MARLBOROUGH

England’s Fragile Genius

RICHARD HOLMES

DEDICATION

I am so entirely yours, that if I might have all the world given me, I could not be happy but in your love.

The Hague, 20 April 1703/Ropley, 20 February 2008

EPIGRAPH

Our horsemen had now the better of the fight; but soon we beheld fresh bodies of horsemen, hastening to the relief of their half-defeated squadrons. Marlborough was at the head of this reserve of cavalry … I can still see him as, undaunted and serene, he rode forward amid the cheers of his troops, shouting ‘Corporal John’, the name they had given their hero; he was surrounded by his staff, evidently receiving his commands. I fell on his men with my whole regiment; he narrowly escaped being made prisoner – oh! That heaven was so unpropitious to France – but he was extricated, and my troopers were compelled to retreat.

COLONEL GERALD O’CONNOR, commanding anIrish regiment in French service, Ramillies, 1706

This is a world that is subject to frequent revolutions

SARAH DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

THE CHURCHILLS

INTRODUCTION: Portrait of an Age

Marlborough and the Weight of History

Portraits in a Gallery

Century of Revolution

Influence and Interest

Whig and Tory

1. Young Cavalier

Faithful but Unfortunate

The King Comes Home in Peace Again

The Army of Charles II

Court and Garrison

To the Tuck of Drum

My Lady Castlemaine

The Dutch War

The Imminent Deadly Breach

The Handsome Englishman

2. From Court to Coup

Love and Colonel Churchill

Politics, Foreign and Domestic

Domestic Bliss, Public Prosperity

Monmouth’s Rebellion

Uneasy Lies the Head

3. The Protestant Wind

Settling the Crown

Little Victory

Court and Country

Irish Interlude

Fall and Rise

4. A Full Gale of Favour

Gentlemen of the Staff

First Campaign

Empty Elevation

The 1703 Campaign

5. High Germany

Forging a Strategy

The Scarlet Caterpillar

Being Strongly Entrenched: The Schellenberg

The Harrowing of Bavaria

A Glorious Victory: Blenheim

6. The Lines of Brabant

Ripples of Victory

Hark Now the Drums Beat up Again

Happy and Glorious: Ramillies

7. The Equipoise of Fortune

Favourites, Bishops and the Union

A Sterile Campaign

Politics and Plans

The Campaign of 1708

The Devil Must have Carried Them: Oudenarde

In the Galley

8. Decline, Fall and Resurrection

Failed Peace, Thwarted Ambition

A Very Murdering Battle: Malplaquet

Failed Peace and Falling Government

Last Campaigns

Dismissed the Service

Exile and Return

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PRAISE

OTHER WORKS

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

THE CHURCHILLS

INTRODUCTION
Portrait of an Age
Marlborough and the Weight of History

Some will tell you that John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, was Britain’s greatest ever general. John Keegan and Andrew Wheatcroft, two wise judges, affirmed that:

There was no talent for war which he did not possess. He had imagination and command of detail to plan a grand strategy: he was an able generalissimo of allied armies, always ready to flatter a foreign ruler for some political advantage. His capacity for innovation really lay off the battlefield … But his greatest strength lay in his attention to the economic underpinning of the war, and in his concern for the morale and welfare of his men … In this combination of military virtues Marlborough’s greatness nestled, but most of all in his understanding that the army was precious and that its value resided in the officers and men who made it up.¹

Winston S. Churchill concluded his six-volume biography of his distinguished ancestor by declaring:

He had consolidated all that England had gained by the Revolution of 1688 and the achievements of William III. By his invincible genius in war and his scarcely less admirable qualities of wisdom and management he had completed that glorious process that carried England from her dependency upon France under Charles II to ten years’ leadership of Europe … He had proved himself the ‘good Englishman’ he aspired to be, and History may declare that if he had had more power his country would have had more strength and happiness, and Europe a surer progress.²

Another assessment added private virtue to public achievement to make Marlborough the very model of the Christian soldier:

He was by nature pure and temperate, kind and brave. He had supreme genius, personal beauty, and the art of pleasing. He was born to shine in courts, and understood the graces of life to perfection. He met with glory and ingratitude, infamy and fame. So, moving splendidly through a splendid world, he saw more fully to the share of most men, of human nature and the human lot.

He was honourable in his public life because he was also honourable in his private life. He was kind and chivalrous abroad, because he was kind and chivalrous at heart, and in his own home, and to his best beloved. He had a deep, strong faith, which never failed him.³

Marlborough’s contemporary, Archdeacon William Coxe, concluded his three-volume biography, which still repays study, with the lapidary declaration that he was simply: ‘THE GREATEST GENERAL AND … THE GREATEST MINISTER that our country, or any other, has produced.’⁴

In his multi-volume history of the British army published in 1910, Sir John Fortescue, never a man to shy from a harsh verdict when he thought it justified, wrote of how Marlborough’s

transcendent ability as a general, a statesman, a diplomatist and an administrator, guided not only England but Europe through the War of Spanish Succession, and delivered them safe for a whole generation from the craft and ambition of France …

Regarding him as a general, his fame is assured as one of the greatest captains of all time; and it would not become a civilian to add a word to the eulogy of great soldiers who alone can comprehend the full measure of his greatness.⁵

Fortescue wrote that Marlborough, like Wellington,

was endowed with a strong common sense that in itself amounted to genius, and possessed in the most trying moments a serenity and calm that was almost miraculous … With such a temperament there was a bond of humanity between him and his men that was lacking in Wellington. Great as Wellington was, the Iron Duke’s army could never have nicknamed him the Old Corporal.⁶

Elsewhere, citing an approving comment in the papers of an officer in Marlborough’s army, Fortescue mused: ‘What modern decoration (save the Victoria Cross) could compare to a word of hearty praise from Corporal John himself?’⁷

However, it was hard even for Fortescue to ignore the fact that Marlborough had detractors during his lifetime, though he maintained that the duke’s ‘fall was brought about by a faction, and his fame has remained ever since prey to the tender mercies of a faction’.⁸ Some of Marlborough’s warmest admirers acknowledge that there was indeed another side to the man. Although Charles Spencer, like Winston S. Churchill, has some of Marlborough’s blood in his veins, he is a wise enough historian to admit that:

It is difficult to understand Marlborough the man. He was enigmatic, focussed, and brilliant. He was also avaricious and – as we know from his correspondence with the Jacobites – capable of double-dealing. However, his men adored him, and they knew his incomparable military worth: they were proud to point out that he never lost a battle, or failed to take a city that he besieged.⁹

Marlborough’s abandonment of James II (who had befriended him and raised him to the peerage) in 1688 was a move so significant that one historian has called it ‘Lord Churchill’s coup’. It led G.K. Chesterton to accuse him of the vilest of betrayals: ‘Churchill, as if to add something ideal to his imitation of Iscariot, went to James with wanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth in arms as if to defend the country from invasion, and then calmly handed over the country to the invader.’¹⁰ Marlborough lived on the margins of treason. He never regarded the verdict of 1688 as final, and remained in touch with the Jacobite court for the rest of his life, a process assisted by the fact that one of James’s illegitimate sons, James FitzJames, Duke of Berwick, was both Marlborough’s nephew and a marshal of France.

Although the circumstances of his upbringing go far towards explaining his notorious cupidity, Marlborough was given to a rapacity remarkable even in a rapacious age, amassing offices which made him one of the richest men in the land. While we must accept stories about his tight-fistedness with caution, for they were circulated by his detractors to damage his reputation, the tale that, after an evening’s gaming in Bath, he borrowed the money for a sedan chair but then walked home regardless may indeed be well-founded. Yet he spent enormous sums on building Blenheim Palace, which still glares out in chilly splendour as his lasting memorial. Though most of the practical work of supervising its construction was left to his wife, who demonstrated that high temper rarely makes a successful contribution to labour relations on a building site, the concept was his, and his pressing on with its construction at a time of crisis in the nation’s history showed that selective blindness which sometimes afflicts the great.

Many of Marlborough’s advocates argue that, great though his achievements were, he would have been even more successful had he not been ‘hampered by the intransigence of the Dutch field-deputies, incompetent civilians attached to the Duke’s staff whose agreement in any project had to be obtained before it could proceed’.¹¹ There is a strongly nationalistic element in much that is written about Marlborough, and in this instance it is worth recalling that an Allied military defeat in Flanders risked having far more effect upon the Dutch than upon the English, conveniently insulated from the armies of Louis XIV by Shakespeare’s ‘moat defensive’. When Marlborough clashed with the Dutch, as he did from time to time, he was not always right and they were not always wrong, and there were times when he avoided the complicating longueurs of coalition politics by outright deception.

One of the pleasures of the research for this book is that it took me back to G.M. Trevelyan’s incomparable trilogy on the reign of Queen Anne. If earnest modern scholars have unearthed evidence which changes some of Trevelyan’s findings, few have his ability to bring an age to life. He concluded his assessment of Marlborough’s personality by speculating that:

Perhaps the secret of Marlborough’s character is that there is no secret. Abnormal only in his genius, he may have been guided by motives very much like those that sway commoner folk. He loved his wife, with her witty talk and her masterful temper, which he was man enough to hold in check without quarrelling. He loved his country; he was attached to her religion and free institutions. He loved money, in which he was not singular. He loved, as every true man must, to use his peculiar talents to their full; and as in his case they required a vast field for their full exercise, he was therefore ambitious. Last, but not least, he loved his fellow men, if scrupulous humaneness and consideration for others are signs of loving one’s fellows. He was the prince of courtesy.¹²

In all this, though, Trevelyan recognised that he was taking issue with his distinguished uncle, whose surname he bore as his own middle name. Thomas Babington Macaulay was a poet (who, if he had never written another word, would surely be remembered for his account of Horatius holding that bridge), politician and the dominant British historian in the mid-Victorian era. Macaulay, argued Trevelyan, ‘adopted his unfavourable reading of Marlborough’s motives and character straight from Swift and the Tory pamphleteers of the latter part of Anne’s reign’. Yet he was

less often misled by traditional Whig views than by his own overconfident, lucid mentality, which always saw things in black and white, but never in grey … He instinctively desired to make Marlborough’s genius stand out bright against the background of his villainy.¹³

The villainy, maintained Macaulay, was certainly dark enough. Marlborough was wholly immoral. He ‘owed his rise to his sister’s shame’, and was then ‘kept by the most profane, impious and shameless of harlots’, Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine. He was woefully ignorant, and ‘could not spell the most common words in his own language’. His avarice knew no bounds, and ‘though he drew a large allowance under pretence of keeping a public table, he never asked an officer to dinner’. And he was, quite simply, a traitor, rendering ‘wicked and shameful service to the Jacobite cause’ by leaking information of a 1694 expedition against Brest so that its troops were slaughtered and its commander, a personal rival, was slain.¹⁴

This is not the moment to deal with Macaulay’s charges in detail, although it is clear that the documents he used to formulate some of them do, in themselves, demonstrate their own falsehood, thereby making Churchill’s accusation of ‘liar’ more appropriate than Trevelyan’s defence of his forebear as an honest historian misled by his emotions and his sources. ‘Lord Macaulay is not to be trusted either to narrate facts accurately, to state facts truly, or to answer the judgement of history with impartiality,’ wrote a barrister who applied his forensic skills to Macaulay’s methods, and it is impossible for a modern historian to disagree.¹⁵

Even though Macaulay erred in his attacks on Marlborough, it is already evident that there is much more to the man than stout hagiography can possibly acknowledge. We might avoid at least part of the problem by concentrating on the military aspects of his career, and by passing rapidly over his early life to see him emerge, full-fledged, as captain general of the English army in the Low Countries. Indeed, David Chandler, one the most gifted historians to write about Marlborough in recent times, sidestepped the issue in his Marlborough as a Military Commander by considering the duke in his role as a general, although there are few men less suited to the description ‘simple soldier’.¹⁶ To consider Marlborough purely as a general is as misleading as it would be to see, say, Paul McCartney as only a classical composer, Alexander Borodin as just a chemist, or Winston S. Churchill as a simple historian.

Part of my task, then, is to get as close as I can to the man that Churchill loved to call ‘Duke John’. However, almost like hunted game that knows its tracks will be followed, Marlborough himself made my task no easier. Although the shelves of the British Library groan beneath the weight of the Blenheim Papers, with thousands of letters showing him in a variety of lights, as husband, lover, courtier, politician, alliance manager, diplomat, commander-in-chief, prosecutor, defendant and even interior designer, he rarely let his mask slip. Wellington is the general to whom he is most often compared, and is the only other British commander who has ever exercised command on sufficient scale, for long enough and in varied enough circumstances for him also to be considered a truly great general. Yet despite his notorious secretiveness, in his later years Wellington was always prepared to unburden himself to friends or diarists. There was generally an answer to those questions that began, ‘Tell me, Duke …’ and the Wellington of old age tells us, across the nuts and port, about the commander of his youth and middle years. It is just possible that Marlborough might have done the same had he enjoyed a long retirement, marching slowly to meet a slothful death. But even then I doubt it: he was too mindful of those necessary treasons of his early life, too well aware that he had been all things to most men, to let us inside his mind.

