some specific intelligence, not long after rising that morning, that provoked him into taking sudden action. A well-placed but anonymous commentator later wrote that
the Earl’s disgrace was not slow, but sudden. He accompanied Lord George Hamilton, afterwards Earl of Orkney, and husband to Mrs Villiers, to King William in the morning, and was well received as usual; yet, within two hours after, the Earl of Nottingham came with a message from the king, saying that he had no further occasion for his services.
He acknowledged that Marlborough ‘spoke very freely of the King’s partiality to the Dutch, of the several mismanagements in the war, and of some indignities that had been put upon the English abroad’. However, he maintained that William was not capricious, and ‘very rarely dismissed his old servants’. The most probable cause of Marlborough’s fall, he argued, was the leakage of information about a projected attack on Dunkirk, known only to Marlborough, Portland and Rochford.52
In the published version of his History Burnet, by then influenced by his friendship with the Marlboroughs, wrote that ‘it seems certain that some letter was intercepted, which gave suspicion’. In his own annotations to Burnet, William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, argues that the ‘true cause of his disgrace’ was betrayal from within the Cockpit circle. Marlborough told Sarah of a projected operation against France, and Sarah passed on the news to Lady Fitzharding. Dartmouth maintains that she informed Lord Chelmsford, who in turn told the king.53 An anonymous well-wisher warned Anne:
I beg of you for your own sake that you will have a care of what you say before Lady Fitzharding, remember she’s Lord Portland’s and Betty Villiers’ sister. You may depend upon it that these two are not ignorant of what is said and done in your lodgings. Then I leave you to judge whether they make not their court at your expense … by exposing you and preserving the king as they call it … The King and Queen have been told that there has not passed a day since Lord Marlborough’s being out that you have not shed tears … If it ended in his turning out he might leave it with patience, but if resolutions hold he will be taken up as soon as the Parliament is up, and if you do not part with his Lady of yourself, you will be obliged to it … 54
The accuracy of these predictions reinforces the veracity of the source. In April Anne herself warned Sarah about Lady Fitzharding.
I can’t end this without begging dear Mrs Freeman to have a care of Mrs Hill [Sarah’s MS insertion: ‘That was a nickname for Lady Fitzharding’] for I doubt she is a jade and though one can’t be sure she has done anything against you, there is much reason to believe she has not been so sincere as she ought, and I am sure she hates your faithful Mrs Morley, & remember none of her family were ever good for anything.55
Princess Anne, pregnant yet again, was shocked, not simply by the news of Marlborough’s dismissal but by its yet unspoken corollary: Sarah, as the wife of a disgraced man, would be expected not to appear at court again. Only two weeks after the dismissal Anne put convention to the test by taking Sarah with her to a formal reception at Kensington Palace, and sure enough, Mary at once wrote to tell her forcefully that ‘never anybody was suffered to live at court in Lord Marlborough’s circumstances. I need not repeat the cause he has given the King to do what he has done, nor his unwillingness at all times to come to extremities, though people do deserve it.’ Under the circumstances it was ‘the strangest thing ever that was done’ for Anne to have brought Sarah to the palace: ‘it was very unkind in a sister, would have been very uncivil in an equal; and I need not say I have more to claim’. She concluded: ‘’Tis upon that account I tell you plainly, Lady Marlborough must not continue with you, in the circumstances her lord is …’56
Anne, furious at the suggestion that she could not choose her own servants, and by being reminded of the duty she owed her sister, slapped off a note to Sarah saying that she would keep her ‘in spite of their teeth’. She followed it with a measured letter telling Mary that ‘This proceeding can be for no other intent than to give me a very sensible mortification,’ and flatly refusing to part with Sarah. The maladroit Lord Rochester, upon whom Mary would rely increasingly heavily after William had departed to the Continent for the campaign of 1692, was summoned to the Cockpit to deliver this missive. Having seen what was in it he felt unable to do so, but advised the queen to expel Anne and her little court from the Cockpit. The lord chamberlain passed on this order, which was manifestly illegal because Anne held the Cockpit’s freehold, given her by Charles II.
However, Anne felt that she had no alternative but to comply, and duly moved into Syon House, on the Thames west of London, generously loaned to her by the Duke of Somerset. Her guards were withdrawn, and the Dutch sentries at Whitehall were told that they need no longer ‘stand to their arms’ for Anne and her husband. Sarah maintained that she was warned by Lady Fitzharding that her continued support for Anne would provoke worse trouble: ‘If I would not put an end to measures so disagreeable to the King and Queen, it would certainly be the ruin of my lord, and consequently of all our family.’ Indeed, she argued that it was her own closeness to Anne, not any action of her husband’s, that had precipitated his fall. ‘The disgrace of my Lord Marlborough,’ she writes, ‘was designed as a step for removing me from her.’57
Sarah offered to resign her post with Anne to defuse the crisis, but Anne replied that her mind was made up: ‘I am more yours than can be expressed, & had rather live in a cottage with you than reign empress of the world without you.’58 She followed this with a violent attack on ‘that monster … that Dutch abortive’, and looked forward to the ‘sunshine day’ of her own succession when she could right the many wrongs that William had done to her country and her friends.59 In early April Mary called on Anne, now in the last stages of her pregnancy, and as Anne put it ‘talked a great deal of senseless stuff’. Anne gave birth to her seventh child, a boy who lived just long enough to be christened George, on 17 April. Having been told that her sister had endured a difficult labour, Mary came to see her again. It was the last time the sisters ever met, and the only account of their conversation comes from Sarah, who heard it from Anne. There was apparently no sympathy for a dangerous labour or a dead child, only a renewed demand for the dismissal of Sarah, reinforced by the same peremptory order given to Prince George as he escorted Mary to her coach.
