4

A Full Gale of Favour

Marlborough was fifty-one years old when he left London for The Hague on 14 March 1702, blown ‘by a full gale of favour’, to reassure the members of the Grand Alliance that England was steadfast in her commitment. The previous summer William, conscious of his own failing health, had chosen Marlborough to command the twelve battalions sent to the Low Countries and made him ambassador to the Dutch Republic. But if Marlborough was then glad of such important employment, he was now wholly replete with honour and dignity. The queen had made him a Knight of the Garter immediately after her succession, and went on to appoint him captain general of her army and master general of the ordnance. Lord Romney was dispossessed, though the broad arrow from his coat of arms long survived as an emblem of government property. Marlborough was also reappointed ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the United Provinces, and this post alone was worth £100 a day, with £1,500 to provide for his equipage and £2,500 for the appropriate plate.

The garter was a particular delight, for he had hoped for it, all those years ago, as a reward for Cork and Kinsale. In those days knights of orders of chivalry wore their insignia most of the time, with braid and tinsel stars sewn to garments like cloaks and overcoats. The practice was not always wise. Berwick says that Schomberg was identified by his garter at the Boyne, and an unlucky French officer, writing home after Blenheim, lamented that his Württemberg decoration had drawn Allied cavalrymen like wasps to a honeypot. Within minutes he had ‘two sword-cuts to the head, a sword-cut which pierced my arm, the contusion of a ball on the leg, and my horse wounded’. A kindly enemy officer took his remaining pistol and said: ‘You are welcome to quarter, follow me, I will get you cared for, and give me your cross.’ The Frenchman added glumly that: ‘I had the weakness to give him the 134 louis d’or I had in a purse; but anyone else would have done the same to make them well disposed and to avoid being massacred.’¹ It was some time before Marlborough had quite enough stars. As late as April 1704 he asked Sarah to arrange for Salamander Cutts, due back in Flanders, to bring him some extra insignia: ‘I desire Lord Cutts to bring me two stars, I having none to put on any clothes I shall make, and if it be not too much trouble to him, a little liquorish and rhubarb.’²

Marlborough already had considerable experience of dealing with the Dutch. They appear in many anglophone accounts as dour and curmudgeonly, always anxious to think of a reason for not fighting and a constant thorn in Marlborough’s side. Their names and titles were a trial in themselves. The field deputy that Marlborough calls ‘Mr Gilder-Malsen’ was in fact Adriaen van Borssele van der Hooghe, Heer van Gueldermalsen.^*

Many of the differences of opinion between Marlborough and the most indispensable of Britain’s allies were rooted deep in that black alluvial soil of the United Provinces. The seven provinces which constituted the Dutch Republic had torn themselves free from Spanish rule by the early seventeenth century, leaving the remaining provinces of the Spanish Netherlands (very roughly modern Belgium and a slice of northern France, which constituted the battleground for most of Marlborough’s campaigns) squeezed uncomfortably between the new republic and the rising power of France.

Most Dutchmen regarded French incursions into the Spanish Netherlands, a constant feature of Louis XIV’s policy, as fundamentally inimical to the security of their republic, and they were also concerned for the safety of their Dutch-speaking co-religionists in the Spanish provinces of Flanders and Brabant. For just as Huguenots and Catholic Irish were marked by their own deep sense of persecution, so the Duke of Alba’s bloody attempt to burn out Dutch Protestantism (he cheerfully told King Philip that he had taken ‘eight hundred heads’ in Holy Week 1568 alone) left its enduring legacy. Moreover, many Huguenot refugees made their way to the Dutch Republic before setting off

elsewhere, and their presence helped assure Dutchmen that rope and pyre would accompany French armies.

The Norman gentleman Isaac Dumont de Bostaquet escaped to Rotterdam by way of Hesdin and Courtrai. There he heard that he had been sentenced to death in his absence: his son-in-law was to go to the galleys for three years, and their womenfolk were to have their heads shaved and to be put in a convent for life.³ Once a French officer, he now swore an oath to the States-General and happily picked up the pay of 520 livres given to captains who had left the active list. The Dutch did not simply give him religious freedom, but they paid him to exercise it. There was a remarkable degree of religious toleration in the Dutch Republic. Laws against Roman Catholics were not enforced, the established Calvinist Church was on good terms with the francophone Walloon Church, and a variety of Protestant sects flourished. The English Quaker William Penn argued, from his experience of the Dutch, that union of interests and not of opinions brought peace to kingdoms – which seems, in our own age riven by divergent opinion, to be a profound truth.

The Dutch state was a confederacy, each of its provinces governed by an elected provincial estate headed by a paid official known as the pensionary. The provincial estates sent delegates to the States-General, where each province had a single vote regardless of the number of delegates it contributed. The pensionary of Holland, the largest and richest of the provinces, was known as the grand pensionary, and he was as near as the republic came to having a chief executive. The very term confused most Englishmen, and even Marlborough, who worked closely with him, habitually translated the word as ‘pensioner’, which gives quite the wrong impression.

The grand pensionary was in day-to-day charge of foreign affairs, and presided over the Council of State, whose greffier functioned almost as a cabinet secretary. Each province had a stadholder, and the House of Orange had long provided the stadholder for the United Provinces: William’s death had left a gap that could not be filled. Few of the estates even tried to elect a successor, and the Dutch were to fight this war without the unifying direction, personal and political, provided by William in the last. Elections in 1702 had left the anti-Orange, republican and traditionally anti-war party in power, but concern about French activities in the Spanish Netherlands, French restrictions on Dutch trade and early evidence that a Spain which toed the French line would exclude the Dutch from trade with its dominions overseas, meant that even anti-Orangists were, in that very Dutch way, not at all keen on the war but determined to prosecute it to a successful conclusion.

The structure of their state, however, made this difficult. There was always tension between the demands of the sea power on which this maritime nation relied, and the armies necessary to seize and retain a barrier between the republic and France. This inevitably played itself out in friction with the British, who complained that the Dutch did not commit sufficient ships to convoy protection, placing an unreasonable burden on the Royal Navy. The Dutch collegiate system of government made even the England of Queen Anne look slick and centralised. There were five independent admiralty boards, whose deputies met to discuss the composition and funding of fleets. The States-General nominated the naval commander-in-chief, but the provincial boards all selected their own admirals. It was not a recipe for clear command and decisive action.

Each provincial estate elected deputies to accompany Dutch armies in the field. Although they were technically civilians, like any sensible gentleman on his travels they carried sword and pistols, and Sicco van Goslinga, the best-known of them, argued that, as direct representatives of the Dutch state, they held residual command authority. Army commanders habitually put major decisions to the vote of a council of war consisting of their senior generals. Even this was rarely a simple process, but Dutch generals could only fight if their field deputies (numbering from six in 1703 to three in 1704 and collectively called ‘the deputation’) concurred, quite regardless of what an Allied commander-in-chief might wish. Field deputies were not necessarily idle or obstructive, but there would be times when their view of what was best for Zealand or Friesland would not mesh comfortably with a British commander’s desire to attack the French that very morning.

Richard Kane of the Royal Regiment of Foot of Ireland believed that in 1702 Marlborough’s lack of experience of command on such a scale naturally made the Dutch a little concerned.

My Lord Marlborough knew that the eyes of all the Confederates were upon him, he never having had the like command before, but especially the States General, who purely to oblige the Queen of England, not only placed him at the head of their army, but even the safety of their country in a great measure depended on his conduct. However, as it had always been the practice of that state, even in the King’s time, to send two of their Council of State with generals into the field, who always acted in concert, they sent with my Lord two of the most experienced men among them as their Field Deputies, which my Lord could not take ill, since it had been their constant practice, though as he ever did, watched all opportunities to give a bold stroke at his first setting out to fix a reputation.⁴

At precisely the same time Marlborough’s private secretary, Adam de Cardonnel, told secretary Blathwayt that bold strokes would be some time in coming.

You will wonder, after what I wrote the last post, to find us on this side of the Meuse; it was then resolved to pass over, but the Dutch are so timorous that they will not venture their army out of sight while the French are so near, and the King of Prussia is of the same opinion, for fear of exposing what is left in the country of Cleve.⁵

Soon afterwards Marlborough admitted to Godolphin that he was finding coalition command harder than he had expected.

I have but too much reason to complain that the ten thousand men upon our right did not march as soon as I sent the orders, which if they had I believe we should have had a very easy victory, for their whole left was in disorder. However, I have thought it very much for her Majesty’s service to take no [formal] notice of it, as you will see by my letter to the States. But my Lord Rivers and almost all the general officers of my right were with me when I sent the orders, so that notwithstanding the care I take to hinder it, they do talk.⁶

Anthonie Heinsius, who had become grand pensionary in 1689, had served as Dutch envoy to Versailles after the Peace of Nijmegen. He had no success whatever in persuading the French to relinquish William’s principality of Orange, and emerged as an inveterate opponent of French expansionism. He was at first anti-Orangist, but had worked increasingly closely with William, who had persuaded him to become grand pensionary. One historian suggests that after William became king of England Heinsius was effectively his alter ego, aware of his deepest thoughts and acting as his most important personal link with the United Provinces. In William’s reign the English and Dutch diplomatic services had worked almost as one, though the links unravelled after William’s death.

The personal relationship between Marlborough and Heinsius, already well established by 1702, was fundamental to the success of the Grand Alliance. They were very different. Heinsius, born in 1641, was a bachelor of simple tastes, whose crushing workload left him little time for any other interests. Although he was widely respected by his countrymen he could never command the loyalty which had attached to William, and as divergent elements welled up within the United Provinces he drew closer to Marlborough. When Marlborough’s grasp on power was fatally weakened in 1711 and the British government was actively considering making a separate peace, it avoided his outright dismissal until the very end of the year because his long friendship with Heinsius helped cloak a policy which would leave the Dutch exposed in the peace negotiations at Utrecht. One of the many anguishes of Marlborough’s fall was having to watch, from the sidelines, the shabby treatment of someone who had become an old comrade.

In the spring of 1702, however, the States-General could not have been more supportive. They at once approved Marlborough’s demand for the inclusion of ‘the expulsion of the pretended Prince of Wales from France’ among the articles of the Grand Alliance, and went on to appoint him deputy captain general of their army. The emperor was uneasy about having the Prince of Wales, son of an anointed king, described as ‘pretended’, but Marlborough made it clear to his ambassador that the clause was fundamental to keeping England in the alliance. Leopold speedily concluded, after speaking to his confessor, that the word could as well mean ‘claimant’ as ‘impostor’, and his emissary Count Goes duly signed the article.

The original treaty, duly modified by this new clause, had subsidiary treaties in which members of the alliance contracted to provide specified forces. The Prussians, for instance, agreed to provide two regiments of cavalry at 874 men apiece and five regiments of infantry, each of twelve companies apiece, or 4,255 men in all. The contingent would be paid for half by the English and half by ‘their High Mightinesses’ of the States-General, and pay was to start immediately the contingent entered Dutch territory. There was a recall clause:

If the King of Prussia comes to be attacked in his own territory, far away from the Rhine, and should be obliged to demand the return of the said troops, they will be sent back to him immediately, without dispute.⁷

The original document was, naturally enough, in French.

Similar agreements governed the military contributions made to the Grand Alliance by other small states, and it is important to recognise from the outset just how important they were. It was Danish dragoons who began the crumbling of the French position at Ramillies by taking the village of Taviers, and Hanoverian cavalry who pushed the French back across the Norken stream at Oudenarde: the British element in Marlborough’s armies was almost always outnumbered by its non-British component. Agreements with Allied contributors required negotiation and re-negotiation, with arrangements for pay and victualling requiring careful attention, for irregularly-paid men often took to looting regardless of whether or not they were on friendly territory. Discipline was a national responsibility, and arrangements would often specify where disciplinary authority ultimately lay. When a British staff officer with a small cavalry escort saw some Danes, accompanied by two officers, engaged in large-scale looting he was wise enough to take no action until British reinforcements arrived. When he handed over the miscreants to a Danish general the officers were at once put in irons, and he was assured that they would be shot forthwith.

Much of Marlborough’s time for the next nine years would be taken up with a thousand and one practical issues of coalition warfare. His correspondence files bulge with letters to monarchs, ambassadors and contingent commanders, and his background as courtier and diplomat was every bit as useful as his ability as a soldier. During the campaigning season operational matters were uppermost. When the Imperialist General Thungen was taking charge of the siege of Ulm in August 1704, Marlborough sent him some Prussian reinforcements.

Mr Schlundt, who will have the honour to present this to you, is a colonel of artillery in the service of the King of Prussia, who his Majesty sends with a brigade, specified on the enclosed list, to assist us in our enterprises. He is an officer of merit and experience, and I do not in the least doubt that you will be wholly pleased with him. When you no longer have need of him, I beg you to send him back to me with his men, and to give them wagons and the other necessities for their journey. I wish you, with all my heart, a happy success, and I am, with real esteem and friendship,

Yours, etc,

Marlborough⁸

When the armies were in winter quarters Marlborough’s mind ran towards detailed issues of structures and establishments. In December 1706 he told Heinsius:

You may remember when it was under deliberation at The Hague, I told you my thoughts that it would be both for the service and for the honour of your troops that your squadrons should be of equal force with the rest of the army, therefore I hope the addition of eight men to a troop will meet with no difficulty, and I think you may depend that the Queen will be ready to increase her foot by an equal proportion to the charge you are at; in order whereto I should be very glad if you would send me, as soon as may be, an estimate of the numbers and expense of this augmentation on your part.⁹

Of course his responsibilities did not end there. He was both captain general of the British army and master general of the ordnance, and in consequence in charge not only of the ‘marching regiments’ of horse and foot, but also of the ‘gentlemen of the ordnance’, the artillery and engineers, as well as all fortifications and many military supplies. By holding both posts he was able to exercise an almost unmatched degree of control over the British army, but at the cost of mastering yet more detail. In July 1702 he wrote his first formal letter to the principal officers of the ordnance, establishing the policy that was to prevail during his tenure of the post.