Many of my sources will be familiar to those who know the period. I have made extensive use of the duke’s own words, going back to the originals in the British Library when I have had to, but also availing myself of Sir George Murray’s five-volume edition of Marlborough’s dispatches and Henry L. Snyder’s three volumes of the Marlborough – Godolphin correspondence. Both Marlborough’s quartermaster general (chief of staff by modern standards), William Cadogan, and his private secretary, Adam de Cardonnel, have left papers which throw useful light on the way that Marlborough’s headquarters worked. Viscount Chelsea, heir to the present Earl Cadogan, recently discovered some of his ancestor’s papers, and through his kindness I am, I believe, the second historian to consult them. They show just how much routine work Marlborough entrusted to Cadogan, and give early grounds for suspecting that even if command is, in a legal and spiritual sense, indivisible, it is harder than we once thought to see just where Marlborough ended and Cadogan began.

Marlborough’s own hold on political power would scarcely have been possible without his wife’s intimate relationship with Queen Anne. Sarah Marlborough is rarely much further away from these pages than she was from her husband’s thoughts. I have not only used her correspondence, but a good deal of her self-justifying pamphleteering, much of it produced with the aid of collaborators like Bishop Gilbert Burnet, who generally strove to be objective, and her man of affairs, Arthur Maynwaring, who did not. While no assessment of the politics of the age could be complete without taking the duchess’s views into account, her words require more caveats than most. Here she is on the subject of Queen Anne, with whom she had once enjoyed a friendship so very close that some writers have detected lesbianism.

Queen Anne had a person and appearance not at all ungraceful, till she grew exceeding gross and corpulent. There was something of majesty in her look, but mixed with a sullen and constant frown, that plainly betrayed a gloomy soul, and a cloudiness of disposition within. She seemed to inherit a good deal of her father’s moroseness, which naturally produced in her the same sort of stubborn positiveness in many cases … as well as the same sort of bigotry in religion.

Her memory was exceeding great, almost to wonder, and … she could, whenever she pleased, forget what others would have thought themselves obliged by truth and honour to remember, and remember all such things as others would think it an happiness to forget. Indeed she chose to retain in it very little besides ceremonies and customs of courts … so that her conversation, which otherwise might have been enlivened by so great a memory, was only made more empty and trifling but is chiefly turning upon fashions and rules of precedence, or observations upon the weather, or some such poor topics, without any variety of entertainment.¹⁷

There are two points of which I have no doubt whatsoever. The first is that the Marlboroughs’ relationship, despite its stormy moments, was a genuine love-match. The second is that if there is indeed an afterlife I must look out for squalls soon after crossing the bar, for Sarah was as jealous of her lord’s memory as of her own historical reputation.

No student of the period can be unaware of the fact that there are far fewer letter-writers and diarists on hand to describe the War of Spanish Succession than there would be, a century later, to tell us about the Peninsular War. However, there are certainly enough to get us in amongst the powder-smoke. That dour Cameronian Lieutenant Colonel Blackader complains of the army’s profanity; Captain Richard Parker takes pride in watching his own Irish soldiers beat their countrymen in French service at Malplaquet; Corporal Matthew Bishop assures us, not once but several times, that Marlborough could not have won the war without him; and Brigadier General Richard Kane warns us of the perils of premature surrender – and the dangers of too resolute a defence.

John Wilson, the ‘old Flanderkin Sergeant’, recalls attacking the Schellenberg with his front-rank men clutching fascines ‘in order to break the enemy’s shot in advancing’.¹⁸ Private John Marshall Deane of the 1st Foot Guards recalls that at the same action, ‘being strongly entrenched they killed and mortified abundance of our men both officers and soldiers’.¹⁹ Chaplain Josias Sandby maintained a useful journal of the Blenheim campaign, often attributed to Marlborough’s chaplain-general Francis Hare. Chaplain Samuel Noyes wrote assiduously to his bishop, hoping no doubt that civil preferment might follow military accomplishment.²⁰

On the French side, the Duke of Berwick, illegitimate son of James II by Marlborough’s sister Arabella Churchill and probably the most competent of the later Stuarts, published a set of memoirs before he was killed in action. Colonel François de la Colonie commanded a Bavarian grenadier battalion composed of French deserters, and escaped from the storming of the Schellenberg with his coat scorched by musket-fire and his long riding-boots jettisoned to run the better. The Count de Mérode-Westerloo, in the perplexing way of the age a Flemish nobleman but a loyal officer in the army of Louis XIV, tells us what it was like to wake up at Blenheim to see the Allies advancing steadily on the French camp but to find everyone else asleep. Marshal Camille de Tallard, the French commander that day, has left us his own account of the action. He told the French minister of war that he had had a bad campaign plan foisted upon him, and found it impossible to get on with his allies: ‘it is a fine lesson that we should only have one man commanding an army, and that it is a great misfortune to have to deal with a prince of the humour of M. the Elector of Bavaria …’ Having been traduced by his senior colleagues, Tallard tells us that he was then let down by his men: ‘The bulk of the cavalry did badly, I say very badly, for they did not break a single enemy squadron.’²¹ Sadly, his subordinates did not share his view. Another of those accounts whose writer lamented that his own courage and prescience were not matched elsewhere concluded: ‘You know, Sir, better than me whose fault this is.’²²

‘Captain’ Peter Drake served in the Spanish, Dutch, English and French armies, often joining one without having completed the tiresome formalities which might properly have accompanied his discharge from another. He was wounded at Malplaquet while serving with the Maison du Roi, the French Household Cavalry, and tells us how he owed his life to the duke’s humanitarian intervention at the close of that terrible day.

Sicco van Goslinga’s Mémoires relatifs à la Guerre de Succession show just how unwise it is to follow the prevailing contemporary English view of the Dutch as dour and unhelpful, any more than the Dutch view of the English as dirty and drunken, as necessarily correct. Goslinga, let it be said, is no more inherently trustworthy than any other witness. No contemporary, however influential, had more than a limited view of events. All tended to supplement what they could themselves remember (which might not in itself be accurate) with what they heard from others, who were themselves rarely fully informed. And most, in the way of things, had likes and dislikes which might reflect nothing more than the imponderables of human emotion. However, Goslinga was in the Allied army but not of it, and in regular contact with Marlborough but never dependent on his goodwill for advancement. He saw Marlborough in his depths as well as at his heights: riding out with him to his outposts in the small hours when it seemed certain that the French had trapped him, or sharing the duke’s riding-cloak when both lay down to snatch some sleep after a long and successful pursuit.

Goslinga gives us a pen-picture which at last begins to catch some of the light and shade of Marlborough.

Here is his portrait, as far as I am able to paint it. I do not speak of his fortune, nor of the manner in which he began to make it: his conduct towards his great benefactor and his first benefactress are things well known, and add nothing to the matter in hand. He was born a gentleman: his stature was above average and was one of the finest one might see: he had a perfectly beautiful face, with two fine and sparkling eyes of an admirable colour, a pink and white complexion which a woman might envy, and fine teeth … He had much spirit … very clear and solid judgment, swift and deep penetration, knowing his people well and able to distinguish real merit from false; speaking well and agreeably even in French, which he actually spoke with poor grammar but with a harmonious tone of voice.

On the other hand, Goslinga found him

capable of profound, even the most dangerous deception, which he covers by manners and expressions which seem to express the utmost frankness: he has a boundless ambition, and the most sordid avarice, which influences all his conduct: if he has courage, which he doubtless has, whatever his enemies say, he has certainly not got the firmness of character which makes the real hero … He did not know much about military discipline, and gave free rein to the soldier, who committed frightful disorders. He also knew little of the detail of the profession, less than was proper for a commander-in-chief. Here are the weaknesses which, however, do not detract from the rare talents of this really great man.²³

Some of Goslinga’s words find answering echoes elsewhere. The two great English diarists of the age, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, both had a view of Marlborough. Pepys, ‘sole counsellor’ to the newly ennobled George Legge, Lord Dartmouth, on his 1683 fact-finding trip to the English garrison of Tangier, chatted with his master about John Churchill, as he then was. Dartmouth:

tells me of the Duke of York’s kindness to him and how Churchill was made what he is by my Lord Rochester, only to lessen him; and that all he knows Churchill rewards himself by, is his lying with their wives, which he says is not certain as to my ladies Rochester and Sunderland.²⁴

This was the sort of salacious gossip that Pepys loved, and in part Dartmouth’s words no doubt reflect the suspicion of one fast-rising man for another. Yet there were persistent rumours that Churchill turned his remarkable physical attractiveness to his advantage, and he is certainly not the first British commander to profit from being big and bonny; nor, no doubt, will he be the last.

In 1702, well before Marlborough had won his greatest victories, John Evelyn complained of the ‘excess of honour conferred by the Queen on the Earl of Marlborough, by making him a Knight of the Garter, and a Duke, for the success of but one campaign’, but added: ‘He is a very handsome person, well-spoken and affable, and supports his want of acquired knowledge by keeping good company.’²⁵ In February 1705, just a year before his death, Evelyn visited Lord Godolphin.

I went to wait on my Lord Treasurer, where was the victorious Duke of Marlborough, who came to me and took me by the hand with extraordinary familiarity and civility, as formerly he was used to do, without any alteration of his good nature. He had a most rich George in a Sardonyx set with diamonds of very great value, for the rest, very plain.* I had not seen him for some years, and believed he might have forgotten me.²⁶

This is a telling anecdote. Marlborough’s social accomplishments were legendary, and his ability to remember old acquaintances did much to help him. The Earl of Ailesbury remembered that when he was a Jacobite exile and Marlborough was the queen’s captain general and Allied commander-in-chief, the duke gave him dinner at his own ‘little table’ at headquarters, and held his hand for part of the meal, although (and here is another penetrating insight) he ensured that their clasped hands were hidden under a napkin.

Portraits in a Gallery

We can get much closer to our quarry in words than we ever can in pictures. Portraits often deceive, and it is perhaps in the early eighteenth century that the deception is most complete. There are the great men of the age, with well-scrubbed pink-and-white faces, staring complacently at their world from beneath full-bottomed wigs, lips pursed in the half-smile of those who know that life has treated them well. The peruke’s soft curls and the snowy lace of a jabot tumble onto a coat whose stuff and hue betokens the wearer’s status: a cleric’s black broadcloth, a merchant’s prosperous blue or plum, or a soldier’s martial red. Peers often wear the ermine of their House, with a coronet denoting their rank (six silver balls on a plain silver gilt circlet for a baron, and on to the chased coronet with its eight strawberry leaves for a duke) dangling from the noble fingers or tossed onto a table just within the picture’s frame. In their portraits generals appear in the armour they would never have worn on the battlefield, sometimes with a plumed helmet, as useless then as a general’s ivory-hilted dress sword is today, standing in for a peer’s coronet.

Women are plump-faced, opulent of bust and shoulders, and usually portrayed with their heads tilted ever so slightly to the right to allow the artist to throw some shadow beneath a soft jawline. Children are rarely allowed much in the way of childhood. Once boys had been breeched, at the age of four or five, they appeared as miniature adults. Johann Baptiste Clostermann’s huge family portrait of the Marlboroughs, painted in about 1694, shows the parents and their five children against theatrical drapes. John, later Marquess of Blandford, their eldest son, is stepping up onto the dais, looking back at the artist and gesturing proudly towards his elegant family. He was nine years old at the time.

A year later Nicholas de Largillière painted James II’s only legitimate son, James Francis Edward Stuart (‘the Old Pretender’) and his sister Louisa Maria Theresa. Although the young prince was only seven and his sister just three, both are dressed for court: James is wearing long coat, lace jabot and silk stockings, and Louisa has a dress with a train and the tall fontange headdress. William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was the only one of Queen Anne’s many children to live beyond infancy, and was regarded by many as the heir most likely to prevent the restoration of his uncle James II. In 1699 Sir Godfrey Kneller painted him as a warrior prince, with a soldier’s cuirass: the boy was ten years old and had just a year to live.

There is enough symbolism to keep costume historians busily engaged for years. Gentlemen advertise their status by wearing swords, the slim, straight-bladed small sword in town and the stubbier hunting sword in the country. Races at Newmarket, then the only major national meeting, were an exception, for folk of all classes met on equal terms, turning out ‘suitable to the humour and design of the place for horse sports’, with nobody wearing swords. Spurs were important even if there was no evidence of a horse, for they showed that although the sitter might not be riding at the time, he could vault into the saddle at a moment’s notice. Not for nothing did the Latin inscriptions on gentry’s tombstones style a knight as equitus and a gentleman as armiger. In Charles II’s time red shoe-heels – a fashion borrowed, like so much else, from France – suggested noble rank, and the fashion spread so that officers of the Restoration army were as identifiable by their bright heels as their great-grandsons were to be by their epaulettes. The greatest officers of state, like the lord treasurer and secretary of state, carried thin white staffs of office. Sidney, Earl Godolphin, had his made short enough to be carried in a sedan chair, while the Earl of Rochester had his, of the longer variety, carried by a bareheaded footman to allay any doubts about the distinction of his chair’s occupant.

A portrait of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough painted in about 1700 had a gold key added to its waist in 1702. In the interim Sarah had become keeper of the privy purse to the new queen, Anne, and the key confirms the status that her expression already suggests: she is a woman whose beauty is matched, at last, by her wealth and influence. And so pigment is splashed across canvas. Mouths curve like cupid’s bow, dogs stare admiringly at masters, steeds curvet without apparent inconvenience to riders, and occasionally, like extras in a drama, lesser mortals gather slain game or ply musket and bayonet amidst the background smoke.

