While Marlborough was racing for Oudenarde and battering at Lille, the Duumvirs were inexorably losing their grasp on government. A biographer who sought to present his readers with Marlborough’s political and military identities in parallel would be forced to intersperse correspondence on strategic policy, tactical detail, administrative minutiae, cabinet reshuffles, borough-mongering and monarch-management. The fact that no reference has been made here to Marlborough’s political tribulations does not, however, mean that they were not both real and present. A psychologist considering his behaviour after he received news of the loss of Ghent and Bruges might opine that those events were simply the trigger for the breakdown that followed, and that Marlborough had simply been doing too much for too long to tolerate the sudden and unexpected appearance of a new crisis. This, indeed, is why his well-wishers, like Natzmer and Grumbkow, found it hard to link the crisis itself to what seemed to them an extreme response.
Relations between Sarah and the queen went from bad to worse, and, with more unwise insinuations of lesbianism from the prurient pen of Arthur Maynwaring, from worse to impossible. The final breakdown came on 19 August 1708, the day of thanksgiving for the victory of Oudenarde. Prince George, beset by chronic asthma, was in slow decline, and the queen had been at Windsor nursing him. It was a hot day, and when she changed her clothes at St James’s Palace, Anne took exception to the heavy jewels that Sarah, as groom of the stole, had laid out for her. Sarah interpreted her refusal to wear the jewels as evidence of Abigail Masham’s influence, and the two women had a blazing row in the royal coach on their way to St Paul’s Cathedral. It apparently ended with Sarah telling the queen to ‘be quiet’ as they reached their destination, so that they would not be overheard by the onlookers. Sarah later tried to make amends, ending what came close to a letter of apology with the assertion that ‘I shall never forget that I am your subject, nor ever cease to be a faithful one’; but the damage was done.1
Anne recognised that at the same time that her relationship with Sarah – groom of the stole, first lady of the bedchamber, and keeper of the privy purse – had collapsed, she needed to retain Marlborough’s services. Yet he had made it clear to her that the continuing pressures of command were imposing a burden that he found all but intolerable. If she dismissed Sarah, then Marlborough might simply retire. Things were not helped by the fact that Sarah was now hard at work on the construction of Marlborough House, on Pall Mall just to the east of St James’s Palace. She wanted it (in contrast to the infinitely grander Blenheim) to be ‘strong, plain and convenient’, and Christopher Wren and his son responded with a two-storeyed house in brick with rusticated stone quoins. In order to pay for it, Sarah, with the queen’s knowledge, borrowed money from the privy purse, probably a total of £20,800, for which, as Anne’s biographer politely observes, ‘No repayments are shown in the extant records.’2
Although the political nation paused to watch the progress of the siege of Lille, recorded in detail in the London Gazette, the grim reaper did not check his stride. In early October Prince George was so ill that the queen could not attend the christening of Abigail Masham’s daughter, and on 25 October Godolphin warned Sarah that: ‘The Prince seems to be in no good way at all (in my opinion) as to his health, and I think the Queen herself now seems much more apprehensive of his condition, than I have formerly remembered upon the same occasion.’ It is a reflection on the state of Sarah’s relationship with the queen that she heard this from Godolphin, who had earlier told her that the leading Whig Tom Wharton ‘seemed very much to wish that Mrs Freeman would come to town. All my answer was, that I wished it at least as much.’3 On the twenty-sixth Godolphin complained to Marlborough that he was not writing often enough (‘how disagreeable it is to see 3 Holland mails come in successively without one letter from you’), and concluded that Prince George
has such a general weakness and decay of nature upon him, that very few people that see him have any hopes of his recovery. The Queen herself … begins to think ’tis hardly possible for him to hold out long. I pray God her own health may not suffer by her perpetual watching and attendance upon him.4
George died early on the afternoon of 28 October. The queen, ‘who continued kissing him until the very moment the breath went out of his body’, had to be helped away by Sarah. Godolphin warned Marlborough that the queen’s grief created ‘a new additional affliction which our circumstances did not need’, and said that unless he could return to England without delay ‘it will be next to impossible to prevent ruin’.5 For Marlborough the blow was as much personal as political. He had known Prince George since 1683, and the two men had always got on very well. Moreover, the Danes had provided one of the most reliable of the Allied contingents, and George had helped ensure that it stayed in the field. In May 1706, for instance, he told Marlborough:
I am very glad the Danish troops have been assisting to you, and hope that they will always do their duty however others behave themselves, nothing shall be wanting on my part to persuade their master to follow the interest of England in everything.6
The duke confessed that the news of the prince’s death ‘made such an impression on me that I have not been well for several days, insomuch that I was obliged to march last night in a litter, but have been all this day on horseback. I pray God to enable HM to support this great affliction.’7 Sarah, however, was little help to her mistress in the hour of her need. She declined the queen’s order to fetch Abigail Masham, and as they were leaving St James’s arm in arm, noted disparagingly that Anne ‘found she had the strength to bend down towards Mrs Masham like a sail’. The fact that the new widow ‘ate a very good dinner’ surprised her, and she ‘could not help smiling’ when the queen, addressing her as ‘dear Mrs Freeman’ for the last time, wrote to say that she had ordered ‘a great many Yeomen of the Guard to carry the Prince’s dear body that it may not be let fall, the Great Stairs being very steep and slippery’.8 There is no doubt that Sarah’s ‘unsympathetic analysis of the Queen’s grief is contradicted by every contemporary authority’.9
The queen was at first too prostrated by grief to oppose further Whig advances, but as the year went on she had recovered sufficient strength to fight a valiant rearguard action against the replacement of the moderate Earl of Pembroke, who had taken over as head of the Admiralty Commission not long after Prince George’s death, by the Whig grandee the Earl of Orford. The parliamentary session of 1708–09, whose first half was missed by Marlborough, did little but define Britain’s minimum terms for peace: Louis XIV should recognise Anne’s royal title and the Protestant succession, order Philip V back from Spain, expel the Old Pretender and demolish the harbour and defences of Dunkirk. The French king was in such financial difficulties that he had had the silver furniture at Versailles melted down, and there was widespread belief that he would be forced to accept a humiliating peace.
French and Allied delegates met at The Hague in April 1709. The Allies had agreed a list of forty terms which, in summary, would indeed have embodied a wholesale defeat for Louis. Marlborough, one of the British delegates, was sure that the French would accept, although he noted with irritation that Torcy, the French foreign minister, had been heartened by news of yet another Allied defeat in Portugal, which, he told Sarah, ‘makes our negotiation move slowly’.10 Overall, though, he assured her that:
there is not doubt of it ending in a good peace, but for some little time it must not be spoke of. You must have in readiness the sideboard of plate, and you must let Lord Treasurer know that since the Queen came to the crown I have not had neither a canopy and chair of state, which now of necessity I must have, so the Wardrobe should immediately have orders; and I beg you will take care to have it made so it may serve as part of a bed when I have done with it here, which I hope will be the end of this summer, so that I may enjoy your dear company in quiet, which is the greatest satisfaction I am capable of having. I have so great a head that you will excuse my saying no more by this post.11
Marlborough’s hopes of cutting a fine figure at the formal signing of the peace treaty were to be dashed. Torcy, ‘not having powers sufficient to agree all we insist upon’, sent the preliminary articles to Louis for his consideration.
The king was at his lowest ebb, well aware of the damage done by the war, a particularly harsh winter, and failed harvests. The frost killed vines in Provence, wine froze in its glasses at Versailles, and Mrs Christian Davies recalled that, not long after the capture of Ghent, ‘two of our sentinels were found frozen to death’. As Torcy tells us: ‘Sensibly affected by the distress of his people’, Louis ‘thought that he could not purchase peace for them too dearly’. Yet the Allies, notably by their insistence on ‘No Peace without Spain’, had pitched that price too high. Conditions 4 and 37 of the articles bound Louis to hand over Spain within two months or face a renewal of the war. He could not in honour order Philip to vacate his throne, and would not consent to using French armies to expel him from it. After intense soul-searching, in early June he rejected the Allied terms, and summoned his people to make a final effort to win peace with honour. It was a phenomenal achievement: one of his biographers is right to maintain that ‘The Revolutionaries of 1792–93 did not do much better.’ ‘I have conducted this war with hauteur and pride worthy of this kingdom,’ he told his people.
With the valour of my nobility and the zeal of my subjects, I have succeeded in the enterprises I have undertaken for the good of the state … I have considered proposals for peace and no one has done more than I to secure it … I can no longer see any alternative to take, other than to prepare to defend ourselves. To make them see that a united France is greater than all the powers assembled by force and artifice to overwhelm it, at this hour I have put into effect the most extraordinary measures that we have used on similar occasions to procure the money indispensable for the glory and security of the state … I come to ask for your counsels and your aid in this encounter that involves your safety. By the efforts that we shall make together, our foes will understand that we are not to be put upon. The aid that I ask of you will oblige them to make a peace honourable for us, lasting … and satisfactory for the princes of Europe.12
These were high words, not all of them honest, but they helped inspire genuine sympathy for a monarch who had confronted so much personal misfortune – and who was soon to lose both his son and his eldest grandson. There are moments in French history when military defeat has summoned up an unexpected reserve of national strength. The threadbare citizen armies of the new Republic were to trounce the pipe-clayed warriors of old Europe at the century’s close; in 1870–71 the Armies of National Defence fought with a determination that often astonished their opponents; and in 1916 the defence of Verdun tapped a vein of resolve and self-sacrifice whose outpouring bleached France for another generation. In 1709 the process was neither instant nor comprehensive, and Cadogan was to write at the year’s close that:
Great numbers of deserters come in daily, they are half starved and quite naked, and give such an account of the misery the French troops are in as could not be believed were it not confirmed by the reports and letters from all their garrison towns on the frontier.13
Yet a fresh spirit began to animate the French army, associated with its new commander in Flanders, Marlborough’s old comrade in arms, Claude Louis Hector, duc de Villars. Like many great generals before and since, Marshal Villars was not a comfortable fellow. His willingness to seek battle had often vexed a more cautious Versailles; an irascible man, he was hard on his subordinates, though he never asked more of them than he would freely give himself; and, no less to the point, he got on so badly with Max Emmanuel of Bavaria that he could not be used in Flanders as long as the Elector was there. With Vendôme out of favour, Burgundy a broken reed, Boufflers ill and Max Emmanuel tainted by failure at Brussels, Villars was simply too competent for his boldness or his hot temper to exclude him from command in France’s hour of need. ‘All I have left is my confidence in God and in you, my outspoken friend,’ said Louis, and his confidence was not misplaced.14 Nor was this all. On 10 June Louis sacked his billiards partner Chamillart, and replaced him as war minister with the capable and energetic Voisin.
The collapse of peace negotiations saddened Marlborough, who assured Sarah, even as he was on his way to the army to begin a campaign he had hoped never to fight, that:
I can’t but think that some way will be found before the end of this month for our agreeing, everybody having approved of the pleasuring thoughts of peace … I confess I thought it sure, believing it very much in the interest of France to have agreed with us; but since they seem to think otherwise, I hope God has a further blessing in store. I was in hopes to have had the happiness of being with you before the winter; I wish I could still flatter myself with these thoughts. I do wish you all happiness and speed with your building at London, but beg that may not hinder you from pressing forward the building at Blenheim, for we are not so much master of that as of the other.15
Marlborough’s concerns about Blenheim, whose completion depended on the grant of public money, reflected a deeper worry about the future. The Whigs were at the height of their ascendancy, but the Duumvirs knew that they had prejudiced their relationship with the queen, who still craved a balanced administration, by packing the government with Whigs. The death of Prince George and the increasing alienation of Sarah worsened matters, and although the Harley – Masham back door into the queen’s closet was not yet fully open, it was evidently ajar.
In the spring of 1709 Marlborough tried to tighten his grip on royal favour and gain public affirmation of his status as military leader of the Grand Alliance by persuading the queen to appoint him captain general for life. Unusually, he does not seem to have consulted Godolphin, his closest political associate; possibly because he knew that Godolphin’s own hold on power was weakening, and that securing the captain generalcy might enable him to swim while Godolphin sank. Neither did he speak to Sarah, probably because he deduced that any interventions she might make would be counterproductive. He weeded his own papers of most of the references which might have helped historians, but the painstaking forensic work of Henry L. Snyder, doyen of Marlburian scholars, now enables us to go well beyond the surmises of Marlborough’s early biographers.
Marlborough had always disliked party politics, but the Harley affair of early 1708 had, in the view of Arthur Maynwaring, shown him that ‘it will not be enough hereafter, to make no enemies. Something more of warmth and zeal will be requisite towards those men that will always applaud his actions and who, I verily believe, though they are sometimes a little forward and angry, do yet really love his person.’16 In short, urged Maynwaring, Marlborough should recognise his true friends and give more support to the Whigs, and he did indeed make a special trip to England to get Anne to include Lords Somers and Wharton in her cabinet. That autumn, stuck fast at Lille, Marlborough could only see, as Professor Snyder relates, ‘dismal prospects for the future. His support of the Whigs had placed him in a more vulnerable position, and he knew that if the Queen and her secret counsellors ever found the strength to turn out the ministry he too would suffer the loss of his places.’17
The Tories had used their parliamentary congratulation of Major General Webb to disparage the duke, and Maynwaring suggested that Marlborough’s supporters should riposte with some ‘Addition of honour … and not of wealth’. The somewhat sketchy evidence suggests that Marlborough made his first request for the captain generalcy for life when he was in England in early 1709, and, after the queen’s temporising response, for there was no precedent for the grant, repeated it later that year. Of the four letters he wrote to Anne on the subject only one, of 10 October NS, has survived.
God Almighty knows with what zeal and duty I have served you for all this many years, and all Europe as well as yourself are witnesses how far God has blessed my endeavours ever since your accession to the Crown. I have for some time with the greatest mortification imaginable observed your Majesty’s change from Lady Marlborough to Mrs Masham, and the several indignities Mrs Masham has made her suffer, of which I am much more sensible than of any misfortune that could have befallen myself, which has made me to take the resolution of retiring as soon as this war shall be ended. I was assured last winter of what I am convinced is true, that Mrs Masham has assured Mr Harley and some of his wretches that let my services or success be whatever they would, from thenceforward I should receive no encouragement from your Majesty … In order to know how far your Majesty’s intentions went in this project, I acquainted you of the desire I had of having that mark of your favour that my commission might be for life. You were pleased to judge it not proper.18
The queen replied on 25 October OS by telling Marlborough that she was not surprised to see him ‘so incensed against poor Masham since the Duchess of Marlborough is so’. She thought she had told him, in a previous letter, why she had refused his request, but concluded by saying that if he was of the same mind when he returned to England at the campaign’s close, ‘I will comply with your desires.’19
By the time he returned, however, the Junto peer Lord Orford had been forced upon the queen, and the influential clergyman Dr Henry Sacheverell had preached two inflammatory sermons attacking the government, the 1688 settlement and ‘by implication the Hanoverian succession’.20 The government duly impeached Sacheverell, and although he was found guilty after a divisive trial, his punishment was nominal, and it was in effect a defeat for the Whigs. When Godolphin told Marlborough that Sacheverell had been ‘found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours’ by a mere seventeen votes in the Lords, he added that the Duke of Somerset, a great lord of the middle party, always high in the queen’s esteem since he had loaned her Syon House half a lifetime ago, had not voted. Somerset had claimed to be sick, said Godolphin, ‘but I fancy ’twas only profound wisdom kept him away from the House’. ‘So all this bustle and fatigue,’ he lamented, ‘ends in no more but a suspension for 3 years from the pulpit, and the burning of his sermons at the old Exchange.’21
By the time of the Sacheverell verdict worse was already afoot. Early in 1710, when the Earl of Essex died, the queen gave his post of constable of the Tower to Lord Rivers, and his colonelcy of a regiment of dragoons to Abigail’s brother Jack Hill, without consulting Marlborough, her captain general. After a period of intense political crisis the queen gave way over Jack Hill, encouraging Marlborough to set the seal on his victory by again requesting the captain generalcy for life, this time demanding both the appointment and Abigail Masham’s removal from court by means of a parliamentary address. The scheme misfired grotesquely. The Tories in both Houses opposed the measure on principle, and many moderates were swayed by strong personal loyalty to the monarch. The Duke of Argyll, Marlborough’s political opponent and personal rival (though also a general serving under his command), declared that ‘her Majesty need not be in pain; for he would undertake, whenever she commanded, to seize the Duke at the head of his troops, and bring him away either dead or alive’.22 Marlborough did his best to pretend that he had never supported the measure, but was forced to leave for the 1710 campaign in February, unusually early, to spare himself further humiliation.
There was more to the queen’s repeated refusal to grant Marlborough the captain generalcy for life than her antipathy towards Sarah or her desire not to be bullied. She believed that any grant would be unconstitutional unless ratified by Parliament, and thought that the creation of a permanent captain general by a Whig-dominated Parliament was a most dangerous precedent. Even the Whig leader Lord Somers, lord president of the council and a distinguished lawyer, warned the queen of the danger she ran if Marlborough’s friends managed to force their way by parliamentary address. The Tories, with their traditional antipathy to a standing army and readiness to see their own times in the light of the 1640s, began to snipe at Marlborough as ‘Oliver’ or ‘King John’. The ensuing propaganda war did Marlborough significant damage, though there is not a jot of evidence to suggest that his ambitions went beyond the captain generalcy.
Although the squabble went on from early 1709 till the beginning of 1710, even in its early stages the queen began to flex her muscles and to take a personal hand in senior army appointments. Early in 1709 the experienced Major General George Macartney, one of Marlborough’s favourite commanders, was appointed governor of Jamaica and selected to command an expedition to Newfoundland, part of which had been taken by the French. In May, however, he was accused of raping his housekeeper, a clergyman’s widow. Rape was then a capital offence, and although Macartney escaped the full penalty of the law, the queen, who took the advice of the Bishop of London, saw that he was cashiered for ‘disgraceful conduct’, though he was allowed to sell his regiment. Marlborough made his own feelings in the matter clear by letting Macartney stay with the army as a volunteer, and he fought so valiantly at Malplaquet with Sir Thomas Prendergast’s Regiment that the queen forgave him, giving him the colonelcy made vacant by Prendergast’s death in the battle. He did not stay forgiven for long, for he was one of the three senior officers dismissed for drinking damnation to the new ministry in November 1710. ‘The orders for their stripping were passed through Marlborough,’ writes Scouller, ‘who had to deliver them unopened.’23 So far had the mighty fallen.
In mid-1709 Marlborough felt that his powers as captain general were not what they had been. From his camp before Tournai he wrote to Robert Walpole, the Secretary at War, enclosing
a memorial delivered to me by Captain Chudleigh of Colonel Bretton’s regiment, complaining of the great hardship he lies under by a much younger officer being made major over his head during his absence in France.