I am obliged to you for your letter of the 30th past, and am very glad to see at the same time that the Queen has thought fit to honour me with an employment of the greatest trust. Her Majesty has been pleased to place me at a board with gentlemen of so much ability and experience, I do not doubt but with your advice and assistance the service will be carried on to Her Majesty’s entire satisfaction, and answer the great confidence reposed in us, wherein I shall always be ready to do my part.

I have likewise your letter of the 4th instant relating to the employments that are become void by this new commission and the vacancies that may happen by death or otherwise among the gunners of the garrisons, and other small officers, and in answer must desire that for such vacancies, where Her Majesty’s service may require the present filling them up, you will do it without expecting further notice from me; but for the others, where the delay may be of no prejudice to the service, I should be glad they might be deferred to my return.

As to the storekeeper and gunner of Scarborough, I leave it to you to do therein as upon examination of the complaint you shall find the merit of the case to deserve, either by restoring him or confirming the other who is now acting in his place.¹⁰

Marlborough did not simply sanction a policy of laissez-faire, for as soon as the board drew something to his attention he moved quickly. On 25 August 1707 he wrote from the army’s camp in Soignies, just off the 1815 battlefield of Waterloo, to inform the board that:

I have received your letter of the 8th inst. relating to the arms that are making in Holland for the service of Ireland, and send you the enclosed memorial which Lieutenant-General Ingoldsby has delivered to me, wherein he sets forth the extravagant rate demanded for the transport of the said arms, besides five per cent customs demanded on their exportation, and desire you will move the Prince’s council to appoint a man of war as soon as any can be spared, to receive the arms in Holland and carry them directly to Ireland to save that expense; in the meantime I shall apply to have the customs taken off. The Lieutenant-General assures me that the arms will be completed within the term of the contract, which he alleged to be eighteen months from the time the advance was made in December last.¹¹

Marlborough had firm views on arms and equipment as captain general, and had to ensure, as master general of the ordnance, that these demands were met. When he reached the Continent in 1702 the matchlock musket had all but disappeared from British service, replaced by versions of the flintlock. The socket bayonet, which fitted around the musket’s muzzle so that the weapon could be loaded and fired with the bayonet fixed, was fast replacing the inconvenient plug bayonet. The pike, however, was trailed for far longer than we might suppose. In about 1702 Peter Drake was serving in Marlborough’s own regiment, having been compulsorily re-enlisted after one of his many desertions. It ‘had been commanded by the Marquis [de Puisan], who in coming from Ireland to join his regiment, was lost at sea: upon which it became General Seymour’s, and soon after Lord Marlborough’s; so that in less than five months we had three colonels’. He had to master pike drill, because

my size made me a pikeman against my will, though indeed I liked that service, and thought it the most becoming and manly of all. There was an encouragement (to induce a brisk and smart motion in charging) of half a crown to every one that should break a pike in that motion, and I had the good fortune to break two before I left the regiment.¹²

Naturally enough Drake soon deserted, first to a Dutch regiment in Spanish pay, and then to Old Pretender’s Life Guard of Horse, having somehow, in the process, changed sides.

As late as 1704 there were evidently not enough muskets for all, and Major General the Earl of Portmore, then at Plymouth, told the Duke of Somerset:

I have the honour of receiving an order from your Grace directing the storekeeper of this place to deliver 450 firelock in lieu of the like number of pikes which some of the regiments that come from Holland [on their way to Portugal] have, as they say, left behind by his Grace the Duke of Marlborough’s allowance.

The storekeeper would not comply unless given a direct order from the ordnance board, because some troops would sail unarmed if he did so.¹³

When Richard Kane wrote his New System of Military Discipline after 1714 he observed that a battalion used to form up in three grand divisions, musketeers on the flanks and pikes in the centre, but now, ‘since pikes have been laid aside’, a new system was required. The abolition of the pike was not universally supported. Lieutenant General Henry ‘Hangman’ Hawley, a government commander in the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, agreed that Marlborough had been anxious to get rid of the pike. However, he argued, as a professional cavalry officer, that he would be hard pressed to break a battalion of pikemen in good order, and the weapon’s long reach might do more harm to his troopers than ill-aimed musketry. Marshal Saxe, who saw his first battle as an Imperialist officer at Malplaquet, always argued that the pike should be retained, because it might be needed one summer’s afternoon.

Marlborough was convinced, however, that infantry primarily achieved its effect by fire, and only secondarily by shock, while for cavalry the reverse was true. Kane tells us that he was only prepared ‘to allow the horse but three charges of powder and ball to each man for a campaign, and then only for guarding their horses when at grass, and not to be made use of in action’.¹⁴ He believed that cavalry should attack in close order, charging at the last moment so as to preserve alignment but on no account pausing to fire their pistols. The sheer terror of charging squadrons often persuaded their opponents to go ‘threes about’. A Royal Dragoon described his first charge: ‘We advanced up to them so far as our horses could go with a loud huzzah, but they did not like our appearance, so they did not give us so much as one salute, but all ran in a confused manner away.’¹⁵ Such tactics, in Marlborough’s view, demanded that all troopers should wear pistol-proof cuirasses and have a ‘secret’ (spider-shaped iron lining) in their felt hats. Some Allied horse wore cuirasses anyway, and some Imperialist cavalry had retained the lobster-tailed zischägge. However, getting the Dutch to provide their cavalry with body armour required yet more work on Heinsius.

Much of Marlborough’s ordnance work could be delegated, but as far as the army’s regiments of horse and foot were concerned, a far greater degree of control was required. On 6 April 1704, when he was about to leave Harwich for the Continent, he wrote to Sir Charles Hedges, briefly the sole secretary of state (and a man much disliked by Sarah as having ‘no capacity, no quality nor interest’) to tell him:

Herewith I send you a list of general officers to be promoted this year, with a list of officers for the two new regiments of foot to be raised under the command of the Lord Paston and Col Heyman Rooke; as also a fourth list of some officers to be commissioned in the Guards, and the Lord Lucas’s regiment, all of which I desire you will lay before Her Majesty and His Royal Highness and prepare commissions thereupon, according to the directions you shall receive in that behalf.

The commissions for the General officers and Brigadiers may bear the date of 1st January last, though it is not intended that those who are to receive pay should commence their allowance before the 1st May next.

I must desire you will remind His Royal Highness, at a proper time, of providing for Mr Montague [Wortley] on the first vacancy of a colours in the Foot Guards.¹⁶

Hedges was one of the great officers of state, albeit a man frequently in trouble over electoral investigations and a loyal supporter of his own interests, but there is no mistaking Marlborough’s peremptory tone. In contrast, by the same post he winged a letter off to secretary Blathwayt, upon whose judgement he had come to rely, even though he was a veteran of Charles II’s administration who was now ‘grown somewhat stiff and rusty’.

I received last night your letter of the 6th, and am just going to embark. I was in hopes I should have taken with me all the troops from home, but I shall be obliged to leave behind me four companies of Sir Richard Temple’s, and about fifty dragoons for the next embarkation for the want of part of our shipping … I must recommend to you that these, with Farrington’s regiment, be all put on board between the 18th and 20th of this month at the farthest, that a convoy may be ready against that time. I shall on this occasion depend upon your care, of which I have had so long experience, and shall always be ready to give you all possible marks of my friendship, and the esteem wherewith I am,

Sir, yours &c Marlborough¹⁷

There was never much shelter from the barrage of calls upon his interest. When a lady made a very general demand for a commission for a relative, he professed himself anxious to oblige, but added that it would assist him if she could tell him just which army the youngster had in mind. A bloody battle produced a flurry of requests. On 30 September 1709, in the aftermath of Malplaquet, he told the Duke of Somerset, seeking a regiment for his son Lord Hertford:

We have only two regiments vacant, that of Brigadier Lalo, and Sir Thomas Prendergast’s; the former, which is the eldest of the two, by agreement between the Brigadier and Lord Mordaunt, is to return to his Lordship as soon as peace is made, so that I know not whether Your Grace may be willing Lord Hertford should accept it with that encumbrance; the other is entirely at my disposal, and I will sign no commission till I receive your answer.¹⁸

Colonel Pennefather was anxious to sell a vacant company in his regiment, and engaged Brigadier Sabine to lobby Marlborough on his behalf. Marlborough could not help him.

I should willingly have agreed to it were it not for the pressing instances of the Prince of Savoy and others on behalf of Lieutenant Jones, to whom I am therefore obliged to give it, but I have promised the Brigadier that you shall have the benefit of the first that become vacant.¹⁹

Lord Halifax hoped that Lieutenant Barton might be preferred, ‘but there is no vacancy in his regiment, and you are too just to desire I should do it to the prejudice of such as were in the battle’.²⁰ Marlborough deployed his own interest almost as often, whether it was trying to get a diplomatic post for that convicted duellist the Master of Sinclair, casting his vote as a Scots peer for the election of the Earls of Orkney and Stair as two of the sixteen representative Scots peers sitting at Westminster after the Union, or recommending Mr Abel the singer, ‘whose fine voice and manner has not displeased His Imperial Majesty’, to that cultured monarch the king of Portugal.²¹

Marlborough’s responsibilities immeasurably outweighed those exercised by British commanders-in-chief in the great wars of the twentieth century, for he did not simply execute strategy but helped to determine it. In the context of 1944, for instance, he would have been Eisenhower, Montgomery and Brooke rolled into one. He was able to do this because of his intimate relationship with the man who was as close as politics then allowed to being prime minister. Sidney Godolphin was appointed lord high treasurer on the accession of Anne, and advanced to earl in 1706. He was eventually unseated by the Tories in 1710, a process to which Sarah Marlborough’s replacement as Anne’s confidante by Abigail Hill (later Lady Masham) contributed. Godolphin was Marlborough’s closest friend and political associate, and in 1712 when he was tired, friendless and felt death’s fingers groping for him, he went to Marlborough’s home, Holywell House, to await the end. ‘The Whigs have lost a great support in the Earl of Godolphin,’ wrote Richard Swift, by then a Tory pamphleteer. ‘’Tis good jest to hear the ministers talk of him now with humanity and pity, because he is dead, and can do them no more hurt.’²²

The fighting in Spain, where British troops were commanded first by Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, and then by that rheumy old Huguenot warrior Henri de Ruvigny, Viscount Galway, lay outside the compass of Marlborough’s sphere of tactical command. Yet it was never far from his thoughts, for he was concerned that the British army could never be simultaneously strong enough in the Low Countries and the Iberian Peninsula, and that the country’s desire to have ‘No Peace without Spain’ would compel the diversion of resources from the war’s main theatre to an important but necessarily subsidiary one. In October 1703 he informed Godolphin:

Mr Secretary [Hedges] sends me word that Lord Nottingham would send me her Majesty’s commands concerning the 2,000 men for Portugal. Not having heard from him, I take it for granted he wrote to me by that packet that is lost. However, I have directed the regiments of Leigh and Lord Baltimore to be ready for to be embarked, which has given so much alarm here, that I had a deputation this day from the States, to represent to me the dangerous consequence of what might happen, by drawing away without their consent any of those troops which were agreed at the beginning of the war … ²³

This might almost be Sir John French, writing to Lord Kitchener in the spring of 1915 to say how much the French resented the diversion of British troops to the Dardanelles.

Both of the Marlboroughs had deep reservations about Peterborough. Sarah thought that his ‘vileness of soul’ had led him into ‘a sort of knight errantry’ with Lord Rivers, himself ‘of no better reputation than a common cheat or pickpocket’.²⁴ Peterborough, initially a Whig, was to win several victories in Spain. The capture of Barcelona owed much to his efforts: when the attackers shrank from the assault on the fort of Montjuich, ‘Lord Peterborough … fell into the horriblest passion that ever man was seen in, and with a great deal of bravery and resolution, led us back to the part we had quitted.’²⁵

However, Peterborough got on badly with other Allied commanders, and suggested a variety of schemes so puzzling that there was reason to believe that he did not in fact wish to see the Archduke Charles installed as king of Spain. Summoned home to explain himself in 1707, he was championed by the Tories, and soon became a member of the opposition to Godolphin and Marlborough. Richard Savage, 4th Earl Rivers, was a general who at first enjoyed Marlborough’s patronage, but he too slid across to the opposition, and succeeded Marlborough when he was dismissed as master general of the ordnance. Both were disappointed military commanders who became political opponents, and both, when the dice rolled again, lost their offices under George I and died in exile.

In April 1707 Galway was beaten by Berwick at Almanza and several British regiments were destroyed, and in late 1710 the capitulation of a British force at Brihuega effectively doomed Allied hopes in Spain. Marlborough, as captain general, was part of the opposition’s target when the Tory leader Henry St John attacked the government for failing to ensure that the Almanza regiments were up to strength: of almost 30,000 troops on the payroll for Spain fewer than 9,000 had actually been present at the battle. Marlborough was then involved in trying to find extra recruits for ‘re-forming broken battalions’, for influential colonels were not prepared to see their regiments disappear, at precisely the same time that Flanders made its own inexorable demands for manpower and, as a theatre commander in his own right, Marlborough had a campaign to fight.