Rochester tried to broker a reconciliation based on Anne’s removal and, when that failed, advised Mary to ban any courtiers from visiting Anne. This was immediately effective, and only two or three Jacobite ladies visited the princess. Sarah observed that the breach between Mary and Anne was welcomed by the Jacobites. When Lady Ailesbury visited Anne, who was still confined to bed, to tell her that a French invasion was imminent and that 5,000 Jacobite soldiers would be ready to escort her to her father, she replied: ‘Well, Madam, tell your Lord that I am ready to do what he can advise me to.’60
As rumours of invasion reached fever-pitch, the nervous government responded by acting on a letter provided by Robert Young, a former confederate of Titus Oates and already a convicted criminal. He drew the Council’s attention to the fact that a treasonable bond of association, signed by Marlborough, Cornbury, Archbishop Sancroft and others, was hidden in a flowerpot at the Bishop of Rochester’s house. A search was made, the document was discovered and all the alleged signatories were sent to the Tower.
The Tower of London, where Marlborough found himself in May 1692, was England’s principal state prison, though it also did duty as royal menagerie (the largest, most splendidly-endowed male lion in Charles II’s time had been called Rowley after his royal master), arsenal, mint and record office. Prisoners of consequence were usually lodged in apartments on either side of Water Lane, the cobbled street just inside the double drum-fronted Byward Tower, or in buildings opening off Tower Green. Their material conditions were often relatively comfortable, and they sometimes had their families with them: Sir Walter Raleigh’s son Carew was born in the Bloody Tower in 1605. The Countess of Ailesbury conceived in the Tower, and her husband blamed the fact that the birth wrecked her health on the governor’s refusal to allow a midwife to attend her. The comparatively gentlemanly conditions of detention meant that there were some escapes, the last of them in 1716 by the Jacobite Earl of Nithsdale, who slipped out in his wife’s clothes.
Marlborough, perhaps understandably, has left no account of his brief stay in the Tower, but the Earl of Ailesbury, mewed up there a few years later after being charged with plotting James’s restoration, reports that he was so courteously treated that he gave venison and wine to the captain, lieutenant and ensign of the company on guard. They felt unable to dine with him, but their colonel, the Earl of Romney (Henry Sidney, formerly a Williamite plotter, and now master general of the ordnance and colonel of the 1st Foot Guards), gave an order that was ‘gracious and gentlemanlike and entirely suitable to him’. ‘Pray go,’ he declared, ‘and if I was not engaged I would go there also.’61 Ailesbury walked for five hours a day across his thirty-three-foot room, daily completing fifteen ‘London miles’ and, because of the numerous nails in the floor, getting through a pair of shoes a fortnight. His stay there was sharpened not only by concern for his own fate (he was released on five recognisances of £10,000 apiece), but by his fears for his fellow prisoner Major General Sir John Fenwick, charged with conspiring to assassinate William, whose quarters were within earshot and who was plainly terrified of what awaited him. He was sentenced to a traitor’s death by an Act of Attainder (the last Englishman to be thus condemned), and was beheaded on Tower Green in January 1697. When the time came, though, ‘he behaved himself decently, nobly and well’.
Marlborough and his fellow accused were committed ‘close prisoners’, and visitors required orders from the Earl of Nottingham to get into the Tower. Anne warned Sarah that she and Prince George were likely to be placed under guard if the wind changed, allowing the French fleet, presumably escorting an invasion army, to leave Brest, and urged her to visit as soon as she could, because a meeting might be impossible later. Sarah was already at her wits’ end, for her younger son Charles was desperately ill. On 22 May, with his father still imprisoned, Charles died, and was buried without his father at the graveside. On 19 May Admiral Tourville, out from Brest with a following wind and forty-four sail of the line, met Admiral Russell’s larger Anglo-Dutch fleet. In a running battle which began rather well for the French off Cape Barfleur, and ended dismally for them in the bay of St Vaast-la-Hougue, Tourville was comprehensively beaten and his flagship Soleil Royal destroyed. In fact the victory did not rule out a future French-Jacobite invasion, for the French had made up their losses in two years, but it drew the moment’s sting and enabled Mary and her Council to proceed with some judgement.