None of this is a great deal of help to historians. Even court artists in England, it is true, could rarely disguise that bulbous blue-eyed, faintly irascible expression that characterised the Hanoverians, any more than their colleagues in Vienna could do much with the Hapsburg jaw. However, artists seldom get us beyond polite generalities. Portraits of Prince Eugène of Savoy-Carignan, Marlborough’s great collaborator, give no real sense that he was widely regarded as one of the ugliest men of his age, and almost always had his mouth slightly open. Louis XIV, for all his sneer of cold command, was five feet five inches tall, a full five inches taller than Charles I but an inch and a half shorter than William of Orange – who was four inches shorter than his wife Mary. William himself was, if you will forgive the phrase, no oil painting: he was thin and somewhat hunchbacked, and his face, already striving to accommodate a prominent nose, was heavily pockmarked.

While artists were happy enough to use their skills to reflect status and lineage and to hint at accomplishments and aspirations, in the main they present us with a great number of plump-faced, well-to-do gentlemen in wigs, accompanied by ladies perhaps too generously built for modern taste. Charles II’s mistresses were generally Junoesque but pretty, while James II’s were as substantial, but so very, very plain that Charles quipped that they had been imposed upon his brother by his confessor as a penance. Sir Peter Lely’s portraits, however, make them look so alike that even contemporaries complained:

Sir Peter Lely when he had painted the Duchess of Cleveland’s picture, he put something of Cleveland’s face as her languishing eyes into every picture, so that all his pictures had an air of one another, and the eyes were sleepy alike. So that Mr Walker the painter said Lely’s pictures were all brothers and sisters.²⁷

Century of Revolution

At one level, the barrier that portraiture interposes between us and Marlborough’s age is a useful corrective. Philip Guedalla, whose books did so much to arouse my passion for history, wrote of the world ‘spinning down the long groove of the eighteenth century’. How wrong he was. The world does not, so to speak, change step as a new century appears, and there is rarely a well-oiled hinge between one epoch and another. Marlborough was in many ways a creature of the seventeenth century, profoundly marked by his family’s experience of the Civil War. But his thoughts and character were forming at just the time that the spiritual and political convictions that had made the war possible were changing. Christianity, as Christopher Wren’s light and airy churches testify, was becoming more rational and less constricting. The execution of Charles I on the one hand, and the Restoration of his son on the other, left both royalists and radicals aware that God’s favour could prove all too transient. Science was fast becoming secularised, and a series of major discoveries, starting with Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood and continuing with the ideas of Newton, Boyle and Hooke, began to replace old mysteries with new rationalism.

This science, however, had yet to transform the economy. Marlborough died while his country was experiencing the first birth-pangs of the Industrial Revolution. The road system he knew would have been familiar to his Tudor ancestors: York and Exeter were still over three days’ travel from London. John Evelyn’s house at Wotton, near Guildford in Surrey, was twenty-six miles from London but was ‘so securely placed as if it were 100’. The first turnpike (essentially a toll road) was established in 1663, and there were only seven turnpikes by 1700: the great explosion did not come till after 1750. The intrepid Celia Fiennes reported in 1698 that her route around England ‘was in many places full of holes, though it is served by a bar at which passengers pay a penny a horse to the maintaining of the way’. John Byng, writing a century later, mused:

I am just old enough to remember turnpike roads, few and bad; and when travelling was slow, difficult and, in carriages, dangerous … In the days of bad roads the country could not be stripped of its timber or despoiled of its honesty, cheapness, ancient customs and civility; every gentleman, then, was bowed to with reverence, and ‘A good morning to you, master. Good evening. Good journey to you, sir,’ were always presented; with every old-fashioned wish, and compliment of the season …

Even till lately, there were hollow ways from Grays Inn Lane to Kentish Town, and a long deep water to be waded through from Mother red-Caps in the road to Highgate. All the Hertfordshire roads were deep ravines.²⁸

The first breaths of the wind of change could already be felt. The swash and buckle of Restoration drama was light years away from the masques of the early part of the century. The witty and elegant essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele are, suggests one editor, like old silver, whose fashion is still well regarded even if its weight is negligible.²⁹ Political thought was also changing fast. In 1690 John Locke affirmed that ‘All men are naturally in a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit without asking the leave or depending upon the will of any man.’ Locke could get away with this in Britain, but these were dangerous ideas elsewhere: the Enlightenment was still two generations away, and few contemporary European monarchs would have tolerated such words.

For some historians the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw James II replaced by William and Mary, is the real turning point, although it accomplished less than many contemporaries hoped. For others, though, the real break comes with the Hanoverian succession, which brought George I bloodlessly to the throne in 1714, even though Jacobitism was to remain a threat until the defeat of Charles Edward Stuart, James’s grandson the ‘Young Pretender’, in 1745–46. Were our focus here European rather than more narrowly British then we might see the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession, and with it the more extravagant ambitions of Louis XIV, as a sharp bend in history’s long and rutted road.

It is not my purpose to answer the undergraduate question as to whether the seventeenth century really ended in 1688 or 1714. Suffice it to say, though, that the most important years of Marlborough’s active career lay between these dates, and that he lived through a period of quite extraordinary change and uncertainty. This was much more the case with the military profession than most biographers acknowledge. He was commissioned into an army which, with its pikes, matchlock muskets and lobster-tail helmets, would not have surprised Oliver Cromwell, and he died as captain general of a force whose infantry had made its reputation with those measured volleys that Wellington so admired.

What is history to us was an unknown and challenging future to John Churchill; even to begin to grasp him we must break from what some historians call ‘presentism’, the inability to see anything save through the lens of the present moment. None of the events of 1688–1714 was predestined. A more adroit James II might have retained the kingdom bequeathed to him by his more supple brother; the ‘Protestant Wind’ of 1688 might so easily have blown up into a Catholic gale; the cannonball which grazed William III at the Boyne in 1690 might have killed him just as surely as another ball decapitated the very capable Jacobite commander, the marquis de St Ruth, at the deciding moment at the battle of Aughrim the following year.

There were no certainties for a man like John Churchill. He was stripped of all his offices twice in his career, imprisoned in the Tower on the first occasion and effectively exiled on the second. He ran the risk of the battlefield death that snatched so many of his comrades and opponents: at Ramillies a cannonball took the head off his equerry as he held the duke’s stirrup for him to mount a fresh charger. He lived in a world where disease was rife and today’s hero was tomorrow’s corpse. Smallpox was no respecter of persons: King William lost his parents and his wife to the disease, and it carried off Queen Anne’s only surviving son the Duke of Gloucester and Marlborough’s own heir the Marquess of Blandford. Indeed, of the five children in that carefully posed Clostermann painting of Marlborough’s family only two lived beyond their twenties. We must judge Marlborough in the light of his times, not our own, and a biographer’s first task must be to sketch out the background to the portrait he is painting.

There are indeed moments when the immediacy of the spoken word strips away the years. The Reverend Andrew Paschall, rector of the Somerset village of Chedzoy, tells us how, when the rebel Duke of Monmouth’s men were first detected in their night attack on the royal army’s bivouac at Sedgemoor in 1686, a trooper of the Horse Guards galloped

full speed to the camp, calls with all imaginable earnestness, 20 times at least, ‘Beat your drums, the enemy is come. For the Lord’s sake beat your drums.’ He then rode back with the like speed the way he had come … Now the drums beat, the drummers running to it, even barefoot for haste. All fly to arms.³⁰

Yet there are as many times when the period seems more ancient than modern. It is easy to forget how deep the iron of Charles I’s execution had entered into the royalist soul. On 17 September 1661 (with young John Churchill still unbreeched) John Evelyn wrote:

Scot, Scroope, Cook and Jones, suffered for reward of their iniquities at Charing Cross, in sight of the place where they put to death their natural Prince, and in the presence of the King his son who they also sought to kill. I saw not their execution, but met their quarters mangled and cut and reeking as they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle. Oh the miraculous providence of God!³¹

Male traitors were hanged, drawn and quartered, a gruesome process that involved being dragged through the streets on a hurdle, partially strangled, and then castrated and disembowelled. The victim’s guts were ‘burnt before his face’ before he was beheaded and quartered. By 1745 the executioner would customarily leave his victim hanging long enough for him to be unconscious, but as late as 1715 some men were ‘bowelled alive and seeing’. The victim’s quarters, duly pickled for longevity, were stuck up at suitable points to ensure that the message was widely distributed. When Captain-Lieutenant Sir Thomas Armstrong of the Life Guards was executed as a traitor in 1683 one of his quarters was sent off to Stafford, where he had been Member of Parliament. The monarch might, by exercise of his prerogative, remit the punishment to beheading or simple hanging. At the time of the Popish Plot (1678–81), William, Lord Russell, had argued that the king did not have it in his power to show such leniency, and when he himself was convicted of treason in 1683 he bravely made no personal appeal for clemency. He was granted the favour of the axe, although the executioner botched his job.

Female traitors, whether they were guilty of high treason towards the monarch or petty treason – an act against what was perceived as being the natural order of things, like the murder of a husband or employer – were burnt at the stake. This too might be commuted to beheading (as it was for Alice Lisle, executed in the square at Winchester in 1685), or the executioner might be privately ordered by the sheriff to stab or strangle his victim before the fire took hold. The devout and philanthropic Elizabeth Gaunt, convicted of harbouring rebels after Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685, probably has the dreadful distinction of being the last woman in Britain to be burnt alive by judicial process. She met her end with exemplary courage, but the spectacle was profoundly shocking even to spectators used to brutality. Gilbert Burnet wrote that ‘Penn, the Quaker, told me, he saw her die. She laid the straw about her for burning her speedily, and behaved herself in such a manner, that all the spectators melted in tears.’³²

There was a widespread feeling that such savagery went against the spirit of the age, and James II’s inability to understand this was not least amongst the causes of his failure as a monarch. It also ran squarely against what seemed to be natural justice. Lord Grey of Wark, who had commanded Monmouth’s cavalry with towering ineptitude, bought his life for a full confession, the surrender of large parts of his estates, and the promise to give evidence against other prominent members of the rebellion. When he testified against Lord Delamere, arraigned before his peers on 16 January 1686, he proved such a poor witness that Delamere got off. The first peer to give his verdict that day was John, Lord Churchill, the junior baron present, who announced: ‘Not Guilty, upon my honour.’

The barbarity of gallows, pyre, block and pillory sits uncomfortably alongside the poetry of John Dryden or the witty dramas of Aphra Behn. It was there in the background when Steele sketched out that genial baronet, Sir Roger de Coverly.

He is now in his Fifty sixth year, cheerful, gay and hearty, keeps a good House both in Town and Country; a great Lover of Mankind; but there is such a mirthful Cast in his Behaviour, that he is rather beloved than esteemed: His Tenants grow rich, his Servants look satisfied, all the young Women profess Love to him, and the young Men are glad of his Company: When he comes into a House he calls the Servants by their Names, and talks all the way up Stairs to a Visit. I must not omit that Sir ROGER is a Justice of the Quorum; that he fills a chair at a Quarter-Sessions with great abilities, and three months ago gain’d universal Applause by explaining a Passage in the Game-Act.³³

The Game Act of 1670 limited the right to kill game to those owning property worth £100 a year, perhaps half of one per cent of the population, and was rigidly enforced by justices of the peace like Sir Roger, whose helpful legal explanations might have escaped a defendant who stood to lose the skin off his back if convicted. But it was wholly consistent with the spirit of the age that Sir Roger spent his morning in vigorous pursuit of a hare, only, at the very end, to scoop up his exhausted quarry and release it in his park, where it joined ‘several of these Prisoners of Wars’, for he ‘could not find it in his heart to murder a Creature that had given him so much Diversion’.³⁴

Sir Roger ‘fought a Duel upon his first coming to town’, and there too he was in good company. While Richard Brinsley Sheridan was later to write of ‘sharps and snaps’, in our period the flintlock pistol (‘snap’) had not yet come of age as a duelling weapon, although Major General William Stewart and Captain Thomas Bellew agreed to use pistols when they met in 1700 because both had wounded right hands. Gentlemen usually went at one another with their small swords, either in the relatively formal circumstance of a duel, or the wholly casual surroundings of coffee house, club or street.

Affairs of honour swept up all those who thought, however flimsy the grounds, that they might have honour to defend. Peter Drake rubbed along at the very bottom end of gentility, and when he kept the Queen’s Arms tavern near St Clement Danes he ‘provided bob-wigs, blue aprons, etc, proper for the business of a vintner; these I wore at home, but could not yet leave off the tie-wig and sword when I went abroad’.³⁵ He duelled whenever the mood took him. Scarcely had he reached Holland, with the first of his many regiments, in 1689, than he had cross words with ‘one Butler, who was a quartermaster in a regiment of Dutch horse … I ran him in the sword arm, and he ran me through the left breast, and so we parted, to take care of ourselves.’³⁶

Nearer the top end of the social scale, the most celebrated duel of the age saw the Whig Lord Mohun, a reformed rake who had already twice been tried by his peers for murder, and the Tory grandee the Duke of Hamilton (who had sired an illegitimate child on Marlborough’s own bastard daughter), just appointed ambassador to Versailles, meet in Hyde Park early on the morning of 12 November 1712. Mohun and Hamilton rushed at one another ‘like wild beasts, not fencing or parrying’. Mohun, run through the chest, was killed on the spot, but he lashed out as he fell and the tip of his small sword opened a vein in Hamilton’s arm, leaving him bleeding to death. Their seconds, Major General Macartney (recently dismissed the service for toasting damnation to the new Tory ministry) for Mohun, and Colonel John Hamilton for the duke, had not let time hang heavy on their hands, and were at it too: Hamilton was pinked in the lower leg. Hamilton later claimed that he was holding his wounded principal when Mohun ran up and stabbed the prostrate man, and although the evidence was uncorroborated, Macartney wisely fled abroad. He reappeared after the accession of George I, stood his trial at the King’s Bench, and was acquitted.