You have likewise a memorial of Major Wedderburn of Colonel Sutton’s regiment. There are so many more instances of the like nature, which deserve to be considered and redressed, that I know not what to advise on it: but I hope that when I come home in the winter, H.M. will think it fit to refer all these matters to the general officers, that proper measures may be taken to relieve those that are prejudiced, and make the officers of the army more easy in the service.24
Even without the painful recognition that his hold on the queen’s affections had been loosened, Marlborough would have begun the campaign of 1709 at a disadvantage, because he had genuinely believed that the French would accept the Allied peace terms. Yet the early spring was not wasted, and Cadogan was ready to put the army into the field, whether to fight or to occupy territory given up by the French under the terms of the peace. On 22 April he cheerfully reported that he could ‘assemble the army at the time your Grace is pleased to direct it … Fine weather has forwarded everything, and a great deal of the corn which was thought dead begins to spring out again, so that suffering the assembly of the army for eight or ten days is as long as any may require.’25 On the following day Marlborough told Major General Palmes, then at Vienna, to meet the Duke of Savoy and ‘press H.R.H. in his preparations to take the field’, for if the French did not make peace, then ‘if we neglect the opportunity of this campaign, while the enemy’s circumstances are reduced to so low an ebb, it is to be doubted whether we may ever have the like again of reducing them to reason’.26 He was doomed, yet again, to be disappointed in the Duke of Savoy, who took so long to agree arrangements with the Imperialists that French troops were able to redeploy from Spain to Dauphiné to parry his thrust.
By the time the Allied army did actually need to assemble, though, both time and weather had worked in favour of the French. ‘We have rain every day,’ Marlborough told Godolphin, ‘which gives us the spleen, and is of great advantage to Marshal Villars, since it gives him time to finish his lines, which he is working at the head of his army.’ Villars was closer to his soldiers than his illustrious predecessors, and knew just how near to starvation they were. ‘I am humble,’ he told Louis’ wife Madame de Maintenon, ‘when I see the backbreaking labour men perform without food.’27
When Marlborough took the field in June, Villars had already been hard at work. He had some 128 battalions and 247 squadrons arrayed in a strong line of field defences between the fortresses of Douai on the Scarpe and St-Venant on the Lys. Much of his infantry was in a strong fortified camp at La Bassée, with most of his cavalry drawn up behind it and a strong detachment thrown out to watch his right flank. ‘He has La Bassée on his front leaving Lens to his rear,’ Marlborough wrote to Godolphin.
His flanks are covered by two little rivers which have marshy grounds to them. By this situation you will see that he has no mind to offer battle but on very advantageous terms … Their people are in great misery, but by what we hear from Paris all the money they have will be employed for the subsisting of their armies. And I think it is plain by the entrenching of Monsieur de Villars’ army that they will be upon the defensive, which they would not do, were they not sure of subsistence. If we should be so fortunate as to have an occasion of beating them, we could not, for want of forage and provisions enter into France, but by the sea coast, and then we should be in want of your assistance.28
Godolphin assured him that he could indeed help with supplies. If Marlborough took his army to the coast it could be supplied with bread for 40–50,000 men with little notice, and agreed that a move along the Channel coast offered better prospects than a thrust into Artois, ‘where the enemy has eaten or destroyed the greatest part of it’.29
In late June Marlborough had 164 battalions and 271 squadrons in the plain of Lens, outnumbering Villars by 110,000 men to about 90,000, and far better sustained. The general dearth, however, made life uncomfortable even for the Allies. Although the weather had now improved, ‘there is no straw in this country, so that the poor men have been obliged to lie on the wet ground’.30 On 24 June Marlborough and Eugène looked at the French position, and their conclusions, as he admitted to Sarah, were unsurprising. ‘If it had been reasonable,’ he wrote,
this letter would have brought you the news of a battle, but Prince Eugène, myself and all the generals did not think it advisable to run so great a hazard, considering their camp, as well as their having strengthened it so by their entrenchments, so that we have resolved on the siege of Tournai, and accordingly marched last night, and have invested it when they expected our going to another place, [so] that they have not half the troops in the town that they should have to defend themselves well, which makes us hope it will not cost us dear. I am so sleepy that I can say no more but that [I] am entirely yours.31
Goslinga maintains that Marlborough would have preferred to besiege Ypres, but Eugène and the rest of the council of war preferred Tournai. Jinking swiftly to invest Tournai was certainly a tactical masterstroke, achieved by striking camp at tattoo on the evening of 15 June and marching all night. ‘Nay, he had done it so privately,’ wrote an admiring Private Deane, ‘that the inhabitants of the town nor soldiers in the garrison knew nothing of it till next day at 3 o’clock in the morning – and then was discovered by a convoy of bread wagons coming innocently out of town laden with provisions for their army’.32 Even Goslinga admitted that it had gone surprisingly well, and that ‘M de Villars was caught head down in the basket’.33
The move may, however, have made less strategic sense. Marlborough had recently asserted that the French, at their last gasp, should be pressed as hard as possible, and sieges, no matter how successful, were unlikely to cause their collapse. Although the written record is silent on the subject, we may doubt whether a thrust along the Channel coast, sustained by seaborne logistics, would have appealed to either Eugène or the Dutch. One of Marlborough’s most astute biographers argues that the abandonment of an offensive reflected Eugène’s influence, ‘which consistently worked towards a conservative policy and by which, almost uniquely, Marlborough would allow himself to be guided when it contradicted his own opinion’.34
Perhaps there may be more to it than that. Marlborough’s correspondence consistently reflects astonishment at the blighted state of France, and a conviction that the French could not continue the war. Louis was indeed in dire straits: early in July he told Villars that he could spend two or three thousand louis d’or on the fortification of Béthune and St Venant, though it was ‘a sum difficult to assemble in the present state of affairs’.35 Early in July Marlborough warned Heinsius that he did not expect better terms at the end of the campaign than had been embodied in the rejected preliminaries. He was wholly correct in emphasising that the Spanish clause had proved fatal: ‘Were I in the place of the King of France, I should venture the loss of my country much sooner than be obliged to join my troops for the forcing [of] my grandson.’36 Yet he still expected that the French would agree terms close to those suggested that spring, and on 22 July suggested that: ‘The account of the misery and disturbances in France are such, that if it continues they must be ruined.’37 Perhaps the whole rotten structure was about to tumble down, and a brisk kick at Tournai might just prove the last straw. He had a well-placed agent at Versailles whose reports told of people struggling to tear fragments from a dead horse on the Pont Neuf, crowds of unemployed workmen seeking jobs, aristocrats preparing to leave the country, and the king’s guards sleeping booted and spurred in case of insurrection. ‘Certainly,’ he told Godolphin, ‘the misery of France increases, which must bring us to a peace.’38
There was, alas, to be nothing brisk about the siege of Tournai. It was defended by the marquis de Surville-Hautefort with a garrison of some 7,700 men. Surville lacked the troops to defend the town itself, and on 28 July agreed to give it up after some of his outworks had been taken by storm. Marlborough promptly informed the queen of this success, hoping that it might ‘oblige the enemy to submit to such terms as may conduce to a happy and lasting peace’.39 Surville retired into Tournai’s citadel, which, as Private Deane reported, ‘is an invincible strong place for mines’.40 Richard Kane agreed that it was ‘one of the best fortified places by art that is in the world, there being more works a great deal under ground, than above, which made our approach very difficult’.41 Marlborough took direction of the siege while Eugène commanded the field army, but ‘bloody work at the siege’ meant that some regiments had to be relieved from the trenches and replaced by fresh units. The defenders’ use of mines lent a particular horror to operations, and Sergeant John Wilson thought that
of all the horrid schemes of war, this bringing of mines and sapping to find out the same was the most dreadful, for it was with great reluctance that even the boldest men in the army then on this service have turned their backs and given way. Nay, even those who had seen death in all its shapes above ground was struck with horror to stand (as he supposed) on the top of a mine in danger of being blown up every minute. And those who went under ground into the saps had a co-equal reluctance, if not more, they being in danger every minute either of being suffocated or buried in the rubbish in the like nature.42
Villars, meanwhile, extended his lines to the Scheldt above Condé, and swung his army up behind them between Douai and Valenciennes. On 8 August Marlborough assured Godolphin that Villars was too weak to cover the lines at La Bassée and to prevent the Allies from moving against Valenciennes if they wished to do so. He watched from a distance the slow unrolling of Allied plans for the invasion of south-east France, spoiled first by its slow development, and then checked fatally by the defeat of the Elector of Hanover’s advance guard at Rummersheim in late August. Perhaps, by any reasonable standards, France might be dead, but her corpse was still twitching to some purpose. Marlborough was convinced that the French would come to terms if only the Allies would moderate their demands, and Spain was still the sticking point. He assured Heinsius that ‘the French ministers have it not in their powers to recall the Duke of Anjou’, and declared that ‘the insisting on the [surrender of] three towns in Spain’ made it impossible for the French to come to terms. ‘I call to God to witness that I think it is not in the power of the King of France … it is in my opinion declaring the continuation of the war.’43
Goslinga thought precisely the same, and warned Marlborough that he could not see how ‘by the terms of this treaty we could enter, without firing a shot, into possession of these fortresses which we could never … take by force of arms in four campaigns’. Marlborough, he complains, could give him no satisfactory answer, and attributes this to the fact that he ‘wished for the war to continue because of resentment at his rejection as Governor of the Low Countries, by ambition and desire for money’.44 As we can now see from Marlborough’s correspondence, the accusation that he was anxious for the war to continue was patently untrue: he was now heartily sick of it, and longed to live out his days at Blenheim, albeit with the captain generalcy as a souvenir of his great and glorious days. In 1706 the emperor, on behalf of Charles III, had offered to make Marlborough governor of the Spanish Netherlands. Godolphin had assured him that the queen ‘likes the thing very well and leaves it to you to do, as you shall judge best for her service and the common cause’.45 Marlborough quickly recognised that ‘it would create a great jealousy, which might prejudice the common cause’, and turned it down.46 It is hard to see how Goslinga could have read Marlborough more incorrectly.
The citadel of Tournai capitulated at last on 3 September, having cost the Allies over 5,000 killed and wounded. Its garrison was allowed to go to France on parole, to await formal exchange with the Allied garrison of Warneton, taken by Le Blanc, the ‘lively, bold and enterprising’ Intendant of Ypres. Marlborough at once darted south-east to besiege Mons, moving his siege train by water to Brussels and then down to Mons by road. On 7 September he told Godolphin that although he could not begin serious battering till the train arrived, probably towards the twentieth of the month, he hoped to take the little fort of St Ghislain with the guns he had with him, and complete his lines of circumvallation around Mons. Villars had just managed to reinforce its garrison before the iron fist closed around Mons, but there could be little doubt that, once the heavy guns started gnawing at its walls, Mons would go the same way as Tournai.
Louis had hitherto been reluctant to allow Villars to risk battle, arguing that a lost battle would leave France open to invasion, while a victory could not be exploited. That summer Villars was given heavily-qualified permission to fight, and on 6 September Marlborough’s agent at Versailles warned him that Villars now planned to give battle as soon as Tournai surrendered. Moreover, claimed the agent, Boufflers, who had been at Versailles, had now departed for the frontier with his cuirass and weapons.47 The marquis de Cheldon, captured in an outpost action near Mons, was happy to assure his captors that Villars intended to fight, and Lord Orkney told his brother that ‘we had intelligence of Boufflers being come up to their camp with orders to risk all and venture a battle’.48 On 10 September, in his last letter written before Malplaquet, Marlborough told Sarah that a battle might not be far off.
I have received intelligence that the French were on their march to attack us. We immediately got ourselves ready and marched to a post some distance from our camp. We came in presence between two and three o’clock yesterday in the afternoon, but as there was several defiles between us, we only cannonaded each other. They have last night entrenched their camp, by which they show plainly that they have changed their mind and will not attack us, so we must take our measures in seeing which way we can be most troublesome to them.49
Marlborough had swept down from the north-west to beleaguer Mons, crossing the little River Haine not far from the town. Villars, in turn, had crossed the headwaters of the Scheldt and marched north-eastwards, with the Sambre away to his right. The town of Bavay was the hub of the local road-system, with Roman roads spreading out from it like the spokes of a wheel. Between the two armies lay a series of big, broad-leaved woods. The most northerly, jutting up towards the Haine, and today dismally curtailed by the post-industrial sprawl of towns like Frameries, Paturages and Boussu (for this was once mining country), was then called Sars Wood, named for the village of Sars-la-Bruyère. Then came the small round copse of Thiery Wood. Finally, Lanière Wood, astride the Roman road from Bavay to Givry, closed the southern front of the battlefield, with a bosky finger poking down towards the Sambre near Hautmont. The woods have changed their size and shape somewhat with the passage of two centuries, and, confusingly, the nomenclature of modern maps bears limited relation to that in contemporary accounts. To any traveller making his way from Mons to Malplaquet, and passing the deserted checkpoint that marks the Franco-Belgian border and the stone obelisk that commemorates the battle, the message is clear. This is close country, made for defence, that denies even the most capable general any room for manoeuvre.
There were three militarily-practicable gaps between the woods: the trouée de Boussu north of Sars Wood, then the trouée de la Louvière north of Thiery Wood, and the Aulnois gap to its south. The ground was generally flat and often marshy, but there was enough microterrain to make a difference to those who must live and die by it. The road from Mons to Bavay forks just north of Sars, and its eastern extension climbs the gentlest of gradients as it traverses the Aulnois gap towards the village of Malplaquet, then as now a few houses strewn along both sides of the road. The solidly-built farm complex of Bléron stood beside a brook just west of Thiery Wood, and, with it, separated the Louvière from the Aulnois gap as the cutwater of a bridge divides the current.
Neither army could get at the other without passing through one of the gaps, and with alert cavalry on both sides it was impossible to ‘steal a march’ and pass a gap without the enemy being able to react. On 8 September, after jockeying around the Boussu gap, the two armies moved up to either end of the Louvière and Aulnois gaps. Marlborough had to leave forces to invest St Ghislain and Mons, and Lieutenant General Henry Withers, with nineteen battalions and ten squadrons, was still on his way down from Tournai. On the eighth Villars told Louis:
I have the honour to inform your Majesty of the resolution taken to assemble the army and give battle to the enemy … I have the honour to tell your Majesty that I am delighted that M le Maréchal Boufflers is here; if we attack, he will bear witness that it is with good reason; if we do nothing, I will be pleased that such a brave man will bear witness that we could not have done better.50
Early on the ninth Marlborough rode forward to reconnoitre, and saw Villars’ army coming up in four large columns. For a moment it seemed as if he might simply push on through one of the gaps beside Thiery Wood, which would have caused some consternation as Eugène was away covering the Boussu gap, but by midday it was evident that he was entrenching a position including Sars Wood on its left and Lanière Wood on its right.
Marlborough was in no position to attack on the ninth. His army was spread out watching the gaps, and what Orkney called ‘a prodigious dusty rain’ caused much confusion. It was only towards mid-afternoon that he had enough guns available to bombard the French, by which time they had ‘began and cannonaded us pretty briskly, particularly where our English foot were, and killed us a good many men’.51 Surprisingly, the Allied commanders decided not to attack on the tenth either. Neither Withers’ men, who would be freed by the fall of St Ghislain on the tenth, nor four German battalions ordered down from Mons, had yet arrived, but Marlborough and Eugène were already stronger than Villars, and the French position grew more formidable by the minute. Failure to attack on the tenth was indeed a serious mistake. ‘Either the battle should have taken place on the 10th or not at all,’ declares Ivor Burton.52 Marlborough, however, was anxious not to miss the chance of what he hoped would be a decisive contest, and trusted to his own skill and his army’s courage to win it.
‘The Allies could not attack the day we arrived,’ recalled de la Colonie, who was to command a Bavarian brigade in the French centre, ‘nor the day afterwards.’53 He watched the Allies preparing a great battery of about thirty heavy guns, facing his position, but at the same time the soldiers of his own army were working with passionate energy on their own position. Five arrowhead-shaped redoubts, their parapets thick enough to be cannon-proof, were thrown up on the open ground between Sars Wood and Bléron Farm, with a gentle slope between them and the Allies. A battery of thirty guns was tucked carefully into a re-entrant near Thiery Wood, while the trees on the forward edges of the French-held woods were felled with their tips facing the expected direction of assault. Where possible leaves were stripped and branches sharpened, but even without these refinements an abatis of felled timber presented a cruel obstacle to attacking infantry. Entrenchments for infantry and guns alike creased the landscape, dug by famished men who now rose supremely to their task. Not long before they had grumbled when Villars had come to speak to them, intoning, with mock piety, ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Now they roared ‘Vive le Roi’ and ‘Vive le Maréchal Villars’ as he rode amongst them. Old Boufflers, born in 1644, was senior to Villars as a marshal of France, but freely agreed to serve under his command, and the sight of this stubby warrior reminded men that he was a doughty defensive fighter, and there were cheers for him too.
Villars gave Boufflers command of his right wing, with forty-six battalions in Lanière Wood under d’Artaignan and de Guiche. The twenty-gun battery swept the ground to their left front, and eighteen battalions, including the Swiss and French Guard, were entrenched opposite Bléron Farm. A nearby memorial now makes the tragic point that there were Swiss in both armies, and that they met in battle here. There were thirteen battalions, some of them Bavarian and Irish, manning the redoubts, with four in close support, and the bulk of the French artillery, some sixty guns, was sited to beat the open ground in front of them. Lieutenant General Albergotti commanded twenty-one battalions securing the angle where the line of the redoubts swung north to the edge of Sars Wood, and Lieutenant General de Goësbriand, in overall command of the left, had seventeen battalions near La Folie Farm. Most of the cavalry was drawn up just behind the redoubts, close enough to support the infantry if required, and to take advantage of any disorder produced by the repulse of an Allied attack, but not so close as to get caught up in the infantry battle. The gentle rise of the ground meant, though, that British cannonballs that skimmed above the low
crest defended by the redoubts went on to hit the cavalry behind. Villars’ units were under-strength, but he had some 85,000 men and eighty guns, posted to take best advantage of the ground.
Marlborough proposed to attack the French army in much the same way that he had at Blenheim and Ramillies, first unbalancing it, and then administering the knockout blow. In this case he would attack the French flanks, thereby inducing Villars to reinforce them from his centre, which would then be broken by direct assault. He had about 110,000 men and a hundred cannon. Though Withers’ men were not to arrive in time to form part of the attack on the left, as was first intended, he decided to commit them to his right, the closest part of the line to their direction of arrival, hoping that they might be able to crash their way through the ungarrisoned portion of Sars Wood and hook round the French left flank. Prince Eugène, in overall command on the right, recorded this as ‘a special attack’.
On the Allied right, Schulenberg was to assault Sars Wood with forty battalions, with d’Auvergne’s forty squadrons of Dutch cavalry close behind. Count Lottum would attack at the angle of Sars Wood and the line of the redoubts with twenty-two battalions, among them the Duke of Argyll’s British infantry. In the centre Orkney commanded fifteen battalions, eleven of them British, with 179 squadrons of cavalry to their rear – a sure sign that Marlborough intended to pass his cavalry through a French centre weakened by making detachments to the flanks. The young Prince of Orange, who had done so well at Oudenarde, commanded the left flank. Although he was not reinforced, as had been expected, by Withers, he nonetheless had thirty Dutch battalions, among them the Blue Guards and the Scots brigade, troops of the highest quality. The attack would begin at daybreak, signalled by a salvo from the entire British artillery, immediately taken up by the Dutch cannon.