William had already warned them that the arrests were ‘a delicate matter’, no doubt fearing that a trial might misfire. Anne assured Sarah on 12 May ‘that they cannot keep Lord Marlborough in the Tower longer than the [legal] term, and I hope, when Parliament sits, care will be taken that people are not clapped up for nothing, or else there will be no living in quiet for anybody but insolent Dutch or sneaking mercenary Englishmen’.62 Marlborough’s own confidence stemmed from early recognition that, whatever the government might once have had against him, the evidence which had put him in the Tower would not stand scrutiny. He told Danby, lord president of the Council, that any letter produced to incriminate him ‘must and will’ be shown to be a forgery. He assured the Duke of Devonshire, lord high steward, that ‘any such letter … must appear to be forged, and made use of only to keep me in prison’. Finally, he told Halifax that his counsel would move for his Habeas Corpus as soon as the next law term opened. He would demand bail, and urged Halifax to stand by him.63
This was not the correspondence of a man who had doubt about the outcome, and the incriminating letter was indeed soon exposed as a forgery, though a very clever one. Marlborough was kept in the Tower till 15 June, when he brought a writ of Habeas Corpus before the Court of the King’s Bench. The government demanded bail of £6,000, and when Halifax and Shrewsbury stood surety for him the queen spitefully struck them both from the roll of the Privy Council. Marlborough’s name was still on it, and she drew her pen through that too. In October Marlborough pointed out that Robert Young had been convicted of perjury (he later excelled himself and was hanged for coining), and that it was therefore unreasonable to keep him on bail, but the Council would not budge. By now a last attempt at reconciliation between Queen Mary and her sister had failed, and the two rival courts were in a state of ‘siege warfare’ in which the queen held all the advantages.
Princess Anne had leased Berkeley House in Piccadilly from Lord Berkeley, groom of the stole to Prince George, who was in turn to move into the Cockpit, although it would take some time for the arrangements to be put in train. In mid-August Anne’s court left Syon House for Bath, where they discovered that the mayor and corporation had been forbidden from showing them the ‘respect or ceremony’ owing to members of the royal family without specific leave from the queen. Anne, pregnant yet again, was scornful, and told Sarah that if they expected to get any change out of her by such small-minded behaviour ‘they will be mightily disappointed’. Sarah herself blamed this petty-mindedness on Lord Rochester.
I remember, when he was treasurer, he made his white staff be carried by his [sedan] chair-side, by a servant bare-headed; in this, as in other things, so very unlike his successor, my Lord Godolphin, who cut his white staff shorter than ordinary, that he might hide it, taking it into the chair with him.64
If Mary and her advisers hoped that all these petty humiliations would drive a wedge between Sarah and Anne, they were indeed mistaken. ‘I hope in Christ you will never think more of leaving me,’ wrote Anne, ‘for I would be satisfied to do you the least service, and nothing but death can ever make me part with you. For if it be possible I am every day more and more yours.’65
The Cockpit circle, strengthened by adversity, reunited at Berkeley House that autumn ‘in a companionship of wrath and misfortune’, and now joined by Shrewsbury. Marlborough remained in contact with Jacobite agents, though we may doubt Lord Ailesbury’s claim that this was now carried out with William’s knowledge to assist in his penetration of Jacobite plans. Sir John Dalrymple, later 1st Earl of Stair and then a key figure in the Williamite government of Scotland, believed that Marlborough was now a leading member of the opposition to the king, and capitalised on the fact that Parliament had been prorogued, and would not meet till November.
That interval gave time for Lord Marlborough, who was enraged at what he called the King’s ingratitude, to the Whigs and to himself, and whose favour with the next heir to the throne, high character in his profession, and above all whose power of industry and intrigue made his influence, though he was only a soldier, and in prison, be felt in every line of life in the kingdom, to prepare a regular and concerted opposition in Parliament.66
Meanwhile the War of the League of Augsburg trudged on. In June 1692 the French took the fortress of Namur on the River Meuse, a crucial cornerstone to the defence of the Spanish Netherlands, and went on to beat William at Steenkirk in August, killing both Mackay and Lanier in the process. When William returned in the autumn he found that Count Solms’ alleged desertion of his leading division at Steenkirk (‘Now we shall see how the bulldogs will come off!’) had heightened the animus against foreigners. The Lords grumbled about the detention of some of their members, and Marlborough was released from bail by the king’s personal intervention, but William gained the subsidies he needed, and set off for another campaign. The battle of Landen, midway between Louvain and Liège in the Spanish Netherlands, fought in July 1693, was vastly more costly than Steenkirk. Like many battles of the age it involved little tactical merit but a good deal of hard pounding, and Luxembourg eventually carried the Allied position by sheer weight of numbers. Solms was mortally wounded, and there was some mean-spirited sneering in the English camp when he did not die with the resolution expected of him. Battles on this scale (there were some 130,000 combatants and 23,000 casualties) simply collapsed the available medical support, and also made it impossible for local inhabitants to give decent burial to the dead. Sicco van Goslinga was there in 1707. ‘I saw a grand foraging party on the battlefield of Landen,’ he recalled. ‘The bones, with which the fields were still scattered, showed what a murderous business it had been.’67
The naval victory of La Hougue encouraged William and his advisers to plan an attack on the naval base of Brest, with the dual intention of inflicting further damage on the French fleet and forcing the French to divert troops from the Low Countries to protect a coastline now apparently vulnerable to British and Dutch seapower. Such excursions were popular with the navy, which naturally secured the leading role, and with certain army officers, who hoped that their success in scrambling briskly up some French beach would not be overshadowed by a Dutchman. But their real merit was political: they gratified the trading interest in the Commons, which liked to see the naval cudgel brandished, and they seemed to reflect a genuinely ‘English’ approach to strategy, rather than the Continental commitment so clearly favoured by William. Many canny contemporaries, however, recognised that they generally accomplished very little, and Shrewsbury admitted to William: ‘The designs that we have on foot appear so frivolous that it is not very pleasant writing upon them.’68
Given his personal preference for concentrating on the Low Countries the Brest project was never William’s first choice, but his attempt to forge a Mediterranean strategy based on the maintenance of a powerful Anglo-Dutch fleet foundered when the huge ‘Smyrna convoy’ of Dutch and English merchantmen bound for the eastern Mediterranean was ambushed by the French off Cape St Vincent in June 1693. London’s losses alone equalled those of the Great Fire of 1666. William and his advisers were vociferously blamed, and the king had to part with Lord Nottingham. A fleet hastily dispatched to round up the Smyrna survivors and, so William hoped, form the nucleus of his Mediterranean fleet, was devastated by a storm, and so the Brest project emerged, faute de mieux, as the great hope of 1694.