Officers, with their keen sense of honour and arms conveniently to hand, were always ready to lug out, though the British army never reached the quarrelsome pinnacle of its French opponents. De la Colonie fought his first duel when still a cadet, but his opponent, a lieutenant and assistant adjutant of the Régiment de Navarre, summoned help by yelling ‘À moi, Navarre,’ and thus unsportingly turning private squabble into public riot. Peter Drake, then serving in a French regiment, was with ‘thirteen friends and bottle companions’ when a dispute arose between two of them. They decided on a mass duel, and as they were walking to a suitable ground Lieutenant de la Salle, observing that the numbers were uneven, cheerfully joined the smaller group. For a moment there was a chance of reconciliation, but de la Salle observed that the wine was drawn and they must drink it.

The fight began, every man tilting at his opponent, and the two principals engaged; and in a short time killed each other. There was another lost on the part for which I fought, and some wounded on both sides; and I had the good fortune to wound and disarm Monsieur de la Salle.³⁷

British officers, though, were no slouches. In 1692, when Lord Berkeley’s regiment of dragoons was quartered in Louvain a convivial evening at Captain Edward Mortimer’s lodgings was interrupted by the drunken arrival of Captain Thomas Lloyd, who had recently left the regiment in disgrace. As the officers walked out across the marketplace, Lloyd blamed Major Giles Spencer for his misfortunes: both men drew, and Lloyd was wounded in the thigh, dying soon afterwards. Spencer was court-martialled, and acquitted on the grounds of self-defence. Two years later, despite the fact that the Allied army was marching flat-out to stop the French from crossing the Scheldt near Oudenarde, Sandy Dundas found time to kill Cornet Conway of Lord Polwarth’s Regiment.

In 1699 the foppish young Conway Seymour met Captain George Kirke of the Royal Horse Guards in Hyde Park, and high words were exchanged. Seymour was stabbed in the neck, and seemed likely to recover when he embarked on a debauch which made him vomit, reopening the wound and causing an infection which killed him. Kirke was convicted of manslaughter and ‘burned in the hand’, branded with a hot iron, a punishment made rather less damaging if one could afford to pay to have the iron dipped in cold water first. He was temporarily suspended from his commission, but went on to be promoted.³⁸ In 1711 the Duke of Argyll, a member of the anti-Marlborough faction, heard from ‘a penny post letter sent him from an unknown hand’ that Colonel Court of the foot guards had refused to drink his health, saying, ‘Damn him he would not drink the health of a man that changed sides.’ When the matter was put to the good colonel he confessed that he had been in drink at the time and had no idea at all what he might have said, but would not deny His Grace satisfaction: ‘They fought in Hyde Park, and the Duke disarmed him, and there’s an end of the business.’

In 1708 it was said by Ensign Hugh Shaw that the Master of Sinclair, captain-lieutenant in Colonel Preston’s Regiment, ‘had bowed himself towards the ground for a considerable time altogether’ in the hard-fought little battle of Wynendaele. Captain Alexander Shaw, the ensign’s older brother, took his sibling’s side, but Sinclair killed them both, allegedly by hitting Alexander over the head with a concealed stick before wounding him mortally, and then going on to pistol young Hugh ‘before he had time to put himself in a posture of defence’.³⁹ The case caused serious difficulties, for Sir John Shaw, brother of the two dead men, petitioned the queen, demanding the death penalty, while John Sinclair, eldest son of a Scots peer, was not without clout of his own. The solution was typical of the age. Sinclair was convicted by court-martial on one count of murder, but miraculously escaped from custody. On 26 May 1709 Marlborough wrote to Lord Raby, then ambassador to Berlin.

This will be delivered to Y[our].E[xcellency]. by the Master of St Clair … who having had the misfortune to kill two brothers of Sir John Shaw the last campaign in Flanders, for one of which being tried and condemned by a court martial, he has found means to get away, and must now seek employment elsewhere. If Y.E. will please to take him under your protection and recommend him to your court, I shall take it as a particular favour … ⁴⁰

Influence and Interest

Influence, that glutinous, omnipresent lubricant that the age called ‘interest’, was never far away, and we cannot hope to understand the period without analysing it. It had a number of components. There was a strong strain of two-way obligation laced with self-interest, with tenants supporting their landlords, officers their colonels, and the heads of families striving to provide for distant relatives. Most contemporaries thought that the process was wholly proper, and the tomb of Elizabeth Bate, widow of the Reverend Richard Bate, who died in 1751 at the age of seventy-four, proudly announced that:

She was honourably descended

And by means of her Alliance to

The illustrious family of Stanhope

She had the merit to obtain

For her husband and children

Twelve several employments

In Church and State.⁴¹

Yet even contemporaries, well aware of how the system operated, sometimes thought that it went too far. In 1722 a news-sheet lambasted Robert Walpole, the first man to be widely regarded as prime minister.

First Lord of the Treasury, Mr Walpole. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Walpole. Clerk of the Pells, Mr Walpole’s son. Customs of London, second son of Mr Walpole … Secretary of the Treasury, Mr Walpole’s brother. Secretary to Ireland, Mr Walpole’s brother. Secretary to the Postmaster-General, Mr Walpole’s brother in law.⁴²

Many posts, lucrative in themselves, brought with them the right to appoint to other posts, and there was a palpable pull-through as interest groups prospered, and its distressing reverse as the fall of powerful patrons sent misfortune knocking on down the line. In 1718 Sir Christopher Wren lost his post as surveyor general as part of a wider redistribution of spoils. Sir John Vanbrugh would not accept the office ‘out of tenderness to Sir Christopher Wren’, so it went instead to an incompetent nonentity, William Benson.⁴³

Sarah Marlborough often repeated that her cousin Abigail Hill, who was to supplant her in the queen’s affections, had been raised from nothing by her deployment of interest. Abigail was the daughter of a City merchant ‘by a sister of my father’, and as soon as Sarah heard that she was in want she sent her ten guineas. When the Duke of Gloucester died Sarah got her £200 a year out of the queen’s privy purse, and secured a place in the customs for her son. She recommended Abigail’s brother Jack – ‘a tall boy, whom I clothed … and put to school at St Albans’ – to the Duke of Marlborough.

And although my Lord always said that Jack Hill was good for nothing yet to oblige me he made him his aide de camp, and afterwards gave him a regiment. But it was his sister’s interest that raised him to be a general, and to command in that memorable [Sarahese for deeply unsuccessful] expedition to Quebec: I had no share in doing him these honours.⁴⁴

As Sarah’s interest waned, Abigail’s waxed. In 1710 Lord Raby told his brother Peter that ‘Lord Powlett has complemented Brigadier Masham [Abigail’s husband] by having him chose a member in a borough he controls.’ It seems likely that Sam Masham sensibly chose himself, for he became MP for Ilchester at about this time, though the grateful Tories soon ensured that he had the peerage that his wife’s new interest demanded.

With Sarah deprived of all her offices she had no interest, and she always respected the few who stood by her in these chilly times. Lady Scarborough wrote to her on 5 November 1711, after Sarah had been succeeded as keeper of the queen’s privy purse by the Duchess of Somerset. Sarah annotated the missive: ‘A very kind letter when I had lost my interest. This is a very great deal for her to say, for she had a great friendship with the Duchess of Somerset …’⁴⁵ Lady Hervey, ‘who has been a slave to the Duchess of Marlborough’, was roundly told by the Duchess of Montagu that she was a fool to waste her time on someone who had no interest.

Lady Hervey in return in a whole company of ladies told her that might be, but she was honest and had lain with nobody but her own Lord. Her Grace had lain with the Duke of Grafton, and the marshal, so they call Lord Villars … The Duchess of Montagu made no reply, but O Lord my Lady is in a passion … ⁴⁶

Those with interest, however small, were besieged by those who sought favours. In the army, colonels of regiments were essentially proprietors who ran their regiments at a profit, receiving a grant from the government for arms, clothing and equipment and generally spending rather less than the allowance for these items and pocketing the difference. Like many other offices, military and civil, colonelcies were sold by private treaty or bestowed by a grateful government or a commander-in-chief anxious to line his pocket or reinforce his own interest. In September 1700 Lord Raby reported that: ‘Lord Portmore has done one good thing for himself, he has sold his regiment for £6000 to Kirk his lieutenant colonel, of a stranger he could have had £7000, as Lord Trelawney told me.’⁴⁷

In 1710 the three disgraced officers Meredith, Honeywood and Macartney were allowed to sell their regiments for half their market value, and Lord Orrery, a political ally of the Duke of Argyll’s, was to have Meredith’s at a knockdown price, having first sold his own for its full value. Honeywood came close to being let off ‘as a young man that might be drawn in … He and Macartney are to sell for £2500 and Meredith for £3500 which he can well afford as he can sell his own [regiment] for more money.’⁴⁸

In 1711 Lord Raby decided to seek an ensign’s commission (in the ungrammatical idiom of the age, ‘to ask a colours’) for his schoolboy son George from Colonel Bellew.

I did design before he went into Ireland to ask a colours for him [George]. He very kindly told me he was to have a regiment, and that when I asked that he would put the Duke of Ormonde [then captain general, who had to ratify the agreement] in mind and desire it might be in his regiment, which was a great favour, for he might be set down for a colonel that would make interest against him … If the regiment is broke [disbanded] the year after it is raised, the half pay will keep the boy at school and save me the charge I am now at.⁴⁹

The monarch was the fountain of all interest, and those who could sipped direct from the fountainhead. Thomas Bruce, Earl of Ailesbury, was a well-placed courtier under the later Stuarts and a well-connected exile in the Low Countries after 1688. He recalled that Charles II rarely had time to himself in the jumbled hothouse of Whitehall, but after getting ready for bed,

according to custom he went to ease himself, and he stayed long generally, he being there free from company, and loved to discourse, nobody having entrance but the lord and the groom of the bedchamber in waiting, and I desired him to bestow a colours in the Guards on a relative of mine.

‘Trouble me not with trifles,’ said the king. ‘The Colonel will be glad to oblige you therein.’⁵⁰ Ailesbury later seems to have repeated the request on behalf of another relative, this time asking ‘a colours for him in the Royal Scottish Regiment of Dumbarton’.⁵¹ The earl was very fond of Charles, who ‘knew men better than any that hath reigned over us, and when he gave himself time to think, no man ever judged better of men and things’.⁵² But being lord of the bedchamber had its disadvantages, for he and the duty groom slept on truckle beds by the king’s door, and the monarch’s affection for the little spaniels that now bear his name meant that ‘a dozen dogs came into our beds’.⁵³

On 16–19 July 1693 the London Gazette, a news-sheet with official information on its front page and announcements and advertisements on the back, told its readers of

a small liver coloured Spanish bitch lost from the King’s lodgings, on the 11th instant, with a little white on her breast and a little white on the tops of her hind feet. Whoever brings her to Mr Chiffinch’s lodgings at the King’s Back Stairs, or to the King’s Dog-Keeper in Whitehall, shall be well rewarded for their pains.

William Chiffinch had succeeded his brother Thomas as one of the pages of the king’s bedchamber and keeper of the king’s closet. The page posts were worth about £80 a year in pay and board, with another £47 for livery, fees worth £17 a year and an assortment of tips (‘vails’) worth perhaps another £120. These lucrative appointments were wholly in the interest of the groom of the stole, and they themselves brought interest of their own.

Will Chiffinch was the only man allowed to enter the king’s closet unbidden. His wife received £1,200 a year for showing selected ladies up to the king’s quarters, and Will acted as royal informer, organising drinking parties for those who sought access to the king, recording their conversation while himself remaining studiously sober thanks to a concoction called ‘Dr Goddard’s drops’. He also became surveyor of the king’s pictures, had a fine art collection of his own, and sat to the painter John Riley, whose portrait shows a hard, canny face, with smile and frown folded away for easy interchange. Chiffinch’s daughter Barbara married the Earl of Jersey, and is nine times removed great-grandmother to Princes William and Harry: interest indeed.