11 September 1709 dawned foggy, and both Lord Orkney and Colonel de la Colonie, perhaps a thousand yards apart at the time, thought that this was advantageous for the Allies, letting them form up without interference from French guns. ‘It was hardly 7’oclock when we marched to the attack,’ observed Orkney,
and it really was a noble sight to see so many different bodies marching over the plain to a thick wood where you could see no man, as all Schulenberg’s, Lottum’s, Argyll’s and Webb’s foot marched and fronted to the wood to attack. I fronted quite another way, to the high ground where the mouth of the defile was, so that we made a crocket [a protrusion in the main line]. My orders were to bring my right into the wood, cross the plain, and advance my line up to their entrenchments. As the others beat them from their retrenchments, such a fire of musketry and cannon I believe no man alive ever heard, and great execution was done on both sides with our artillery.54
De la Colonie found himself facing Orkney in the very centre of the field. A fourteen-gun battery came into action on the right of his regiment, almost touching the Gardes Français, the next unit along.
I noticed the officer commanding the artillery in front of our brigade, who was not terribly young, but so active in his task that he lost no opportunity to hasten the fire of his battery: I was able to see the balls plunge deep into the depth of the enemy column. But as soon as a breach was made, it was at the same instant filled up, and the enemy marched, meanwhile, at a normal pace.
As the Allied infantry advanced, they made a quarter-turn to the right, and disappeared into Sars Wood, ‘in the place where their battery had made a breach’. ‘The head of this column soaked up all the fire of our infantry which was entrenched before it,’ said de la Colonie, ‘and which did it terrible damage, but it did not slacken in its stubbornness.’ As the column vanished into the smoke and confusion of the wood, an Irish brigade was ordered to leave the central entrenchments and move into the wood, and de la Colonie’s brigade was told to replace it. Later his own brigade was ordered to follow the Irish.
The first order which was brought to us, addressed to the brigade major, we refused to obey because of the importance of retaining the post we then held, and the danger of abandoning it; but a lieutenant general came a second time to order us, with great passion, to march.55
De la Colonie’s memory has compressed the events of several hours into a single narrative, and the vision-narrowing effects of stress, combined with the obscuration caused by the grey-white powder smoke, meant that he could never see what went on to his flanks. The fighting in Sars Wood was a bitter close-quarter struggle, with successive Allied attacks being checked and fresh battalions committed to replace broken ones. Sergeant John Wilson wrote of
an obstinate engagement for the space of two hours in which there was a great effusion of blood on both sides, the armies firing at each other bayonet to bayonet. And after they came to stab each other with their bayonets and several came so close that they knocked one another’s brains out with the butt end of their firelocks.
Having taken the first part of the wood, the attackers found more trees and earthworks before them.
This action continued both desperate and bloody which continued for the space of five hours with incredible fury and resolution on both sides. And all this while doubtful of success because the enemy rallied and regained, with extraordinary valour, the entrenchments from which we had beaten them.56
Allied progress was agonisingly slow and costly, and, as senior officer casualties were to show, death was often the price of superfine cloth and gold lace. Eugène was hit in the neck but refused to have his wound dressed: if the Allies won, he said, there would be time enough later, and if they lost it would not matter. John Marshall Deane, whose 1st Foot Guards saw some very hard fighting, regretted that
abundance of men was lost in our side at these bold attacks, and amongst the rest a great many of our commanding officers as generals, brigadiers, colonels, lieutenant colonels, majors and officers of all ranks, likewise several gentleman officers and engineers belonging to the two trains of artillery, and abundance of good old experienced soldiers.57
The Duke of Argyll, whacked three times by spent musketballs, heard his soldiers mutter that he must be wearing a breastplate, and ripped open his waistcoat and shirt to show them that he was not. ‘The Duke of Argyll went open-breasted amongst the men to encourage them to behave as became Englishmen,’ wrote Mrs Davies. ‘You see, brothers, he said, I have no concealed armour, I am equally exposed with you.’ She went forward into the wood to take her husband some beer, but her dog began to howl, leading her to fear the worst. ‘I ran amongst the dead,’ she wrote, ‘and turned over near two hundred, amongst whom I found Brigadier Lalo, Sir Thomas Prendergast, and a great number more of my best friends, before I found my husband’s body which a man was stripping. At my approach he went off, and left his booty.’58
The Royal Regiment of Ireland was the last to come in from Tournai, where it had been levelling the siege works, and it is impossible for us to be certain whether it actually formed up on the right of Withers’ detachment, which is where it should have gone, or was a good deal further to the east, and engaged in the fighting for Sars Wood, as David Chandler suggests. In any event, as Captain Parker recalled:
We continued marching slowly on, till we came to an opening in the wood. It was a small plain, on the opposite side of which we perceived a battalion of the enemy drawn up, a skirt of the wood being in the rear of them. Upon this Colonel [Richard] Kane, who was then at the head of the regiment, having drawn us up, and formed our platoons, gently advanced towards them, with the six platoons of our first fire made ready. When we had advanced within a hundred paces of them, they gave us a fire of one of their ranks: whereupon we halted, and returned the fire of our six platoons at once; and immediately made ready the six platoons of our second fire, and advanced upon them again. They then gave us the fire of another rank, and we returned them a second fire, which made them shrink; however, they then gave us the fire of a third rank after a scattering manner, and retired into the wood in great disorder; on which we sent our third fire after them, and saw them no more.59
Parker’s comrades found, amongst the forty dead and wounded marking the enemy’s line, the wounded Lieutenant O’Sullivan, who told them that they had beaten the Jacobite Royal Regiment of Ireland. Parker’s regiment had only four killed and six wounded.
On the Allied left the Dutch attack fared much worse. At their first attempt the Dutch on the extreme left actually got into the entrenchments in Lanière Wood, but were dislodged by a counterattack by the Régiment de Navarre, ‘which happened at that time to be composed of very short men, nearly in rags’. The Dutch Blue Guards, further to the right, were raked by the concealed French battery and fell in their hundreds. As the Dutch tide ebbed the Prince of Hesse-Cassel brought his cavalry forward to discourage a counterattack. The Dutch, Scots and Danish battalions rallied and attacked again, only to be scythed down in their windrows by French musketry and cannon fire: Generals Fagel, Spaar and Oxenstiern were among the dead. ‘The Hollands army suffering very much,’ wrote Private Deane. ‘The 2nd and 3rd battalions of Blue Guards being bloodily smashed and broke, insomuch that the three battalions altogether cannot make above 800 men … And a great many other regiments in the Hollands service being very much broke and shattered.’60
At a little before eleven o’clock Goslinga galloped over to Marlborough, who was preoccupied with the battle for Sars Wood, and urged him to support the Dutch attack. Marlborough rode across to his left, congratulated Orange on the valour of his men, and told him to make no more assaults for the moment, but simply to keep the French right fixed and unable to move. Commentators have not been slow to blame the Prince of Orange for what was, by any standards, a disaster. The redoubtable C.T. Atkinson suggests that Orange was simply meant to ‘demonstrate’ against the wood, but ‘suddenly converted his demonstration into real attack’, though he gives no evidence to support this interesting deduction.61 Marlborough was perhaps a mile away from the Dutch attack, and we cannot suppose that he would have mistaken, over a period of several hours, the noise of a real attack as opposed to a feint. Nor is it really credible to suggest that Orange was so piqued at the absence of Withers’ detachment that he decided to risk his own life repeatedly, and to persist in a course of action that killed most of the generals to whose care he had been entrusted, not to mention thousands of his rank and file. The suggestion that he lost direction in the smoke and thus attacked the wrong wood is not wholly incredible, but does raise the issue of what wood he was meant to attack, and, again, why Marlborough, probably just within sight and certainly within earshot, did not intervene.
Marlborough never blamed Orange, even at a time when a scapegoat would have been useful. Indeed, he told Godolphin: ‘Our left was Dutch troops only, who behaved themselves extremely well but could not force the enemy’s retrenchments, so that their foot has suffered more than any other nation.’62 It is more likely that, just as Marlborough did not tell Orkney that his role at Ramillies was essentially diversionary, preferring to keep his options open until he could see how the battle was shaping, so at Malplaquet he did indeed order Orange to attack Lanière Wood. What surprised him, and most Allied commentators, was how very well the French fought. There were those who, like Sergeant Wilson, maintained that French soldiers could only fight from behind entrenchments and barricades, but the fact remains that at Malplaquet, Villars’ men withstood a shock that had broken their comrades at Blenheim, Ramillies and Oudenarde, and Marlborough had underestimated their staying power: perhaps the French had underestimated it themselves. In sum, it is hard to disagree with David Chandler’s judgement that ‘the fact that Marlborough unquestioningly shouldered the responsibility for Orange’s attacks should at least dispose of allegations of misconduct or blatant error on the part of the Prince of Orange’.63
At about midday Villars was strengthening his failing left wing by leaching troops from his centre, the Irish brigade first, with de la Colonie’s Bavarians to follow, hoping to attack Schulenberg’s men when they emerged from the wood. In the process, as Boufflers was to tell Louis, ‘our centre was deprived of infantry by the necessity to send it to the left’.64 Marlborough, prompted by Schulenberg, told Orkney to press on into them, and ordered d’Auvergne and Hesse-Cassel to prepare to follow him with their cavalry. ‘It was about one o’clock that my 13 battalions got up to the retrenchments,’ wrote Orkney, ‘which we got very easily, for as we advanced they quitted them and inclined to their right.’65
Villars might yet have reaped a dividend from weakening his centre, for he had by now assembled some fifty battalions ready to counterattack the Allies as they emerged from Sars Wood. He had just been told that the redoubts had been lost when he was hit in the knee by a musketball: he tried to retain command, but fainted, and was carried off in a sedan chair. At the same moment another general was killed and Albergotti himself was seriously wounded. Command of the French left wing now passed to Puységur, but he failed to launch the quick counterattack that might have jarred the Allies. However, when Miklau’s ten squadrons of cavalry, which had accompanied Withers’ outflanking force, appeared near La Folie well ahead of the infantry which might have supported it, it was roundly charged by ten squadrons of carabiniers and scattered.
In the centre, though, the battle was now turning decisively against the French. The Allied cavalry began to pass through Orkney’s battalions, ‘and formed up’, as he tells us,
under [e.g. covered by] my fire. The enemy were in two lines on the other side of the retrenchment, and there was Boufflers at the head of the Maison du Roi and the gens d’armes. I took care not to fire even when they came pretty near – only some platoons to make them pay us respect, and to give us opportunity to form our horse on the other side of the retrenchments. But, as our horse got on the other side their horse came very near ours. Before we got 80 squadrons out they came down and attacked; and there was such pelting at each other that I really never saw the like. The French fired a little, but ours not at the first. We broke through them, particularly four squadrons of English. Jemmy Campbell, at the head of the grey dragoons, behaved like an angel, and broke through both lines. So did Panton, with little Lord Lumley, at the head of one [squadron] of Lumley’s and one of Wood’s. At first we pushed them, but it did not last long, for they pushed back our horse again so that many of them ran through our retrenchments … However, more squadrons went out, and sometimes they gained a little ground, and were as fast beat back again. I could see however it go better in other places … While the horse were engaged, I had little to do but encourage them, in which I was not idle, but oftentimes to little purpose.66
That genial soldier of fortune Peter Drake, now serving with the Maison du Roi, was shot in the calf and received two sword-cuts in the unavailing struggle to hold back the Allied horse. Drake believed that the second Allied cavalry attack worked because cannon had been hauled forward to support it. ‘The success of this last attack was greatly owing to a large number of cannon, and small mortars continually firing and throwing their shells into the woods, which tore down whole trees,’ he affirmed. He tried to surrender to a cavalry officer, but took the wise precaution of keeping his carbine cocked and handy. The officer aimed a pistol at him, and ‘his shot and mine went off instantaneously, I shot the upper part of his head, and he tumbled forward; his ball only gouged my shoulder, and tore the flesh a little’. An officer in the same regiment later accepted Drake’s surrender.67
De la Colonie thought that the first shock of cavalry was violent but indecisive, but that the Allies had the edge after they had rallied and passed through the redoubts again. He admitted that those grey-horsed dragoons – he called them ‘the Scots Guards of the Queen’ – were very good indeed. He reckoned that Villars was wounded during the second phase of the cavalry battle, and argued that if Boufflers had not ordered a retreat the battle might yet have been won, for there were fresh cavalry further back to support the Maison du Roi. All the evidence suggests that he was too sanguine, for the French infantry on both flanks had now begun to give way. Puységur’s men had at last been taken in the flank by Withers’ detachment, and the dogged Schulenberg had hauled seven twelve-pounder guns through the wood and begun to gall the French from its southern edge. Puységur knew that it was time to go, and ordered a retreat on Quiévrain. On the French right, d’Artaignan, who had taken command when Boufflers rode to the centre to assume command of the whole army, fell back on Bavay. Some historians suggest that he was forced from his entrenchments by another Dutch assault, but Marlborough admitted that ‘we were afraid to make them advance, having been twice repulsed’. De la Colonie was right to say that this was not broken infantry, seeking safety in flight, but formed brigades coming off, badly mauled but in good order. The Allied cavalry followed the French rearguard to the banks of the little Hogneau, but the chevalier de Luxembourg’s well-handled rearguard kept them at bay, and there was nothing approaching collapse and pursuit. Sensitive to French accusations of ‘our not pressing them in their retreat’, Marlborough told Sarah that ‘we had not foot’ to support the cavalry, as the infantry on his right were too far away and the Dutch on his left were too badly knocked about.68
Most combatants recognised at once that there was something wholly shocking about Malplaquet. The Allies probably lost just over 20,000 killed and wounded, with the burden falling disproportionately on the Dutch, with 8,462 casualties, and the French perhaps 12,000. Later that month Boufflers told Louis that 6,000 of his soldiers were still receiving treatment, and this takes no account of those killed on the spot or who died of wounds in the days after the battle. His official list gave 240 officers killed and 593 wounded, but only seventeen prisoners. Lord Orkney, who had seen many a stricken field, told his brother:
As to the dead and wounded, I leave you to the public letters: but depend on it, no two battles this war could furnish the like number. You will see great lists of generals and officers. I can liken this battle to nothing so much as an attack of a counterscarp from right to left; and I am sure you would have thought so, if you had seen the field as I did the day after. In many places they lie as thick as ever you saw a flock of sheep; and, where our poor nephew [Colonel Lord] Tullibardine was, it was prodigious. I really think I never saw the like; particularly where the Dutch guards attacked, it is a miracle. I hope in God it may be the last battle I may ever see … The French are very proud they have done so well. I doubt it is with us as it was with the French at the battle of Landen …
There is hardly any general that either is not shot in his clothes or his horse … many had 3, 4 and 5 horses shot under them. None alive ever saw such a battle.69
Major Blackader was soon to become Lieutenant Colonel Blackader, for his commanding officer, Colonel Cranston, had been ‘killed by a cannon-ball … shot in at the left breast and out at the back: he spoke not a word’. The morning after:
I went to view the field of battle … in all my life, I have not seen the dead bodies lie so thick as they were in some places among the retrenchments, particularly at the battery the Dutch guards attacked. For a good while I could not go among them, lest my horse should tread on the carcasses that were lying, as it were, heaped on one another … The Dutch have suffered most in this battle of any. Their infantry is quite shattered; so that it is a dear victory.70
Corporal Matthew Bishop and some comrades had hoped, ‘having no tents to fix’, that they could spend the night in a convenient house, but found it ‘full of miserable objects, that were disabled and wounded in such a manner that I thought them past all recovery’. They looked elsewhere, but ‘all the hedges and ditches were lined with disabled men … the horrible cries and groans of the wounded terrified my soul, so that I was in tortures and fancied I felt their sufferings’.71
Marlborough himself thought that ‘There never was a battle in which there has been so many killed and wounded as this, for there are very few prisoners, considering the greatness of the action.’72 He told Boyle that this was because ‘in the heat of the battle there was little quarter given on either side … Most of the officers we have taken are wounded.’73 On 13 September he wrote to Villars, lying wounded at Le Quesnoy, to wish him well after ‘the accident which you suffered in the battle’, and to propose measures ‘for the succour of officers and others of your army who have been left on the field of battle, or who have dragged themselves into neighbouring houses’. If Villars was to dispatch wagons to Bavay, the wounded would be collected and could then be sent, on parole, wherever Villars wished. Marlborough intended to send Cadogan there on the fourteenth, at whatever hour Villars thought suitable, to supervise ‘prompt succour and transport’. In case Villars was ‘no longer with the army’, he copied the letter to Boufflers.74
Publicly Marlborough claimed a victory. Strictly speaking he was entitled to do so, for he had forced the French from a well-chosen position, though at appalling cost, and Boufflers himself opened his report to Louis with the words: ‘I am much afflicted, sire, that misfortune compels me to announce the loss of another battle, but I can assure your Majesty that misfortune has never been accompanied by greater glory.’75 On the afternoon of the action Marlborough told Godolphin that ‘we have had this day a very murdering battle … If 110 [Holland] pleases it is now in our power to have what peace we please, and I have the happiness of being pretty well assured that this is the last battle I shall be in.’76 He took the same line with Sarah, telling her: ‘I have every minute the account of the killed and wounded, which grieves my heart, the numbers being considerable, for in this battle the French were more opinaitre [Fr: stubborn, obstinate] than in any other of this war. I hope and believe it will be the last I shall see, for I think it impossible for the French to continue the war.’77
With the French field army beaten, the Allies went on to besiege and capture Mons, which was no mean prize, although Cadogan was hit in the neck by a musketball on the night of 26 September when the besiegers opened their trenches before the fortress. ‘I hope he will do well,’ wrote Marlborough,
but till he recovers it will oblige me to do many things, by which I shall have very little rest. I was with him this morning when they dressed his wound. As he is very fat their greatest apprehension is growing feverish. We must have patience for two or three dressings before the surgeons can give their judgement. I hope in God he will do well, for I can entirely depend upon him.78
The real results of Malplaquet were political rather than military. As Marlborough hoped, it did bring Louis back to the conference table, although as he had feared, the Allies still pitched their terms too high. An Anglo-Dutch agreement, the first Barrier Treaty, signed that October, bound the Dutch to support the British demand for ‘No Peace without Spain’, and in return Britain supported Dutch territorial claims in the Netherlands, agreed to relinquish trading concessions secured by a secret treaty with Charles III, and to give up Minorca. Godolphin backed the treaty, but Marlborough, correctly recognising that it would cause trouble in Parliament because of the damage that the Tories feared it would do to British economic interests, refused to sign it.