Gentlemen of the Staff

This workload was unending and potentially crushing, and if its tenor changed between the campaign season and the winter months, its weight scarcely ever receded. Marlborough coped as well as he did not simply because of personal energy and an acute brain, but because the delegation of routine work was fundamental to his style of command. His principal staff officer, ‘quartermaster general’ in the terminology of the age, was William Cadogan. Cadogan’s family was Welsh, but his grandfather had gone to Ireland with Charles I’s lord deputy, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. He later became a major in the parliamentarian army and served as governor of Trim Castle, whose massy square Norman keep still guards the River Boyne many miles upstream of the battlefield. His son Henry married Bridget, daughter of the regicide Sir Hardress Waller, and they had two sons and two daughters. Henry Cadogan was determined that William, born in 1672, should follow him into the law, and he duly went to Trinity College Dublin, where he met the convivial Lord Raby, subsequently Earl of Strafford.

William Cadogan escaped north when the Jacobites arrived in 1689, and was commissioned as a cornet in the Enniskillen Dragoons. He fought on the Boyne and took part in Marlborough’s attacks on Cork and Kinsale. In 1694 he bought a captaincy in Thomas Erle’s Regiment of Foot, and was present when William of Orange recaptured Namur the following year. Cadogan went back to the Enniskillen Dragoons as major in 1698, but in 1701 we find him entrusted with the transport of Danish troops to the Low Countries, dealing with issues which went well beyond the responsibilities of the average major. ‘I had by the Danish post that came in this morning letters from the Duke of Württemberg and Mr Gregg,’ he told secretary Blathwayt,

which to my very great satisfaction brought an account that the final order was given for the march of the troops and that it would be dispatched by the same post, of which I immediately sent notice to the Danish Commissary General, and to let him know how we were now ready to receive the troops. I have ordered the ships to fall down the river with the first tide to Gluckstadt, and having before settled everything in relation to the march of the horse, there can be no further delay in this matter.²⁶

There is no direct evidence that Cadogan knew Marlborough well because they had served together at Cork and Kinsale. After all, Marlborough was a lieutenant general and Cadogan a cornet, although his huge size did mean that he was a hard man to miss. Winston S. Churchill’s assertion that ‘they were already old friends’ is pure speculation. However, Cadogan had certainly earned Blathwayt’s approval by the way he dealt with the Dutch in early 1702, and the circumstances argue strongly for some previous relationship with Marlborough, because that summer he was appointed colonel of foot and quartermaster general on ten shillings a day. Marlborough gained him an extraordinary payment of £175.4s early in 1703, and soon afterwards he was appointed colonel of the Earl of Arran’s Regiment of Horse.

Cadogan’s career now moved in parallel with Marlborough’s. He was promoted steadily, and, like his chief, made a handsome profit from a variety of perquisites and investments. In 1709 he was able to spend over £6,000 buying the Caversham estate near Reading, and his share of what his most recent biographer calls the ‘net fraudulent profit’ on insider dealing in 1708 alone was over £33,000.²⁷ In 1706 he slid easily into the House of Commons, in the Whig interest, as Member for Woodstock, a borough firmly in Marlborough’s pocket.

If we deplore Cadogan’s avarice we cannot but admire his courage. After the fall of Marlborough he must have known that his own future was decidedly cloudy, but he wrote to Robert Harley, now Earl of Oxford and one of the main agents of Marlborough’s downfall, asking permission to join him on his travels on the Continent. ‘The Duke of Marlborough’s ill-health,’ he wrote, ‘the inconvenience a winter’s journey exposes him to, and his being without any one friend to accompany him, make the requesting leave to wait on him an indispensable duty on me, who for so many years have been honoured with his confidence and favour and [owe] all I have in the world to his favour.’²⁸ He was allowed leave, and was, as he must have expected, dismissed from all his appointments immediately afterwards.

When Marlborough’s fortunes turned again, Cadogan shared them. In February 1718, in uneasy combination with the Duke of Argyll, he was commanding the government forces putting down the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland, and heard that he was to receive a peerage. He wrote to Marlborough at once, to ‘beg leave to return my most humble thanks for your great goodness in being pleased to approve of the services I have endeavoured to render here, and Your Grace’s representing them so very favourably to His Majesty’.

He hoped to have his barony styled ‘of Cadogan, near Wrexham on the borders of Wales’. He reminded Marlborough that he had no son, and had settled his fortune on his brother, and so it would be very generous if the title could slide sideways after his own death. ‘I humbly beg pardon for mentioning it,’ he wrote, as if they were still back in the old days, as commander-in-chief and quartermaster general, ‘and entreat Your Grace to consider it no more than if I had not.’²⁹ At that time the tiny hamlet of Cadogan was not deemed suitable to sustain a peerage, but when, after a flurry of distinguished diplomatic work, Cadogan was raised to an earldom, he was duly made ‘Earl of Cadogan in Denbighshire; Viscount of Caversham in Oxfordshire; and Baron Oakley, in Buckinghamshire’.³⁰

Cadogan was big, hard-headed – often with a glass in his hand but rarely in drink – and an inveterate gambler, both at the tables and, less creditably, by advising his London-based business partner to bet on the progress of campaigns. ‘They now give 20 Guineas for £100 if either Mons, Charleroi, Lille, Tournai or Namur be not taken by the last of October,’ wrote his cautious associate, ‘but I won’t venture without your advice.’³¹ In the autumn of 1707, when Cadogan replaced George Stepney as envoy to the States-General, the same friend wrote to ‘congratulate you on two pieces of good news that the town is full of, one that you have won six thousand pistoles at play, and the other that you are to reside at the Hague in the room of Mr Stepney’.³² Cadogan spoke fluent French, and in 1702 he married Margaretta Munter, a beautiful Dutch heiress, and quickly added both Dutch and German to his languages.

Careful study of both the Cadogan papers and the Marlborough – Cadogan correspondence in the British Library shows the real scale of Cadogan’s contribution. First, during the winter months he was in charge of what we would now, less than elegantly, term ‘force packaging’ and was then called drawing up the order of battle. The Allied forces for the coming campaigning season were divided into brigades, usually on a national basis. Larger formations like divisions did not then exist, but it was customary to divide an army up into formations of the right and left wing, and sometimes to subdivide these further into first and second lines, appointing general officers to command them. Frustratingly for historians, these definitions held good for the whole of a campaign, so it was perfectly possible for the army’s right wing to find itself, after a good deal of marching and countermarching, on the left flank of the battle.

The process of drawing up the order of battle needed careful thought, to gratify national preferences and minimise clashes of personalities. Although generals might not always find it easy to ensure that another nation’s contingents complied with their orders, the generals of an allied army ranked on a common roll of seniority by the date of their current commission, and it was important to ensure that nations supplying large contingents did not suddenly find themselves commanded by a very senior officer from another, much less significant, force. In August 1703 Marlborough warned Godolphin:

If I leave the army some time before they go to garrison, it would be for the honour of the English that the right wing should be commanded by an Englishman; and that can’t be, there being several lieutenant generals among the foreigners that are elder [i.e. senior] than our lieutenant generals, so that I would beg the favour of the Queen that I might have a commission sent to me for my brother, he being the oldest [English] lieutenant general, to be General of the Foot. I desire that nobody might know of the commission, for if I did not leave the army before they went into garrison, I would not make use of the commission.³³

When Marlborough went back to England the following month General Charles Churchill duly took command of the right wing of the army, the troops in English pay.

In the winter months Cadogan compiled orders of battle, sent them to England for Marlborough’s approval, and then awaited orders for ‘assembling the army at the time your Grace is pleased to direct it’. Assembling too early would start the logistic meter ticking too soon, with foraging parties bringing in hay and bread contractors busy. Assembling it too late, though, might mean that the French would be able to steal a march. In April 1709 Cadogan informed Marlborough: ‘Fine weather has forwarded everything, and a great deal of the corn which was thought lost begins to spring out again, so that suffering the assembly of the army for eight or ten days is as long as any will require.’³⁴ On 10 April 1710 he acknowledged receipt of Marlborough’s letter of the eighth, and said that he was prepared

to give all orders that may be necessary in your Grace’s name. ’Tis with great satisfaction that I acquaint your Grace our magazines and everything of that kind are in the readiness that could be desired, and due care is taken for the providing wood, straw and [?] in the places the troops encamp at in their passage, what relates to the bread and bread wagons is also requested, so that I hope your Grace on joining the army will find all matters in the forwardness and order you expected.³⁵

He did not merely act as the passive instrument of Marlborough’s endeavour, but developed operational plans along the lines laid down in outline by his chief. In February 1711 he announced:

I have the honour to enclose to your Grace the memorial I prepared for assembling the army in the middle of April NS [New Style, i.e. according to the Continental calendar] in order to make the siege of Douai. I [have] not entered into any reasons concerning the importance of the design, the facility of the expedition, or the impossibility of the enemy’s being able to provide supplies to subsist a body of troops able either to oppose our forming the siege, or to embarrass us by a diversion … This project is founded on taking the field on the 10th of April NS and success absolutely depends upon it.³⁶

Douai duly fell in June.

Cadogan had prime responsibility for the army’s logistics, dealing with the Dutch contractors who supplied bread to the army when it was not so far from its bases that it was forced to bake its own. Roads and waterways alike were his concern. In August 1710 he wrote from Courtrai, possibly to Marlborough’s private secretary, to say:

I received at Lille the favour of yours by Colonel Alexander. I have endeavoured to execute his Grace’s commands in relation to the bread, and hope such measures as are now taken about that matter, as shall remove all … complaint in the future. I was obliged to go beyond St Eloi to meet the artillery boats. I came on with them all night and they are now passing the sluices at Harleseck. They will get this afternoon to Menin, and I hope tonight or tomorrow morning at the camp. If my Lord Duke should not be at home when this comes into your hands, I beg the enclosed may be sent to him.³⁷

Cadogan was also Marlborough’s intelligence chief. He collated information extracted from prisoners and deserters, and given by officers who had been taken prisoner but were then exchanged. In August 1702, for instance, Lord Mark Kerr, Marlborough’s aide de camp, was captured and entertained by the Duke of Berwick, then a lieutenant general, who generously, as one nobleman to another, showed him the French army. The youngster kept his wits about him and reported that the French had seventy-two battalions and 109 squadrons, ‘but he says that our battalions are much stronger than theirs’.

In addition to dealing with day-to-day tactical intelligence, Cadogan ran a network of agents in France, especially at the principal seaports. In 1708, for example, his agent at Dunkirk told him that a French fleet was ready to embark fifteen battalions and the Old Pretender in person, and he was informed immediately the fleet sailed northwards. He then sent a sloop, escorted by a fast Dutch privateer, to tell Admiral Sir George Byng what was afoot, and prepared to embark ten British and Dutch battalions for Scotland, the expedition’s probable destination, as soon as a convoy arrived.³⁸ In the event the comte de Forbin, commanding the French squadron, missed his landfall, and by the time he entered the Firth of Forth, his selected objective, Byng was close behind. Forbin did not regard the loss of his little squadron as a price worth paying to get James’s force ashore, and he ran for it, losing one ship, the Salisbury, captured in 1703, to her namesake HMS Salisbury in the pursuit. Forbin had mishandled the expedition, but even if James had landed the countermeasures initiated by Cadogan would probably have doomed the enterprise.

The collation of information gleaned from agents and the interception of mail over the winter months enabled Cadogan to help Marlborough fix his annual campaign plan. At the opening of the 1710 campaigning season he gave Marlborough a full intelligence brief as soon as he arrived, telling him of

my appointing the several persons I employ, to meet me on Tuesday next at Tournai. As your Grace arrives at Ghent only on Wednesday, I can come from Tournai early on Thursday to met you at Oudenarde and give your Grace an account of all I shall be able to learn of the enemy’s strength in the lines … ³⁹

Some of his intelligence was of strategic importance, and went straight to the government. In May 1709, when the French were making discreet overtures for peace, he told Sunderland that three enemy agents with passports from the Dutch had passed through The Hague on their way to Antwerp. One was ‘the post-master of Paris; and the other a Spanish courier’. He thought that the third was Marshal Boufflers, travelling incognito. Two days later he confirmed that Torcy, the French foreign minister, had passed through Brussels, and a week afterwards he was able to forward to Sunderland the peace terms Torcy had covertly offered to the Dutch. He was later able to tell Sunderland:

The last advices from Paris say the Dauphin with the Marshal Villars is to command here next summer, the Duke of Burgundy with the Marshal d’Harcourt on the Rhine, and the Duke of Burgundy in Dauphiné …

None of the French troops on this frontier have as yet received either money, clothes or recruits, nor is there any appearance of even endeavouring to form such magazines as will be necessary to subsist the troops they must bring into the field to cover their places exposed in Flanders.⁴⁰

Some information was paid for in cash, but there was sometimes a hint of payment in kind. ‘You will give me leave to remember my good friend the Conseiller Intime,’ Cadogan told Marlborough’s private secretary in 1705. ‘I hope the Tokay and the lady are provided for him as promised.’⁴¹

Cadogan’s practical good sense meant that he was never misled by simple theoretical strengths. Precise organisations varied a good deal, and some regiments (like the four-battalion Régiment du Roi) were very much bigger than others, so the armies of the age reckoned their infantry strength in battalions and their cavalry strength in squadrons. A battalion, usually commanded by a lieutenant colonel, consisted of several companies, and was meant to comprise eight hundred officers and men, while a squadron of cavalry contained two to four troops under a major or a senior captain, and had a strength of perhaps 150 officers and men. Unit numbers, often high at the start of a campaign, tended to fall off as the season wore on because of battle casualties, sickness and desertion. It was easy for one army to have more battalions and squadrons than its adversary, but actually to have fewer soldiers. In June 1707 Cadogan told Raby that Marlborough had one hundred battalions of foot and 164 squadrons of horse facing 120 French battalions and 190 squadrons, but the latter were ‘so weak that our troops who are all complete exceed them in number as much as in goodness. I think the King of France does with his troops as his money, makes three hundred men pass for a battalion, as a Louis d’or for Fifteen Livres, and our folly gives this cheat currency.’⁴²

Cadogan’s officers needed to pay constant attention to the fluctuating strengths of friendly and enemy forces. Amongst the papers of Henry Davenant, English envoy to Frankfurt and Regensburg and one of Cadogan’s correspondents, are numerous orders of battle of troops provided by German states, as well as detailed assessments, apparently from a French source, of enemy strengths. French battalions, each of thirteen companies (themselves of forty-five men and three officers apiece), should comprise 624 soldiers, and squadrons, each of four troops of thirty-five men and three officers, should number 152 soldiers. ‘But,’ added Davenant’s French informant, ‘as the infantry is not usually fully up to strength, we can reckon the battalion at 550 men at the opening of the campaign,’ falling to five hundred or even 450 as it went on.⁴³

Cadogan was even more than chief of staff, master logistician and chief of intelligence. When the army was on the move he often commanded the cavalry of the advance guard, moving about half a day ahead of the main body, likely to meet the enemy first and send a contact report back to Marlborough. At Ramillies he found the French deploying for battle, and informed Marlborough, who then hurtled forward to view the ground and make his plans while the army swung along behind. At Oudenarde, the least planned of Marlborough’s great battles, Cadogan commanded the whole of the advance guard, horse and foot, took the village of Eyne and then held it against the odds as the French counterattack rolled in. He was indeed a general for all seasons.