As groom of the king’s bedchamber from 1662, Baptist May – always Bab May to his friends – was one step up the court ladder from Will Chiffinch, and no less indispensable. Son of an influential royalist gentleman, he had been in exile with the Duke of York in the Low Countries during the interregnum, and received lucrative offices after the Restoration. May entertained the king and his close friends in his lodgings in Whitehall and St James’s, and was allowed more liberties with Charles than most men. In November 1667 the lord chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon, was unseated by a court conspiracy. Samuel Pepys tells us that: ‘As soon as Secretary Morrice brought the great seal from my Lord Chancellor, Bab May fell upon his knees and ketched the king about the legs and joyed him, and said that this was the first time he could call him king of England, being freed from this great man.’⁵⁴ May was on very good terms with Barbara Villiers, the most powerful of Charles II’s mistresses, and in 1665 it was probably her influence that secured him the post of keeper of the privy purse, upon which she immediately made substantial demands. He received ‘several parcels of ground in Pall Mall Fields for building thereon a square of thirteen or fourteen good houses’. May became an MP, and his work on Charles II’s divorce, a measure abandoned by the king at the last moment, brought him the appointment of ranger of Windsor Great Park. With money rolling in from a variety of sources, May was able to indulge his tastes for art and the breeding of racehorses. Although he fell from favour after Charles’s death, May sensed the way the wind was blowing, and in 1695 received £1,000 for his ‘loyalty’ to William of Orange. This affable old rogue is remembered today by Babmaes Street, a short dogleg kicking down from Jermyn Street towards St James’s Square.⁵⁵

On James II’s last hurried visit to Whitehall before he fled to France in 1688, the Earl of Mulgrave, lord chamberlain, rightly fearing that this particular fountain would shortly be shut off, asked the king to make him a marquess. ‘Good God! What a time you take to ask a thing of that nature,’ said James. ‘I am just arrived and am all in disorder.’ He added that he did not have a secretary to hand, but the ever-helpful earl replied that he had already made out the warrant himself, and a simple signature would do the business. It was, though, too much for the harassed monarch.⁵⁶ When Queen Mary died in 1694 her sister Princess Anne, James II’s younger daughter, seemed assured of the succession, and Sarah Marlborough saw how her popularity rocketed overnight. Suddenly ‘clouds of people’ came to pay their respects. This

sudden alteration … occasioned the half-witted Lord Carnarvon to say one night to the princess, as he stood close by her, in the hall, I hope your Highness will remember that I came to visit you, when none of this company did; which caused a great deal of mirth.⁵⁷

The Stuarts created peers as they chose, and had three distinct peerages – of England, Ireland and Scotland – to pick from.⁵⁸ James I ennobled a number of good-looking young men, and Charles II usually had a peerage to hand for his mistresses and their offspring. Although Nell Gwyn (‘pretty, witty Nell’ to the admiring Mr Pepys) was never ennobled, it was said that she held Charles Beauclerk, the elder of her two sons by the king, out of the window when the monarch visited her, lamenting that the infant had no peerage. ‘God save the Earl of Burford!’ shouted the happy father. James FitzJames, James II’s son by Marlborough’s sister Arabella, was created Duke of Berwick at the age of seventeen in 1687, and, already a major general in Emperor Leopold’s service, was given his own regiment of infantry and in February 1688 was made colonel of the Blues, replacing Aubrey de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who as lord lieutenant of his county had refused James’s order to appoint Roman Catholics to public offices, saying: ‘I will stand by Your Majesty against all enemies to the last drop of my blood. But this is a matter of conscience and I cannot comply.’⁵⁹

Louis de Duras, marquis de Blanquefort in the French peerage, came to England in the retinue of James, Duke of York, and was given an English peerage as Baron Duras in 1693. He inherited his father-in-law’s earldom by special remainder, becoming Earl of Feversham. He was colonel of the King’s Troop of Life Guards, and commander-in-chief for the campaigns of 1685 and 1688. He was a nephew of the great Marshal Turenne, and fought under his command in the Dutch War. William gave many of his Dutch followers English or Irish peerages, leading Ailesbury to complain that: ‘Dutch Lords come in so thick, and the crown not being limited, it is a melancholy prospect for us English peers.’⁶⁰ To avoid creating irritation amongst English peers, monarchs created Irish peerages to reward those for whom an English peerage might have been considered more than they merited. ‘In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,’ write Mark Bence-Jones and Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, ‘Irish peerages were frequently conferred on English, Welsh or Scots magnates who were not considered to have merited peerages of England or Great Britain; even though they may have had no family connection with Ireland at all.’⁶¹

The redoubtable John ‘Salamander’ Cutts, so called because he loved to be where the enemy’s fire was hottest, was created Baron Cutts of Gowran in the peerage of Ireland in 1690, and the Huguenot general Henri de Massue, marquis de Ruvigny, was made Viscount Galway in the Irish peerage in 1696. He had the misfortune to be badly beaten by Berwick at the battle of Almanza in 1707, and the mismatch between his name and his title has induced one writer to surmise that there were in fact two generals in command, the marquis de Ruvigny and his colleague Viscount Galway.⁶² Summoned to the bar of the English House of Lords to explain his defeat, Galway argued that his halting English and physical infirmities (he had lost a hand in one battle and been cut across the head in another) meant that he could not really explain himself, and the House allowed him to reply in writing.

Some men reached the House of Lords by sheer merit. John Somers was an Oxford-educated lawyer who was one of the counsel for the seven bishops tried before the King’s Bench in 1688 for petitioning James II against his Declaration of Indulgence, helped draft the Declaration of Rights, and rose through the ranks of the government’s law officers to become lord chancellor as Baron Somers in 1697. Charles Montagu was a Cambridge man who produced a little light poetry before establishing himself as the financial wizard of his age, initiating the national debt, setting up the Bank of England and overseeing a wholesale recoinage in 1695, though he had to raise window tax to pay for it. He was shoved upstairs into the Lords as Baron Halifax when the Tories came to power in 1699, and became an earl, and effectively prime minister, after the accession of George I.

Others rose without visible trace (it is good to note some continuity between this age and our own), often because there was interest to be repaid. Sarah Marlborough maintained that she had only personally asked Anne to create one peer, the result of a long personal obligation, but that she had failed in a subsequent attempt to get Lord Hervey promoted to an earldom. In January 1712 the queen was persuaded to create peers to overcome the Whigs in the Lords. The Tories enjoyed a comfortable majority in the Commons but were defeated in the Lords, and it seemed likely that the government would fall. But the lord treasurer, Robert Harley (whose audibly Welsh background had not prevented him from becoming Earl of Oxford and Mortimer in 1711), and the queen had agreed to create a dozen peers, amongst them the husband of the queen’s favourite (and Harley’s cousin) Abigail Masham, as well as Harley’s son-in-law and another of his cousins. One of the secretaries of state told the queen that although the creation was certainly legal, he ‘very much doubted the expediency, for I feared it would have a very ill effect in the House of Lords and no good one in the kingdom’.

Lord Wharton waspishly asked the new peers, when they took their seats, whether, like a jury, they voted by their foreman. Most had adopted grand territorial titles, apparently confusing the Italian-born Duchess of Shrewsbury. ‘Madam,’ she said to the pious Lady Oxford, ‘I and my Lord are so weary of talking politics. What are you and your Lord?’ Lady Oxford dourly replied that ‘she knew no Lord but the Lord Jehovah’. ‘O dear! Madam, who is that?’ enquired the duchess innocently. ‘I believe ’tis one of the new titles, for I never heard of him before.’⁶³

We should not be surprised that the House of Lords grew steadily in size. In 1687 there were twenty-six lords spiritual (archbishops and bishops) and 154 lords temporal at Westminster. By 1714 this had risen to 171 lords temporal and sixteen representative Scots lords, elected by their peers. There was a substantial inflation at the upper end of the peerage, with the record number of forty-four dukedoms in 1726. Degrees in the peerage were a matter of very real concern. The Tory leader Henry St John, ennobled as Viscount Bolingbroke in 1712, regarded the appointment as a slap in the face, for he believed himself entitled to an earldom, like his ally Robert Harley. Earls usually had one or two subsidiary titles, the senior of which was borne as a courtesy title by their eldest son, and their daughters were styled ‘Lady’. Sidney Godolphin’s granddaughter, who became Duchess of Leeds, cheerfully signed a letter with all her family titles: ‘I am, dear sister, affectionately yours, M Leeds, Carmarthen, Danby, Latimer, Dumblin, Osborne.’⁶⁴

The last words of Anne Hyde, James II’s first wife, were: ‘Duke, Duke, death is terrible, death is very terrible.’ An outraged duke, whose wife had tapped him gently with a fan, sharply observed that his first duchess had never taken such a shocking liberty, although ‘she was a Percy’.⁶⁵ Peers’ brothers assiduously made use of their siblings’ titles. In 1704 Captain John Campbell wrote to his brother to say that he had survived Blenheim:

My Lord the post is going this minute so I have no time to write to Willie Primrose’s brother [Viscount Primrose] but I beg that your Lordship will be so kind as to tell him that his brother is wounded and without money.

He moved on to become a major in Hepburn’s Regiment in the Dutch service, and survived both ‘a very critical time’ at Ramillies and ‘cruel work’ at the siege of Lille, but eventually complained that promotion was too slow: ‘There is no man of my quality in the island of Britain that hath served so long as captain and major (which is now fourteen years) as I have.’

John Campbell’s luck ran out at Malplaquet. His elder brother James, who commanded the Scots Greys with great distinction that day, wrote to tell their brother that:

Colonel Hepburn’s [Regiment] is all cut to pieces the colonel and lieutenant colonel is killed our brother John is shot through the arm I have seen him this day, his surgeons have very good hopes of him and he is very hearty …

Despite the rush of claims on his interest produced by heavy casualties amongst senior officers, Marlborough ensured that John received the colonelcy of Tullibardine’s Regiment, left vacant by Tullibardine’s death at Malplaquet, but he died of his wound. James saw him buried in the Capuchin cloister in Brussels: seventy grenadiers with blazing torches followed him to the grave. ‘It is such a great loss that we cannot enough regret,’ wrote James. ‘This is a prodigious loss to your lordship and me to lose such a brother and comrade I do assure you that he is regretted by every one that knew him.’⁶⁶

William Cadogan, told that he was to be ennobled for his service against the Jacobites in 1715, at once wrote to Marlborough, his patron, to ‘beg leave to return my most humble thanks for your great goodness in being pleased to approve of the good success I have endeavoured to render here, and your Grace’s representing them so very favourably to his Majesty’. He hoped to style his barony after ‘Cadogan, near Wrexham on the borders of Wales’, and, reminding Marlborough that he had no son, hoped that the title would be allowed to pass sideways to his brother. ‘I humbly beg pardon for mentioning it,’ he concluded, ‘and entreat your Grace would consider it no more than if I had not.’⁶⁷ He was next elevated to an earldom in 1716, after distinguished diplomatic service in Europe, as ‘Earl of Cadogan, in Denbighshire, Viscount of Caversham in Oxfordshire; and Baron Oakley, in Buckinghamshire’.⁶⁸ The barony did indeed pass on to his brother Charles, and the earldom, with the new viscountcy of Chelsea added, was later revived for his descendants.

Interest was at its most viscid at election time. The House of Commons had 513 Members before union with Scotland in 1707 added forty-five Scots Members, bringing the total to 558, ‘knights of the shire’ for rural areas and burgesses for the boroughs. Throughout our period the franchise was limited, in the forty English counties, to ‘forty shilling freeholders’, and in the boroughs to men meeting the appropriate local qualification. For instance, there were ‘corporation boroughs’, where the corporation – maybe as few as thirteen men or as many as fifty-four – could vote; ‘freeman boroughs’ where all freemen – like London’s 8,000 liverymen – could vote; and ‘burgage boroughs’ where the franchise was attached to particular parcels of land, leaving Old Sarum in Wiltshire with just ten voters in 1705. Perhaps one man in seven had the vote. There was no secret ballot; most constituencies returned two Members, and many would-be MPs stood for several constituencies at once to allow a greater chance of success. It was to take the Industrial Revolution and the burgeoning of manufacturing centres to render the whole system palpably absurd, with great cities unrepresented while some tiny boroughs, villages then and now, glibly returned their two Members.

There were many ‘pocket boroughs’, where the electors were so dependent on a major landowner as to be effectively in his pocket, and ‘rotten boroughs’ where electors cheerfully sold themselves to the highest bidder. Although the high-minded occasionally inveighed against the system, there was no real pressure for change, certainly not from the electors themselves, who stood to gain good dinners and full pockets by its survival. In 1716 the electors of Marlborough sent a flowery petition to Parliament, attacking the Septennial Act and unsuccessfully arguing that triennial Parliaments were ‘the greatest security to the preservation of liberty’.

The Earl of Ailesbury’s family was Scots by origin and owned land in Bedfordshire, but it had a substantial interest in the Wiltshire constituencies of Marlborough, Great Bedwyn and Ludgershall. With the earl in exile in the Low Countries his son, Lord Bruce, presided over the family’s borough-mongering. In November 1701 the economist Charles Davenant, who had already represented the pocket borough of Great Bedwyn, told Bruce that seeking election at Ampthill, also within the family’s sphere of influence but less securely in its pocket, would require personal effort and financial outlay: it was therefore too risky for him.

I received the packet from Ampthill, and the letters from there have quite made me lay aside the thought of standing there. Besides, the electors are generally such a corrupt pack of rogues that it is a chance an honest gentleman should represent them. I hope I have done my country so much service that some friend or other will bring me into this Parliament.⁶⁹

In April 1705 Bruce’s agent warned him that there was dirty work afoot at Great Bedwyn, where ‘three or four score of the voters have received £5 each and have engaged to serve Pollexfen whose agents gave £5 to the women under pretence of their spinning five pounds of wool at 20 shillings a pound’. The night before the election the Whig agents got sixteen of the electors blind drunk, and the candidates’ servants kept them under guard until they were frogmarched to the hustings to cast their ballots.