The negotiations, carried on at Gertruydenberg in the spring of 1710, eventually hit the same sticking point as the peace talks of 1709: the future of Spain. Louis would not use troops to force Philip off his throne, and attempts to procure his voluntary withdrawal in return for compensation elsewhere, which might have moved him, failed because Charles would not make concessions. Marlborough, well aware that Spain had wrecked the 1709 talks, had no doubt that it would ruin those of 1710 too. Although publicly he toed the government line, privately he warned Heinsius:
I think it very unreasonable to press France to do so treacherous a thing as to deliver three towns in Spain, I think that they should deposit the three towns formerly mentioned: Thionville, Valenciennes and Cambrai, and that for the rest the preliminaries should continue as they are except the 37th article … If I could flatter myself that Holland were willing and able to continue for three years longer the war, you might then reject what is now proposed, and be assured that in that time and with the blessing of the Almighty you might impose what conditions you should see fit; but if the war can’t be continued, then this is a properer time [to make peace] than the [next] winter.79
The fact that Malplaquet eventually emerged as an empty victory was not Marlborough’s fault, and he took the field in the spring of 1710 with a heavy heart. By now the political balance at home was tilting against him, and he asked Sarah, ‘Am not I to be pitied that am every day in danger of exposing my life, for the good of those who are seeking my ruin?’ A few days later, recognising that negotiations at Gertruydenberg would indeed founder, he confessed unhappily: ‘I never in my life wished for peace more than I do now, being extremely dissatisfied with everything that is doing.’80
Some of Marlborough’s gloom stemmed from the fact that Sarah had now had her final meeting with the queen. Anne increasingly flouted Sarah’s traditional prerogatives over household appointments, and there was a major row in August 1709 over the appointment to the bedchamber of one Belle Danvers, who, Sarah maintained waspishly, ‘did not look like a human creature’. The queen’s dispute with Sarah became inextricably entwined with Marlborough’s continuing attempt to obtain the captain generalcy for life. Having made predictably poor progress in her efforts to secure proper respect from Sarah, the queen pointedly told Marlborough:
You seem to be dissatisfied with my behaviour to the Duchess of Marlborough. I do not love complaining, but it is impossible to help saying on this occasion, I believe nobody was ever so used by a friend as I have been ever since my coming to the crown. I desire nothing but that she would leave off teasing & tormenting me & behave herself with the decency she ought both to her friend and her Queen & this I hope you will make her do, & is what I am sure no reasonable body can wonder I should desire of you, whatever her behaviour is to me, mine to her shall be always as becomes me.81
Another royal trespass on her prerogative provoked Sarah into sending Anne a long and tendentious ‘Narrative’ of her relationship with the queen, complaining again of Abigail Masham’s influence. She followed it shortly with a fresh tirade which reflected some material from one of Maynwaring’s tasteless insinuations about ‘passions between women’. To show how shamefully her enemies were treating her, she included large chunks of the even more tasteless Secret Memoirs and Manners … from the New Atlantis, the work of Mrs Mary de la Rivière Manley, a catspaw of Harley’s, which defamed both of the Marlboroughs in a barely concealed and often quasi-pornographic way. Upon whom can Mrs Manley have modelled ‘Stauvatius the Thracian’?
A man who at present, and for some time past, has seen himself as the greatest subject upon earth, who never undertook any adventure that he did not perform to his satisfaction; whether it were to subdue a mistress, to win a battle, to take a town, or to secure himself such and such heaps of money, employment, grant or contribution … could one repeat the individual distresses of so many brave officers and soldiers, upon whose shoulders he has mounted to victory, through whose blood he has so often waded to conquest, one would detest, despise and loathe that abominable, sordid, despicable vice, which makes him more the hated of his own army, than their bravery has made him the dread of his enemies.82
Mrs Manley was prosecuted for seditious libel, but the case against her was not pressed, and as soon as the Tories were in power she was one of the most notable anti-Marlborough pamphleteers, accusing him of prolonging the war for his own profit.
In the autumn of 1709, before he returned to England after the fall of Mons, Marlborough made it clear to Sarah that he sided with her against Anne, who was ‘set so entirely wrong’. He thanked her for the draft of the letter he was to send the queen, assuring her that ‘I shall be careful in making the alterations as they are marked.’ This was the basis of his letter of 10 October in which he again demanded the captain generalcy for life and begged the queen ‘to be sensible of the long and faithful services of Lady Marlborough’. But he went on to warn Sarah that he had had quite enough of politics, and that
all the honours and riches in the world could not tempt me to take any other part in Ministry than what belongs to my employments, which in time of peace is very little. As I hope you will approve of this resolution and that no consideration will make me depart from it. I would not have my friends deceived by taking other measures for me.83
When he returned home in November the Whigs, who were perforce his supporters, though not his friends, seemed at the very zenith of their power. They had at last forced the queen to accept Orford at the Admiralty, and her speech at the formal opening of Parliament on 15 November described Malplaquet as ‘a most remarkable victory, and with such other great and important successes, both before and after it, that France is thereby become much more exposed and open to the impression of our arms, and consequently more in need of a peace, than it was at the beginning of this campaign’.84 However, Arthur Maynwaring told Sarah that the queen’s voice was fainter, and her manner ‘more careless and less moving’ than it had been on previous occasions.85
Dr Henry Sacheverell had preached his inflammatory sermon, ‘The Perils of False Brethren in both Church and State’, on 5 November, and the events of the next four months went on against the backcloth of his trial. During this period Harley capitalised on the fierce passions raised by the trial, used Abigail Masham to give him secret access to the queen, and worked hard at the creation of an opposition party founded, as Edward Gregg tells us, on two principles: ‘The queen should be liberated from the tyranny of the Marlborough family and England should be given a respite from the war.’ Both planks of his policy attracted widespread and increasing support for many reasons.
First, it was and remains the nature of British politics for tall poppies to excite the malice of small boys with big sticks, and there were no fairer flowers than John and Sarah. Marlborough’s thirst for wealth was remarkable even by the standards of the age, and those who felt inclined to forgive a successful commander were less inclined to tolerate the frequency with which Cadogan’s plump fingers also slid into the till. Some of their perquisites, although wholly unjustifiable to us, were tolerated then. Other sources of income were far more suspect, and Cadogan’s conduct aroused particular indignation. Van den Bergh, who served alongside him on the Anglo-Dutch condominium, called him ‘the greatest thief in the whole army’, and Giulio Alberoni, Vendôme’s secretary during the period in question, maintained that Cadogan had ‘carried off more than 200,000 pistoles from Flanders, quite apart from other unknown thefts’.86
However, what qualified as theft to a French marshal’s secretary could easily seem legitimate to the recipients of its proceeds. In December 1706 Marlborough told Stepney that the règlement for the governance of Netherlands
was made with a great deal of deliberation and, as the Deputies assured me, contained nothing contrary to the known laws of the country. However, our chief aim ought to be to satisfy the people, and to make them easy under the present administration, so that the collecting at present a little money more or less ought not … to come into competition in a matter of this moment, especially considering that when we take the field we shall be able to leave but small garrisons in the great towns, and must depend in some measure on the faithfulness of the inhabitants. I believe the states will readily agree with me in this point, and authorise their Deputies to concur with you in leaving the Council of Sate to do what might be most advisable for quieting the minds of the people, and putting them to good humour.87
The selective quotation of the middle part of this letter has been used to imply that Marlborough had a personal interest in extracting money from the Netherlands, but the whole document makes it clear that the issue was one of legitimate taxation, and that Marlborough was primarily concerned with alleviating its burden so as to encourage citizens to remain loyal. Indeed, had more attention been paid to his concerns, then Ghent and Bruges might have remained loyal.
Huge sums of money passed through Marlborough’s hands for the pay of British and British-funded foreign troops as well as for provision contracts. In June 1710, for instance, Cadogan told Marlborough: ‘The present wants of the contractors are supplied with an advance of five hundred and fifty thousand guilders.’88 The money often arrived long before it was required, and Cadogan generally invested it wisely and remitted the interest to Marlborough. The combination of legitimate perquisites, interest on government money and what his enemies alleged were simply bribes or extortions, produced very large sums. In the spring of 1709 van den Bergh told Heinsius that Marlborough had had ‘six hundred thousand rixdollars or 15 tons of gold transferred to England by Antwerp bankers; so that the safeguards, the marches, the orders for winter quarters, and more things of that kind no doubt bring in nice profits’.89
Cadogan was an inveterate gambler: in 1707 James Brydges wrote to congratulate him ‘on two pieces of good news the town is full of: one that you have won six thousand pistoles at play, the other that you are to reside at the Hague or Brussels in the room of Mr Stepney’. Usually his deals worked well, and the fact that Brydges was paymaster general to the army overseas put them both in a good position to slice off percentages here and there. In the spring of 1707 the two men agreed a complex scheme of shuffling government money between currencies with different agents. ‘I am persuaded this method is so settled,’ wrote Cadogan, ‘that we shall turn £15,000 or £16,000 a month at 100 per cent clear of all charges.’90 Cadogan’s friendship with Lord Raby meant that he enjoyed some of the benefits of what we might now call insider trading. In July 1707 he confessed to Raby: ‘We are in mighty pain about the King of Sweden. If that storm should break on the Hereditary Countries [of the Hapsburg crown] the affairs of the Allies would be in worse condition than ever. I that am a thousand deep in the Silesia loan, have some reason to enquire about it, for upon any hint from your Lordship I could dispose of it in time.’ Raby reassured him, correctly predicting ‘an accommodation between the Emperor and the King of Sweden’.91
However, Cadogan was not always fortunate, and shortly before Marlborough’s death Sarah pursued him in court for having placed £50,000, given him for investment in Holland, in Austria instead, where the rates seemed better: a sudden fall in Austrian rates left the Marlboroughs out of pocket. With a determination untroubled by Cadogan’s long personal loyalty to the duke, Sarah hounded him to what she regarded as a satisfactory conclusion even after her husband had died. She was so concerned that Marlborough, close to death, would wreck her suit by changing his will in Cadogan’s favour, that ‘I ordered his gentlemen that they should be sure to let me know when Lord Cadogan came to see him … I was so fearful of his altering his will that I locked up all the pens and ink.’92
If Cadogan’s evident rapacity helped prejudice people against Marlborough, the duke’s own ‘close accounting’ helped convey the impression that he was not only very rich but a skinflint into the bargain. In June 1709, with many other things on his mind, he drew Sarah’s attention to the fact that Lord Feversham, who had just died, had fallen into arrears with a mortgage he owed Marlborough, and that she might thus purchase his property at advantageous terms.
I think Lord Feversham owed three years last Christmas, but if you send for the steward he will show you the last acquittance. As for his estate, when I was about it two years ago, everyone thought him unreasonable in his demand, but if you can have it a penny worth you will do well by it. I remember one objection was that he had ploughed up the meadow ground so that some years hence it would not yield the same rent.93
What was in fact financial astuteness was easily misrepresented by Marlborough’s enemies, who claimed that he chivvied the dying and impoverished Feversham for payment, telling him that he could not invest his money on such good terms elsewhere. The fact that the mortgage was so long overdue is actually proof of the latitude he allowed his old commander. Moreover, as Philip Rambaut’s recent work demonstrates, Feversham died ‘a man of considerable means’, having an estimated income of £8,000 a year.94
It was not hard for folk to compare the Marlboroughs’ all too evident wealth with the financial state of the country. Over the duration of the war public expenditure had risen from £3 million to £13 million a year, and the national debt eventually rose from £10 million to £50 million during Anne’s reign. The hard winter of 1708–09, which had caused such suffering in France, also caused great hardship in Britain, and in January 1710 the price of grain in London was higher than ever before. There was an influx of some 10,000 Protestant refugees from the Palatinate, some of them hard-working but others (and where have we heard this before?) ‘inactive and mutinous’. ‘Charity begins at home,’ was the cry among the labouring poor, ‘and these foreigners are a plague to us.’95
Country gentlemen of a Tory persuasion met to quaff their bumpers, thump the table and damn the government and its land tax. City merchants complained of the damage done to trade by French privateers – the contemporary claim that 3,600 merchantmen were lost during the war is, thinks N.A.M. Rodger, ‘not much exaggerated’.96 G.M. Trevelyan was quite right to observe that Malplaquet might have once been regarded as a victory, but that under the shadow of the failed peace talks only a decisive battle and a march on Paris would have sufficed. Terrible though the slaughter had been, the British contingent of 14,000 had lost fewer than six hundred killed and under 1,300 wounded. Tories and Jacobite sympathisers, though, were not slow to magnify these figures. The Oxford diarist Thomas Hearne had been unmoved by Blenheim, Ramillies and Oudenarde, but now described
the most direful battle to England that has yet happened, and there is not, in the opinion of honest men, the least reason for bragging. Private letters frequently come which give the most impartial accounts, and we are well assured from the greatest to the meanest officer hardly one escaped but was either slain or very much wounded.97
Lastly, ‘No Peace without Spain’ was evidently what had wrecked the talks, and that was a key plank of Whig policy. This was an administration in deep trouble, now faced, in the shape of Robert Harley, with a politician with the skill to bring it down, and a monarch with slights to avenge.
The tale is quickly told. Harley succeeded in converting the Dukes of Shrewsbury, Somerset and Argyll to his cause. All were Whiggish by sympathy but were distinct from those ‘Lords of the Junto’ so detested by Anne, and were invaluable allies for Harley. Marlborough’s own position had been very seriously damaged, as we have already seen, by his failure to make the queen part with Abigail Masham in early 1710, and was later dented again by a row with the queen over promotions, in which he tried, ultimately without success, to avoid promoting Abigail’s brother Jack and her husband Sam. The narrow majority which convicted Sacheverell, and the very moderate penalty imposed on him, weakened the government’s authority. And then, on Thursday, 6 April 1710, there was a final, fulminating interview between Sarah and the queen. There is no impartial account, for Lord Dartmouth, who tells us the story, was a political opponent of the Marlboroughs, and the tale comes secondhand via Mrs Danvers, who was in waiting at the time. She told Dartmouth that:
The Duchess reproached her [the queen] for above an hour with her family’s services in so loud and shrill a voice, that the footman at the bottom of the back stairs could hear it … The Queen, seeing her so outrageous, got up, to have gone out of the room: the Duchess clapped her back against the door, and told her that she must hear her out, for that was the least favour she could do her, for having set and kept the crown upon her head. As soon as she had done raging, she flounced out of the room and said, she did not care if she never saw her more; to which the Queen replied, very calmly, that she thought the seldomer the better.98
In mid-April, without consulting the Duumvirs, the queen made Shrewsbury her lord chamberlain, not in itself a fatal blow but a dangerous sign of the way the wind was now blowing. She toyed with the idea of dismissing Sunderland, the Marlboroughs’ Whig son-in-law, as secretary of state, and her determination to do so was strengthened rather than diminished by Sarah’s clumsy threat to make public some of the royal correspondence. Godolphin warned Anne that Marlborough would resign if she did indeed sack Sunderland, and the queen sweetly replied that she had no intention of replacing Marlborough, and that if he did ‘desert my service’ at what she called ‘this critical juncture’ then the blame would be Godolphin’s alone. On the same day, 14 June, Godolphin joined seven leading members of the government in urging Marlborough not to resign because of Sunderland’s dismissal. The duke, then besieging Douai, told Sarah:
I am only thinking how I may soonest get out of all business. All my friends write me that I must not retire, and I myself think it would do great mischief if I should quit before the end of this campaign. But after the contemptible usage I meet with, how is it possible to act as I ought to do? … I hope tomorrow we may sign the capitulation of this town, which would give me pleasure, were I not so extremely mortified with what you are doing in England.99
On the following day he informed Godolphin that Douai had indeed surrendered, but that ‘My spirits and zest are quite gone.’ He feared that ‘the expectation of disorders in England’ could only hearten the French, and was afraid that he would simply ‘drudge on for four or five months longer, and venture his life for those who do not deserve it from him’.100
By now Harley and his associates were applying increasing pressure to the queen to make her part with Godolphin, and he, tired and isolated, responded with a sourness that did not help his cause. An attempt by the Whigs to hold their ground backfired. The Dutch, Imperial and Hanoverian envoys were persuaded to ask the queen neither to change her ministry nor dissolve her Whig-dominated Parliament until the war was over. Harley was easily able to persuade Anne that this was foreign interference in her affairs, and both Godolphin and Marlborough were associated, probably rightly, with the appeal. On 8 August the queen sent a letter dismissing Godolphin with a pension of four thousand a year. She thought that it would be easier for them both if he broke his staff of office rather than, as was the custom, returning it to her personally. Anne probably felt genuine pain at parting with Godolphin, but what was meant to be a courteous dismissal turned into brusqueness.
The letter which effectively ended Godolphin’s distinguished political career was delivered to him by one of the Duke of Somerset’s grooms. John Smith, chancellor of the exchequer, called on him shortly afterwards, and saw Godolphin break his staff and fling the pieces into the fireplace, telling him ‘to witness that he had obeyed the Queen’s commands’.101 His pension was never paid, although the fact that he inherited the bulk of the family fortune when his elder brother died soon afterwards meant that he was able to survive without it. Arthur Maynwaring, writing before Godolphin had inherited, warned Sarah that Godolphin ‘will not be able to keep his family, unless 39 [Marlborough] assists him, which I really think he should do’.102 Godolphin continued to attend Parliament and to associate with what had become the Whig opposition, but his health failed fast, and he died at the Marlboroughs’ house in 1712. Sarah wrote on the flyleaf of her Bible: ‘The 15th of September at two in the morning the Earl of Godolphin died at the Duke of Marlborough’s house at St Albans, who was the best man that ever lived.’103
On 8 August Godolphin wrote to tell Marlborough that ‘The Queen has this morning been pleased to dismiss me from her service.’104 On the same date Anne herself told Marlborough what had happened, so ‘that you may receive this news first from me & I do assure you I shall take care that the army shall want for nothing’.105 On the ninth, when his initial pain had begun to subside, Godolphin assured Marlborough that although his ‘circumstances are at present a little discouraging’ he would do his best to ensure that Marlborough was ‘effectually supported to the end of this campaign, in the post where he now is’, and emphasised that it was essential to keep the Alliance together.106
At a meeting of the Privy Council on 20 September the queen ordered a proclamation dissolving Parliament to be read out – the clerk did it so eloquently that it was clear he had been practising. Most of the Whig ministers resigned the following day. The queen bade farewell to the Whig leader Somers and the lord keeper, Lord Cowper, with evident regret, in Cowper’s case probably because Harley had no one in mind to replace him. Some of the new ministers, notably Harcourt, who became lord chancellor, and St John, lord keeper, sympathised with Marlborough. St John, who kept in touch with the captain general through his confidential man of affairs, James Craggs the elder, did much to prevent a war office committee established by Harley from wresting political control of the army from Marlborough’s hands.107
Craggs, born in 1657, had entered the Duchess of Marlborough’s service and, through her interest, became MP for the Cornish borough of Grampound in 1702, retaining the seat till 1714. He served as clerk of the deliveries of the Ordnance from 1702 to 1711 and again in 1714–15. He died, possibly by his own hand, enormously wealthy but in disgrace over his involvement in the South Sea Bubble, in 1721. All the property he had acquired since December 1719 was subsequently confiscated by Act of Parliament. His correspondence with Marlborough seems not to have survived, but he flits through extant documents like a rather substantial wraith. By 1710 he was coded as ‘185’ in letters between Marlborough and Godolphin, and the latter told Marlborough: ‘I have spoken to him as fully as I can upon the posture of our affairs here, and I think nobody understands them as fully as he does.’108 In August that year Marlborough asked Villars for a passport for ‘Mr Craggs the elder, an English gentleman returning from Italy, who wishes to pass through here on his way back to England’.109 A year later, rightly foreseeing worsening problems over getting the Treasury to pay for Blenheim Palace, Marlborough wanted Craggs to work on the accounts, as it was clear that Harley, now Earl of Oxford, was anxious to avoid any official recognition that the queen was obliged to pay for the place.110
Although Cragg’s shuttle diplomacy ensured that the captain general was in close contact with sympathetic members of the new government, the fall of Godolphin and the rise of Harley and his associates left him increasingly isolated. The election of 1710, which resulted in a Tory majority of 151 in the Commons, further strengthened his enemies. Marlborough had initially hoped that the Tory majority would not be so overwhelming, and told Heinsius of his distaste at seeing ‘a great many honest people turned out to make room for the Earl of Rochester and the Duke of Buckingham and such like men. God knows where this can end …’111 Although Sarah and the queen had met for the last time in April 1710 they still corresponded – or, more accurately, Sarah wrote to the queen through the agreed medium of Sir David Hamilton, a Whig doctor – but now her further insinuations of a lesbian relationship between Anne and Abigail Masham determined the queen to be rid of her at last. Anne did her best to prevent Sarah from travelling to the coast to meet Marlborough when he returned home on 11 December, and hoped that he would be ‘calm and submissive’ and would not be inflamed by his wife.