In so much of what follows it is sometimes hard to see where Marlborough ended and Cadogan began. Lord Strafford, admittedly a boyhood friend of Cadogan’s and a political foe of Marlborough’s, told Robert Harley: ‘I do believe the greatest part of my Lord Marlborough’s victories are owing to him; and even the Pensionary said to me, “Si vous voulez avoir un duc de Marlborough un Cadogan est nécessaire.”’ Yet recognising the part played by Cadogan does not diminish Marlborough’s stature. He could not be everywhere and do everything, and the careful delegation of responsibility, with authority to back it up, enabled him to shine as commander, alliance manager, administrator and diplomat.

Of course Cadogan could not shoulder his burden alone. His own staff, many of them holding appointments as deputy quartermaster generals, plied devolved authority of their own. Captain Richard King of Lord Orrery’s Regiment was authorised in 1707 to draw £100 in his capacity as assistant engineer by the master general of the ordnance, a good example of Marlborough rewarding in one capacity services done to him in another. As one of Cadogan’s deputies King was responsible for dealing with civilians who found themselves on the army’s line of march. In June 1709 a countess wrote from Malines:

I hear that you are on the march with the Palatine troops and are likely to pass this town. In that case, Sir, I beg you to remember that we are interested in Bonheiden, where we have meadows which may be greatly damaged by the passage of troops. So, Sir, if you can avoid that route we shall be eternally grateful to you.

She added, ‘if you pass by Malines yourself give us at least the pleasure of making use of our house’. Her husband was away at the moment, but sent his best wishes. Ambassador Stepney’s secretary, Mr Laws, wrote to ask if two villages near Brussels ‘may be entirely spared if possible and left off the routes by which the troops are to return to their winter quarters’. He too was able to hint at some reward, for ‘I am employed in this affair by so fair a person that I persuade myself, when you see her, her thanks will be a sufficient recompense for your trouble, though she granted you no other favour.’ The implication, of course, is that she might just have other favours in mind.

Captain King also dealt with bread-and-butter letters on Cadogan’s behalf. On 13 September 1708 Cadogan asked him to thank an officer ‘for his letter and exact account he gave me of everything’. He could not write a decent letter himself because he had been on the move for two days and ‘I drop asleep as I write.’ King was a colonel in 1711, and squared himself with Marlborough’s enemies before his fall. The Hanoverian succession and Marlborough’s reinstatement ruined him, and he disappears from history in 1716, blind and searching desperately for a cure.⁴⁴

Most letters from Cadogan are not in his own ‘round, half-formed schoolboy’s hand, not very beautiful to look at but very easy to read’, but are instead the work of clerks or assistants. He generally wrote to Marlborough in his own hand, however, and in February 1716, though a full general and commander-in-chief in Scotland, nonetheless apologised because ‘my arm being extremely bruised and my shoulder bone wounded by a fall I got riding from Aberdeen to Montrose obliges me to make use of another hand to write to your Grace’.⁴⁵ Similarly, many of Marlborough’s letters were written by secretaries or clerks, and his private secretary, Adam de Cardonnel, not only ran his private office in the field but led for the headquarters on many matters that were diplomatic rather than strictly military. Incoming packages of mail from the same source might be divided up between Cadogan and Cardonnel. On 26 June 1710 Cadogan told Marlborough: ‘I send Mr Cardonnel by this cover a relating of what was done in the conference here these two days past, by which your Grace will find the present want of the contractors are supplied with an advance of five hundred and fifty thousand guilders …’⁴⁶

Adam de Cardonnel, the second son of a Huguenot refugee who had got no further than Southampton, and there prospered, had become chief clerk in the secretary at war’s office, and was appointed Marlborough’s private secretary early in 1692. During Marlborough’s ascendancy he was rewarded by a parliamentary seat at Southampton, eventually being designated secretary of war in place of Walpole in 1710, although he did not actually succeed to the office, for George Granville’s Tory friends secured it instead. In February 1712 he was expelled from the House for having accepted an annual sweetener of five hundred gold ducats from Sir Solomon de Medina, the army’s main bread contractor. Many MPs had done far worse, but Cardonnel was, as his Dictionary of National Biography entry asserts, ‘a pawn in a larger political game’. His wife died the following year, and Marlborough, then in exile in Frankfurt, wrote him a touching letter.

I would have written to you sooner, dear Cardonnel, if I had believed it possible to say anything to lessen your grief; but I think of all the worldly misfortunes, the losing what one loves is the greatest, and nothing but time can ease you. However, I could not deny myself any longer the satisfaction of writing to assure you that I shall always be very sorry for anything that is a trouble to you, and that I long for the opportunity of assuring you myself that I am your humble servant and faithful friend.

He remained Marlborough’s secretary until his death in 1719, and was buried in Chiswick, not far from Marlborough’s old lover Barbara Castlemaine.

Cardonnel’s correspondence, much of it now in the British Library, gives a penetrating view of attitudes at Marlborough’s headquarters. In July 1703 he told John Ellis, an under-secretary in London, that both Marlborough and the deputies wanted the Dutch engineer Coehoorn to besiege Ostend, ‘but I find ’twill be very difficult to persuade the old gentleman to do his part, so that in all probability we soon return again towards the Maas’. He added: ‘My Lord Duke has a very hard task indeed to keep our generals in humour and to prevent their falling out among themselves, particularly Lieut General Slangenburg, who is of a very unhappy temper to command an army.’⁴⁷ Although Cardonnel was not a soldier, he ran many of a soldier’s risks. On the way to Blenheim in 1704 he reported: ‘Our last march was all in fire and smoke. I wish to God it were well over that I might get safe out of this country.’ In May 1706 he told Ambassador Stepney that the pursuit after Ramillies had left him ‘almost dead with the fatigue of marching, fighting (or at least the fright and apprehension of it) and writing for three days together without any rest’.⁴⁸

The wars of the period were divided into distinct annual campaigns, although on occasion a commander might mount a surprise attack in the winter if he thought the reason good enough. In the winter of 1703–04 Colonel de la Colonie, troubled by the raids of Imperial hussars (‘a sort bandit on horseback’), led three hundred of his Bavarian grenadiers and two squadrons of cavalry to the village where they were quartered and took them by surprise in the darkness. The hussars turned out in their shirts, but could offer no effective resistance to men who were not over-anxious to take prisoners. De la Colonie killed four hundred and captured another 140 without the loss of a man. This was, however, exceptional, and generals usually preferred to wait until there was hay for their horses to eat and the roads were firm enough to bear the weight of guns and wagons.

Some Allied contingents simply marched home when the season ended, and the remainder went into garrison in the United Provinces or captured territory of the Spanish Netherlands following plans developed by Cadogan and his staff. British officers tried to get home on leave, to see to family business, sit in Parliament or hunt the fox, for the fox-hunting and campaigning seasons were closely aligned, or simply to recruit. Each March the London Gazette gave its call to arms.

It is Her Majesty’s Royal Will and Pleasure, that the General Officers, Field Officers, and all others whatever, belonging to the Army in Flanders, do repair forthwith to their respective commands, and not omit the opportunity of the present Embarkation, which is appointed the 15th Instant, upon pain of Her Majesty’s highest Displeasure.⁴⁹

Drafts were recruited during the winter to bring regiments up to strength. In November 1711 the Gazette told its readers that:

The Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain, having issued into the hands of the Paymaster-General of Her Majesty’s Forces a sufficient sum of money for recruiting the army in Flanders, notice is hereby given to the several agents of the regiments concerned that they do apply for their proportion of what they are to receive thereof, which they are to distribute to the officers of the respective regiments to enable them immediately to proceed upon their service. And the General Officers of the army having allotted what counties each Regiment shall recruit in.⁵⁰

In January 1712 the Gazette announced that just a few ‘able-bodied men are wanting to supply Her Majesty’s Royal Artillery in Flanders’, and men wishing to join ‘may repair to Colonel Pendlebury, at his house in the Tower, any morning, and shall enter into perfect pay, and have further encouragement’.⁵¹ Elsewhere regimental recruiting parties followed the process so beautifully described in George Farquhar’s play The Recruiting Officer (1706), with the likes of Captain Plume and Sergeant Kite encouraging men to leave nagging wives, pushy parents or harsh employers and go off to pull down the French tyrant. Kite urges them to meet him ‘at the sign of the Spread Eagle, in this good town of Shrewsbury’, where they will immediately receive suitable ‘relief and entertainment’. He does rather well to recruit five men in a single week, ‘the strong man of Kent, the King of the Gypsies, a Scotch pedlar, a Scoundrel Attorney and a Welsh parson’. Plume forces him to release the attorney, for he cannot abide literate men, who are sure to get up petitions.

Desertion was a constant plague, and the London Gazette regularly contained descriptions of men who had run from their colours. In October 1704 it announced:

Deserted out of the Rt Hon the Lord Paston’s Regiment in his own company, Rob. Weston, a well-set man, about 5 foot 5 inches high, a fresh complexion, round visaged, aged about 24 years, supposed to be gone to Sheffield in Yorkshire; Rich. Brown, about 5 foot 6 inches high, thin visaged, swarthy complexioned, aged about 22 years, a locksmith; Benj. Lowe and John Tawits, both shoemakers by trade; Rich. Dewberry, aged about 44 years, 5 foot 6 inches high, light brown hair, bald on his crown, a miller; Steph. Burrel, about 5 foot 5 inches high, aged about 26 years, wears a wig, hath lately had the small-pox, and born at Diss in Norfolk … If they will return to the company in 14 days they shall be kindly received; or, whoever apprehends them, so as they may be brought to justice, they shall receive for each man two guineas, to be paid by Mr Rob. Perryman, agent to the said regiment, at his house in Leicester Fields.⁵²

The fact that Tilbury was the rendezvous suggests that Paston’s men were about to embark for Flanders, though it was late in the year to move a regiment.

Marlborough sometimes spent part of the winter on the Continent, but he normally returned home before the campaign season started, and then left England in March or April, often crossing by yacht from Harwich to Helvoetsluis. Sarah sometimes accompanied him to the port, and Marlborough always felt the separation keenly. ‘It is impossible for me to express with what a heavy heart I parted with you,’ he told her when he set off for the 1702 campaign.

I would have given my life to come back but I know my own weakness so much that I darest not for I know I should have exposed myself [revealed his feelings] to the company: I did for a great while with a perspective glass look upon the cliffs in hopes I might have had the sight of you, we are now out of sight of Margate, and I have neither soul nor spirits, but I do at this minute suffer so much that nothing but being with you again can recompense it. If you could be sensible of what I now feel you would endeavour ever to be easy to me, and then I should be most happy, for it is you only that can give me some content … ⁵³

Marlborough normally visited The Hague to see Heinsius and other important officials before setting off south to join the army. Although he sometimes undertook long journeys by coach, on campaign he generally rode, with fresh mounts being provided from a string of horses under the care of his ‘gentleman of the horse’, Colonel Bringfield, who was killed at Ramillies. On 11 July 1703 he closed a letter to Sarah, written the day before, saying: ‘I am just come off my horse where I have been near 14 hours, so that I own to you that I am so weary that I have not spirits to write any more, especially when I know I must be on horseback by three o’clock tomorrow morning.’⁵⁴

At that time European capitals were connected by regular posts, leaving perhaps twice a week, and national authorities then distributed mail internally. London now had a general post office with some forty sorters, and it had recently become possible for ‘cross posts’ to go between major towns without passing through the capital. On average a postboy would take six days to ride from London to Edinburgh. Posts from London to The Hague and vice versa usually took three days, but bad weather in the Channel could leave a backlog at the ports, and sometimes a packet boat went down in a storm or was snatched by Dunkirk privateers, rather interrupting the mail. An express, the equivalent of modern special delivery, ran outside the times of the normal post, but it too ran the risk of being stopped by bad weather. Really important documents, like first reports of battles, would be sent by hand of an officer, and Marlborough assured Sarah that he would always send her a letter if he had an official courier on the way. Although her fierce temper did not always make her a comfortable spouse, when she wished to be loving she could certainly charm. ‘Wherever you are, whilst I have life my soul shall follow you my ever dear Lord Marlborough,’ she wrote in 1701–02, ‘and wherever I am I shall only kill the time, with the night that I may sleep & hope the next day to hear from you.’⁵⁵

The post was notoriously insecure, and many correspondents used simple codes to screen their meaning. Marlborough and his circle replaced names and places by numbers, which changed from time to time. In August 1710, for instance, he gave Sarah instructions about the Woodstock election.