It is easiest to tell the end of this disagreeable story first. Admiral Russell sailed from Plymouth on 2 June, and continued southwards with his main fleet after sending a squadron under Rear Admiral Berkeley to take Lieutenant General Tollemache’s little army into Camaret Bay on 7 June. As the squadron first stood into the bay the vigorous fire of the batteries covering the approaches to Brest proved that the element of surprise was long lost. That genial hero ‘Salamander’ Cutts offered to take fifty grenadiers ashore to sample the quality of the fire, of which he was something of a connoisseur. Tollemache affirmed that they could not in honour retreat, and Berkeley felt that he must not disappoint such courage.
On the following day the squadron stood close inshore and took on the batteries, while Tollemache landed, in the teeth of heavy fire, with fifteen hundred men. The attackers were assailed by infantry and cavalry on the beach itself, and attempts to withdraw were frustrated by the fact that the landing had taken place on a falling tide, and few of the boats could be refloated. Tollemache, hard hit, was carried to safety, but his wound became infected and he died in Plymouth: he was buried with his ancestors in the church of St Mary at Helmingham in Suffolk.69
William had that year reappointed Shrewsbury as one of his secretaries of state, and immediately after the disaster he told him of his surprise that the attack, which was ‘at discretion’, and dependent upon the opinion of senior officers on the spot, had not been better reconnoitred, for the French ‘were well apprised of our intended attack, and made active preparations for defence; for what was practicable two months ago, was no longer so at present’.70 It was evident that the French had known about the attack long enough to take steps to meet it, and Macaulay is among those who argue that the project was betrayed by Marlborough in a letter of 4 May 1694 to James II. The charge is very grave: this ‘Camaret Bay letter’ ensured that the landing failed and that Tollemache, Marlborough’s rival, was killed as its direct result.
The origins of the letter and its associated documents lie in the murky world of Jacobite politics. Captain David Lloyd visited London that March and claimed that he was received by Godolphin, Marlborough, Russell and Shrewsbury with protestations of support for the Jacobite cause. Marlborough gave nothing away: indeed, as he was out of office and had recently been accused of treason, it is fair to wonder what information he might have been privy to. Lloyd maintained that Godolphin, who was indeed a minister, told him ‘that Russell would infallibly appear before Brest, the land officers believing that the place may be insulted even though the sea officers were of a different opinion’, and Lloyd’s report on these conversations, some of them so similar that we must suspect collusion, arrived at Versailles on 1 May. However, the plan was ‘town-talk in London’ some time before this, and we know that the French began to strengthen their defences around Brest on 22 April: Vauban himself arrived there on the twenty-third. A letter written in England on 4 May would have taken some time to reach James at St Germain, and then be passed on to Versailles: it could only have arrived long after preparations to meet the landing were well advanced.
This far, then, even if the Camaret Bay letter is authentic, it was hardly the cause of the reverse. But the currents run deeper still. The letter, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is a French transcription of the original, and is not in Marlborough’s hand. It is in the handwriting of David Nairne, James’s under-secretary, and its heading affirms that it was translated from a ciphered document sent to France by the Jacobite agent Major General Edward Sackville. The original, if indeed there was one, has never come to light. It is, though, very hard to imagine a man as careful as Marlborough, only recently freed from suspicion of treason, writing a letter which would kill him if it fell into the wrong hands. Winston S. Churchill concludes that ‘Such evidence would not hang a dog,’ and it is hard to disagree.
Some historians, surmising that there can be no smoke without fire, and aware of Marlborough’s other contacts with the Jacobites, have concluded that he probably did write the original letter, though he did so only when he knew that it would be received too late for its information to be of any practical use. John Paget argues that ‘his offence seems to have been against James, in seeking credit for a service of no value, [rather] than against William’.71 C.T. Atkinson agrees that the material Marlborough disclosed was of no value, but nonetheless finds this ‘the meanest episode in his career’.72 Stephen Saunders Webb says that the letter was ‘a political ploy, not a betrayal of comrades. Marlborough had made an overdue payment on an unsavoury insurance policy.’73 They are rather like a shaky bench of magistrates who, unable to resolve a case to their satisfaction, decide to find the defendant guilty but then impose a token punishment. The fact remains that the evidence linking Marlborough with the Camaret Bay letter is slender. The assertion that he hoped to have Tollemache killed is patently ludicrous. How was he to expect that Tollemache, who as overall land commander had good reason to spare himself (and had the Salamander himself to hand for those dangerous tasks at which he excelled), would land with the first wave?