It was very hard for him to remain calm, for he had already been publicly humiliated. In September Harley had engineered the dismissal of Marlborough’s private secretary Adam de Cardonnel, the newly appointed secretary at war, and his replacement by George Granville, later Lord Lansdowne, a personal enemy of Marlborough’s. In November generals Meredith, Macartney and Honeywood were dismissed from the army for drinking damnation to the new ministry. All three were Marlborough’s men, and he had only recently pressed to have Honeywood (the least culpable of the three, and the only one to have a notable military career after reinstatement in 1714) made a brigadier general.
Not only was Marlborough commanding the Allied army on a busy and successful campaign while all this was going on, but he remained determined to keep the British army under tight administrative control as long as he remained captain general. He promoted officers by seniority where this was appropriate, but always tried to give an advantage to those on active service. On 11 September he informed a Mr Pulteney that, despite ‘having just reason to be satisfied with his services’, he could not make his brother a captain, for there were several officers in the Guards who were senior to him. In a similarly conciliatory vein, he told another correspondent that while ‘I am very sorry the death of Captain Hearne should occasion you any loss than that of a brother’, his captaincy had already been given to an officer ‘to whom I could not refuse it without doing a piece of injustice’.112 Some correspondents railed against what they saw as such injustices. A lady describing herself as ‘an officer’s wife that was killed under your command’ bewailed ‘the loss of twenty thousand pounds a year to his family’. She felt that ‘the quality and estates of my near relations’ entitled her to ‘the same favours others receive from your Grace or my Lady Duchess’, but her late husband’s regimental agent was unable to produce the money. ‘May God send your Grace a happy conscience,’ she concluded.113
The process inevitably had political overtones. Regimental colonelcies were potentially lucrative appointments, coveted by the government’s friends, real or imagined. When Lord Essex’s death left the colonelcy of his dragoon regiment vacant, Marlborough hoped to fill it with Lord Hertford, son of the Duke of Somerset, who the ministry was eager to please. Jack Hill, the queen’s candidate for the post, was actually far better qualified from a purely military point of view. Because generals did not receive pay for the rank they held, but only for the post they filled, command appointments were also useful ways of rewarding the government’s supporters and punishing its opponents. Marlborough was certainly not immune to personal or political favouritism. There were some officers, like his brother Charles or the capable Philip Honeywood, whose interests he looked after, and others, like Jack Hill and Sam Masham, who were elevated despite his attempt to rig the lists for a periodic promotion so that the elevation of brigadiers stopped just short of Hill and that of new colonels just short of Masham. Marlborough professed friendship for Lord Raby, a major general and colonel of a dragoon regiment, whose old schoolfriend Cadogan assured him: ‘I hope that I shall soon wish your Lordship the joy of being lieutenant general.’114 Marlborough, however, had no intention of making somebody he regarded as a Harley supporter a lieutenant general, and was anxious that Raby should not join him and Lord Townshend as a plenipotentiary in the 1710 peace talks. Once Harley gained control of the government he did his best, not wholly successfully, to deprive the captain general of his patronage by setting up a board under Ormonde, later Marlborough’s successor, which began its work by dismissing all the captain general’s brigadiers.
Brevet promotion, which gave its holder rank in the army but not in his regiment (and thus conferred status but not necessarily employment consistent with that rank) was a cheap and widely used way in which, in an age where decorations were not available, commanders-in-chief could reward the successful or the favoured. It inevitably produced confusion, which Marlborough did his best to mitigate. ‘Besides Colonel Hollins having a commission of brigadier,’ wrote Marlborough, ‘does nowise exempt him from his duty as major, there are older captains in the first regiment to whom it would be a prejudice when they come to roll together.’115 However, attempts to sort out the rank structure created almost as many problems as they solved, and officers who were passed over often responded by blaming political interference.
Ormonde’s board of general officers produced a set of regulations intended to govern officer appointments and promotions. No officer who had retired by selling his commission could serve again; sales of commissions could take place only with the crown’s consent; officers could normally sell after twenty years’ service, disablement, or ‘on some extraordinary occasion’, and twelve pence in the pound would be payable, by both buyer and seller alike, to help run the Royal Hospital. Although the work of the board inpinged (as Harley had intended) on what might have been regarded as his legitimate interest, Marlborough at once told St John that he would ensure that the new regulations would ‘be duly observed by those under his command’, although he had some suggestions for minor modifications. First, it would be wiser to allow subalterns to sell out without the need to obtain prior royal approval, as many ‘by misfortune in their recruits or otherwise, have run themselves so far behindhand as not to be able to continue the service, so that, unless they have the liberty to dispose of their commissions, the debt must fall on the regiment’. Next, officers who died in service often had ‘great families in a starving condition’ who deserved the sale price of their relative’s commission. Finally, regimental colonels should be able ‘to have officers out of other regiments whom they judge better qualified than those in the next rank in their own’, and in a distant theatre of war it was simply impractical to await what would inevitably be a lengthy process of approval for cross-posting between regiments. Marlborough’s suggestions were practical and humane.116
Not all Marlborough’s work consisted of promoting the few and apologising to the many. There were lists to be furnished of French officers on parole, Scots recruiting officers to be transported from Ostend to Leith, Lieutenant General Ross’s regiment of dragoons to have 720 guilders charged to its account and payment of the same sum made to the inhabitants of Steesch, near Bois-le-Duc, who had complained of ‘exactions committed … in their march to winter quarters’.117
Marlborough assured Lord Halifax that he was determined that his recent misfortunes should not ‘lessen my zeal for the public, nor my endeavours to carry on this war with all possible vigour while I have the honour to command the army’.118 He corresponded with the new ministers with all the energy he had shown in his dealings with the old, and told Heinsius that an augmentation of the British contingent by ten squadrons was a new mark of the queen’s enthusiasm for the common cause. He certainly considered resignation, but decided against it, partly because of pressure from leading Whigs and the Elector of Hanover. He told Baron Bothmar, who was shortly to become the Elector’s envoy to London, that ‘I will never be able to applaud and recognise sufficiently the manner with which Monseigneur the Elector has used me on this occasion.’119 The end of the campaign found him ‘a sick man, desirous and believing still to find ease in another place’, but determined above all ‘to act as becomes an honest Englishman’.120
No sooner had Marlborough returned to England in December 1710 than the humiliation began afresh. Before she met him, the queen had a long conversation with Hamilton, making it clear that not only must Sarah be dismissed from all her offices, but her daughters must go too, for none was suitable to be at court. Anne Sunderland was ‘cunning and dangerous’, and the ‘silly and imprudent’ Henrietta Godolphin had ‘lost her reputation’, a process she was to continue with a relationship with the poet William Congreve, who was probably the father of Lady Mary Godolphin – thanks, some said, to the waters of Bath, which had ‘a wonderful influence on barren ladies, who often prove with child, even in their husbands’ absence’.121 Mary Montagu was worst of all, for ‘she was just like her mother’.122
In one sense Anne was perfectly correct. Just as Sarah’s character was heavily influenced by her own difficult relationship with her mother, so too her daughters were marked by their stormy relationship with Sarah. She even fell out with Henrietta’s son, the odious Willigo, who became Marquess of Blandford, despite the fact that Willigo’s ‘drunken habits and partiality for low company put him on bad terms with his mother, which in itself was probably sufficient to commend him to his grandmother’. When in 1731 Willigo died ‘of a drunken fit or fever’ in the wholly apt surroundings of Oxford, Lord Hervey
could not help reflecting how peculiar it was, that the only remaining branch of such a family as the Lord Treasurer Godolphin, and the head of such a family as the late Duke of Marlborough’s, should go off so universally unregretted, especially when nobody ever pretended to say that he had not sense, good nature and honesty.123
On 28 December 1710, when Marlborough had his first meeting with the queen, she told him that he must not expect the thanks of Parliament for the year’s not inconsiderable achievements, and he took the news calmly. Hamilton passed the queen’s message to the duke on the twenty-ninth, and on the following day reported that Marlborough had offered his ‘duty and submission’, adding that ‘he longed to have his wife quiet’. This encouraged Hamilton, who should have known better, to suggest a three-phase reconciliation, first between Marlborough and Harley, then between Sarah and the queen, and finally and most ludicrously, between Sarah and Abigail. The queen recognised that this would never work, and was determined to sack Sarah, though she would not risk a meeting because of the display of bad temper that would inevitably ensue.
On the evening of 5 January 1711 Hamilton discussed the matter with Marlborough and Godolphin. This was apparently the first time that Marlborough was made aware of the full details of Sarah’s correspondence with the queen, and Hamilton told Anne ‘how angry my Lord Duke was to hear that the Duchess had spoke so to her Majesty’, adding unsurprisingly that Anne was ‘extremely pleased’ to hear this.124 In one of his addenda to Burnet’s History, Lord Dartmouth maintained that Marlborough had ‘complained of his wife who, he said, acted strangely, but there was no help for that, and a man must bear with a good deal, to be quiet at home’.125 Lord Cowper, who had heard Sarah ‘railing in the most extravagant manner against the Queen, and said she had always hated and despised her’, was assured by the duke that ‘he should not mind what she said, for she was used to talk at that rate when she was in a passion, which was a thing she was very apt to fall into, and there was no way to help it’.126
We cannot be sure whether Marlborough’s astonishment at hearing just how bad things had become was real or feigned, for he remained, even now, a consummate courtier. Over the next few days, however, it became clear that Sarah would have to go. At first she blustered, announcing that ‘such things are in my power, that if known by a man that would apprehend, and was a right politician, would lose a crown’.127 Bothmar, now the Hanoverian envoy, was assured by Shrewsbury and St John that Sarah’s departure was the price of Marlborough’s remaining in command. He passed the news on to Sarah, who agreed to submit. She made a last attempt to save herself by writing a letter of apology to the queen, but when Marlborough tried to deliver it, Anne would not receive it. Instead, she told Marlborough that he had two weeks in which to procure Sarah’s resignation.
The only surviving account of Sarah’s giving up the golden key of office as keeper of the privy purse is Dartmouth’s, and so must be treated with caution, though it is wholly in character. ‘When the Duke of Marlborough told her the Queen expected the gold key,’ he wrote, ‘she took it from her side, and threw it into the middle of the room, and bid him take it up, and carry it to whom he pleased.’128 Marlborough returned it to the queen the next morning. Sarah later maintained that she had agreed not to publish the queen’s letters in return for retrospectively accepting the 1704 offer of a pension of £2,000 a year, deducting the resultant £18,000 from the money she owed the privy purse.129 In the absence of proper accounts it is impossible to be sure quite how Sarah left the privy purse, though Edward Gregg suggests that in all ‘Sarah gained £32,800 above her normal salary and prerequisites [sic].’130 There was a last undignified spat when Sarah asked to store her furniture at St James’s Palace until Marlborough House was finished, and the queen retorted that she would charge her ten shillings a week for the privilege. Sarah responded by having all fixtures and fittings, including the fireplaces, removed from her apartments, and Anne duly ceased paying for work at Blenheim. It was a dreadful end to a remarkable friendship.
While he faltered at home, Marlborough remained reasonably successful abroad. In 1710 he began well by taking the field before Villars, forcing the French to withdraw from the line of the River Scarpe and besieging Douai. Villars held a council of war which promptly decided against offering battle (the bellicose marshal was outvoted by all his generals), and Marlborough’s intelligence service produced a copy of its deliberations only two days after the document was sent to Paris. Douai, without support from the French field army, surrendered on 29 June. Immediately afterwards Marlborough was still confident that ‘the intention of Monsieur de Villars is not to risk a battle’, so the best the Allies could do was to ‘put all the country on both sides of the Somme, and home to the sea, under contribution, and make such sieges as the Dutch may think worth the expense they must make’.131 When he moved on to besiege Béthune he again believed that ‘they do not intend venturing a battle’, and he was right: the governor duly beat the chamade on 28 August and capitulated on the twenty-ninth. Marlborough then besieged St-Venant and Aire-sur-la-Lys simultaneously, taking the former on 30 September but the latter not till 9 November.
Both sieges had been held up by a successful French attack on an ammunition convoy at St-Eloois-Vijve, on the Lys just upstream of Ghent, on 18 September. The escort blew up the powder and sank the store-boats to prevent their capture, but Marlborough sent Walter Colyear, a Scots lieutenant general in Dutch service, to the scene of the action, and he managed to recover many of the unfilled mortar bombs.132 Pioneers had to raise the sunken craft and dredge the river before it could be reopened to traffic. Marlborough had clearly hoped that he would be able to move on to attack Calais, which might indeed have unravelled the French defence of the northern frontier: ‘I never was more fond of any project since this war,’ he announced.133 However, the protracted defence of Aire was aided by ‘the continual rains … Our poor men are up to their knees in mud and water, which is a most grievous sight, and will occasion great sickness.’134 It was now obvious that nothing else could be accomplished before the troops went into winter quarters, for they had ‘suffered much by the late ill season’.135
By the time Marlborough returned to the Continent in March 1711 the political landscape of Britain had, as we have seen, been transformed. He was now so concerned about the interception of his mail by agents of the new government that he urged Sarah to ‘be careful in your discourse as well as in your letters’. Marlborough was always sensitive to press criticism, and now lamented that ‘the villainous way of printing … stabs me to the heart’.136 He was also unwell, with what might have been a recurrence of the familiar migraine, or something more akin to labyrinthitis, a disease of the inner ear. ‘I found myself in the night so out of order,’ he told Sarah, ‘that I have been obliged for some days [to] keep at home … I let you know this fearing you might hear it from others, and think it worse than it is. My illness was giddiness and swimmings in my head, which gave me often sickness in my stomach.’137
The Emperor Joseph I died of smallpox in April and was succeeded by his brother, Charles III of Spain. Villars cheerfully assured a trumpeter of Marlborough’s that this would ‘occasion great disorders amongst the Allies’, and he was perfectly right, for to press on with ‘No Peace without Spain’ would now risk creating a Hapsburg super-state of Spain linked with the Holy Roman Empire, and it was precisely the fear of a French super-state being created that had drawn Britain into the war in the first place.138 Whatever his political concerns, though, Marlborough noted that Villars was doing all he could to strengthen his position along the Rivers Scarpe and Sensée and, for all his gasconading, was again unlikely to offer battle. However little he liked the new ministry, Marlborough had come to terms with it, and, fighting the last campaign of his career, he rose to the very peak of his form.
For the 1711 campaign the Allies made their major effort in Flanders, where the captures of 1710 had left them with only the rearmost belt of Vauban’s pré carré between themselves and Paris. Eugène’s Imperialists brought Marlborough’s field army up to 142 battalions and 269 squadrons. The death of Joseph I, however, produced a change in strategy. The French sought to use it as an opportunity to intervene in Germany once more, and Vienna decided to switch Eugène’s command from Flanders to the Rhine to parry any thrust. Marlborough feared that this would lead to the Allies failing to concentrate on what he saw as the war’s decisive theatre. He did all he could to prevent it, and enlisted the help of Heinsius:
We are assured the King of France is coming to a resolution of sending troops from hence for the reinforcing of his army on the Rhine. What I fear is, that he may send a detachment thither which may occasion Prince Eugène’s marching there with the Imperial and Palatine troops, by which we shall lose so great a body of horse as may give Marshal Villars the superiority in the horse as well as in the foot.139
Two weeks later he told Heinsius that the French had already sent a detachment to the Rhine, and that he expected the whole of the Bavarian contingent to follow soon. But Eugène had also gone with his own Imperial and Palatine troops, and he had just heard from the Prince of Anhalt, commander of the Prussian contingent, that his king, who had a territorial claim against the Prince of Orange, would recall them unless he obtained satisfaction during his current visit to The Hague. Marlborough urged Heinsius not to say anything ‘that may hurt the Prince of Anhalt’, but it was essential not to let the King of Prussia depart without an agreement which would leave his troops in Flanders ‘for at least this campaign’.140 The Prince of Orange’s untimely death while crossing the Rhine estuary on his way to The Hague to discuss the issue did indeed produce a settlement in favour of the Prussians, who took part in the campaign.
Marlborough’s relationship with Anhalt, which had given him early warning of the danger of Prussian withdrawal, testifies to his skill as an alliance manager. On one occasion Anhalt decided that the duke had offended him, and set off for Marlborough’s quarters to expostulate.
Upon his admittance, his eyes darting fire, the Duke received him with open arms, and, embracing him, said, ‘My dear Prince, you have prevented me. I was just sending to beg the favour of your company in order to have your opinions upon a design I have formed for attacking the enemy, which I cannot undertake without your approbation, and assistance in the execution, for there are no troops I depend upon like those you command, nor any general in the army but yourself whose head and heart I can trust so in the conduct of an enterprise of such importance. If your Highness will be pleased to sit down, I will inform you of the particulars of my scheme …’ When the Prince returned, he said to his friends, whom he had informed of his intentions to insult the Duke of Marlborough, ‘The ascendancy of that man is inconceivable. I was unable to utter an angry word; he totally disarmed me in an instant.’141
With Eugène gone but the Prussians under his command, Marlborough had some 90,000 men in the Douai plain, confronting a French army perhaps 30,000 men stronger. Villars had thrown up the lines of Ne Plus Ultra, ‘No Further Back’ – or perhaps, if we accept Winston S. Churchill’s suggestion that Villars had borrowed the phrase from a tailor’s description of Marlborough’s latest red coat, ‘The Last Word’.142 The lines were a thick belt of field fortifications, woven into inundations, running from Bouchain on the River Scheldt, along the southern bank of the Sensée, and then following the Scarpe to Arras. Their left flank was secured by field fortifications on the River Canche and the fortresses of Frévent, Hesdin and Montreuil, and their right by Valenciennes, Le Quesnoy, Maubeuge, Charleroi and Namur. Ypres and St Omer, outside the lines, were both strongly garrisoned, and although Marlborough might take them, he would waste the campaign doing so. There were two causeways through the central part of the lines, at Arleux and Aubenchel le Sec.
Before deciding what to do in 1711, Marlborough sent Lord Stair to England in an effort to persuade Harley (now Earl of Oxford) to provide sufficient extra money to enable the Allies to remain in the field all winter, imposing a pressure that the French would be unable to bear. The idea was shelved, however, because it was not Oxford’s intention to continue the war on the same basis through 1712. This left Marlborough with the pressing need to do something about Villars and his pestilential lines. He began on 6 June by snatching the little fort of Arleux, which guarded the northern end of one of the causeways over the Sensée, and began to refortify it on a larger scale. The operation was covered by Hompesch, with a strong force camped just outside Douai, and when Villars mounted a surprise attack Hompesch’s force was badly cut about, although Arleux held out. Marlborough was visibly irritated, as well he might be, for as Richard Kane tells us, ‘this was the only affront the Duke of Marlborough received during the whole war’.143 However, he then proceeded to leave Arleux so thinly garrisoned that Villars was able to take it on 22 July.