39 [Marlborough] shall expect more assistance in 87 [Parliament] from 197 [Cadogan] and 202 [Sir Thomas Wheate, the other MP for Woodstock] than any numbers … I do earnestly desire that these two men may be chosen preferable to all others which I desire you will lose no time in acquainting 38 [Godolphin] and that I beg it of him as a particular favour, and that he would take care of securing an election for 202, for 39 does not think it absolutely necessary to have him early in 108 [England] this winter, of which he will take care.⁵⁶

Despite the quality of his staff, his own acumen and growing experience, there were moments when Marlborough found his burden almost intolerable. Sarah’s occasional sulks, apparently worsened by the approaching menopause, meant that she was not always as reliable a source of comfort as that other lodestar of Marlborough’s existence, Sidney Godolphin. In the depth of gloom after a battle which failed to materialise because of Allied disobedience, with Sarah ill and no word from her, he told Godolphin: ‘I am in so ill humour, that I will not trouble you, nor dare I trust myself to write more. But believe this truth; that I honour, and love you, my Lady Marlborough, and would die for the Queen.’⁵⁷

First Campaign

In 1701 the War of Spanish Succession had opened well for the Allies in Italy, where the Imperialist general Prince Eugène of Savoy had first thrashed Marshal Catinat and gone on to capture his successor, Marshal Villeroi, in a midwinter attack on Cremona. There had been no fighting in the Low Countries, although the initial French incursion into the barrier fortresses had placed them in an advantageous position before a shot had been fired. For the 1702 campaign the French, like their opponents, had to find troops for other theatres of war, and the size of their field armies was reduced by the constant need to garrison fortresses. However, for the first few months of the campaign in the Low Countries the weight of numbers told in their favour.

When Marlborough arrived to take command in July, Marshal Boufflers had just jabbed hard at the main Allied army under the Earl of Athlone (Godert de Ginkel, commanding by virtue of his Dutch commission), which had fallen back on the fortress of Nijmegen. Boufflers was now close to invading the republic’s own territory, but Marlborough at once saw that there was nothing to be gained by mere frontal defence. Instead, an Allied crossing of the Meuse below Grave would threaten Boufflers’ communications, especially if some simultaneous pressure could be put on the French right on the lower Rhine. Before the Allies could reach a decision on this plan Louis ordered Boufflers to divert a strong detachment to the upper Rhine, giving Marlborough a clear numerical edge. Yet the Dutch were still not confident, and, as Marlborough told Godolphin, ‘the fears the Dutch have of Nijmegen and the Rhine, creates such difficulties when we come to take a resolution we were forced to send to the Hague’.⁵⁸ He pressed Heinsius hard, telling him:

It is a shameful thing our lying idle and letting Marshal Boufflers make his detachments for the upper Rhine, that I have no patience … Will not Prince Louis of Baden [Allied commander on the upper Rhine] have great reason to be angry when a superior army does not hinder the enemy from sending detachments nor send none themselves? Till we act offensively, all things must go ill.⁵⁹

The Dutch did not approve the plan till 22 July, and Sergeant John Wilson tells us what happened as soon as Marlborough heard that he could move.

We continued in this ground without any motion till … there was orders to the pontoons to march to the right to lay two bridges over the Maas, as also for the [artillery] train and wheel baggage to march that afternoon by way of … Grave. At night there was orders for the quartermaster general, the vanguard and the camp colour men to parade on the right of the front line by four o’clock in the morning and the General to beat at 5.00. Which orders were all punctually obeyed and the army decamped accordingly and that day passed the Maas and advances about two and a half leagues and there encamped. Whereupon the enemy decamped also … ⁶⁰

This is a classic description of an early-eighteenth-century army at its business. Although the Maas at Grave is a wide and stately river, it was the stock in trade of engineers to bridge it with pontoons, boats carried to the river on carts, floated, anchored and roped together before being turned into bridges by the addition of wooden trackway. Wheeled vehicles and heavy baggage were wisely sent over the fixed bridge in the town. Soldiers, roused from their slumbers by the drag and paradiddle of the general call to arms, drew up in line when the assembly was beaten perhaps half an hour later. Normally the troops to march first were on the right of the line, and included Cadogan with a small cavalry escort, and then the army’s vanguard. The camp colourmen were guides from each battalion who carried ‘camp colours’, small identifying flags which would enable their commanding officers to identify their allocated campsite at the end of the day’s march. It was as well to start the whole process as soon as it was light enough to strike camp, to ensure that there was plenty of daylight left when the army reached its next campsite. A river crossing and a march of two and a half leagues (seven and a half miles) was a good day’s work.

As soon as the Allies moved, Boufflers behaved just as Marlborough had expected and moved south as quickly as he could, crossing the Meuse at Roermond, now having to march very close to the Allied army and, as Richard Kane saw, ‘in great perplexity to get by us’. The little garrison of Gravenbock found itself in the middle of the Allied army, and both sides could hear the other’s daily routine. The evening drumbeat of the tattoo, its name derived from the Dutch doe ten tap toe, was an instruction for camp settlers to ‘turn off the tap’ of the wine or beer barrel and for soldiers to turn in. Accurate timekeeping was never easy, and usually a gun was fired from the artillery park to tell regimental drummers to set about their noisy business, as Sergeant Wilson remembered.

We being then encamped … at Gravenbock, the English [artillery] train according to the ancient custom of war, fired the tattoo gun. Upon which all the drums in the army according to order beat off the tattoo and the French garrison in Gravenbock beat their tattoo at the same time, notwithstanding they were within the heart of our camp. Of which my Lord Marlborough being informed, replied with a smile, ‘If they beat a tattoo tonight, I’ll beat the reveille in the morning.’⁶¹

Marlborough was not noted for his sense of humour, and he followed this rather crisp quip by immediately constituting a small attacking force, including cannon, an assault party and an unarmed working party under Brigadier Henry Withers, and by dawn the next day the French garrison was encircled by trenches. After a brief exchange of artillery fire the governor offered to surrender with the honours of war.

But the Brigadier sent them word that they must content to be prisoners at discretion or he would enter the fort sword in hand and neither he nor any of them need expect quarter. Which the governor considered and submitted to be prisoners at discretion. Upon which the command under arms and also the workmen entered the fort and pillaged and made booty of all they could find therein and then demolished the same.⁶²

There were several opportunities for a battle on favourable terms for the Allies, but all of them were vetoed by the field deputies, who argued, perhaps rather more reasonably than British historians sometimes suggest, that there was no point in running the risk of a battle unless its outcome was absolutely certain now that the object of the campaign had `been achieved and the French had ‘been drawn away from their borders.

On the first of these occasions Boufflers tried to slip away by using the risky expedient of a night march, having first mounted a grand foraging expedition so that it looked as if he proposed to stay where he was for some time. Marlborough, however, was not taken in, and ordered his men ‘to lie on their arms all night’. ‘By the time it was day,’ recalled Robert Parker,

their front had entered the heath, and my Lord Marlborough had his men under arms, and just ready to march, when the Field-Deputies came to him, and prayed him to desist. This greatly surprised him, as they had agreed to his scheme the night before: but being a man of great temper and prudence, and being determined not to do anything this first campaign without their approbation, at their earnest entreaty he desisted.⁶³

In fact Marlborough was quite content not to fight. He had told Godolphin that his real objective was to ‘oblige them to quit the Meuse, by which we shall be able to besiege Venlo’, and that is precisely what he now did.⁶⁴

Marlborough began the siege of Venlo, bringing the now redundant garrisons of Nijmegen and Grave, as well as a Prussian detachment from the lower Rhine, down to help. While the besiegers commenced their stately choreography, Marlborough kept a powerful covering force under his hand, and when Boufflers, on orders from Paris, tried to intercept the Allied siege train on its way in from Bois-le-Duc, Marlborough pounced, slipping in between Boufflers and his base, but missing the opportunity of a battle on favourable terms because the Dutch General Opdam did not move as quickly as he had hoped. It was this inaction that gave rise to Marlborough’s exasperated letter of 16 August to Godolphin.⁶⁵ He was no better pleased with the early stages of the siege, and wrote to Heinsius:

I think if you had been so lucky as to have left the command of the siege to [the Prussian commander] Baron de Heyden, we should now have been masters not only of this town but of all the Meuse, but as things now are I am apprehensive you may not have the town and may have your army beaten … The troops have been before Venlo these eight days, and they now talk of opening trenches two days hence. If this be zeal, God preserve me from being so served as you are, my friend. I take a liberty of writing freely to you … I write this by candle light, so that I know not if you will be able to read it.⁶⁶

He reported himself ‘very impatient to hear of the cannon being arrived at Venlo’, but soon told Godolphin that trenches were open and the batteries installed: the siege had begun in earnest, and he would soon be able to tell him when the campaign would end.

Boufflers made no effort to raise the siege of Venlo. Fort St Michael, described by Robert Parker as ‘a regular fortification of five bastions’, covered the northern approaches. The attackers pushed their trenches on to the foot of its glacis, and, with a rather suppressed tow row row, the combined grenadiers of Hamilton’s brigade were preparing to assault the covered way when that stormy petrel Lord Cutts gleefully informed their officers that if there was any opportunity of continuing beyond their objective they should press right on. ‘We all thought these were very rash orders,’ grumbled Parker, ‘contrary to both the rules of war, and the design of the thing.’

At four in the afternoon the signal for the assault was given. The attackers rushed the covered way, and ‘the enemy gave us one scattering fire only, and then ran away’. The grenadiers crossed the ditch and entered a ravelin protecting the curtain wall of the fort itself. The captain and sixty men guarding the ravelin were mostly killed, and the attackers then found a second, smaller ditch between themselves and the curtain. ‘They that fled before us,’ writes Parker,

climbed up by the long grass, that grew out of the fort, so we climbed after them. Here we were hard put to it, to pull out the palisades, which pointed down upon us from the parapet; and was it not for the great surprise and consternation of those within we could never have surmounted this very point. But as soon as they saw us at this work, they quitted the rampart, and retired down to the parade [ground] in the body of the fort, where they lied down their arms, and cried for quarter, which was readily granted them.

Parker felt that the whole business had been unaccountably lucky. The retreating French had failed to throw the loose planks of the wooden bridge over the first ditch, 120 feet wide, into the water, and the governor was culpable in not keeping the grass ‘close mown, as he ought to have done’. ‘In the end,’ Parker admitted, ‘his Lordship had the glory of the whole action, though he never stirred out of the trenches till it was over.’⁶⁷ Richard Kane took much the same view, but added generously that ‘the young Earl of Huntingdon’, who had come along with Cutts as a volunteer, pluckily kept up with the foremost of the stormers the whole way. The episode did much to establish the reputation of the British troops, ‘so that no one there could with modesty express, nor no one that was not believe’, the valour of the attackers.⁶⁸

The garrison of Venlo capitulated on 25 September, and marched out a few days later. As soon as he heard the news, Marlborough sent a detachment to snap up the little fortress of Stevensweert, and then moved the Venlo force straight up the Maas to besiege and capture Roermond too. Thus, as he told Godolphin, ‘I hope before the end of this month we shall have cleared the Meuse from home to [the Dutchheld fortress of] Maastricht, after which I hope we may have time to force Marshal Boufflers to quit his post at Tongres.’⁶⁹

He did rather better than that. Liège lay on the Maas south of Maastricht, and its commanding geographical position, between the hilly country of the Ardennes and the Eifel to the south and the ‘Maastricht appendix’ of Dutch territory to the north, made it just as important in 1702 as it was to prove in 1914. As long as the French held it they could move troops freely between Brabant and Flanders on their western flank to their lower Rhine garrisons at Cologne, Bonn and Düsseldorf. From his position at Tongres, the western apex of a triangle whose base was formed by Liège and Maastricht, Boufflers was well-placed to threaten the flank of an Allied advance down the Maas. He probably doubted that Marlborough would try for Liège so late in the season, and when the Allies moved south he botched his attempt to parry them and then, as a delighted Marlborough told Heinsius, ‘abandoned Tongres after spending a whole month to fortify it’. The city of Liège had only medieval fortifications, and the city elders wisely opened their gates as soon as the Allies appeared before them.

The citadel, a powerful five-bastioned work on the high ground west of the Maas, staunchly held by Brigadier de Violaine with seven and a half battalions of infantry, was another matter. On 12 October NS it was besieged, and a practicable breach had been made by the twenty-second. Marlborough summoned the governor to surrender on terms, but ‘he answered, it would be time enough a month hence, to talk of a surrender’. On 23 October the Allies mounted a general assault and stormed the place after only an hour’s fighting. ‘Our men gave no quarter for some time,’ admitted Parker, ‘so that the greater part of the garrison was cut to pieces.’⁷⁰ The official bulletin was more circumspect, the attackers ‘having after the first fury been very merciful to the enemy’. Marlborough had already written to Lord Nottingham that day, but added a triumphant postscript.