Sir Tresham Lever, Godolphin’s biographer, put the whole episode in the context of English politicians seeking to insure themselves against a Jacobite revival. Even if Lloyd’s account of his conversations was substantially correct, he argued, his subjects ‘were only saying what Lloyd and half England knew already, they only made the statements because they knew they revealed nothing, and they therefore betrayed no secrets of any sort either to the Jacobites or to the French Court’.74 The recurrent theme of Jacobite complaints against Marlborough was that he promised much but never delivered anything, and we have no reason to suppose that he behaved differently in 1694.
The tide of politics was beginning to turn in Marlborough’s favour. When corresponding with William over Camaret Bay, Shrewsbury, back in office but only recently a refugee in the Cockpit circle, wrote:
Writing upon this subject it is impossible to forget what has here become a very general discourse, the probability and conveniency of Your Majesty receiving my Lord Marlborough into your favour. He has been with me since this news to offer his services, with all the expressions of duty and fidelity imaginable. What I can say by way of persuasion upon this subject will signify but little, since I very well remember when Your Majesty discoursed with me upon it in the spring, when you were fully convinced of his usefulness; but some points remained of a nature too delicate for me to pretend to advise upon, and on which Your Majesty is the only and best judge; who if those could be committed to Your Majesty’s satisfaction I can but think he is capable of being very serviceable. It is so unquestionably his interest to be faithful, that single argument makes me doubt it not.75
The demise of Tollemache, coming so soon as it did after the deaths of Mackay and Lanier, undoubtedly helped Marlborough’s case. William was under continual pressure to employ more British generals, and he had just lost three of his best. Indeed, just as Sir John Moore’s death at Corunna in 1809 opened up the field for the future Duke of Wellington, so the fall of that brave and headstrong officer Thomas Tollemache left a yawning gap on the generals’ list.
During the Christmas celebrations in 1694 Queen Mary was stricken with smallpox. She rallied briefly, disappointing some Jacobite ladies who had planned a celebratory dinner, and died on 28 December. William was visibly distraught, and the unfeigned intensity of his grief helped Englishmen like him better, for, they now thought, he had really loved their queen, and not simply married her to draw England into a war. William had also, at long last, started behaving like an Englishman. When a Jacobite nobleman rode deliberately into his path on Newmarket Heath, William struck him with his whip, a forceful act which commended him to the squirearchy.
James, in contrast, refused to order court mourning, and his minister Lord Middleton announced coldly that: ‘The King, my master, does not consider her his daughter, because she had renounced her being so in such an open manner.’ Jacobite hopes that the death of Mary improved their chances were misplaced, not least because there was now an heir apparent who commanded wide support in England.
Anne had tried hard to see her sister before she died, saying that she would ‘run any hazard’ for a meeting. She made her peace with William on 29 December, saying how much she regretted ‘having fallen into her displeasure’. William was not sure what to make of this, but the Archbishop of Canterbury assured him that the quarrel should be settled. Anne, recovering from what seems to have been a phantom pregnancy, was carried in to see William on 13 January. Her guards had already been restored, her sister’s jewellery was passed on to her, and she was given St James’s Palace to hold court in, for she was now heir to the throne.
Marlborough did not return to favour immediately. In January 1695 Shrewsbury told Russell that
our friend [Marlborough] who has no small credit with her, seems very resolved to contribute to the continuance of this union … I do not see he is likely, at present, to get much by it, not having yet kissed the King’s hand, yet the reversion is very fair and very great.76
Marlborough duly kissed hands on 25 March. Sarah, however, was much more inclined to bury the hatchet in the head of an adversary than to make peace, and it took her another year to come to terms. Even then, she tells us, ‘I believe I should have continued it, but that my Lord Sunderland dissuaded me from it.’77
There were fresh Jacobite plots afoot. The Duke of Berwick visited England incognito and met several supporters, but ‘they continued firm in their resolution not to rise, till the King of England [James II] had landed with an army’. He agreed with them, for ‘In a battle with their raw, undisciplined troops, against a good number of tried and experienced soldiers … they must inevitably have been destroyed.’78 Louis, however, was not prepared to commit troops until a rising was under way. Early in 1696 a group of plotters prepared to attack William at Turnham Green on his return from hunting, but the plot was betrayed and some of those involved were executed. Lord Ailesbury felt that there was something fundamentally sound in popular judgement at moments like this, and that William’s advisers were right to punish ringleaders but not to embark upon a witch-hunt. ‘They are good at heart,’ he wrote,
and have compassion; and even in tumultuous occasions the mob ever reasons well, and seldom do they rise when not oppressed and weighed down. They have sudden starts … hasty enough to go to the execution, but after that some few have suffered, they would cry out ‘that is enough, some few must die for example.’79
A successful assassination would have triggered an attempted invasion, for the French fleet had concentrated in the Channel and the hopeful James II went to Calais to join the invasion army. But with no assassination, no rising in England and, above all, none of the naval superiority which riveted the whole business together, the moment passed.
Sir John Fenwick’s plot for the assassination of William was discovered that summer of 1696 and the accused man, facing a Bill of Attainder which, if passed, would simply declare him a traitor without the necessity for a trial, which would have demanded evidence, accused Marlborough, Russell, Godolphin and Shrewsbury of being in treasonable communication with the Court of St Germain. Shrewsbury privately admitted to William that he had indeed undertaken to help Lord Middleton, a Jacobite relative, and William at once forgave him. A nervous Godolphin resigned from the ministry, suggesting to many (including his biographer) that there was some truth in Fenwick’s accusations.