It is widely agreed that Marlborough’s action was deliberate. Cadogan was sent to relieve the place, but ‘took not as much haste as the occasion seemed to require’. Having captured Arleux, Villars demolished its fortifications, thereby leaving the northern end of the causeway undefended, and, encouraged by his success, sent a strong detachment to Maubeuge, whence he might be able to raid into Brabant. Marlborough’s correspondence, admittedly an inexact guide to his thoughts, for he was always concerned about the danger of his letters being captured, gives no hint of his detailed intentions. On the twenty-seventh he told Godolphin that he had been ‘so out of humour’ that he had not written by the last post, though whether this irritation was caused by the simple fact of Arleux’s capture or because the captured garrison had been ‘stripped naked’ it is impossible to say.144 Sometimes the smallest of things can make a difference. In August Marlborough received a letter from his eleven-year-old grandson William Godolphin (eventually to earn notoriety as Willigo, Marquess of Blandford), who had visited Queen Anne to present the standard, due on 13 August each year as the ‘peppercorn’ rent for Blenheim. The boy reported that he had been ‘received but coldly’, a sure sign that the family was out of favour.145
Richard Kane thought that Marlborough ‘seemed very much chagrined’ by all this, and, unusually, ‘seemed very peevish, and would see but little company, and seemed resolved upon attacking Villars’.146 On 30 July Marlborough informed Godolphin: ‘I shall march the army on Saturday [1 August], and if I can see any hope of success, I shall attack them.’147
Marlborough now had much of his army concentrated opposite the lines just west of Arras. He reconnoitred Villars’ position with an escort of 2,000 horse, and discussed his intention to attack with the Dutch general Count Tilly, whose wife, present on the campaign, was at best talkative and at worst, if Goslinga is to be believed, in communication with the French. Villars deduced, not unreasonably, that the attack would be delivered in the area between Vimy Ridge and Avesnes le Comte, and concentrated to meet it. Although Marlborough had apparently placed all his weight on his right foot, he had begun, imperceptibly, to shift it to his left. Albemarle had been sent to Béthune, a little to his left, with twelve battalions and twenty-four squadrons, and in the general clutter of his move the army’s heavy guns and baggage were slipped further eastwards behind Vimy Ridge. Marlborough stripped the garrisons of Lille, Tournai and St Amand to bring Hompesch’s force at Douai up to twenty-three battalions and seventeen squadrons, and, a key intelligence indicator had Villars only known of it, now had all his pontoons at Douai.
Captain Robert Parker, who knew the duke’s methods well, thought that there was ‘something extraordinary’ in his reconnaissance of the French position, and saw how ‘his countenance was now cleared up, and with an air of assurance, as if he was confident of success, he pointed out to the General Officers, the manner in which the army was to be drawn up, the places that were to be attacked, and how sustained’. Parker saw Cadogan break away from the group with only a single servant, but thought nothing of it at the time.148 Having fluttered the matador’s cloak, Marlborough lunged with the sword. On the evening of 4 July,
on our beating Tattoo, to our great joy, orders came along both lines, to strike our tents, and form our regiments with all dispatch imaginable; and in less than an hour, the whole army was on a full march away to the left. This was no small surprise to us; nor could we yet conceive what he meant by it. We continued marching all night, being favoured by the light of a bright full moon, and fine calm weather. A little before day [at about 3 a.m. on the fifth], the Duke being at the head of the march, an express arrived from General Cadogan, signifying that he and General Hompesch had passed the causeway of Arleux without opposition … and that they were in possession of the enemy’s lines. Upon this the Duke rode off with all the left wing of horse; at the same time he sent an account of it to every particular regiment of foot, with orders to continue their march with all the expedition they possibly could.149
It was the apotheosis of Marlborough’s infantry. With the French sometimes in sight in the moonlight on the other side of the Scarpe, and with the men lengthening their stride, the word was passed back, for the last time, that ‘My Lord Duke desires the foot to step it out.’ Private Deane remembered how ‘we accordingly marched … at a very sharp rate all the night long, leaving Arras on the right hand … and got to Arleux and marched through it at about 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning’. He could see that the French cavalry had already come up, but that they dared not attack without infantry, which was still strung out along the line of march. ‘And by this means and nobly thought and notable stratagem,’ exulted Deane, ‘was this noted admirable pass taken and nearly tricked from the enemy by the noble conduct and the profound judgement of a wise, prudent general.’150
Villars’ army was complete in the area of Bourlon Wood, just west of Cambrai, and Marlborough debated attacking it. Goslinga, our main source for the discussion, records his despair at Marlborough’s eventual decision, backed by the majority of his council of war, not to attack. Goslinga complained that suggestions that the ground was ill-suited to an attack were merely temporising, but Villars had already begun making abatis on the northern edge of Bourlon Wood, and the shadow of Malplaquet fell across the debate. Marlborough’s decision aroused criticism, some of it from the same folk who had blamed him for attacking at Malplaquet, and on 13 August he told Heinsius:
I cannot help unburdening myself to you, that I think I lie under great hardships and discouragement on this occasion by some letters I have seen in Holland, which seem to reflect on my note making the best use of our advantage by giving the enemy battle as soon as we had passed the lines. I own that had it been practicable there is no comparison between the advantage of a battle and what we can reap from a siege, but there is not one general or other officer that have the least judgement in these matters but must allow it was altogether impossible to attack the enemy with any probable hopes of success. I cannot but think it is very hard, when I do my best, to be liable to such censures.151
Instead, Marlborough swung north-east to besiege Bouchain. He could not begin the siege proper until he had dislodged Albergotti from a strong intermediate position, and on the morning of the ninth Robert Parker, waiting in a wheatfield with the grenadiers of the British contingent, saw how
the Duke of Marlborough (ever watchful, ever right) rode up quite unattended and alone, and posted himself a little on the right of my company of grenadiers, from whence he had a fair view of the greater part of the enemy’s works. It is quite impossible for me to express the joy which the sight of this man gave me at this very critical moment. I was now well satisfied that he would not push the thing, unless he saw a strong possibility of success; nor was this my notion alone: it was the sense of the whole army, both officer and soldier, British and foreigner … He stayed only three or four minutes, and then rode back. We were in pain for him while he stayed, lest the enemy discovered him, and fired upon him; in which case they could not very well have missed him.152
Marlborough cancelled the assault, and when the French followed up his withdrawal, savaged their advance guard.
In order to press the siege of Bouchain while Villars was on hand with an army roughly the size of his own, Marlborough constructed elaborate lines of circumvallation, fortified his camp, and entrenched a corridor up to the Scarpe at Marchiennes to protect the arrival of his supplies. In mid-August the besiegers cut the ‘Cow Path’ linking Albergotti’s position outside the town to the fortress itself, and on the twentieth Marlborough happily reported to Godolphin that ‘They are now shut up on all sides.’ On 14 September he told his old friend: ‘I am sure you will be very well pleased with the good news I now send … of our being masters of Bouchain, and that Marshal Villars has done us the honour of being witness of the garrison being made prisoners of war. They consist of eight battalions and 500 Swiss.’153
Marlborough rated highly his achievement in breaking the Ne Plus Ultra lines and capturing Bouchain, and three of the great tapestries in Blenheim Palace were to be devoted to these episodes. However, with Maynwaring and other Whig pamphleteers assailing the ministry, Tory propagandists struck back, belittling the captain general’s achievements, and Marlborough looked vainly to his political masters for some support. But, unknown to him, as early as August 1710 Harley had opened secret negotiations with Torcy, the French foreign minister, based on the recognition that Philip V was never going to be expelled from Spain. The negotiations became formal in April 1711, and were placed in the hands of St John, who became Viscount Bolingbroke in 1712, though with a very bad grace, for he had hoped to be an earl. ‘I was dragged into the House of Lords,’ he complained, ‘in such a manner as to make my promotion a punishment, not a reward.’154 Bolingbroke sought to get the best peace he could for Britain, even though this involved forcing her allies to accept worse terms than those which had so nearly been achieved in previous negotiations. Preliminaries were signed in October 1711, although they did not end the war, and a conference was to assemble at Utrecht in January 1712 to discuss definitive terms. The ministry used Jonathan Swift to support its case for peace in a brilliant pamphlet called The Conduct of the Allies in the late War, in which he argued that the conquest of Spain had never been in Britain’s interest, and that had it not been for the Whigs’ rash insistence upon it the war could have been ended in 1709.
The peace signed at Utrecht in early 1713 embodied a number of individual treaties between the belligerents. The Duke of Anjou was recognised as Philip V of Spain, but he renounced, for himself and his descendants, all claims to the throne of France, while various French princes relinquished their own possible claims to the Spanish throne. The Pyrenees had been rebuilt. Archduke Charles, the Hapsburg claimant to Spain, could survive well enough without his pretended throne, for he had in fact succeeded his brother Joseph as Holy Roman Emperor in 1711. At Utrecht he received the Spanish Netherlands, the Kingdom of Naples, Sardinia, and most of the Duchy of Milan. Victor Amadeus of Savoy was rewarded for his adherence to the Allies by gaining the remainder of Milan and the whole of Sicily.
Spain ceded both Gibraltar and Minorca to Britain, enabling Richard Kane of the Royal Irish to set off for the latter as its new governor, and to pen his own account of the war in its pleasant climate. Spain also granted Britain the asiento de negros, a thirty-year agreement to sell slaves and five hundred tons of merchandise annually in Spanish colonies. This allowed legitimate traders into the hitherto closed markets of Central and South America, and smugglers immediately followed: disputes, and the alleged mutilation of a British sea captain, led to the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739.
France made extensive concessions in North America, renouncing its claims in Newfoundland, the huge territory of Rupert’s Land (named for the cavalier Prince Rupert) around Hudson’s Bay, and the coastal region of Acadia. Both Île St-Jean (Prince Edward Island) and Île Royale (Cape Breton Island) remained in French hands, and work soon began on building the Vauban-style fortress of Louisbourg on the latter. War between France and the Empire formally lurched on until it was ended by the Treaties of Rastatt and Baden in 1714. In the following year the Treaty of Madrid closed the struggle between Spain and Portugal, although a state of war between Spain and the Empire officially existed till 1720.
There was widespread indignation amongst the Whigs that the French had escaped too lightly, especially in view of the fact that the terms agreed at Utrecht fell well short of those the French had earlier seemed so close to accepting. The Whig politician John Wilkes later said that, like ‘the Peace of God, the treaty passeth all understanding’. The Tories argued that the treaty served British interests well, though there was no denying that the Dutch, who had played such a resolute part in the struggle and then hosted the negotiation that ended it, had gained little. ‘De vous, chez vous, sans vous’ (‘About you, at home with you, but without you’), quipped bitter Dutchmen. However, although many of the fortresses captured by the Allies in the last three years of the war were, like the mighty Lille, restored to the French, there was no realistic threat to Dutch sovereignty for the next two generations.
What was undeniably true, though, was that the treaty had removed the danger of a huge Bourbon super-state, comprising not only France and Spain but all the latter’s overseas colonies, whose existence could only have been inimical to British interests. The lesser risk of a Hapsburg super-state had also been averted, and the Tories could claim, with some justice, that the agreement created a European balance of power which it would be hard for a single nation to disrupt.
Marlborough’s position was exceptionally difficult. He had long had reservations about the Whigs’ policy of ‘No Peace without Spain’, but as what Winston S. Churchill calls ‘the soul of the Grand Alliance’, he disliked the notion of abandoning the allies upon whose troops he had relied. He had especially close relations with Hanover, whose Elector, likely to become king of Great Britain in the foreseeable future, was firmly opposed to the preliminaries. However, he was more Tory than Whig by personal persuasion, and had worked well enough with members of the present ministry, most notably Bolingbroke.
He was certainly convinced that the war could not go on, though he was less sure what constituted reasonable peace terms. In October 1711 he told Oxford that ‘there is nothing upon earth I wish more than an end of the war … I am perfectly convinced that it brings the draining of our nation both of men and money, almost to the last extremity. Our Allies by degrees so shift the burthen of the war upon us, that at the rate they go on, the whole charge must at last fall on England.’155
It would have been hard for Marlborough to keep his head below the political parapet, although the signs are that, tired and beset by an increasing number of headaches, he might well have wished to. In December 1711 the House of Lords debated a Whig amendment to the queen’s speech. It affirmed that ‘No Peace could be safe or honourable to Great Britain or Europe if Spain and the West Indies were allotted to any branch of the House of Bourbon.’ Marlborough supported the amendment, and sealed his fate: the Lords took the same view and sealed their own. Twelve Tory peers were to be created so as to ensure the passage through the Lords of the eventual peace, and the ministry unleashed the commissioners of public accounts, already digging deeply into the parlous state of the nation’s finances, upon Marlborough.
Two of the many irregularities that the commissioners discovered in army accounts affected Marlborough personally. The first was that he had accepted a total of £60,000 in gifts from Antonio Machado and Sir Solomon de Medina, contractors for bread and bread wagons. Medina, testifying in London, agreed that he had indeed given Mr Sweet, the deputy paymaster at Amsterdam, 1 per cent of all the monies he had received for the contracts, and had also paid Cardonnel five hundred ducats a year. As soon as Medina had given his evidence, Marlborough assured the commissioners that ‘this is no more than what has been allowed as a perquisite to the general, or commander-in-chief of the army in the Low Countries, even before the Revolution’. He told them that he had not accepted the money on his own behalf, but that it had been ‘constantly employed for the service of the public, in keeping secret correspondence, and getting intelligence of the enemy’s motions and designs’.156 Cadogan, who produced the papers to assist Marlborough in his defence, went back so far in the accounts that he was sure it was ‘undeniably evident, that for these five and thirty years past it was the established custom to present the grand commander-in-chief with a considerable annual gratification in proportion to the number of troops of the army’.157
The second accusation against Marlborough was that he had received 2½ per cent of the money paid to foreign troops in British pay. He replied that this was the traditional way in which a commander-in-chief financed his secret intelligence, and added that he had himself negotiated the agreement in the time of William III, and also held a warrant from Queen Anne, dated 6 July 1702, authorising the practice. His defence was not wholly persuasive. William had instituted the scheme to get round Parliament’s tight control over military expenditure during his reign, and the 1702 warrant had lapsed and its existence was not known to the paymaster general or to the exchequer. While Marlborough had undoubtedly spent some of the money on that intelligence service which had served him so well, Ivor Burton is surely right to suggest that ‘nothing like 2½ per cent of the entire cost of 30,000 auxiliary troops could possibly have been needed for this purpose’.158 Nevertheless, the fact that Marlborough’s successor enjoyed the same perquisites emphasises that his conduct was not wholly unreasonable.
The findings of the inquiry were enough for Harley to persuade the queen to dismiss Marlborough from all his military offices on 31 December 1711. The London Gazette on New Year’s Day 1712 duly recorded Marlborough’s dismissal. The Duke of Ormonde succeeded him as commander-in-chief and colonel of 1st Foot Guards, and Lord Rivers became master general of the ordnance. The same Gazette announced the promotion of the twelve new Tory peers.
Marlborough took his downfall with remarkable equanimity, writing to assure his well-wishers that he sought only ‘a quiet retirement … [which is] what I have long wished for, I shall be easy in my relation to my own destiny, and shall always add my good wishes for the continued success and prosperity of the public’.159 Amongst the dozens of replies to foreign monarchs, soldiers and diplomats who had sent their commiserations was a note to Sir Thomas Wheate, who lived at Glympton, near Woodstock. ‘I am very much obliged to you for being mindful of my want of beagles,’ Marlborough wrote, ‘though I am yet at a loss where to keep them; however I should be glad to know where they are, and if the huntsman will undertake to keep them till I have a proper place, and upon what terms, to which I shall pray your answer at your leisure.’160 It seemed that he might, at long last, be able to live in retirement as a country gentleman, albeit in a rather big house.
Marlborough had little to do with the Treaty of Utrecht, though he can have taken little comfort in the events leading up to it. Bolingbroke’s plans received a serious jolt when in 1713 the Duke of Burgundy and his eldest son both died, leaving only one infant prince, the future Louis XV, between Philip of Spain and the French throne. Bolingbroke and Oxford decided that Philip could either keep Spain but renounce France, or leave Spain to the Duke of Savoy and take the latter’s territories and Sicily instead. Neither the Imperialists nor the Dutch would accept this, and resolved to fight on. To prevent the Allies from gaining a victory which might have upset their plans, the ministry imposed ‘restraining orders’ on Marlborough’s successor. Ormonde was secretly forbidden to engage the French, leading to letters like this, from Ormonde to Villars:
It is true, Sir, that for the siege of Quesnoy, which it was not in my power to prevent, I was obliged to contribute some troops in the pay of the Estates-General, but not a single man in the Queen’s pay; it seems to me that, as we had not even opened our trenches, that the siege could in no way break the measures agreed by our sovereigns.161
‘Whether the Duke of Ormonde was really concerned at receiving these orders, I shall not take it upon me to say,’ wrote Robert Parker; ‘but however that was, most certain it is, that he was extremely punctual in observing them.’162 Corporal Bishop thought that with Marlborough’s departure, ‘the neck of the war was broke, and that I should be disappointed of the pleasure of seeing Paris next year’.163 Richard Kane was even more critical. Ormonde, he thought, was ‘a good natured, but a weak and ambitious man, fit to be made tool of by a crafty set of knaves’.164 Without British help, the Allies took Quesnoy but lost it again almost immediately, and Eugène, who had taken over as Allied commander-in-chief, was beaten by Villars at Denain. Villars finished up with Marchines, Bouchain and Douai in his hands, having undone much of the work of Marlborough’s last two campaigns.
The treaty was not signed till 1713, and it took the Empire another year to agree to it. The terms were approved by Parliament, passing the Lords by eighty-one to thirty-six votes. Twenty-four peers, Marlborough and Godolphin among them, recorded their formal protest, but the majority ordered this to be struck from the records of the House. When the protest was printed for circulation, the ministry prosecuted its printers and publishers.
By this time Marlborough’s own position had deteriorated. Parliament concluded, by a substantial majority, that ‘the taking of several sums of money annually by the Duke of Marlborough from the contractor for foraging the bread and wagons in the Low Countries was unwarrantable and illegal’, and that the 2½ per cent deducted from the pay of foreign troops ‘is public money, and ought to be accounted for’.165 The House of Commons took vengeance on Cardonnel, one of the MPs for Southampton, and duly expelled him for having accepted bribes from Medina. The government press enjoyed open season on Marlborough, that man who had ‘once perhaps been fortunate’. Captain Parker was shocked to see that the Examiner, one of the ministry’s news-sheets, described the former captain general as ‘naturally a very great coward … all the victories and successes that attended him, were owing to mere chance, and to those about him’. ‘Had I not read those words,’ Parker wrote, ‘I should never have believed that any man could have the face to publish so notorious a falsehood.’166
Falsehood or not, it was clear to Marlborough and his supporters that he was in real trouble. The ministry’s lawyers had it in mind to make him repay the cash he had acquired from Medina and his percentage of the pay of foreign troops, and the crown was likely to demand the return of part of the money expended on Blenheim Palace, still far from completion. The repeated attacks on his reputation made it dangerous for him to remain in England, and with Anne’s health visibly failing, the prospect of a Hanoverian succession might provoke factional violence or, as many Whigs feared (with good reason, as we shall see), a Jacobite invasion. He had other reasons for wishing to go to the Continent. It seemed probable that peace negotiations would result in his principality of Mindelheim being given to Bavaria, and he hoped to prevent this. Marlborough also hoped that he might persuade the Elector of Hanover and other Allied sovereigns to send an expedition to Britain to forestall the expected Jacobite attack. In short, he had much to risk and little to gain by staying at Holywell. ‘In England,’ writes Winston S. Churchill, ‘he was a prey. In Europe he was a prince.’167
The queen, who retained great personal attachment to Marlborough, told Dr Hamilton that ‘it was prudent of him’ to depart, and signed his passport on 30 October. Bolingbroke maintained that there had been ‘a good deal of contest’ within the cabinet about allowing him to go, though the passport bears his countersignature. There have been suggestions that Oxford was so anxious to get Marlborough out of the country that he threatened to make public details of his dealings with the French over the money promised him for helping bring about peace. There is no doubt that Marlborough met Oxford that autumn, but the best we can say of the ‘blackmail’ assertion is that, even if it were true, Oxford was ‘forcing at an open door with a battering ram’, for Marlborough had many other reasons to depart.168 However, one of Oxford’s letters to Maynwaring, Marlborough’s intermediary in his application for a passport, tells him that ‘You will … assure your friend that there have been endeavours from both sides to obstruct granting the pass desired, yet I shall have the honour to put it into his hands.’169 This would be odd language had the idea of exile been Oxford’s in the first place. Marlborough passed much of his money to his sons-in-law, and transferred £50,000 to Cadogan, then serving as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary at The Hague, in case, as Sarah put it, ‘the Stuart line were restored’: Cadogan’s error in investing this money in Austria rather than Holland, losing interest in the process, was to attract Sarah’s wrath.