The post being not gone, I could not but open this letter to let you know that, by the extraordinary bravery of the officers and soldiers, the citadel has been carried by storm, and, for the honour of her Majesty’s subjects, the English were the first that got upon the breach, and the governor was taken by a lieutenant of Stewart’s regiment.⁷¹

The four-battalion garrison of the nearby Chartreuse, a fortified monastery, were so dismayed by what had happened to the citadel that they surrendered on the twenty-sixth. ‘They had liberty to march out with their hands in their pockets,’ says Parker, ‘and every man was to go where he pleased, by which means the officers carried very few of them home.’⁷² The formal surrender terms are actually a good deal more generous. The garrison was allowed to march out ‘with arms and baggage, drums beating and matches lit, to be conducted by a sufficient escort to Namur by the shortest route’.⁷³

Marlborough still half-hoped to go on and take Huy, but realised that he had done enough, even if unusually he left a small force to take the fortress of Rheinberg in a winter campaign. Although Winston S. Churchill complains that Dutch interference had prevented his distinguished ancestor from striking one of those ‘crashing blows in the field’ which became his hallmark, it is difficult to see what battle could have given Marlborough that deft manoeuvre did not. He had ended the risk of direct French attack on the United Provinces and cleared the whole line of the Maas to Liège, a feat so remarkable that it calls to mind Abraham Lincoln’s comment about the Father of Waters flowing unvexed to the sea. He had wholly imposed his will on Marshal Boufflers, as the Duke of Berwick acknowledged. Boufflers, Berwick said, was ‘in a dreadful embarrassment; though a man of great personal bravery, he stood in fear of the enemy, and on the other hand he knew in what manner he was spoken of both at court and in the army’.⁷⁴

Although the siege of Rheinberg still went on, the army dispersed into winter quarters in the first week of November, and Marlborough set off for England. On 2 November he boarded a large yacht at Maastricht with General Opdam, the two Dutch field deputies and an escort of twenty soldiers. At Roermond they joined Coehoorn, who had a larger boat and a sixty-man escort. After dinner with the Prince of Holstein-Beck, the governor, they continued downstream, with fifty horsemen keeping pace with the boats and closing in to provide security at night. The cavalry escort changed at Venlo, and when the little party was about ten miles below the town it was attacked by a partisan band based on the French garrison of Guelders, off to the east of the Meuse and not yet reduced.

The attackers were led by Lieutenant Farewell, an Irish deserter from Dutch service who had escaped from Maastricht under accusation of planning to set fire to the magazines. Arson in an artillery park was, by the old laws of war, punishable by being burnt alive, on the cruel logic of the punishment fitting the crime. Indeed, later in the war a French arsonist was ‘burnt to death between two fires with every refinement of cruelty’. There is a case for assuming that Farewell, unlike his countryman Peter Drake, was ideologically committed to his cause, but the real story may be more complex. Farewell, who knew the ground well, chose a point where the cavalry escort had to leave the river, pounced on Marlborough’s yacht and dragged it to the bank with the rope being used to haul the vessel along the river, fired a volley ‘and then threw in several grenades’.

At the time senior officers regularly granted passports to enemy officers and officials, giving them safe conduct through territory in which they might be detained. The system did not simply accord with the age’s notion of gentlemanly behaviour, but worked to the advantage of both sides by giving some freedom of movement to senior folk beyond the confines of the battlefield. Although the raiders knew the deputies by sight, and Farewell recognised Opdam, having ‘stood sentry a hundred times over his tent’, all three had valid passports signed by the Duke of Burgundy. Marlborough had no passport, but one of his clerks, Stephen Gell, quickly slipped him one made out for his brother, Lieutenant General Charles Churchill. The pass was in fact out of date and did not cover transit by water, but after a long discussion Farewell agreed to let Marlborough through, apparently either because of Charles Churchill’s pass or by counting him as one of the two secretaries allowed to Field Deputy Gueldermalsen. The raiders took all the money and plate out of the vessel and carried off the escort as prisoners of war, but allowed Marlborough and the Dutchmen to continue.

Robert Parker thought that the partisans were ‘more intent on booty than making prisoners’, and let them pass ‘when they had received a handsome present’.⁷⁵ The official bulletin declared that the attackers ‘examined the several passports, without knowing my Lord Marlborough’. However, Farewell immediately slipped away from his party and appeared at The Hague, where he received a free pardon and a captaincy in the Dutch army. The Earl of Ailesbury believed that he had betrayed his trust, and would have deservedly been broken on the wheel if the French had ever caught him. He hinted that Marlborough had simply bought off Farewell: ‘No doubt he had not the spirit of thrift at the time.’⁷⁶

Marlborough certainly rewarded the quick-thinking Gell with a pension of £50 a year, and obtained him a post in the Exchange of Prisoners Office. The last of the letters printed in Murray’s five-volume edition of his dispatches was written in March 1712 when Marlborough was out of office. In it he told Grand Pensionary Heinsius:

Mr Gill has, I believe, the honour of being known to you, having served us all the war as a commissioner for the exchange of prisoners. Having particular obligations to him as he helped save me from enemy hands when I was captured on the Meuse, I would have much wished to do something for him; but as it is not in my power, please permit me to recommend him to the honour of your protection so that he can obtain some small employment or subsistence at the Hague, where he has lived for forty years.⁷⁷

Marlborough was never a man to forget old obligations.

Empty Elevation

Shortly before Marlborough set off for England, Queen Anne had told Sarah that she knew that her husband ‘deserves all that a rich crown can give. But since there is nothing else at this time, I hope you will give me leave as soon as he comes to make him a duke.’⁷⁸ Sarah was not convinced that it would be wise to accept. She did not think the family was rich enough to support the title, especially should she produce the numerous sons she might yet be blessed with, which tells us much about her private hopes. ‘Though at the time I had myself but one,’ she wrote later, ‘yet I might have had more, and the next generation a great many.’⁷⁹ She told her husband of her misgivings in a letter which has not survived, and he replied from The Hague on 4 November OS: ‘I shall have a mind to do nothing but as it may be easy with you. I do agree with you that we ought not to wish for a greater title until we have a better estate.’⁸⁰

Two days later he told her that he had broached the matter with Heinsius, who suggested that he should accept the offer now that it was so clearly connected to a military success, rather than wait till the end of the war. ‘He said if it were not done now in the heat of everybody’s being pleased with what I had done,’ wrote Marlborough, ‘it would at any other time be thought the effect of favour, which would not be so great an honour to my family, nor to the Queen’s service.’⁸¹ Sarah met Marlborough when he arrived at Margate on 28 November, and they travelled up to London together. The following day the queen told the cabinet that she intended to make Marlborough a duke, and to grant him, for her lifetime, an annual pension of £5,000 from Post Office revenue to enable him to support the dignity, hoping that Parliament would vote him a similar sum. On 2 December she made his promotion public, and eight days later the proposed pension was debated by the Commons.

The Tory majority in the new Parliament had already shown its teeth by voting a congratulatory address which affirmed that ‘the vigorous support of Your Majesty’s Allies and the wonderful progress of Your Majesty’s armies under the conduct of the Earl of Marlborough have signally retrieved the ancient honour and glory of the English nation’. This was anti-Williamite and thus anti-Whig, and a similar address commending the navy’s descent on Vigo Bay, where the Spanish treasure fleet was taken, was regarded by Sarah as an affront: how could one naval action take station with a string of successes on land? There was even more to it than that. By commending naval commanders alongside Marlborough, the Tories were making clear their presence for the ‘traditional’ British strategy based on seapower, rather than a Continental commitment. The queen responded by ordering a victory procession through the City, and Bishop Trelawney preached on Joshua 22: 8–9, ‘Return with much riches unto your tents, and with very much cattle, with silver, and with gold, and with brass, and with iron, and with very much raiment: divide the spoil of your enemies with your brethren.’⁸²

No amount of public rejoicing could blunt the Tories’ assault on the pension proposals, and on 15 December the measure was withdrawn. Anne generously offered the Marlboroughs £2,000 a year from her privy purse, but Sarah, arguing that they had had enough already, turned it down. The episode did much to confirm Sarah in her hatred of the Tories. Her correspondence with Anne already revealed that they were in different political camps. Although Anne ‘would never have you & your poor unfortunate faithful Morley differ in opinion in the least thing’, she went on to tell Sarah, unusually forcefully, that she quite misunderstood the character of the Whigs and would do better to ‘show more countenance’ to ‘the Church party’. Godolphin regretted that the defeat had been brought about by men he had trusted, Rochester amongst them, and lamented to Harley that he had been beaten in the Commons by ‘those of whom I thought we had deserved better’.

There was more choppy water ahead. Parliament quickly granted the queen’s request that Prince George should receive £100,000 a year, cheerfully demonstrating that its grudge against Marlborough was political rather than financial. The Whigs in the Lords then attacked a measure which excepted the Prince of Denmark from a clause in the Act of Settlement which would bar naturalised subjects sitting in Parliament or on the Privy Council after a Hanoverian succession. They were led by the Marlboroughs’ son-in-law the Earl of Sunderland, and Anne was incandescent. Eventually the clause squeaked by in the Lords by only four votes, and Anne thanked the Marlboroughs for all that they had done to help.

Anne gave a practical sign of her gratitude when the Marlboroughs’ daughter Lady Elizabeth Churchill was married to the immensely wealthy Scrope Egerton, 4th Earl of Bridgewater. The queen gave a dowry of £10,000, and Bridgewater was made a gentleman of the horse to Prince George. The Marlboroughs aimed at the senior post of master of the horse, but they failed to secure it for Bridgwater till 1705, when it became all too evident that the incumbent, the Earl of Sandwich, was mentally deranged. The queen also did something for the Duumvirs, as Marlborough and Godolphin were now becoming known, by ordering Rochester to go to Ireland to take up his duties as lord lieutenant, not to reappear at cabinet. When he refused she dismissed him and appointed the Duke of Ormonde in his stead. Rochester at once threw in his lot with the opposition, and inserted a ‘tendentious introduction’ to the second volume of his father Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion, which appeared in 1703, warning Anne that only adherence to Tory principles could prevent her from sharing the fate of Charles I.

At the beginning of 1703, despite the failure of the attempt to gain a pension from Parliament and some crumbling of Godolphin’s political power-base, all seemed set fair for the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. In February, however, they were struck by a blow from which they never fully recovered. Their eldest son John, so recently made Marquess of Blandford by courtesy title that his proud father still called him ‘Lord Churchill’, was a sixteen-year-old undergraduate at King’s College Cambridge. Even the Marlboroughs’ subsequent unpopularity could never induce their many opponents to rake up any mud about young Blandford. ‘Notwithstanding his high birth, splendid prospects and courtly education,’ says Archdeacon Coxe, ‘he set an example of affability, regularity, and steadiness, above his years.’⁸³ His best friend was Horace Walpole, also of King’s, and the two young men spoke about serving together in the cavalry. Blandford wrote to Marlborough asking for a commission in the summer of 1702, and Marlborough sent the letter on to Godolphin, characteristically asking him not to show it to Sarah if he thought it would ‘vex’ her, but saying that he would ‘write what answer she shall think best’. Sarah, like many a worried mother before and since, could not let her son go while he was still so young.

In the winter of 1702–03 Blandford often rode across from Cambridge to stay with Godolphin at Newmarket. Early in 1703 there was smallpox in Newmarket, but Godolphin was sure that the Marlboroughs’ son, ‘going into no house but mine, will I hope be more defended from it by air and riding, without any violent exercise, than he could be anywhere else’. But shortly after returning to Cambridge from Newmarket in February John was struck down by the disease. Sarah rushed to Cambridge as soon as she heard the news, and the queen, no stranger to this fell illness, sent her own doctors at once. Marlborough wrote to Sarah immediately, dating his letter only ‘Thursday, nine in the morning’.