But it was with perfect confidence that Marlborough, speaking coolly and with complete self-possession, told the Lords:
Nobody can wonder that a man whose head is in danger should try to save himself by accusing others. I assure your Lordships that, since the accession of his present Majesty, I have no intercourse with Sir John on any subject whatever, and this I declare on my word of honour.80
The ‘impeccably Whiggish’ Colonel Godfrey, who had married Marlborough’s sister Arabella, spoke warmly on his brother-in-law’s behalf, while George Churchill, also an MP, muttered that dead men told no tales and hoped to see Fenwick dealt with, one way or another. Marlborough himself voted for Fenwick’s attainder, and helped persuade Prince George, not a regular attender in the Lords, to avail himself of the rights of his English dukedom by going to the House and voting the same way. If there had indeed been an original Camaret Bay letter this would surely have been the moment for the Jacobites to use it: simply hinting that the document might be shown to William would have been sufficient to stop Marlborough in his tracks. The vote was close, and Godolphin voted in Fenwick’s favour. Sir John Fenwick was duly beheaded on 28 January 1697, and Marlborough had safely weathered the last of the season’s storms.
Even as Fenwick’s fate trembled in the balance, the war was drawing to a close, for Louis opened secret peace negotiations with William late in 1696. William’s Grand Alliance had been under terrible strain, with Victor Amadeus of Savoy making a separate peace with France in August 1696 and Britain, Holland and France all financially exhausted. The terms of the Treaty of Ryswick, concluded in the autumn of 1697, were essentially a return to the status quo ante bellum. The most fundamental exception was Louis’ recognition of William and his heirs as de facto monarchs of Great Britain, and his promise not to afford assistance, directly or indirectly, to any of William’s enemies. Although, as we shall soon see, Louis was perfectly capable of breaking his word, for mere promises did not bind Sun Kings, this provision was nevertheless a turning point in the history of the British Isles, for it finally took them out of the French sphere of influence.
The French gave up the fortresses they had captured in the Spanish Netherlands – Luxembourg, Chimay, Mons, Courtrai, Charleroi, Ath and Dinant. Barcelona, seized in the last year of the war, was also restored to the Spanish. The French obtained legal title to Strasbourg, though they had to give up their other fortresses on the Rhine. The Dutch gained a favourable commercial treaty with France, but the English asked for nothing, believing that ‘The balance of trade, as it now stands, is evidently on the English side.’81 The French merchant fleet had declined from 750 sizeable ships to 533, while the British, despite the damage done by privateers like Jean Bart, was larger at the war’s end than its beginning. Perhaps most seriously for the long-term future of Europe, the French were unable to reform their financial institutions, and raised money to fuel the war by selling offices connected with trade, increasing restrictive practices.
England faced a crisis which was no less serious, and brought the fleet to the edge of mutiny. As N.A.M. Rodger has observed, ‘All naval activities cost more money than was coming in. There was virtually no long-term system of borrowing, and the short-term credit of the Navy and the government wilted rapidly.’82 The government revolutionised public finances by introducing the land tax, exchequer bills and the concept of national debt, and in 1694 Charles Montagu set up the Bank of England. Two years later, with the help of John Locke and Isaac Newton, Montagu carried out a total recoinage, getting rid of clipped and counterfeit coins. There was a brief dearth of currency, and the Bank of England, having over-issued its notes, might well have foundered. However, England had begun to initiate the reforms which would give her the financial and economic strength to fight another, even larger, war, and none of Marlborough’s achievements on the battlefield would have been possible without them.
In the meantime, though, a Parliament dead-set on making economies pressed for the reduction of the army from its wartime strength of around 90,000 to an establishment of 7,000 in England and 12,000 in Ireland. These were all to be native-born, and the Dutch Guards were sent back to Holland, despite William’s plea, in a personally-written note to Parliament, to be allowed to keep them. The capricious English, who had once seen these big men in blue coats as a symbol of Dutch domination, now grew quite fond of them as they marched to the coast. Many of them had married local girls, and somehow it was sad to see them all go.
The men who had fought at Steenkirk and Landen were treated even worse than their descendants who were to fight on the Somme and at Passchendaele, for Britain’s national gratitude has all too short a lease. Despite a series of emergency measures, like opening up all trades to ex-officers and soldiers regardless of whether or not they had served an apprenticeship, there was significant unrest, and many ex-cavalrymen, allowed to keep their horses on demobilisation, simply became highwaymen. A line of guardhouses, manned by soldiers, was built on the road from London to Kensington to protect travellers from ex-soldiers. The problem of how to deal with them had not been solved by the time recruiting began for the next war.
The recoinage of 1696 strengthened Sarah’s position in Anne’s household, and it was through this that Marlborough’s route back to favour lay. The value of the guinea was reduced from thirty shillings to twenty-one, but Sir Benjamin Bathurst, the comptroller of the household, made up his accounts as if the change had not occurred. Sarah told Anne what had happened, but was urged to say nothing, for ‘there is nobody perfect but dear Mrs Freeman’. In April 1697 Sir Benjamin was found to have been selling posts in the household, and although Anne forgave him, this convinced her that she should have ‘a Mrs Freeman in every post in my family’.