Seven months later the agent wrote to say that another of the Bruce family’s bastions was under attack:

I was yesterday at Marlborough and find the [Whig] Duke [of Somerset’s] agents very lavish in their expenses and offers. Williams is about paying £30 debts for Solomon Clarke, and almost as much for Flurry Bowshire, so they are wavering. Persons are at work to counterplot them.

When Lord Bruce asked who this Mr Bowshire might be, his agent answered: ‘Flurry Bowshire is he with one eye, and jealous, it is said, of his wife.’ Happily, Solomon Clarke, offered £20 and a job as porter by the duke’s agent, had turned him down, ‘and vowed he would not serve him if he would give him the castle and the barton farm’.⁷⁰

Although candidates and their agents did what they could to make bribery less obvious, elections were regularly overturned when disappointed candidates petitioned the Commons, although, oddly enough, the outcome of the challenge often reflected the political balance of the House. Even ‘legitimate’ expenses might raise a modern eyebrow. The Tory magnate Sir Edward Seymour was a Member for the city of Exeter in 1688–89. Before the vote he gave the electors a good dinner of the roast beef of old England, ‘two pieces of rib-beef weighing 96lb at 3d per lb – £1 4s 6d’. After it he distributed ‘25 bottles of sherry … 11 bottles and one pint of canary … 11 bottles of claret …’ Of the total drinks bill of £3.8s.4d, a mere fourpence was spent on ale.⁷¹

There was much more to electioneering than simple bribery, for family influence and local allegiances ran strong. Edward Seymour was a prominent figure in the West Country, colonel of the Devon militia, and men spoke of his ‘Western Empire’. The Tories certainly had it their own way in Cornwall. The county’s sturdy gentry families like the Grenvilles, Slannings and Trevanions had raised some of the very best royalist infantry in the Civil War, and in William’s last Parliament only half a dozen of the county’s forty-four MPs were whiggish. In Devonshire, however, religious dissent was strong, and the Whigs enjoyed the support of the powerful Russell family.

But the Bishop of Exeter was Sir Jonathan Trelawney, baronet, a local magnate in his own right. He was one of the seven bishops tried for their opposition to James II, but one of the two of this number who were prepared to swear allegiance to William and Mary. He was a Tory by upbringing and conviction, and used his power-base to increase his interest. In 1703 he reminded the Tory Earl of Nottingham, one of the two secretaries of state, that he had secured the election of eleven Tory Members, but nothing had so far been done to relieve his ‘numerous family from the burdens of a poor bishopric’. Wondrous to relate, Trelawney soon found himself promoted to the rich see of Winchester, and appointed prelate to the Order of the Garter.

That ‘vigorous and attractive debauchee’, the Whig leader Thomas, Lord Wharton, had, in contrast, a puritan and parliamentarian background, ‘but he owed his scepticism, his engaging manners and his loose morals to the Restoration society in which he had been brought up’. Jonathan Swift, churchman and Tory pamphleteer, hated him ‘like a toad’, but could not help admiring the way in which Wharton, when vigorously assailed by yet another pamphlet, would tell Swift that he had been ‘damnably mauled’ by it, but then chat with him as if nothing really mattered. The Tories made repeated attempts to see him off in a duel, but he disarmed their swordsmen one after another, and always spared their lives.

A contemporary gives us a pen-picture of Wharton wielding interest just as deftly as he did his small sword. He recommended two candidates of his own persuasion for the borough of High Wycombe, only to find that:

Some of the staunch Churchmen invited two of their own party to oppose them and money was spent on both sides … They found my Lord Wharton was got there before them and was going up and down the town with his friends to secure votes on their side. The [Tory] gentleman with his two candidates and a very few followers marched on one side of the street; my Lord Wharton’s candidates and a great company on the other. The gentleman, not being known to my Lord or the townsman, joined with his Lordship’s men to make discoveries, and was by when my Lord, entering a shoemaker’s shop, asked where Dick was? The good woman said her husband was gone two or three miles off with some shoes, but his Lordship need not fear him, she would keep him right. ‘I know that,’ says my Lord, ‘but I want to see Dick and drink a glass with him.’ The wife was very sorry Dick was out of the way. ‘Well,’ says his Lordship, ‘how does all thy children? Molly is a brave girl I warrant by this time.’ ‘Yes, I thank you,’ says the woman. And his Lordship continued: ‘Is not Jemmy breeched yet?’

It was all too much for the principal Tory, who ‘crossed over to his friends and cried: “E’en take your horse and begone; whoever has my Lord Wharton on his side has enough for this election.” ’⁷²

Whig and Tory

Discussion of the importance of interest has already slid us deep into politics. Political parties as we understand them did not yet exist: there were no formally appointed party leaders, central offices, manifestos, whips or lists of approved candidates. Yet there were most certainly political groupings, and a rancour between them so intense that a Victorian editor of Sarah Marlborough’s papers warned his readers that ‘It is almost impossible to conceive the bitter hatred which they bear to each other, and the atrocious libels against their leaders which the press sent every day into the world.’⁷³ I was taught history at a time when Sir Lewis Namier’s views on the politics of the age were very much current. He stressed the importance of connections – groupings based on family or interest – rather than party as we would now understand it. Recent research, especially the painstaking work carried out for the monumental History of Parliament project (whose House of Commons 1690–1715 has proved invaluable), now suggests that party was a good deal more important than Namier believed.

So what did Marlborough and his contemporaries understand by parties? As the historian Tim Harris has so brilliantly demonstrated, the political legacy of the Restoration was a complex one. For a start, it was different in England, Ireland and Scotland, for these three kingdoms were united only in the person of the monarch, and presented distinct problems of their own. In England, with whose politics Marlborough was most intimately concerned, there were two broad groups, each composed of men of similar political persuasions but subject to wide internal disagreement.

On the one hand the Whigs (dubbed ‘the party of movement’ by our Victorian editor, who saw them as the ancestors of the radicals of his own age) had welcomed the return of Charles II but emphasised that he had been called back by Parliament, and believed that the monarch should rule according to law. The Whigs were the least homogeneous of the parties, for they were an alliance of nonconformist churchmen at one end of the spectrum, and grandees at the other, their most notable figures known as the ‘Lords of the Junto’ in the first decade of the eighteenth century.* The more astute Whig leaders, like Lord Wharton, recognised that if they were to succeed it would be by a political organisation which their rivals lacked. On the other hand the Tories applauded the restoration of a monarch sanctified by God, and although most of them expected him to obey the law, they believed that there were times when he could use his royal prerogative to override it. Some High Tories went further, arguing that he held his throne by divine right and was accountable only to God, and not to man.

Supporters of the established Church, with its bishops and prayer book, tended to the Tory view. Presbyterians and the descendants of the Civil War puritans hoped to see the Church of England reformed before they could work within it. They agreed with the Anglicans in their dislike of separatist sects, but they were generally whiggish in sympathy. Both parties found their views easily misrepresented by opponents, and the pamphleteering of the age, unshackled by the removal of censorship in 1695, left no stone unhurled when it came to blackguarding opponents: the Tories were Popish and autocratic, seeking to turn England into Louis XIV’s France, while the Whigs were nonconformist republicans who would bring back the dark days of the interregnum.

In addition to declared Whigs and Tories, there were always some ‘Queen’s Servants’, who were inclined to support the government of the day. These were often numerous enough to swing the balance of the Commons, and Marlborough and Godolphin could scarcely have survived without the support of these gentlemen, most of whom were moderate Tories by persuasion. Service officers were often MPs: over the period 1660–1715 the Commons never had fewer than between 12 and 18 per cent of its members in the army or the navy. James II’s tendency to reward the political opposition of officers by removing their commissions meant that, in his reign and immediately after it, most officer MPs tended to be Tories. By 1702, though, most of them, like generals William Cadogan, George Macartney and Francis Palmes, were Whigs. John Webb, the victor of Wynendaele, was a Tory, and his fellow Tories made much of the fact that he had allegedly received scant recognition for his victory. In his private correspondence Marlborough professed disdain for party politics so often that one believes him. Given a choice, he would probably have been a moderate Tory, while Sarah, never one for half-measures, saw all Tories as closet Jacobites, and lost no opportunity to tell Queen Anne of the danger they posed. Whatever else united John and Sarah, it was certainly not politics.

There is no simple political map of the England of Marlborough’s day. Country squires like Sir Roger de Coverly were proverbially Tory, and the Spectator’s engaging sketches of the good-natured baronet show a man who behaved, in his own little kingdom, much as a benevolent monarch might act on a bigger stage. The parish clergy, whose comfortable liaison with the squirearchy produced the squarson, that hybrid of squire and parson who was more comfortable on his hunter than in his pulpit, were usually Tory, though Low Church bishops often tilted the political balance in the Lords in favour of the Whigs.

The City of London, so important to Parliament’s success during the Civil War, was firmly Whig. What Trevelyan called ‘the middling classes of society … rich merchants, small shopkeepers, freehold yeomen, artisans and craftsmen’ were whiggish, as were those, like younger sons and merchants trading overseas, who found ‘antique custom and privilege’ more hindrance than help.⁷⁴ There were great noble houses on both sides, sometimes as much because of traditional rivalries and an eye for the main chance as because of genuine political conviction, and in terms of ‘wantonness, unbelief and faction’ there was little to choose between the High Tory Henry St John, champion of the bishops, and the Whig Lord Wharton, mainstay of the dissenters.⁷⁵ Indeed, our earnest Victorian believed that it was all about interest: ‘The leading men of all parties aimed chiefly at getting into high places.’ Nor should we discount the way that the terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ became tribal markings, with the smoky little loyalties of club, coffee house and hunting field holding men together, like a covey of partridges in the same patch of stubble.

There was political movement too. During the last four years of his reign, in the early 1680s, Charles II managed to appeal to opinion in the wider political nation ‘out of doors’, reaching out past the Whigs in Parliament to find a solid majority of royalists in the country at large, encouraging meetings and addresses which undercut the Whigs’ claim to be speaking for the people. In contrast, Whig grandees like Wharton recognised that their own party, an essentially disparate alliance, could only hope to win if it emphasised its agreement on the key issues of the day: religious toleration for all Protestants; war with France; union with Scotland; and the Hanoverian succession. Although the Tories constituted a ‘solid phalanx’ based on the Church and landed interest, they were divided on all these issues.

The fact that the war was financed largely by a land tax of four shillings in the pound meant that however much Sir Roger and his cronies revelled in the spectacle of the French, widely regarded as England’s natural enemies, getting a good drubbing, they became increasingly concerned that their own broad acres were paying for it. It was easy enough to put this out of their minds ‘while Marlborough and Galway beat/The French and Spaniards every day’. But as the Allies’ early successes were followed by disaster in Spain and apparent stalemate in the Low Countries, so the Tories became increasingly sure that the war was neither in the nation’s interest, nor – perhaps more to the point – in their own.

Ruling the country actually involved a good deal more than securing a majority in Parliament, for what Tim Harris calls the ‘social history of politics’ reveals that, in order to make its writ run, any government needed to control

peers, gentry and merchants at the top level who served as Lord Lieutenants [of counties], deputy Lieutenants, grand jurors, JPs, mayors and common councilmen, down to the men of lesser social standing who served as petty jurors, militiamen, tax assessors, churchwardens, overseers, vestrymen, constables and other parish and ward officers.⁷⁶

In this context Sir Roger’s neighbour, hacking into the county town with his spaniel at his side, was scarcely less important than the baronet himself. He was

a Yeoman of about an hundred Pounds a year, an honest man: He is just within the Game-Act, and qualified to kill an Hare or a Pheasant … He would be a good neighbour if he did not destroy so many partridges: in short, he is a very sensible man; shoots flying; and has been several Times Foreman of the Petty-Jury.⁷⁷

Successive governments used their interest to try to ensure a favourable balance of power locally, in particular by removing those justices of the peace – in default of a paid bureaucracy the keystones of local administration – who were known to oppose their policy. This straightforward spoils system found supporters at both political extremes, but the majority, like Queen Anne herself, correctly feared that it caused local instability and increased political rancour. It is always as well to remember that while Marlborough’s England could be threatened, cajoled and bribed, it could not be coerced, and that solid and unremarkable truth, however elusive it might have seemed in Whitehall, underlies the febrile politics of the period.

* The George referred to here was the Riband Badge of the Order of the Garter, with a central depiction of St George killing the dragon, usually cut in cameo in hard stone, encircled by large rose-cut brilliants, usually diamonds. Sardonyx is a form of onyx in which white alternates with cornelian.

* They included Somers, Montagu (Halifax), Wharton and Russell (Orford). The word ‘Junto’ is derived from the Spanish junta.

1
Young Cavalier
Faithful but Unfortunate

It was 26 May 1650. Charles I had been beheaded on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall only sixteen months before, and England was a republic. True, it was not a very happy republic. The House of Commons, summoned by Charles in 1640, had long ago lost its royalists, had more recently been stripped of its Presbyterian Members, and was now too obviously the mere rump of its former self. The House of Lords had been abolished. There was no sense of political equilibrium. On the one hand there were complaints that those ‘persons of condition’ upon whom so much of the practical exercise of local government depended had simply withdrawn from active participation in it. On the other, although the army had put down Leveller mutinies in the spring of 1649, there were many who thought that England was nothing like republican enough.

These were uncertain times for everyone, and downright difficult ones for those who had demonstrably been on the wrong side in the recent Civil War. Fate chose this unpropitious moment to provide a son for a West Country gentleman called Winston Churchill, sometime captain of horse in the king’s army, and his wife Elizabeth. They named him John, for his paternal grandfather.