I have this minute received Mr Godolphin’s letter, and have sent to Mr Morta’s shop [Daniel Malthus, apothecary to the queen] for what is desired, which is what this messenger will bring. I hope Doctor Hans [Edward Hans, physician to the queen] and Dr Collidon [Sir Theodore Colladon] got to you early this morning. I am so troubled at the sad condition this poor child seems to be in, that I know not what I do. I pray God to give you some comfort in this great affliction. If you think anything under heaven can be done, pray let me know it, or if you think my coming can be of the least use let me know it. I beg I may hear as often as is possible, for I have no thought but what is at Cambridge.⁸⁴

He wrote again that night, telling her:

I hope the doctors were with you early this morning. If we must be so unhappy as to lose this poor child, I pray God enable us to behave with that resignation which we ought to do. If this uneasiness which I now lie under should last long, I do not think I could live. For God’s sake, if there be any hope of recovery let me know it.⁸⁵

The Marquess of Blandford died on the morning of Saturday, 20 February 1703: Marlborough had arrived just in time to join Sarah at his bedside. The death of any child is a tragedy, and the Marlboroughs, like too many of the parents of their age, were already painfully familiar with loss. It hit Marlborough hard. His hopes of founding a dynasty had perished. He quickly made a new will, and begged the queen to allow his dukedom to descend collaterally, hoping at first that it might eventually go to Godolphin’s son and his descendants, provided they assumed the name and arms of Churchill. Affairs of state were so pressing that he had little enough time to mourn, for although Cardonnel at once told Heinsius what had happened, he emphasised that ‘despite this great misfortune His Excellency will embark in the middle of next week’.⁸⁶ When Ailesbury saw him at The Hague soon afterwards Marlborough confessed: ‘I’ve lost what is so dear to me, it is fit for me to retire and not toil and labour for I know not who. My daughters are all married.’⁸⁷ In April he wrote wistfully:

I have seen this day a very great procession, and the thoughts how pleased poor Lord Churchill would have been with such a sight added much to my uneasiness. Since it has pleased God to take him, I do wish from my soul I could think less of him.⁸⁸

If Marlborough, with the mind-filling solace of hard work, was able to rise above his grief, it was much, much harder for Sarah. On 26 February, Godolphin said that he was pleased to hear that ‘the drops’ seemed to be doing her some good. Marlborough was an even more sedulous correspondent than usual: when he reached Brill after his sea crossing the following month he wrote to say: ‘My letter a Tuesday may come as soon as this, but I would not omit this occasion, nor will I ever any that I think may give you the least satisfaction, for the greatest pleasure of my life will be the endeavouring to make you happy.’⁸⁹ However, for a time her grief was such that she lost her self-possession: a Westminster schoolboy saw her wandering through the cloisters of the Abbey like a madwoman.

Anne, herself no stranger to this sort of misfortune, did her very best to help. When Sarah left London for Cambridge to attend Blandford, Anne begged her ‘for Christ Jesus sake to have a care of your dear precious self’, and when she heard that the case was hopeless, prayed ‘Christ Jesus comfort & support you under this terrible affliction, & it is his mercy alone that can do it.’⁹⁰ The tragedy should have drawn the two women closer together in the sisterhood of shared adversity, but it did not. One contemporary observed: ‘We hear the Duchess of Marlborough bears not her affliction like her mistress, if report be true that it hath near touched her head.’ Edward Gregg, Anne’s masterly biographer, does indeed suggest that the tragedy tipped Sarah’s personality over the edge: ‘Her wit, which had been sharp, became piercing; her humour, which had been biting, became mordant; her convictions, which had been firm, became absolute; her manner, which had been bold and assured, became precipitous and arrogant.’⁹¹

There was another element to the tragedy. In her correspondence with Sarah, Anne had always been very forthright about her own periods, sometimes saying that ‘Lady Charlotte’s’ failure to turn up as anticipated suggested that she was pregnant again. We have no evidence that Sarah ever used the same cant with her mistress. Perhaps the letters which did so have simply not survived, but more probably this is yet another example of Anne needing to confide in Sarah far more than Sarah ever needed to confide in her. We cannot describe Sarah’s fertility with absolute certainty, but it is clear that in 1702 she certainly hoped to have more children, and likely that she thought herself pregnant in the spring of 1703: she was by then forty-two years old, so it was not an unreasonable hope. It was certainly a hope shared by her husband. ‘It was a great pleasure to me when I thought we should be blessed with more children; but as all my happiness centres in living quietly with you, I do conjure you by all the kindness I have for you … that you will take the best advice you can for your health,’ he assured her.⁹² On 17 May he wrote to tell her how delighted he was that ‘the troublesome visit’ she had experienced the day he left had not recurred, though he was unaware of the real significance of its absence.⁹³

As the year went on it became evident that missed and irregular periods denoted, not the chance of giving birth to another son, but the menopause. Jealous (and unfounded) suspicion that the queen was herself pregnant may have contributed to Sarah’s refusal to return to London to visit Anne early in 1703, although in fairness she was so deeply distressed at the time that she would not even see her daughters. Early in 1704 her relationship with Marlborough was to break down almost completely. She accused him of infidelity, and he repeatedly wrote to ask what cause she had to treat him as badly as she did. This is creaky ice for a male historian to wander out on, but some comfort may be taken from the fact that Iris Butler suggests, in Rule of Three, that sexual jealousy and suspicion of a much-loved partner are common symptoms of women in menopausal age.⁹⁴

All this did not simply affect Sarah’s dealings with her husband, but with Queen Anne too. Sarah spent much of 1703 at Holywell or at Windsor Lodge in the Great Park, and did not even appear at court during Prince George’s illness that autumn. She deluged the queen with what Gregg calls ‘long epistles packed with her own political views’, and in May that year ostentatiously called the queen ‘your Majesty’ in a letter provoking Anne to ask her if anything was wrong. However, Anne still gave her right of refusal when the employment of a maid of honour was being considered. Later that month, when Marlborough, stuck fast in a campaign that was mired by political squabbles, and still conscious of the collapse of his dynastic hopes, first talked of resigning, Anne responded with a warm declaration of support.

The thoughts that both my dear Mrs Freeman & Mr Freeman seem to have of retiring give me no small uneasiness & therefore I must say something on the subject, it is no wonder at all people in your posts should be weary of the world … but give me leave to say, that you should at least consider your faithful friends and poor country, which must be ruined if you should ever put your melancholy thoughts in execution, as for your poor unfortunate Morley she could not bear it, for if you should forsake me, I would have nothing more to do with the world, but make another abdication, for what is a crown, when the support of it is gone. I will never forsake your dear self, Mr Freeman nor Mr Montgomery [Godolphin], but always be your constant faithful servant till death mows us down with his impartial hand.⁹⁵

Anne prorogued her first Parliament at the end of February 1703, and then promoted the Marquess of Normanby (who made his first appearance in these pages as Earl Mulgrave, James II’s lord chamberlain) to be Duke of Buckingham, and created four new Tory peers to give their party a working majority in the Lords. She also yielded to Sarah’s request to make the Whig John Hervey a baron, the only time, so Sarah claimed, that a peer was created simply to please her. Sarah’s letters returned to their familiar theme: that the Tories were simply closet Jacobites. Anne replied, on 11 June, with a measured defence of the Tory role in the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Settlement, and although she admitted that some High Tories were undoubtedly Jacobites, the same could not be said for most of them. Sarah intensified her attack on the Tories in general and Buckingham in particular, and tried to enlist the support of both Godolphin and her husband.

Sarah tried to get Anne to take action over the allegedly incorrect boundaries of the new house Buckingham was building, which was to become the nucleus of Buckingham Palace. She joined a royal visit to Bath rather late in proceedings, and was roundly rebuked by the queen when she complained about a new treaty of alliance with Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy, who had once deserted William III. Parliament met again in early November, and there was more tension when the Tories made a second attempt to pass an Occasional Conformity Bill, which would have made life more difficult for those Dissenters who avoided legal discrimination by their ‘occasional conformity’ to the Church of England. Anne generally favoured the Bill, as she thought that it would strengthen the Church, though she supported her Lutheran husband’s right to oppose it. It was probably Prince George’s example that encouraged some wavering peers to stay away when the vote was taken. The Tories were furious with Anne, and could not understand how Prince George had absented himself without his wife’s support. Marlborough and Godolphin both voted for the Bill, for they could not afford to affront the moderate Tories, upon whose support they relied to secure subsidies with which to continue the war. Yet both were delighted to see it fail.

At home, then, the year 1703 had seen a shift in Sarah’s relationship with the queen, subtle, perhaps, but a portent of what was to come. It had also seen Sarah become increasingly extreme in her denunciation of the Tories despite specific warnings from Anne, a confirmed supporter of what she, devout as ever, saw as the Church party. Godolphin was still able to manage Parliament to his advantage, but the Tories had become noticeably stronger. These were gentle judders, not seismic shifts, and they might have been counteracted by a major success on the battlefield. Yet that is precisely what eluded Marlborough in the 1703 campaign.

The 1703 Campaign

The year began just as badly for the Grand Alliance as it did for the Churchill family. Maximilian Emmanuel, Elector of Bavaria and so ruler of the largest and best-armed state in southern Germany, had been a member of the Grand Alliance, and governor of the Spanish Netherlands on behalf of his father-in-law the emperor, in the previous war. However, he had now developed the idea of his own Wittelsbach family competing with the Hapsburgs for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, and decided to side with Louis XIV. His defection, accompanied by his seizure of Ulm, opened up a new front deep in Germany, and encouraged Louis to make his main effort in the south that year. Marshal Villars was to besiege and capture Kehl, just across the Rhine from Strasbourg, with his manoeuvres covered from the Imperialists by another army under Marshal Tallard in the Lines of Stollhofen, field fortifications covering the gap between the middle Rhine and the Black Forest.

In the Low Countries, Villeroi now had about 60,000 men behind the River Mehaigne, threatening Maastricht, and more in a long line of field fortifications known as the Lines of Brabant, running all the way from Namur to Antwerp, making good use of the river systems, notably the Dyle as it curved between Leau and Tongres. Brigadier the comte de Mérode-Westerloo, who had been born in the Netherlands as a vassal of the Spanish crown and whose Walloon regiment now fought for the French, described the Lines as being

of prodigious extent, stretching all the way from the Meuse to the Scheldt and thence to the sea, [and] were to my way of thinking more profitable to the purses of the engineers who built them than for the country they were supposed to protect; they really represented a scarecrow for little birds, providing a pretext for those who wished to halt and do nothing. How could anyone guard such an extended system of defences?⁹⁶

Marlborough, on his way back home the previous year, had told Godolphin that the Dutch and British needed to raise another 20,000 men between them, and this was indeed the total agreed in a treaty signed at The Hague the following March. Parliament consented to bear its share of the augmentation only if the Dutch agreed to give up trade with France. Marlborough told Heinsius that he wished ‘the troops had been given without any condition’, but begged him to persuade the Estates- General to comply, as ‘I tremble to think of the consequences that may happen, if this should occasion any coldness between England and Holland.’⁹⁷ In practice the troops, four-fifths of them hired from German states, had been obtained before the Dutch actually agreed to suspend trade for a year. In April Marlborough lamented that the French success in southern Germany meant that ‘You can have no troops from any prince in Germany but by paying dearly for them, and that they at the same time expect to be protected by your army.’⁹⁸

The Allies met at Wesel, on the Rhine, to discuss strategy in early March. Marlborough had not yet arrived from England, and was represented by Lieutenant General Cutts. Anthonie Heinsius told Marlborough that Cutts would be able to fill in the plan’s detail, but briefed him on its outlines. The Allies would besiege Bonn, where Prince Louis of Baden already commanded an Allied detachment, and then do something unspecified in Flanders or Brabant. He added that the effort would demand all the British and Dutch troops that could be made available. The scheme was fleshed out after Marlborough arrived: the capture of Bonn would be followed by a large-scale attempt on Antwerp.

It is clear from this that the general scheme was not Marlborough’s, as Winston S. Churchill suggests, but it is perfectly possible that its refinement into the Antwerp design was. He certainly did not favour the attack on Bonn, but told Godolphin that the Allies had made ‘so much noise’ about it that ‘I think it would be scandalous to avoid the making of it now.’⁹⁹ On 27 April he wrote from the Allied siege lines before Bonn, where he had taken personal charge of operations, to tell Heinsius ‘that Antwerp is a greater security to the States than any other conquest that might be made’. However, he prefaced this with the warning that news from Paris suggested that the French saw Bonn as ‘but a feint’ and were taking steps to reinforce Antwerp. If they applied their whole strength to the place it might be impossible for him to take it.¹⁰⁰

Marlborough hoped to be master of Bonn by the end of May, before the French were in the field, though a strong covering force under the Dutch field marshal Hendrik van Nassau, Heer van Ouwerkerk (‘Overkirk’ to his British allies) had been pushed forward between Liège and Maastricht in case Villeroi stirred early.¹⁰¹ Villeroi, his army far bigger than Overkirk’s, did indeed move sooner than expected, falling on two Allied battalions, one British and one Dutch, at Tongres on 8 May. This little garrison held out for a day before being forced to surrender, but the defence of Tongres gave Overkirk time to concentrate under the guns of Maastricht, ‘where he entrenched himself’, as Robert Parker tells us.

Notwithstanding this Villeroi advanced to attack us, and began to cannonade us with great fury; but the cannon of the town, of our camp, and of the Fort of Petersburg, soon made him weary of that work, and obliged him to retire; and upon hearing of the approach of the Duke, he made what haste he could to get within his lines.¹⁰²

Marlborough offered good terms to the garrison of Bonn to ensure its surrender on 15 May, and then marched to join Overkirk, compelling Villeroi to scuttle away.

The fall of Bonn and the relief of Overkirk’s force left the Allies free to embark upon their Great Design against Antwerp. Marlborough would certainly have agreed with Mérode-Westerloo’s assessment of the Lines of Brabant. The French were not powerful enough to be strong everywhere, and the key to Allied success would lie in concentrating against a chosen point, in this case Antwerp, while manoeuvring elsewhere to prevent the French from reacting to the real threat. This use of manoeuvre in order to unbalance the enemy was an important ingredient of Marlborough’s battlefield tactics, with Ramillies as the outstanding example of its success. The method’s execution on a large scale, however, hinged on the prompt and unquestioning obedience of orders which must inevitably travel by courier, allowing Marlborough little opportunity for personal intervention with Allied generals who had not yet come to trust him. Moreover, the Allies had to communicate via exterior lines stretched around the great bend of the Dyle, while the French could use interior lines to move directly to any point.