Marlborough at least had the opportunity of seeing Sidney Godolphin to his grave before going into exile. Godolphin died at Holywell, and it took three weeks to get sufficient Whig Knights of the Garter to act as his pallbearers, ‘for they don’t find the Tory knights so ready to come to town a purpose’. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on 7 October with the Dukes of Marlborough, Devonshire, Richmond and Schomberg bearing his pall. Sarah recognised in their old friend a virtue she admired, even if she could not share it: ‘He was a man of wonderful frugality in the public concerns but of no great money above his paternal estate. What he left at his death showed that he had indeed been the nation’s treasurer and not his own.’170
Marlborough drove to Dover on 24 November 1712 with just a few servants, but, held up by contrary winds, could not get a packet boat till the end of the month, and arrived in Ostend on 1 December. He was received there with enthusiasm, and went on to Antwerp, where his welcome was so spectacular, with shipping in the harbour firing salutes, that he made the next stage of his journey, to Maastricht, in Dutch territory, by a circuitous route to avoid stirring up public excitement that might affront the British government. Now accompanied by both Cadogan and the Dutch General Dopff, he was greeted by a guard of honour and yet more demonstrations of public regard when he reached Aachen on 21 January 1713.
That day he told Sarah that he had received no letters from her since 20 December, and was not sure where she now was. He advised her that because of a sudden thaw ‘you will find the ways extremely bad, and as this place is extremely dirty I have resolved to go to Maastricht at the beginning of the week, and there to expect you. I send this letter to Ostend in hopes it may meet you there.’171 By early February he was palpably concerned at not having heard from her. ‘If you have observed by my letters that I thought you would have left England sooner than you have been able to do,’ he wrote,
I hope you will be so kind and just to me, to impute it to the great desire I had of having the satisfaction of your company. For I am extremely sensible of the obligation I have to you, for the resolution you have taken of leaving your friends and country for my sake. I am very sure, if there be anything in my power that may make it easy to you, I should do it with all imaginable pleasure. In this place you will have little conveniences; so that we must get to Frankfurt as soon as we can. I wish we may be better there; but I fear you will not be easy till we get to some place where we may settle for some time; so that we may be in a method and orderly way of living; and if you are then contented, I shall have nothing to trouble me.172
Sarah applied for her passport on 29 January. It was granted without delay, and she set off to join her husband. But while he had travelled light, she took with her a substantial wardrobe, which included forty cloaks and petticoats and several leopard-skin muffs, as well as a chocolate pot and a five-pint kettle. Her little retinue included a Protestant chaplain with the improbable name of Whadcock Priest. What she saw soon convinced her of ‘the sad effects of Popery and arbitrary power’, though she was delighted by her reception by the nuns of Aachen.
If our enemies do prevail to our utter ruin, I think I had best go into a monastery. There are several of them in this town, and tis all the entertainment I have to vist [them]. I supped with about twenty [nuns] the other night but twas a very slight [meal] nothing but brown bread and butter … They were as fond of me as if I had not been a heretic.173
They reached Frankfurt in the middle of May, and Sarah was delighted to see that the troops, under Eugène’s command, paid her lord ‘all the respects as if he had been in his old post’.
To see so may brave men marching by was a fine sight. It gave me melancholy reflections, and made me weep; but at the same time I was so much animated that I wished I had been a man that I might have ventured my life a thousand times in the glorious cause of liberty …
When I had written so far I was called to receive the honour of a visit from the Elector of Mainz. I fancy he came to this place chiefly to see the Duke of Marlborough. His chap [cheek] is, like my own, a little of the fattest, but in my life I never saw a face that expressed so much openness, honesty and good nature … I can’t help repeating part of his compliment to the Duke of Marlborough, that he wished any Prince of the Empire might be severely punished if they forgot his merit. It would fill a book to give you an account of all the honours done the Duke of Marlborough in all the towns … as if he had been king of them.174
She could not but contrast the civility with which they were received on the Continent with the way they had been cold-shouldered in England.
’Tother day we were walking upon the road, and a gentleman and a lady went past us in their chariot who we had never seen before, and after passing with us the usual civilities, in half a quarter of an hour or less they bethought themselves and turned back, came out of their coach to us, and desired that we would go into their garden, which was very near that place, and which they think, I believe, is a very fine thing, desiring us to accept of a key. This is only a little taste of the civility of people abroad, and I could not help thinking that we might have walked in England as far as our feet would have carried us before anybody that we had never seen before would have lighted out of their coach to have entertained us.175
Marlborough visited his principality of Mindelheim, where he was received with royal honours. He already suspected that its location meant that it would go to Bavaria when peace was concluded, and this is indeed what happened. The emperor promised to ‘give his highness an equivalent principality out of his own hereditary dominions’, and eventually created a new principality from the county of Mellenburg, in Upper Austria. Archdeacon Coxe doubted if this had actually happened, grumbling that ‘The most eminent services are but too often ill requited, when they cease to be necessary or useful,’ but the best evidence suggests that the exchange was indeed made.176
Marlborough was in very close contact with the Electoral court at Hanover, and worked hard, with Cadogan and Robethon, to ensure that the Elector would succeed bloodlessly to the throne on Anne’s death, although the Elector made it clear that he had no intention of sending an expedition to Britain before he had formally succeeded to the throne. They concluded that most of the British troops on the Continent at the time of her death ‘would readily obey a man so agreeable to them as the Duke of Marlborough’, and both the Duke and Cadogan received provisional commissions from the Elector authorising them to take command of these troops when the queen died. Marlborough moved from Frankfurt to Antwerp, to be as close as possible to England when the moment came. In Britain, meanwhile, the ministry purged the army not simply of outright Whigs, but of men like Argyll and Stair, many of whom joined armed associations ready to support the Protestant succession when Anne died.
At precisely the same time that he was working so eagerly for a Hanoverian succession, Marlborough was corresponding with the Jacobites. Indeed, the German historian Onno Klopp argued, in Der Fall des Hauses Stuart, that ‘Marlborough succeeded in an astonishing way in not losing the confidence of Saint-Germain, while at the same time preserving that of Hanover.’ Winston S. Churchill maintains that his contact with the Jacobite court gave him ‘a window of indispensable intelligence’, and that this is the only motive for his behaviour that ‘fits all the facts of twenty years’.177 It is hard to share this confidence. We have already seen that Marlborough had shifted £50,000 to the Continent in case of a Stuart restoration, and we shall soon note that he remained on good terms with the Jacobites when he was close to death and had no official responsibilities or personal ambitions. The truth is probably that, as Sarah observed on 17 October 1713, it was impossible to be sure of anything, and dangerous to burn any bridges. ‘This is a world that is subject to frequent revolutions,’ she wrote, ‘and though one wishes to leave one’s posterity secure, there is so few that makes a suitable return even upon that account.’178
Moreover, the spirit of the age saw little wrong in Marlborough’s continuing friendship with James II’s illegitimate son the Duke of Berwick, who was his nephew long before he became a Marshal of France. As Berwick pointed out, when asking Marlborough leave for an equerry to visit the Allied army ‘to buy some English horses’, there were contacts ‘so indifferent to the public cause’ as not to excite reasonable criticism. Berwick concluded: ‘pray [give] my compliments to Mr Godfrey,’ the English officer now married to his mother.179 When they were in exile Sarah feared that her husband’s old fire had left him. She thought he had grown ‘intolerably lazy’, and one early biographer recorded a comment made at the time: ‘The only things the Duke has forgotten are his deeds. The only things he remembers are the misfortunes of others.’180 In early 1714 his favourite daughter Elizabeth, Countess of Bridgewater, died of smallpox. He received the dreadful news in his house at Antwerp, where he was leaning on a marble mantelpiece: it was said that his head slammed against the marble so hard that he fell to the floor unconscious.
Queen Anne had been very ill over the winter of 1713–14, but had recovered sufficiently to open Parliament in person on 15 February. However, it was ‘universally recognised that her days were numbered’, and on 5 January Oxford’s cousin Thomas Harley was sent to Hanover to assure the Electoral court that Anne was determined to adhere to the Act of Settlement that enshrined the Hanoverian succession.181 Just as Marlborough kept a foot in both camps, so Oxford also negotiated with the Jacobites, though there can be no doubt that his overtures to St Germain were perfectly sincere. He used an intermediary to ask James, the Old Pretender, to change or at least conceal his religion, and Bolingbroke assured the French envoy in London that unless he did so there was no chance of his succeeding, for ‘people would rather have a Turk than a catholic’. Happily for the Protestant succession, James declined to temporise.
On about 9 June Marlborough told Viscount Molyneux of yet another twist: there would be no Queen Sophie. He had arrived at Herrenhausen, the country retreat of the Electoral court,
And there the first thing I heard was that the good old electress was dying in one of the public walks. I ran up there, and found her just expiring in the arms of the poor electoral princess, and amidst the tears of a great many of her servants, who endeavoured in vain to help her … No princess ever died more regretted, and I infinitely pity those servants that have known her a long time, when I, that have had the honour to know her but a month, can scarce refrain from tears in relating this.182
Marlborough thought that the electress’s death had been brought on by receiving letters from Oxford saying that, despite her hope that her grandson would be summoned to Parliament by virtue of his British dukedom, so as to be on hand when Anne died, no member of her family would be allowed to enter the kingdom while the queen still lived. Anne at once ordered that ‘The Princess Sophia’ should be replaced by ‘the Elector of Hanover’ in the appropriate part of The Book of Common Prayer. The Elector, now heir apparent to the throne of Great Britain, repeated his request for a senior member of his family to reside in England, and replaced his envoy there with Baron von Bothmar, not only his close confidant but an enemy of Oxford’s.
On 9 July Marlborough, writing from Antwerp, told Robethon that ‘the arrival of Mons Bothmar may be of great use’. He added that he would not leave for England till the end of the month, and was confident that the British troops at Dunkirk ‘are all well inclined apart from the two battalions of Orkney’s [Regiment]’.
Although Winston S. Churchill argues that Marlborough’s determination to return home was a bold personal decision, we now know that he had written to the queen through the medium of his daughter and her godchild Lady Sunderland. Although the contents of the letter are unknown, it is possible that the queen may have summoned him home, using Cadogan as her point of contact. In any event, Bolingbroke had been in touch with James Craggs, Marlborough’s man of affairs, and it seems to have been agreed that Marlborough would be reinstated in his former offices, with Ormonde becoming viceroy of Ireland by way of compensation. Adverse winds delayed Marlborough’s arrival in London, where he had been expected on 21 July, and this probably thwarted Anne’s hope that Marlborough and Bolingbroke between them would assume the reins of government, ensuring a smooth succession on her death.
On 7 July Anne dismissed Oxford, leaving Bolingbroke, directionless at the moment of supreme crisis, in effective charge of the ministry. On the thirtieth, barely conscious, she passed the lord treasurer’s white staff to the Duke of Shrewsbury, one of the middle party who had brought Oxford to power in 1710, and she died at 7.45 on the morning of Sunday, 1 August. She was forty-nine years old. The Elector of Hanover was proclaimed King George I at St James’s Palace at four o’clock that afternoon, and the Marlboroughs reached Dover on the following morning. The Flying Post reported from Rochester that:
The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough passed through this city; they were received with great expressions of joy from the people, especially those at Chatham, who strewed their way with flowers, as they adorned their houses with green boughs, and welcomed them with repeated shouts and acclamations.183
They arrived in London later that day, and rode through the streets of the city in their coach, escorted by a great body of gentlemen on horseback, the civic authorities and a detachment of grenadiers, to the accompaniment of cheers leavened with the occasional boo. Marlborough was irritated to discover that his name was not on the list of regents kept by Bothmar, but as he was abroad when the list was made out his absence from it is not surprising. George had decreed that he wished Anne’s funeral to have taken place before he arrived, and she was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the presence, amongst others, of both Henrietta Godolphin and Mary Montagu.
King George arrived in London on 18 September. He had already dismissed Bolingbroke and ordered the seizure of his papers, and received Oxford ‘with a most distinguishing contempt’. Now the Tories were out and the Whigs were in, and when a parliamentary committee investigated the Utrecht negotiations Bolingbroke fled to France, and though he was eventually allowed to return to England he never again held office. Oxford was impeached and lodged in the Tower, but although the case against him was dropped he too never again held office. Marlborough, in contrast, was received by the new king with the greatest cordiality. ‘My Lord Duke,’ he said, ‘I hope your troubles are now all over.’184 The first warrant signed by George I reinstated Marlborough as captain general, master general of the ordnance, and colonel of 1st Foot Guards. The first knighthood of the new reign was bestowed on the king’s physician, Dr Samuel Garth. He asked to have the ceremony performed with Marlborough’s sword, and the king was happy to agree. A Whig majority was returned at the new election: the Tories were to be out of power for almost forty years.
Marlborough’s natural good nature had been somewhat bruised by the treatment he had received, and when, with the aid of Cadogan and Argyll, he remodelled the army in 1714–15 he reinstated his friends and evicted many of his enemies. During the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 Argyll and Cadogan commanded the army in the field, and Marlborough presided over the campaign from London. Documents in the Cadogan papers show that there was nothing nominal in his exercise of authority. He helped ensure that the Dutch sent a lieutenant general and six battalions, six Flemish and six Swiss, to help government forces, and Cadogan relied on him to get the exchequer to open its stopcock. ‘I beg your Grace to press the giving orders for the payment of my bills,’ begged Cadogan; ‘the least failure in that point would ruin my credit entirely.’185
Like so many Jacobite attempts on the throne, the ’Fifteen suffered from abysmal leadership. The proverbial unsteadiness of the Earl of Mar, James Stuart’s chosen instrument in Scotland, had already gained him the nickname ‘Bobbin’ John’, and although he raised around 8,000 men and seized Perth, he failed to take swift and potentially decisive action. He sent a detachment to join other Jacobites in the Lowlands, and although this little army got as far as Preston it was overwhelmed in November. His main force, over twice the size of the government army, had the better of a battle against Argyll at Sheriffmuir near Perth on 13 November, but did little to exploit this success. When James landed in Scotland and established himself at Scone he did no better, consumed by melancholy and bouts of fever which were an ominous echo of his father’s misfortunes in 1688. He departed for France early in 1716, advising his followers to shift for themselves. Three years later a small Spanish fleet was providentially scattered by storms before it could land the troops it carried, and the handful who reached Scotland found little local support and soon surrendered. In 1715 intended risings in Wales and the West Country had been quickly snuffed out by the arrests of their leaders.
The government sought to strengthen its grip on Scotland by passing the Disarming Acts, building forts and barracks linked by military roads, and, in 1725, raising local independent companies soon known, from the dark hue of their plaids, as the Black Watch. However, it would have taken an unusually prescient man to write off Jacobitism, for the ’Forty-Five rebellion, which was to end in drizzle, blood and powder smoke at Culloden, got as far as Derby, just 125 miles from London, and enjoyed a tantalising prospect of success. As long as Marlborough lived a Jacobite restoration could not be ruled out, and he continued to entertain Jacobite agents until shortly before his death.
That ‘ease and quiet’ which had been the subject of so many wistful letters was denied Marlborough. He had already lost Elizabeth Bridgewater during his exile, and in April 1716 Anne Sunderland died of ‘pleuritic fever’ – probably septicaemia after blood-letting. Sarah complained that the doctor ‘did as certainly murder my dear Lady Sunderland as surely as if he had shot her through the head’.186
Soon afterwards, at Holywell on 28 May 1716, Marlborough suffered the first of his strokes, losing the power of both speech and movement. Thanks to (or perhaps despite) the efforts of his physician Samuel Garth he improved sufficiently to go to Bath in mid-July, where Sarah thought him ‘vastly better in his head and his speech’, although ‘he can’t come upstairs without uneasiness’. Sometimes he felt well enough for a hand or two of ombre, but he was often gloomy about his health, and complained that his belly had grown hard: Sarah agreed that his coat, roomy when they went down to Bath, no longer buttoned easily. She had him fed vipers boiled in broth, and the Duchess of Shrewsbury assured her that the best viper broth came from Montpellier. Although Sarah hoped that the vipers might ‘mend his blood and take off the lowness of his spirits’, she soon decided that hartshorn and calvesfoot jelly would be much better.
In November, while staying in a house on the Blenheim estate, Marlborough had another, more severe stroke. The diarist Dudley Ryder was shocked by what he saw.
The Duke of Marlborough is very ill and has lost much of his senses that he often falls into fits of crying. Methinks the frailty and mortality of human nature never appeared in a more moving and affecting light than in him. To see a man that was but just now the glory and pride of a nation, the hero of the world, of such vast abilities and knowledge and consequence sink almost below a rational creature, all his fine qualities disappear and fall away.187
Marlborough recovered well enough to ride again, and his mind was as sharp as ever, but his speech remained impaired, and his inability to manage certain words kept him increasingly confined within the family circle, though he attended the Lords to vote for Oxford’s impeachment, and wept with frustration when he escaped without punishment.
Building at Blenheim, which had stopped in 1712, began again in 1716. Many of the craftsmen who had previously worked there were reluctant to return, fearing that the lumbering venture would stall yet again. Left to her own devices Sarah would not have pressed on with it. She thought that it had already cost a quarter of a million pounds, and that the whole business was ‘a ridiculous madness’. Vanbrugh did his best to persuade her that the expense would be justified by its result, but she was not in the least convinced, and had a final row with him just before Marlborough suffered his second stroke.
With death now almost audibly falling into step behind him, Marlborough was more determined than ever to see Blenheim finished. Sarah’s biographer Frances Harris argues cogently that ‘Nothing demonstrates the limitation of her influence with him … more clearly than the continued slow rise of his baroque palace in the Oxfordshire countryside, in spite of all she could do or say to hinder it.’188 Now the project became an obligation laid upon Sarah by her husband’s burning desire to see the palace completed at last. They spent part of their time at Holywell, part in the Lodge at Windsor Great Park, and part on the Blenheim estate. Marlborough often rode out to watch the workmen, or sat by Vanbrugh’s ornamental bridge (a particular dislike of Sarah’s) to see work on house and estate proceed. The Marlboroughs moved into rooms in the east wing in the summer of 1719. The duke was delighted, although many contemporaries agreed with the waspish Alexander Pope that it could be no fun actually to live in the place: ‘I find, by all you have been telling,/That ’tis a house, but not a dwelling.’