Winston and Elizabeth had married across the jagged political divide of the 1640s. John Churchill the elder was a prosperous lawyer, a member of the Middle Temple, and Deputy Registrar of Chancery before the Civil War, who had bought an estate at Newton Montacute in the parish of Wootton Glanville, near Sherborne in Dorset. Aged about sixty, he was too old to be in arms, but like Robert Browning’s ‘Kentish Sir Byng’ he ‘stood for his king/bidding the cropheaded Parliament swing’ and served as one of Charles’s commissioners. When he came to terms with the victorious parliamentarians he pleaded that he had broken his allegiance to the king in November 1645, after the decisive battle of Naseby but before the surrender of Oxford, the royalist capital, in May the following year. He was fined £440 in addition to the £400 he had already paid, and having thus ‘compounded’ with the victors he was allowed to keep his estate.

John Churchill had not simply bought his way into the gentry with money made in law, but had wed wisely too. In 1618 he married Sarah, daughter of a Gloucestershire knight, Sir Henry Winston, in the City church of St Stephen’s Walbrook, and the couple’s son Winston was born in 1620. Winston had been a student at St John’s College Oxford and, like his father, was destined for a career in the law, for he joined Lincoln’s Inn in January 1637. The Civil War changed his life. He joined the royalist army on the outbreak of war in 1642, and was the storybook cavalier: an early portrait shows a self-confident young man with luxuriant shoulder-length hair and a bright doublet with slashed sleeves, and, typically, he became a captain of cavalry.¹ Captain Churchill has left us no account of his service, but a brother officer, Captain Richard Atkyns of Prince Maurice’s Regiment, a Gloucestershire gentleman whose background was much like Churchill’s, remembered how the King’s Horse, threadbare West Country regiments riding up from Devizes and a fresh brigade hurtling down from Oxford, between them beat Sir William Waller’s cavalry on Roundway Down on 13 July 1643. The royalists called it ‘Runaway Down’, as well they might, for they broke the roundhead horse and sent some of them tumbling to ruin down the steep western edge of the down.

I cannot better compare the figure of both armies than to the map of the fight at sea, between the English and the Spanish Armada … for though they were above twice our numbers; they being six deep, in close order and we but three deep, and open (by reason of our sudden charge) we were without them at both ends … No men ever charged better than ours did that day, especially the Oxford horse, for ours were tired and scattered, yet those that were there did their best.²

Winston Churchill’s parliamentarian accusers maintained that he was still in the field against them in December 1645, and in the winter of 1649 he was duly charged with ‘delinquency’. He fought a stiff rearguard action, trying both to haul in money owed him by others and to delay the government’s case against him, no doubt hoping that if it eventually went against him he would have some money for the fine. He could delay the evil day but not avoid it, and on 29 April 1651 the Commissioners for Compounding ordered that:

Winston Churchill of Wootton Glanville in the county of Dorset, gent. do pay as a fine for his delinquence the sum of four hundred and four score pounds; whereof four hundred and forty-six pounds eighteen shillings is to be paid into the Treasury at Goldsmith’s Hall, and the thirty-three pounds two shillings received already by our treasurer Mr Dawson of Sir Henry Rosewell in part of the money owing by him to John Churchill, father of the said Winston, is hereby allowed of us in part of the said four hundred and four score pounds.³

Although the fine was severe enough for a gentleman worth £160 a year, he had paid it by the end of 1651. However, he could not afford to house his family, and we know that he was on bad terms with his stepmother, whom his father had married in 1643, for there was eventually to be an acrimonious squabble over John Churchill’s will.⁴ Instead, he turned to his mother-in-law, Eleanor, Lady Drake, widow of a Devonshire gentleman, Sir John Drake of Ashe, and daughter of John, Lord Boteler of Bramfield. The Drakes were a substantial Devonshire gentry family, with connections by marriage to the Cornish Grenvilles, and were of the same tribe, though a different branch, as the Elizabethan seaman Sir Francis Drake. Indeed, one of the Musbury Drakes, from whom Sir John Drake descended, had knocked down Sir Francis for daring to use the armorial wyvern that he believed to be his by right.⁵

Lady Drake lived at Ashe House, a substantial Elizabethan E-shaped building in the parish of Musbury, on the right of the main road winding south from Axminster. She was ‘of good affection’ to the Parliament, had ‘animated her tenants in seven adjoining parishes’ to its cause, and her son John was serving with its forces. She feared a royalist descent upon Ashe and asked the local parliamentarian garrison of Lyme to send troops. They duly arrived, but before they could fortify the place a royalist force under John, Lord Poulett, leader of the Somerset royalists, arrived and took the house. Poulett’s men fired the chapel and an adjoining wing, and ‘stripped the good lady, who, almost naked and without shoe to her foot but what she afterwards begged, fled to Lyme for her safety’.⁶

No sooner had Eleanor Drake arrived at Lyme than it was besieged by Prince Maurice, one the king’s nephews and brother of the better-known Rupert. The royalists hoped for help from a fleet commanded, in the topsy-turvy way of the loyalties of the day, by the grandson of Lady Drake’s sister, James Ley, Earl of Marlborough. The earl remained in the Channel Islands, and the siege was raised when the Earl of Essex’s main parliamentarian army arrived in the West Country in 1644, enabling Lady Drake to get to London where, on 28 September, she was allocated the house of Sir Thomas Reynell, a gentleman then in arms for the king. When he came to terms with Parliament and compounded for his house in 1646 he accused Lady Drake of wrecking the place in search of concealed treasure, but she continued to live there for some time, herself pursuing compensation from Lord Poulett for the substantial damage his men had inflicted on her own house. In the spring of 1648 she was awarded £1,500, but £500 of this was still owing in July 1650, possibly because Poulett himself had died in 1649.

We cannot be wholly certain of Eleanor Drake’s residence at this time. There is an argument that Ashe House had been too badly damaged to be habitable, and that in consequence she moved to her son John Drake’s house at Great Trill, in the parish of Axminster. The question is anything but academic. As Winston Churchill was living with his mother-in-law, Ashe House and Great Trill vie for the honour of being the birthplace of the future Duke of Marlborough. However, the parish register of St Michael’s church Musbury tells those who can penetrate its spidery scrawl: ‘John the son of Mr Winston Churchill, born the 26th day of May 1650,’ and the majority of scholars, including Archdeacon Coxe, whose life overlapped the duke’s, agree that it was indeed in Ashe House that John Churchill first saw the light of day.⁷

Winston and Elizabeth Churchill had at least nine children. Four sons, Winston (b.1649), Henry, Jasper and Mountjoy, died in infancy or youth. Theobald, born in Dublin in 1662, took holy orders and died in 1685. The remaining four children, Arabella (1647–1730), John, the subject of this book (1650–1722), George (1653–1710) and Charles (1656–1714) all enjoyed careers which abutted on their better-known brother’s, and we will hear from them later.⁸ The circumstances of John Churchill’s childhood are largely surmise, for he himself tells us nothing of it. The anonymous author of The Lives of the Two Illustrious Generals, published in 1713, assures us that:

He was born in the time of the grand rebellion, when his father siding with the royal party against the usurpers, was under many pressures, which were common to such as adhered to the king. Yet, notwithstanding the devastations and plunderings, and other nefarious practices which were daily committed by the licentious soldiery, no care was omitted on the part of his tender parents for a liberal and gentle education. For he was no sooner out of the hands of women than he was given into those of a sequestered clergyman, who made it his first concern to instil sound principles of religion into him, and that the seeds of humane literature might take deeper root, and he from a just knowledge of the omnipotence of the creator, might have a true sense of the dependence of the creature.⁹

Things were certainly not easy for the king’s supporters. In 1656 an abortive royalist rising in the south was led by Colonel John Penruddock, who surprised the judges at Salisbury and got as far as South Molton in Devon before he was surrounded and captured. This encouraged Oliver Cromwell, searching fruitlessly for some enduring constitution, to divide England and Wales up into twelve military districts, each under a major general charged with enforcing not only security but also laws against drunkenness and sexual licence. The rule of the major generals was paid for by a ‘decimation tax’ of 10 per cent on royalists. Although the troops of horse who enforced the central government’s will on the regions were sometimes brutal, they were generally ‘honest and efficient’. There was little of the plundering and devastation that our anonymous author complains of, and certainly no licentiousness from these psalm-singing bigots whose efforts did so much to instil in contemporaries a deep hatred of military rule and a suspicion of standing armies.

While Cromwell’s Protectorate fumbled on in its quest for a settlement, Winston Churchill – called to the bar in 1652, though he made no use of it and did not keep term – remained at Ashe, living in the part of the house left unburned by Lord Poulett’s men, in an atmosphere redolent of old dogs and young children, painfully aware that he had backed the wrong horse. He busied himself with the family genealogy, discovering, at least to his own satisfaction, an ancestor who had come over with William the Conqueror, and edging gingerly past the decided possibility that his great-great-great-grandfather had been a blacksmith who had married his employer’s widow. Sarah Marlborough was forthright about all this, and in 1736 commented on Thomas Lediard’s biography of her husband that:

This history takes a great deal of pains to make the Duke of Marlborough’s lineage very ancient. This may be true for aught I know; but it is no matter whether it be true or not in my opinion, for I value nobody for another’s merit.¹⁰

There was, sadly, no denying either the fact that the Drakes were a more substantial family, or that without Lady Drake’s generosity Winston Churchill would have no roof over his head. We simply cannot be sure what all this meant in terms of the relationship between Winston Churchill, his growing family and his mother-in-law: young John was certainly proud enough of the Drake connection to take the title of his own earldom from that of Eleanor’s sister’s royalist husband.¹¹ However, he was brought up in a household that demonstrated all too clearly the consequences of being on the losing side and having neither money nor influence: in this respect the child was father to the man.

The King Comes Home in Peace Again

Oliver Cromwell, almost broken by the agonising death of his favourite daughter, died in September 1658, leaving not the stable settlement he had so craved, but a shifting and unstable coalition headed, at least in name, by his son Richard. In an air of worsening political breakdown General George Monck, commander of the army in Scotland but a Devonian by ancestry, who had served the king until his capture in 1646, marched southwards, reaching London in February 1660. He dissolved Parliament, no less than the reinstated Rump of the Long Parliament which had met before the Civil War, and issued writs for another, for which royalists would be allowed to vote. Monck now began to receive letters written to him by the exiled Charles II, but there was still no certainty that the monarchy would be restored.

The Declaration of Breda, issued by Charles on 4 April, made known the conditions on which he would accept restoration to his father’s throne. He proposed to take ‘possession of that right which God and nature hath made our due’, guaranteed a general pardon to all who returned to ‘the loyalty and obedience of good subjects’, apart from those specifically excepted by Parliament, and promised a free Parliament and ‘liberty to tender consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of religion which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom’. The army would receive arrears of pay, and there was an attempt to reassure landowners, great and small, by affirming that grants and purchases of estates made ‘in the continued distractions of so many years and so many and great revolutions’ would be determined by Parliament.¹²

The declaration and accompanying letters were received by the new ‘Convention’ Parliament, which declared the monarchy restored, and Charles duly returned to the royal palace of Whitehall on 29 May 1660, his thirtieth birthday. ‘All the world in a merry mood,’ wrote Samuel Pepys, ‘because of the king’s coming.’¹³ John Evelyn was even more elated.

I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God. And all this was done without one drop of blood shed, and by that very army which rebelled against him; but it was the Lord’s doing, for such a Restoration was never mentioned in any history ancient or modern, since the return of the Jews from their Babylonish captivity; nor so joyful a day and so bright ever seen in this nation, this happening when to expect or effect it was past all human policy.¹⁴

The vast quantity of scholarly work produced since Samuel Rawson Gardiner wrote on the subject over a century ago has not diluted the fundamental truth of his assertion that: ‘The majority of political Englishmen … thought that Charles II ought to be their king.’¹⁵ The issues which were to bedevil the whole of John Churchill’s career were not about monarchy as opposed to republicanism, but about the nature of that monarchy. In this sense the Declaration of Breda was a carefully drafted compromise. It spoke of the authority conferred on Charles by ‘God and nature’, but recognised that much of the implementation of that authority was a matter for Parliament.

In the short term, though, the Restoration changed the fortunes of the Churchill family at a stroke. A gleeful Winston immediately published Divi Britannici: Being a remark upon the lives of all the kings of this isle, a joyfully uncritical celebration of monarchy. He was elected MP for Weymouth in 1661, sitting for that constituency in the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ which lasted till 1679, and going on to represent Lyme from 1685 until his death in 1688. Winston enjoyed the patronage of Sir Henry Bennet (Lord Arlington from 1663), also an Oxford man and a Civil War royalist. He had taken a sword-cut across the face (an occupational hazard for a cavalryman, and precisely the reason why sensible folk, roundhead or cavalier, wore a lobster-tail pot with a sliding noseguard) in a skirmish near Andover in 1644, and habitually wore a black plaster which concealed the wound but, in so doing, advertised its recipient’s loyalty. Arlington accompanied the royal family in exile, where he became secretary to James, Duke of York, and after the Restoration he went on to be a major political figure, not least because of his ability to select (and, so some averred, sample in advance) ladies who might meet his master’s generous tastes.