The French defenders of the Lines of Brabant consisted of Villeroi and Boufflers, with sixty battalions and 110 squadrons, in the west, and Count Bedmar, with fifty battalions and ten squadrons, most of them Spanish and spread out in small garrisons, in the east: a small force covered the centre of the Lines. The Allied plan was certainly bold. The attack on Antwerp would be carried out by General Jacob van Wassenaer, Heer von Wassenaer en Obdam (‘Opdam’ to the British), an experienced Dutch officer who had been promoted full general the previous year. His force would be strengthened by fourteen battalions, released by the fall of Bonn, which would travel by river round to Bergen op Zoom, while another six battalions and fourteen squadrons marched by land. Dutch garrisons in the east would be reduced to strengthen Opdam still further. On 19 May Marlborough wrote to Opdam from Maastricht, saying that he had done his best to ensure that The Hague understood the need to send as many troops as possible to Bergen op Zoom, and begging him to apply pressure of his own.¹⁰³

While the Allied field army under Marlborough, with sixty battalions and 130 squadrons, fixed Villeroi in the east so as to prevent him from helping Bedmar, the venerable siege expert Menno van Coehoorn was to move along the Flanders coast to besiege Ostend, presenting Bedmar with a conflict of priorities. On 23 May, with Villeroi duly fixed near Hannef, Marlborough wrote a long and diplomatic letter to Coehoorn, assuring him that ‘I know your experience, your zeal and your good judgement too well not to trust it entirely,’ but stressing that the siege of Antwerp could not begin until Coehoorn had first attacked Ostend.¹⁰⁴ However, he informed Godolphin that he was very worried that Coehoorn would not in fact besiege Ostend as agreed, but would instead make a ‘diversion’ in Flanders ‘which will not oblige them [the French] to make any great detachment’. He believed that Coehoorn simply hoped to force the northern end of the Lines to raise money, ‘for as he is the governor of Dutch Flanders he has the tenth of all the contributions’.¹⁰⁵ This was not an unreasonable view, for the Dutch themselves were concerned at Coehoorn’s attitude. On 25 June Jacob Hop, the Dutch treasurer general, warned that ‘It seems that we cannot justify the conduct of M. Coehoorn, if he pretends to dispute the command of the army in Flanders with his superior [Opdam],’ though he agreed that ‘It would be irritating enough for a governor of Flanders … to have the honour and profit’ of the operation taken from him.¹⁰⁶

There was actually another layer of inter-Allied complexity. The Dutch feared that if Ostend was taken it would finish up in English hands, and would form a bastion of future English trade. On 17 June Marlborough tried to persuade Heinsius that this was not in fact the case. ‘I do assure you that [we] are very desirous it should be taken from the French,’ he wrote, ‘but they would not be masters of it … so that you need not apprehend any dispute that might arise upon the taking of this place.’¹⁰⁷ Soon afterwards he warned Heinsius that Coehoorn might be ‘disobliged’ by one of the generals in Opdam’s force, quite possibly Lieutenant General Frederik Johan Baer, Heer van Slangenburg, with whom he was shortly to have a blazing row. He would be happy to meet Opdam’s generals at any central spot, but warned that time was being wasted: ‘I think the common interest does require that no more time should be lost, but that we either attack Antwerp or Ostend, or else put ourselves on the defensive and send the rest into Germany.’¹⁰⁸ As late as 25 June NS Marlborough still hoped to persuade Coehoorn to besiege Ostend, and sent the baron de Trogne, governor of Liège, to press his case again.

By this time, though, Coehoorn was concerned that his own attack would run into forces released by Villeroi. Marlborough agreed to send some extra troops, repeatedly assured him that Villeroi had not yet moved a detachment westwards, and undertook to keep the French under pressure. It was not until the very end of the month that the Allied right wing at last advanced. Coehoorn and Spaar each pierced the Lines of Brabant to enter the Pays de Waes, the coastal area just west of Antwerp, and Opdam, on the other side of the Scheldt, headed towards Antwerp itself. However, Coehoorn’s attack was not serious enough to persuade Bedmar to divide his forces, and on 28 June Marlborough, who had always argued that the project would work only if Bedmar was distracted from Antwerp, told both Coehoorn and Opdam that he would make best speed to join them. On the same day he warned Godolphin that, although he was confident that he had stolen a march on Villeroi, ‘we are now got into so enclosed a country’ that the French would probably move faster. Worse still, he thought that Villeroi would probably now be able to send a detachment to support Bedmar.

That is precisely what happened. Villeroi had already ordered his central force to join Bedmar, and now he ordered Boufflers to take thirty squadrons of cavalry and thirty companies of grenadiers (five battalions’ worth) to make forced marches to the west: Marlborough’s spies reported that a foot soldier was mounted behind each horseman to make better time. On 28 June Marlborough warned Opdam that the French were on the move in open country ‘where it will be very easy for them, without running any risk, to make detachments’. Villeroi, moving within his own lines, had no shortage of forage, whereas Marlborough, ‘our march being upon the heaths’, was less well supplied. He assured Opdam that he would be in a position to help him just as soon as he could.¹⁰⁹ The next day he wrote again, begging Opdam to keep him apprised of his movements, and on the thirtieth he admitted that he was a little vexed not to have heard from him for days. On 2 July he assured Heinsius that he was only two days away from Opdam, and urged him to convene a meeting of Allied generals and members of his own government at some suitable place. With the letter signed but not sealed, he added a desperate postscript: ‘This minute I am told the postmaster of Breda has written to the postmaster here that Opdam is beaten. I hope it is not true.’¹¹⁰ He also dashed off a postscript to a letter to Godolphin when he heard the news, saying: ‘We have a report come from Breda that Opdam is beat. I pray God it be not so, for he is very capable of having it happen to him.’¹¹¹

Jacob Hop, the Dutch treasurer general, had joined Opdam at the end of June, and told the Estates General that Marlborough had warned them that the French were on the move south of the Lines. A council of war had accordingly decided that Opdam’s camp at Eckeren, containing only thirteen battalions and twenty-six squadrons, was dangerously exposed. Opdam’s generals got their heavy baggage away towards Bergen op Zoom, and on 30 June, with the French now in sight, they resolved to fall back on Lillo on the Scheldt. ‘But that could not be done so soon but that the enemy appeared both before and behind, and on both sides of us,’ wrote Hop to the Estates-General.

We then engaged with them, and the fight was very furious in several places, lasting from 3 o’clock till it was nearly dark, and frequently with very doubtful success, till at last, by the unwearied bravery (which in truth can never be enough commended) of both your own national troops and those of foreign princes in your service, one of the chief posts by which we must pass to come hither, viz. the village of Oerderen, was forced from the enemy and kept in possession.¹¹²

Mérode-Westerloo acknowledged that the Allies fought very hard indeed, and saw for himself that Oerderen, through which they had to pass to escape, was the scene of frenzied fighting. His own leading battalion bolted under heavy close-range artillery fire, and although he rallied about three hundred of his men, all was in ‘desperate confusion, pikemen picking up muskets and musketeers laying hold of pikes’. Major General Hompesch led a handful of Dutch horsemen in a counterattack which drove back superior numbers of French cavalry. The infantry wilted too, and Mérode-Westerloo could not hold the village without support that never came: ‘I never saw a single general officer during the whole affair,’ he complained.

We lost more than 2,000 killed or wounded, although, in fact, we might have made the whole Dutch army prisoners of war for a loss of less than a hundred if only we occupied the line of dykes and pounded them to pieces with cannon … But French foolhardiness and I don’t know what besides made us muff the opportunity.¹¹³

Opdam himself had been cut off from his troops, and was first reported missing: Jacob Hop heard that he was a prisoner in Antwerp. It soon transpired, however, that he had made best speed to Breda, whence he gave the Estates-General what Robert Parker called ‘a melancholy account of the affair’. Slangenburg took charge of the initial battle and the running fight that followed it, and although Eckeren was scarcely a victory, its results could have been far worse. One byproduct, welcomed by Parker, was that Opdam never received another active command. Marlborough acidly observed that Baron Hop ‘had the honour of seeing more of it than the general that should have commanded’, and added that the French, who had certainly not done as well as they ought, ‘will pretend … they had the best of it, and prove it by Opdam’s letters’.¹¹⁴

The battle of Eckeren left the Great Design in ruins, and worse followed. Marlborough heard that Coehoorn had fallen out with Slangenburg and was thinking of quitting the army. He urged them both to put the public interest before private matters, but Coehoorn, ill and with only a year to live, returned to The Hague. It was in evident despair that Marlborough wrote to Heinsius on 21 July.

It is impossible the war can go on with success at this rate, if measures must be taken between two armies, and the quarrels and animosities of private people shall make a delay which hinders the whole … I know not if I shall outlive this campaign, but I am sure I have not the courage to make another.

He added that his own government was pressing him to send troops to Spain, but he had been able to stave them off for the moment, promising only four battalions of newly-arrived foot and Lord Raby’s Dragoons. ‘I own to you that I have the spleen to a great degree,’ confessed Marlborough, ‘which may make me an ill judge of what I write in this letter. I wish it may prove so, and that you may have a glorious campaign.’¹¹⁵ There was something of the same gloom in a letter to Sarah.

I find myself daily delaying, so that if I may not have time of living quietly with you, and meddling less with the business of this world, I can’t hold long. But of this I shall say a great deal more when I have the happiness of seeing you, which time is passionately wished for by him that loves you above all expression.¹¹⁶

A conference at Bergen op Zoom resolved that the Allies would pierce the Lines of Brabant near Antwerp, but Marlborough discovered that neither cannon nor forage was ready, and by the time he reached the Lines, Villeroi and Boufflers were there before him. He still rode forward to see if anything could be done.

On Friday [27 July NS] I went with 4,000 horse to see the lines. They let us come so near that we beat their outguard home to their barrier, which gave us an opportunity of seeing the lines; which has a ditch 27 foot broad before it and the water in it nine foot deep, so that it is resolved that the armies return to the Meuse, and in the first place take Huy. Upon the whole matter, if we can’t bring the French to a battle, we shall not do anything worth the being commended.¹¹⁷

Huy fell surprisingly quickly, and its garrison, which surrendered as prisoners of war, gave Marlborough the wherewithal to exchange his own two battalions taken at Tongres earlier in the year. Already, shaking off the despair of high summer, he had spotted a new opportunity. The Lines of Brabant were incomplete between the Mehaigne and the Meuse, and he proposed piercing them between Leau and the headwaters of the Mehaigne. As this is precisely where he was to penetrate them in 1706, it is likely that his plan would have succeeded, and that he would have brought the French to battle.

At a council of war, held at Marlborough’s headquarters at Val Notre Dame, not far from Huy, on 24 August, all the Allied generals present supported the plan. The Dutch generals, however, would not agree, and without their consent the operation was impossible. They proposed instead the siege of Limburg, which Marlborough rightly believed was so insignificant an objective that it could be fitted in at the end of a campaign. The senior British, Danish and German generals took the unusual step of signing a formal document declaring that they believed that with an attack on the Lines ‘We could, with the help of the good Lord, hope for a victory so complete, and whose consequences would be so great as not to be predicted.’¹¹⁸ Marlborough sent a copy of the letter to Harley, and told Godolphin what had happened, enclosing a copy of his own letter of well-mannered protest to the Estates-General. He added that ‘I am really tired out of my life,’ but concluded by telling Godolphin that he had, as requested, ‘taken care of’ one of his clients: John Yarborough duly became a captain in Hill’s Regiment of Foot.¹¹⁹

The dispute with the Dutch hit Marlborough hard. He told Godolphin that he would be home soon, for he had no mind to command an army that did nothing but eat forage. He added that the whole business ‘has heated my blood so, that I am almost mad with a headache’, and railed against the Dutch generals, some of whom were by then beginning to say that they would have supported the attack if only they had had more cannon.¹²⁰ He warned Heinsius that Dutch failure to support offensive action would be used by ‘disaffected people in England … to convince our Parliament men that the war ought to be made in other places and not in this country’.¹²¹ It is clear that his complaint was against the Dutch generals, not the field deputies, and on 11 October he reported to Heinsius that ‘the Deputies have promised me that they will tell their generals very plainly that the army must continue in the field all this month’.¹²²

Even now, dragging on the fag-end of a wasted campaign, he was still corresponding about the regiments due to be sent to Portugal and the allocation of generals to command them; discussing the state of affairs in southern Germany and northern Italy with a bevy of princelings; lamenting the defeat, in late September, of Count Styrum’s Allied army by Villars and Max Emmanuel near a small town called Hochstadt on the Danube; and telling the Duke of Schomberg that he did not think the government would give the generals ordered to Portugal any more than the £10,700 already allocated. There was a little old-world courtliness with his nephew, the Duke of Berwick, whose master of the horse wanted a passport to visit the United Provinces to buy some horses. Indeed, he risked trespassing on this scarred friendship, saying:

I should be glad … if you think it proper, and not otherwise, that you would desire the Maréchal de Villeroi to give me a pass for twenty pieces of burgundy or champagne to come to Huy or Liege, which in that case M. Puech may deliver to Colonel Cadogan when they meet on Thursday at Borchloen.¹²³

Even his return to England did not go smoothly. He was marooned at Briel by contrary winds, and eventually reached London, where he landed at Tower wharf on 30 October, just in time to sit in a Parliament which became almost as firmly enmeshed in the Occasional Conformity Bill as he had been in the Lines of Brabant. 1703 could not, by any reasonable definition, be termed a good year.

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* In these pages I generally call Dutch officers by the names used by their British allies, and thus use ‘Overkirk’ instead of ‘d’Auverkerque’ or ‘Ouwerkerk’; but I realise that this practice may be considered now (as it was then) another symptom of British cultural myopia.