Marlborough enjoyed playing cards with his grandchildren: whist was his favourite, but he liked basset, ombre and piquet too. He took particular pleasure in watching Lady Anne and Lady Diana Spencer act in John Dryden’s All for Love (the story of Antony and Cleopatra, thoughtfully censored by Sarah) at Blenheim, and walked with difficulty through the house and the park, once stopping to gaze up at his portrait by Kneller and murmuring wistfully: ‘That was once a man.’
Storms flashed and flickered over his head. Sarah fell out with Sunderland, who she thought had remarried beneath him. His new wife, Judith Tichborne, was an Irish heiress. She was ‘about fifteen’, complained Sarah, with ‘a squinty look’ to boot, a wholly unsuitable match for a man of forty-two. It was like ‘marrying a kitten’, and he would doubtless be persuaded ‘to come out of his library to play with puss’. Although Sunderland’s new wife’s character was unblemished, Sarah doubted if it would remain so for long, and she feared that his second litter would be ‘beggars with the titles of lords and ladies’, who could only be provided for at the expense of his first children.189 She invested in the South Sea Bubble but, with what Winston S. Churchill called ‘her almost repellent common sense’, got her money out well before the bubble popped, made £100,000 and then proceeded to lambast the stupidity of those who had not realised that ‘the project must burst in a little while and fall to nothing’.
Sarah not only fell out with James Craggs (she thought him ‘wicked enough to do anything’), but with his flamboyant son, James Craggs Junior. She might have forgiven him for misconduct with a servant at Holywell, but he went too far when, on his way to a masquerade disguised as a friar, he cautioned her against issuing a general invitation to other folk in disguise because her enemies might arrive pretending to be her friends, and ‘the Duchess of Montagu or my Lady Godolphin may come, and … you may give them a cup of tea or a dish of coffee’.190 Sarah did not care to have it known that she had quarrelled with her daughters, Henrietta Godolphin and Mary Montagu, but it was all too true. Winston S. Churchill suggests that the fault was theirs, but it is fairer to say that there was blame on both sides, and Sarah, like her mother before her, had never been one to kiss and make up. Both daughters would come to visit their father, not in the morning, when they might have seen him alone, ‘but at the hours when company was there’. They would, complained Sarah, go straight to him without paying any attention to her, ‘as if they had a pleasure in showing everybody that they insulted me’.191 Marlborough was offended by their behaviour, and told Mary: ‘I observe that you take no manner of notice of your mother; and certainly when you consider of that, you can’t imagine that any company can be very agreeable to me, who have not a right behaviour to her.’ Early in 1721 he wrote, in a faltering hand, to lament: ‘I am the worse to see my children live so ill with a mother for whom I must have the greatest tenderness and regard.’192
Even now Marlborough still dallied with the Jacobites. In June 1718 the Jacobite agent James Hamilton reported to the Earl of Mar:
Lord Portmore was last Saturday with Marlborough. After several things passing the latter advised him to draw all his effects out of the stocks, which he did that day. Marlborough entertained him with railing against Cadogan and the measures of his directors, notwithstanding few doubt of Marlborough being the mainspring of the club, though he still affects the reverse. Lord Portmore looks on his head to be as sound as he has known it for some years … 193
In mid-June 1722 Sarah was warned that Marlborough, in the Lodge at Windsor, was dying. She summoned her children and grandchildren to his sickbed, but there was the usual row. Sarah tells us:
I am sure it is impossible for any tongue to express what I felt at the time, but I believe anybody that ever loved another so tenderly as I did the Duke of Marlborough may have some feeling of what it was to have one’s children come in, in those last hours, who I knew did it not to comfort me, but like enemies that would report to others whatever I did in a wrong way.
Eventually Sarah asked her daughters and granddaughter Harriot to leave the room so that she could lie down beside her husband. Mary Montagu replied:
Will our being here hinder you from lying down? Then I sent Grace [Ridley, her servant] to ask again, to ask if she had such an affliction & was in my condition, whether she would like to have me with her? She said no, but did not go out until I sent her a third time.
With his wife lying beside him, John Churchill slipped away at four o’clock in the morning of 16 June 1722, at the very hour that his armies in Flanders and Brabant had been accustomed to hear the general call to arms rouse them from their tents for a day’s march. Sarah said that she felt the soul tearing from her body as he died.
They buried him, with ‘solemn splendour and martial pomp’, in the vault at the east end of Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey. Montagu was chief mourner, and eight dukes who were also Knights of the Garter followed him. Cadogan, who had succeeded Marlborough as commander-in-chief, walked in the procession behind the coffin, but was criticised for being ill-dressed and bumptious. Sarah was determined to pay for the funeral herself, to avoid being criticised for imposing a charge on the public purse when the family was so rich, but was horrified to discover that it had cost over £5,000. She went over the accounts carefully, discovering that she had been charged twice for the horses’ black plumes, and complaining that the forty-eight yards of black cloth for the mourning coach would have been enough to cover her garden.194
Sarah lived on for another twenty-two years. Scarcely was Marlborough cold in his grave than she found herself courted. At sixty-two she was still attractive, although, in the way of ladies of a certain age, she thought herself rather overweight. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said that she had ‘the finest hair imaginable, the colour of which she had preserved by the constant use of honey water’.195 She brushed Lord Coningsby aside, and also rejected the proud and wealthy Duke of Somerset, telling him that ‘I would not marry the Emperor of the world though I were but thirty years old.’ When he persisted, she silenced him by saying, ‘If I were young and handsome as I was, instead of old and faded as I am, and you could lay the empire of the world at my feet, you should never share the heart and hand that once belonged to John Duke of Marlborough.’196
Marlborough’s death did not bring about a family reconciliation. As he had died without male heirs, Henrietta Godolphin became Duchess of Marlborough in her own right. Her relationship with her mother was improved neither by the fact that she produced a child in 1723, after visiting Bath with the dramatist Congreve, nor by her friendship with Marlborough’s sister Arabella, of whom Sarah had always disapproved. Henrietta died in 1733, and was succeeded by her nephew Charles Spencer, second son of her sister Anne and Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland: Charles had already inherited the Sunderland title from his elder brother (his death deeply regretted by Sarah) in 1729. Thereafter the dukedom passed steadily along the male line of the Spencers, and George Spencer, 5th Duke of Marlborough, obtained royal licence to assume the name and arms of Churchill, with the family name formally becoming Spencer-Churchill. Britain’s Second World War leader Winston S. Churchill was a grandson of the 7th Duke, and was, rather unexpectedly, born at Blenheim in November 1874. His arrival was not anticipated for some weeks, but his mother fell while accompanying a shooting party, was rushed back to the palace in a donkey cart, and gave birth in a ground-floor room. His first name was that of John Churchill’s father, and he always had a particular affection for the ancestor he loved to call ‘Duke John’. He was fond of Blenheim too, and in 1908 proposed to Clementine Hozier, who was to become his long-suffering wife, in the Greek temple in its garden.
When Henrietta died Sarah was far more unhappy than she had ever expected, and told a goddaughter that Henrietta had begun by being sweet-natured, but ‘wretched’ friends like Congreve and John Gay were responsible for corrupting her. ‘But,’ she added perceptively, ‘families seldom agree to live easily together.’197 In contrast, she could not find a good word for Mary Montagu, and returned all her letters unopened. When the Duke of Montagu wrote to Sarah to complain ‘upon her daughter’s F[ucking] with M. Craggs’, Sarah promptly replied: ‘Milord, I have received your gracious letter. I am sorry you are a cuckold, my daughter a whore … and my niece such a bawd: I am your Grace’s etc.’198
Sarah spent her last two decades supervising accounts of her husband’s life, drawing up twenty-six drafts of her will, and working, with the assistance of various ghosts, on successive versions of her own political role. She lived so long that somehow people forgot how exasperating she had been. As the historian Christopher Hibbert put it, by the time of George II’s coronation, when, exhausted by trudging to Westminster Abbey in her robes, she sat on a drum to recover herself, ‘she had long been accepted as a kind of national institution’.199
She died in 1744, ‘immensely rich’, wrote Tobias Smollett, ‘and very little regretted by either her own family or by the world in general’.200 Frances Harris’s luminous prose tells us that ‘she went into the unknown not hoping or fearing very much; only trusting, in spite of everything, that the sincerity on which she had so long prided herself would be her saving grace if any were needed’.201 She had long finished Blenheim, first jettisoning Vanbrugh, and then taking little notice of his successor Hawksmoor, but dealing direct with several of the master craftsmen working there. Economy and simplicity coloured much of what she did, but she spent £2,200 on a tomb in the chapel, designed by William Kent and carved by William Rysbrack. She had left instructions that Marlborough should be exhumed from Westminster Abbey to join her at Blenheim, and on 1 November 1744 their bodies were laid side by side in the vault beneath the chapel.
Sarah had never much liked the place, and John had not lived to see it completed. Yet there is good reason for him to rest in that overstated pile for eternity. It had been built to commemorate a battle that changed the fate of Europe. No reasonable observer, glancing at the Continent in 1700, could have predicted anything other than its domination by the French. And yet the same observer, looking at the world in 1722, the year Marlborough died, could not have ignored the rise of Great Britain to European stature and the beginnings of world power.
The process owed a good deal to men in dirty shirts and powderburnt red coats, too often reviled by their countrymen and cast aside once the need for them had passed. The British army came of age under Marlborough’s tutelage. The Dictionary of National Biography entry on that stormy petrel George Macartney, who rose, fell, rose, fell and rose again, makes the point perfectly. Macartney ‘was a man of no great note on his own account, but he belonged to a band of fighting-men who built an army that … altered the course of European history’.202 Some of them have tramped across these pages: Salamander Cutts and Charles Churchill, little Lord Lumley and Jemmy Campbell, the Duke of Argyll (‘Red John of the battles’), Sergeant Millner, Corporal Bishop and Private Deane, drinking more than was good for them and not doing all their fighting against the Queen’s enemies, but standing steady in rank and file when the drums beat up and their colours gleamed through the smoke. It was an army whose tactics leaned forward to Wellington rather than back to Oliver Cromwell and Prince Rupert, and whose regimental identity still strikes a chord (its tone, sadly, more muted than it once was) with the British army of the early twenty-first century.
Marlborough firmly grasped the essentials of his three combat arms. His infantry achieved its effect primarily by fire and his cavalry by shock. He recognised that artillery had the power to shape battle: at Blenheim, pushing his cannon across the Nebel helped tilt the balance in his favour; at Ramillies the French lamented the damage done to their battalions around the village by the Allied guns; and even at Malplaquet, where so much went wrong, the massed guns in his centre helped pave the way for the decisive stroke.
Marlborough knew that effectiveness on the battlefield depended on solid training, and that this could not simply be left to regimental commanders: standardisation was required. In December 1706 Lieutenant General Richard Ingoldsby wrote from Ghent:
My Lord, I have begun to exercise all the adjutants, sergeants and corporals, who are already pretty perfect, and [am] mightily pleased that your Grace has thought fit to put them upon exercise.
It is impossible to tell your Grace the disorder they were in, no two regiments exercising alike, nor any one company of grenadiers able to exercise with the battalion [from which it came] so that if your Lordship had a mind to see the Line exercise, all the grenadiers of the army must have stood still.
I must not forget to tell your Grace that the Duke of Argyll’s Regiment never had any pouches, or slings, but are trusting to a little cartouche-box which will not contain half the ammunition necessary for a day of action … 203
It speaks volumes for Marlborough that he could attend to the detail of grenade drill and cartridge boxes while commanding the biggest army that Britain had ever put into the field and presiding over a large and complex coalition.
Marlborough’s soldiers knew that they owed much to the man they liked to call ‘Corporal John’. He bore a greater burden, military and political, than any British commander before or since, and of him alone could it be said that he never besieged a town he did not take, or fought a battle he did not win. In some respects Marlborough was a child of his times. He tried to give his men a day’s rest on Sunday if the tempo of operations allowed it (though both Blenheim and Ramillies were fought on the Lord’s day), and his courteous behaviour to his opponents betokened an age which strove, not altogether successfully, to introduce something of the first stirrings of the Enlightenment into war.
The German military thinker Carl von Clausewitz, who lived a century later, told his readers that in a coalition war the very cohesion of the coalition was of fundamental importance, and Marlborough was, first to last, a coalition general, supremely skilled at holding the Grand Alliance together, and at devising what a recent commentator calls ‘agreed “systems” of orders, staffwork and movement’.204 He was always keen to attack the cohesion of his enemies while at the same time protecting his own, and recognised that wars were not won by resolute defence, but by offensive action against the enemy’s army in the field. If that was beaten, then territory could be taken and fortresses must inevitably fall. Of his contemporaries only Charles XII of Sweden grasped the importance of offensive action to the same degree, but he lacked Marlborough’s sense of judgement, and owed his decisive defeat at Poltava to launching his marvellous infantry against a position which even they could never hope to take.
On the battlefield, Marlborough’s methods embodied all the ingredients of the best modern military doctrine. The acquisition and analysis of intelligence underlay everything he did. He had a remarkable eye for the ground, quickly identifying the potential it offered. At Blenheim, he knew that his infantry could form up on the Nebel in relative safety, because the French guns could not hit them if they lay down, and at Ramillies he spotted the covered route that enabled him to shift his weight from right to centre. Once battle was joined, he attacked on one part of the front to pin his opponent to the ground, before jinking elsewhere to strike an enemy who had now lost his balance, like a skilled judoka who uses his opponent’s weight to throw him all the more heavily.
Marlborough was essentially manoeuvrist, always trying to apply his own strength to an enemy’s weakness. There were, though, times when, by accident or design, attrition trumped manoeuvre. He launched a doggedly attritional frontal assault on the Schellenberg because he had no time for subtlety (one needs both time and space to manoeuvre), and knew that a speedy victory, even if dearly bought, must tilt the balance of the campaign in his favour. At Malplaquet he badly misjudged the strength of French resistance, and although his customary technique of unbalancing his opponent in order to create a fatal weakness ultimately worked, it did so at appalling cost. Though it might have helped him politically, he made no attempt to shift the blame, but his biographers have not always been as generous. He had a gentle streak: he begged Queen Anne that a man convicted of libelling him should be remitted the prescribed period in the pillory. The prospect of men lying out on wet straw upset him, but he did not hesitate to send the same men into the cannon’s mouth if he had to. Soldiers know that their trade requires them to risk death. They often mind this far less than civilians imagine: what they resent is the risk of pointless death, of purposeless sacrifice. Marlborough was never vindictive towards his opponents: the harrying of Bavaria before Blenheim was the cruellest of necessities, intended to bring about a decisive confrontation, and it is evident from his letters that he hated it.
Officers and men loved him in part because of the care he took in ensuring their well-being. Yet this did not spring simply from his good nature. Like Wellington, he knew that one penalty of logistic failure was the collapse of discipline and the pillaging that inevitably ensued. This not only exasperated friendly rulers but alienated their populations, demanding ever-greater protection for foraging parties and couriers, and making it harder to glean intelligence. Marlborough’s subordinates sensed that he was a natural winner, who set his army on that virtuous spiral of success breeding success, consigning his opponents to the vicious circle of defeat reinforcing defeat. There is a shamanistic quality to great generals which goes beyond wise strategy, solid logistics and successful tactics, enabling them to get straight to the hearts of the soldiers they command. It is one of the intangibles of generalship, what T.E. Lawrence saw as its elusive 10 per cent, like a kingfisher flashing across a pool, and Marlborough had it in abundance. Captain Robert Parker tells us:
It may perhaps be thought that … I am too sanguine in favour of the Duke of Marlborough, and that my attachment to him may be occasioned by favour received from him. But for my part, I never lay under any private or personal obligation to his Grace; on the contrary he once did me the injustice of putting a captain over my head. This however I knew he could not well avoid doing sometimes, for men in power are not to be disobliged. My zeal for the man is founded on his merit and service, and I do him no more than bare justice. I have been an eyewitness of many of his great actions. I knew that he never slipped an opportunity of fighting the enemy whenever he could come at them; that to the last moment he pushed on the war, with a sincere desire of reducing France within her proper bounds … 205
Marlborough was unquestionably avaricious in an avaricious age, though even here we must be cautious, for his reputation for tight-fistedness was first earned when he was a young man, simply because he did not share the spendthrift habits of the bewigged gallants at Charles II’s court. He never forgot what it was like to be poor and friendless. Men who rose high often fell hard, and his own career faltered twice, with imprisonment on the first occasion and exile on the second. Despite his material rewards – huge wealth, a dukedom and an Imperial principality – he was often unhappy, a martyr to migraine, and worn to a frazzle by endless scrabbling in the busy ant-heap of coalition warfare. His urge to stay near the top of the greasy pole of British politics was tempered by a deep desire to be rid of it all, and to live quietly in the country with wife, horses and dogs. Far from prolonging the war for his own interest, he became heartily sick of it, and saw, far better than many of his countrymen, that there was much to be lost by pushing France to the last extremity. If, on the one hand, he genuinely feared the expansionist ambitions of Louis XIV, on the other he sought to constrain France, not to cripple her. If there is indeed a tragedy to Marlborough, it is that his retirement was short and racked by ill health, by the loss of two of his daughters and by repeated bickering between Sarah and her surviving offspring.
We cannot say with any certainty what John Churchill would have been like without Sarah Jennings, though perhaps the indolence observed by that shrewd judge Charles II might have become his dominant trait. He might have reverted to bucolic type, sitting for a pocket borough in the Tory interest, worrying about his hunters and his partridges, riding into town for the quarter sessions, and earning the admiration of the Spectator for kicking Bully Dawson down St James’s Street. Sarah not only helped give him dynastic ambitions (so cruelly blighted by young Blandford’s untimely death), but also produced the contacts that helped realise them. There were occasional tales of his infidelity – with Lady Southwell in early 1705, and later with the dancer Hester Santlow – but there is no surviving evidence. Marlborough’s early conduct at court, mud-slinging by his detractors and Sarah’s own constant jealousy (she admitted that she was ‘tormented by fears of losing him’) all helped generate smoke where there was, at least as far as a historian can tell, no fire.206 There comes a time when a biographer can make as much of a judgement about his subject as he might about a close friend, and the Marlboroughs’ marriage seems a shining example of a love-match (interspersed, let it be said, with the crashes and bangs from which even the happiest of marriages are not immune), not only across the political divide, for she was always a firm Whig and he an instinctive Tory, but between different personalities. John was affable and courtly but always guarded, and Sarah passionate and intense, her opinions never understated, her sincerity at once her greatest virtue and her most striking liability.
Even Marlborough’s enemies could not deny that there was something very special about the man. When his old adversary Bolingbroke was in exile in France, some of his friends began to criticise Marlborough’s tight-fistedness, hoping to please him. ‘I am the last person in the world to be told this,’ Bolingbroke replied. ‘I knew the Duke of Marlborough better than any of you; and he was so great a man that I have entirely forgotten any of his failings.’ In his Letters on the Study of History, published in 1752, after his death, Bolingbroke declared: ‘I take with pleasure this opportunity of doing justice to that great man, whose faults I knew, whose virtues I admired, and whose memory, as the greatest general, and as the greatest minister that our country, or perhaps any other has produced, I honour.’207