On 24 July 1696, his seventh birthday, Anne’s son the Duke of Gloucester was inducted into the Order of the Garter in a ceremony at Windsor attended by the whole court. In April 1698 William invited Marlborough to become the boy’s governor on a salary of £2,000 a year, and soon restored him to both his rank in the army and the Privy Council. When William departed for Holland in July Marlborough was one of the lords justices left running the country in his absence.
Gloucester’s miniature court included Gilbert Burnet as his spiritual guide. Burnet had been made Bishop of Salisbury, but his influence at court had diminished with Mary’s death. William, who had once valued his advice, had grown tired of his badgering and indiscretions, calling him ein rechter Tartuffe (a real religious hypocrite). Shoving him off to the young duke’s court suited William, but Burnet himself was not eager to move, and Anne suspected his whiggish principles and maintained that the king appointed him simply in order to be disagreeable to her. At first Burnet was no more enamoured of the Marlboroughs than they were of him, but he soon fell under John Churchill’s spell. The published version of his History, written after he got to know them, is far more favourable to the Marlboroughs than the original rough draft.
Lord Churchill, the Marlboroughs’ surviving son, was master of the horse, one of Burnet’s sons was a page to young Gloucester, and Sarah’s cousin Abigail Hill, ‘daughter of a city merchant by a sister of my father’, was laundress to the little court. This, so the waspish Sarah assures us, ‘was a good provision for her’. Abigail’s parents had died leaving two sons and two daughters, and Sarah used Godolphin’s good offices to get one son into the customs house, and the other, Jack, into Gloucester’s household and then into the army. After Gloucester’s premature death Sarah took Abigail into Anne’s household as bedchamber woman. Bedchamber women were personal maids, unlike the ladies of the bedchamber who were social companions and often confidantes. At that stage Abigail’s duties were purely domestic, and Sarah had no idea that she was installing within Anne’s household a rival who would eventually supplant her.
Marlborough was busy carefully repairing the dynastic damage done by his disgrace. Although he was given no office of state till the summer of 1701, William now consulted him regularly, though Marlborough told Shrewsbury in May 1700 that he still found the king cold towards him. He spoke in the Lords against the wholesale reduction of the army, said nothing about the Dutch Guards, and later declined to join the clamour against the king’s grants of Irish land. His eldest daughter Henrietta had married Godolphin’s only son Francis in 1699, and his second surviving daughter Anne married Lord Spencer, Sunderland’s heir, the following year. It was a controversial match: Spencer was an extreme Whig and made no secret of his republican views. Princess Anne contributed £5,000 towards the bride’s portion in each instance, and made both of them ladies of her bedchamber. The resignation of Marlborough’s old enemy Portland in the summer of 1700 and his replacement in William’s favour by Joost van Keppel, now Earl of Albemarle, helped smooth the upward path. Marlborough crossed the king by supporting Prince George’s long-standing claim to the money owed him since 1689, but William soon forgave him, and Anne was delighted by his help, ‘it being wholly owing to your & his kindness’, she assured Sarah. When William went to Holland in 1700 Marlborough was again appointed one of the lords justices.
Anne suffered another miscarriage on 14 January 1700, producing a boy who was judged to have been ‘dead in her a month’. It was probably her seventeenth pregnancy, and was certainly her last. A deeper tragedy followed: on 30 July the ten-year-old Duke of Gloucester died of smallpox. Anne, suggests a biographer, never really recovered from the blow, and thereafter habitually wrote to Sarah as ‘your poor unfortunate faithful Morley’, a play on the Churchill family motto, ‘Faithful but Unfortunate’.83 Although Gloucester’s death deprived Marlborough of his only office, he found himself at the very centre of the discussions on the succession. He was involved, this time on Anne’s behalf, in discussions with the omnipresent Jacobite agents (with the customary camouflage of secrecy laced with deception), and it seems likely that Anne was endeavouring to secure her own unopposed succession to the throne on the death of William by implying that the Jacobite claimant (the twelve-year-old James, Prince of Wales) might succeed her. She was probably never serious in this, and most well-placed contemporary observers believed that she was genuinely committed to the official line.
This policy, championed by William and his predominantly Tory ministry, was that the Protestant succession should be assured. They supported the dowager Electress Sophia of Hanover, who, as a granddaughter of James I, had some of the old Stuart blood in her veins, and who herself had a grandson, the Electoral Prince Georg August. William was now visibly in failing health, and the issue needed speedy resolution. In June 1701 Parliament passed an Act of Settlement which vested the crown in Electress Sophia and her heirs should Anne die without children, as then seemed almost certain.
Marlborough was not simply influential in steering the measure through the Lords, but also supported the election as speaker of the Commons of Robert Harley, a kinsman of Sarah’s, and Harley’s careful management nudged the Bill through the Commons. The Act did more than determine the succession. It declared that future monarchs must be communicating members of the Church of England, they were forbidden to leave their three kingdoms without permission from Parliament, only the native-born could hold office, and the full Privy Council must consider major matters of policy. The terms, indeed, were so restrictive that Georg August genuinely believed that the measure was designed to make him refuse the crown and thus assure a Jacobite succession. While Anne saw the need for a Protestant succession, she was, and remained throughout her reign, very sensitive about the issue. She wanted no heir apparent looking over her shoulder, and no cloud on the horizon to dim the glory of her own accession, an event that evidently could not be delayed for long.
Europe changed gear with a palpable jerk in 1700–02. The Treaty of Ryswick had delayed but not expunged Louis’ plans for dominating Europe. The death of the childless and decrepit Charles II of Spain had been widely anticipated, and negotiations between the major powers considered ways of partitioning the Spanish Empire, in the New World and the Old, so that neither the French nor their potential adversaries gained decisive advantage from it and that whoever succeeded to the throne of Spain (and there were a number of credible claimants) would not immediately join their realm to France or the Empire. Charles died in November 1700, and his will provided for his entire empire to be offered to Louis’ grandson Philippe, duc d’Anjou. If Anjou refused it, then it was to go to the Hapsburg Emperor Leopold’s younger son, the Archduke Charles. Louis thought for some time before acting, but eventually decided to back his grandson, introducing him to a room full of waiting courtiers and ambassadors with the pregnant words: ‘Gentlemen, here is the king of Spain.’ The delighted Spanish ambassador whispered that the Pyrenees no longer existed.
The French may genuinely have hoped, as their foreign minister Colbert de Torcy told William, that this would simply ensure smooth succession and that the two Bourbon kingdoms would remain distinct. However, the French army was now at a high level of readiness, and in February 1701 Louis’ troops moved into the barrier fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands with the connivance of the Spanish authorities. William had just issued orders authorising their Dutch garrisons to withdraw, but the French moved too quickly and grabbed them all, releasing them only after a firm line had been established on the Dutch border. Max Emmanuel, Elector of Bavaria, an Allied general in the previous war and now governor of the Spanish Netherlands, threw in his lot with France and departed to Bavaria to raise troops.
It now seemed evident that the French planned a new war, and French and Austrian troops were fighting in Italy by early summer. English public opinion, not for the last time, was resolutely opposed to a fresh Continental commitment, so much so that William told the Dutch grand pensionary Anthonie Heinsius that this blindness to an obvious danger was a punishment from heaven. On 7 September a Treaty of Grand Alliance bound the Emperor Leopold, the Dutch and the British to support the partition of the Spanish Empire with ‘satisfactory compensation’ for the Hapsburgs, and equally satisfactory arrangements for the maritime powers in the West Indies. Marlborough had negotiated on Britain’s behalf. The Dutch had installed him in the beautiful and exotic Mauritshuis in The Hague, and Marlborough, so familiar with courts, was wholly in his element, charming, flattering, wheedling and cajoling, but always ensuring that he sent drafts of the treaty to Whig and Tory leaders so that there could be no suggestion that he was acting without consultation: the lessons of the last decade had been well learned.
Thus far Louis XIV had dominated events, but he now proceeded to make an error so serious that we must surmise that it sprang from genuine conviction, not subtle statecraft. James II’s court just outside Paris at St Germain en Laye, with its odour of sanctity and disappointed ambitions, had never been a happy place. In the late 1690s it grew gloomier still. There was never enough money; French neighbours blamed the continuation of the war on Jacobite pressure, and James’s apparent support for the assassination of William (who, whatever his status in England, was indisputably stadholder of the United Provinces) looked rather like an attempt to procure the murder of a Christian prince. Many of his Irish troops were disbanded, and veterans of the Boyne, Aughrim and Limerick became brigands or footpads, risking ‘death on the wheel or life eked out in the galleys’. James became increasingly preoccupied by the need to preserve his immortal soul, and spent retreats at the wintry monastery of La Trappe. When the Archbishop of Rheims saw the old king shuffling down the steps of Notre Dame de Paris, he pointed out a ‘good man’ who had ‘renounced three kingdoms for a mass’.84
James was hearing mass at St Germain in March 1701 when he collapsed with a heavy nosebleed, and he had a stroke that paralysed his right side a week later. He collapsed again in September, and then lay centre-stage for the finest role he ever played, the resolute confrontation of death in the presence of his family and the comfort of his Church. It was the very public nature of this death, with his magnanimous forgiveness of his three greatest foes – the emperor, the Prince of Orange, and Princess Anne – and the selfless fulfilment of the very highest moral duty of a king that impressed Louis. There, in the antechamber to James’s room, he recognised the Prince of Wales as James’s lawful heir. Men torn between joy and despair cried ‘God save the King’ when James died in the small hours on 16 September.
English indignation against Louis knew no bounds, and when William dissolved Parliament that month the election produced a House of Commons almost equally divided between Whigs and Tories but united in one thing: support for the war against a perjured king. William did not live long to enjoy the fruition of his life’s work. On 21 February 1702 he was hunting in Richmond Park when his horse stumbled on a molehill and threw William, whose collarbone was broken. The injury should not in itself have proved fatal, but William, at fifty-one, was old and tired, and he died at Kensington Palace on the morning of 8 March. It was ironic that a man who had done so much to frustrate French ambitions should end his life with his last words in French: ‘Je tire vers ma fin,’ ‘I draw near my end.’ Bishop Burnet raced across London to throw himself at Anne’s feet, ‘full of joy and duty’, and tell her that her ‘sunshine day’ had come at last, and she was queen. For Marlborough, already described as her ‘grand vizier’, the sun could scarcely have beamed more brightly.