We do not know what brought Arlington and Churchill together, but we can make an educated guess. They had overlapped at Oxford, though they were in different colleges, and they both fought in the south-west, so it is just possible to think of a friendship forged in an Oxford ale-house and continued through the hack-and-gallop affair at Andover; and Arlington was anxious to build up his own client base in the West Country. Thanks to Arlington’s patronage, in 1661 Winston Churchill became a commissioner of the Court of Claims and Explanations (Ireland), a body charged with reviewing the redistribution of land in Ireland during the Civil War and the Protectorate. In 1664 he became junior clerk comptroller to the Board of Green Cloth, a committee taking its name from the baize-covered table at which its members sat, which audited the expenses of the royal household and exercised administrative jurisdiction within royal palaces. On 12 June 1681, for example, with a proper regard for interior economy, the board ordered that: ‘The Maids of Honour should have cherry tarts instead of gooseberry tarts, it being observed that cherries are three pence a pound.’ In 1664 Winston was knighted, and he had already been authorised to add an augmentation to his cherished coat of arms, ‘for his service to the late king as captain of horse, and for his present loyalty as a member of this House of Commons’. His arms bore the motto Fiel pero desdichado, ‘Faithful but Unfortunate’.

Winston might more accurately have described himself as faithful but busy. In 1662 he departed for Ireland, where young John attended the Dublin Free Grammar School. He returned to England in 1664, and it seems safe to surmise that John came with him, to become one of the 153 scholars at St Paul’s School. It is certain that Sir Winston bought a house in the capital, for Sarah Marlborough later recalled John showing her the family home in the City of London. The early records of St Paul’s School were destroyed in 1666, during the Great Fire, but a copy of Vegetius’ De Re Militari, with an annotation certifying that it was from that book that ‘John Churchill, scholar of this school, afterwards the celebrated Duke of Marlborough, first learnt the elements of the art of war’, survived.

Winston S. Churchill wondered how ‘our hero was able to extract various modern sunbeams from this ancient cucumber’.¹⁶ However, Professor Philip Sabin has recently suggested that military history might indeed be the most important legacy of the ancient world. While Vegetius’ first two books are perhaps of little value to succeeding ages, his third, in which he sums up Roman strategy, tactics and logistics, has been hailed as ‘the foundation of military learning for every European commander from William the Silent to Frederick the Great’. He emphasised the importance of seeking information to dispel the fog of war, while at the same time concealing one’s own strength and plans. Vegetius dealt with the principles of war fought for limited objectives, by no means an inapt comparison with the wars of the early eighteenth century. ‘Consult with many on proper measures to be taken, but communicate the plans you intend to put in execution to few, and those only of most assured fidelity,’ he suggested. ‘Or better,’ he added, ‘trust no one but yourself.’¹⁷ There could scarcely be a better description of John Churchill’s approach to generalship.

In 1665, with John still at school, his sister Arabella was appointed a maid of honour to the Duchess of York, wife of the king’s brother James. Given the close relationship between York and Arlington, and the latter’s role as royal pander, what followed soon afterwards should come as no surprise. Winston called on the fashionable portraitist Sir Peter Lely, and at some time in the very early 1660s Lely painted his eldest son Winston and his daughter Arabella in neo-classical dress. At this time Arabella was perhaps fourteen years old, and her remorselessly flat-chested portrait gives little hint that she was soon to prove irresistibly attractive to the Duke of York.

In 1659 James had contracted a secret marriage to Anne Hyde, daughter of Charles II’s adviser Edward Hyde, who as Earl of Clarendon was to dominate politics in the period 1660–66. Of the children she bore him only two, Mary (b.1662) and Anne (b.1665), survived infancy. The marriage was formalised in London in 1660, but James’s eyes and hands were for ever wandering, and he embarked on a series of affairs. In 1665 the gossipy Pepys identified a lady who ‘is said to have given the Duke of York a clap upon his first coming over’; the following year the eager duke was said to be ‘desperately in love with Mrs Stewart’, and on Easter Day 1669 Pepys, now frankly alarmed rather than merely gossipy, complained that the royal lecher ‘did eye my wife mightily’.¹⁸ We might style James gourmand rather than gourmet, and his taste in ladies, like his religion, was Catholic. Catherine Sedley, one of his mistresses, confessed that: ‘We are none of us handsome, and if we had wit, he has not enough to discover it.’¹⁹

Arabella Churchill was described by one contemporary as having a face of no more than ordinary feminine beauty, which made her a good deal more attractive than many of James’s ladies, but a very pretty figure. We are told that the ducal party was riding to a greyhound meet near York when Arabella’s horse bolted. She fell, and the Duke of York found her unconscious and dishevelled: the fact that underwear was not in general use at the time may well have increased the joy of his discovery. Arabella bore James at least four children, Henrietta FitzJames (b.1667), James FitzJames, later Duke of Berwick (b.1670) and, after Anne Hyde’s death in 1671 and James’s marriage to Mary of Modena in 1673, Henry FitzJames, later Duke of Albemarle (b.1673), and Arabella FitzJames (b.1674).

Lord Macaulay, whiskery jowls quivering, thundered that the complaisant John Churchill stood dishonoured by his sister’s behaviour, though Sarah Marlborough acidly wondered quite what ‘he could do when a boy at school to prevent the infamy of his sister’. Sir Winston could do little, even if he had the inclination to make the attempt, because in 1665 he was sent back to Ireland, leaving his family behind in London. At about this time John went to court as page to the Duke of York, and in 1667 he begged his patron for an ensign’s commission in the foot guards, which was duly granted on 14 September that year. There was no formal uniform for army officers at this time, but the guards, like the rest of the infantry, wore red, and young John would have turned out in a knee-length red coat with broad blue turned-back cuffs and a good deal of gold lace. It would have taken rare perception to have guessed just how much lustre he would bring to coats like that and the men who wore them.

The Army of Charles II

The army that John Churchill joined was the product of an uneasy union between George Monck’s regiments, which represented the New Model Army, instrument of parliamentarian victory in the Civil War, and the force of exiled royalists maintained by Charles in the Low Countries. In 1660 Monck, now the well-pensioned Duke of Albemarle in reward for his services, began the disbandment of his troops as their arrears of pay were met, and by Christmas that year only two regiments of this remarkable army remained: his own foot, the ‘Coldstream Regiment’, and his own regiment of horse. A force of around 6,000 foot and six hundred horse was maintained in Dunkirk, consisting partly of ex-parliamentarian soldiers and partly of royalists, including Lord Wentworth’s regiment of foot guards.

It soon became clear to Charles that he could not afford to maintain Dunkirk, and in 1662 he sold it to France. Some of the troops went to the North African city of Tangier, which had come to the crown as part of the dowry of Charles’s queen, Catherine of Braganza. Others went off to fight in Portugal, and still others were disbanded in Dunkirk or joined the French army as mercenaries: Lord Wentworth’s guards returned to England in 1662, and were amalgamated with Colonel John Russell’s 1st Foot Guards in 1665.

Charles did not share the widespread mistrust of standing armies, and Gilbert Burnet maintains that lord chancellor Clarendon agreed that such a force was needed to protect the king from riots and risings.

And there was great talk of a design, as soon as the army were disbanded, to raise a force that should be so chosen and modelled that the King might depend upon it; and that it should be so considerable, that there might be no reason to apprehend tumults any more.²⁰

However, the Earl of Southampton, the lord treasurer, feared that while the New Model’s men had been ‘sober and religious’ the king’s would perforce be brutal and licentious, and the probable instrument of royal despotism. One of Samuel Pepys’s drinking companions certainly agreed with him:

They go with their belts and swords, swearing and cursing, and stealing – running into people’s houses, by force oftentimes, to carry away something. And this is the difference between the temper of one and the other.²¹

Charles’s army was small – 6,000 strong at its peak – and it would have been a wise man who predicted that it would eventually grow into a force of European stature. There were many who argued, throughout his reign and beyond it, that the Trained Bands of the City of London and the county militias, their officers appointed by local potentates and their men selected by ballot from lists provided by parish constables, were sufficient guarantee of domestic security. On 1 January 1661, however, a small armed group of no more than fifty Fifth Monarchy men under ‘Venner the cooper’ seized the north gate of St Paul’s. A plucky watchman cried out that he was for King Charles. They replied that they were for King Jesus, and piously shot him through the head. Venner’s men went on to beat both a detachment of musketeers sent across from the guard on the Royal Exchange, and the lord mayor’s own troop of City militia, before making off to Highgate. Running short of food, they returned to the City on the fourth. It took the king’s Life Guard and ‘all the City Regiments’ to subdue them: ten were taken and twenty killed. Thomas Venner was wounded, but lived long enough for rope and bowelling knife.

Charles had already raised a regiment of foot guards commanded by John Russell, one of the Duke of Bedford’s grandsons and a steadfast Civil War royalist. The king had brought a Life Guard of horse across with him in 1660, but it had subsequently been reduced in size and the residue sent to Dunkirk. As a consequence of Venner’s rising the officers and men of Albemarle’s Coldstream regiment of foot were disbanded (thus meeting the letter of the agreement that specified that the old army was to disappear) and then immediately re-enlisted. In 1684 a royal ruling made this ‘new’ regiment junior to Russell’s 1st Foot Guards, but the Coldstreamers made clear their disapproval by adopting the motto Nulli Secundus, second to none. Members of the 1st Foot Guards helpfully translated this as ‘second to one’ or ‘better than nothing’.²² The Life Guards were brought back from Dunkirk and augmented into three troops – the King’s, the Duke of York’s and the Lord General’s, with a Scots troop raised soon afterwards. At the same time Aubrey de Vere, Earl of Oxford, raised a regiment of horse, properly the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards but known, from the colour of their uniforms, as the ‘Oxford Blues’. This was based on a parliamentarian regiment, brought up to strength with royalist volunteers.

This process gave Charles II guards, both horse and foot, and with them came the realistic prospect of preserving order in the capital and escorting the monarch when he travelled in the country. There were also a number of isolated non-regimented garrison companies in key strongholds like Portsmouth, Dover and Hull, all now commanded by officers of suitable royalist credentials. Although the small standing armies of each of Charles’s kingdoms were theoretically separate, ‘In practice,’ as John Childs tells us, ‘all three were interdependent and formed part of the same large whole. Soldiers from Scotland and Ireland were raised to serve on the English establishment whenever forces were needed for foreign service.’²³

Charles expanded his army beyond this tiny kernel for two reasons. Firstly, there were the demands of his foreign policy, and as John Churchill was to find himself swept up in the wars that this provoked, we need to grasp its essentials. The treaty of 1661, which established the conditions for Charles’s marriage to the Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza, brought England the North African city of Tangier, intermittently under siege by the Moors, and it required garrisoning. Amongst troops raised for this dangerous task was the Queen’s Foot, which went on to become the 2nd of Foot, the Queen’s Royal Regiment, whose paschal lamb badge can still be found on the buttons of its lineal descendant, the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment. A brigade of one regiment of cavalry and two of infantry also served in Portugal itself in 1662–68.

Then there were forces needed for war on the Continent. A dominating influence across the whole of John Churchill’s active career was the desire of the French monarch Louis XIV to extend the borders of France and secure influence across a wider Europe. However, for much of Charles’s reign the government pursued a pro-French policy. This undoubtedly reflected Charles’s personal inclination. His mother Henrietta Maria was French, his sister Henriette-Anne was married to the Duke of Orléans, and his personal religious beliefs drew him strongly towards Catholicism. In 1670 the secret Treaty of Dover, pushed on by some of Charles’s advisers (including Winston Churchill’s patron Lord Arlington, who had succeeded the fallen Clarendon), provided for an alliance between Britain and France. Charles affirmed that he was ‘convinced of the truth of the Roman Catholic religion and resolved to declare it and reconcile himself with the Church of Rome as soon as the welfare of his kingdom will permit’. Louis XIV would send 6,000 soldiers to help him against any recalcitrant subjects, and would provide Charles with £140,000, half payable in advance of his declaration. Amongst the treaty’s other clauses was one which bound the two kings to declare war on the States-General of the United Provinces, and others which determined the arrangements for this war – including a generous annual subsidy for the British. Henriette d’Orléans visited her brother in 1670 and persuaded him to defer his declaration of Catholicity until after the war had begun.

In fact Charles did not need much convincing, for, with that finely-tuned survival instinct which his brother so signally lacked, he recognised that such a pronouncement would be profoundly unpopular, and he was reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church only on his deathbed. A bogus treaty, which excluded the awkward clause committing Charles to Catholicism, was signed in December by five of his ministers – Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley Cooper and Lauderdale – whose initials conveniently made up the word cabal, or conspiracy, giving us some indication of what many of their contemporaries thought of them and their policy.²⁴

As a consequence of this policy, a brigade of infantry served alongside the French army against the Dutch in 1672–78. It included the Earl of Dumbarton’s Scots Regiment, which was to become the Royal Scots, the 1st of Foot, and the senior line infantry regiment in the British army, rejoicing in the nickname ‘Pontius Pilate’s bodyguard’.* There was also the Duke of Monmouth’s Royal English Regiment, an Irish regiment under Sir George Hamilton (replaced, when he was killed at Saverne in 1676, by Colonel Thomas Dongan), assorted cavalry, and further infantry battalions which were broken up, on their arrival in France, to reinforce existing units. We shall see more of this brigade later.²⁵

The government’s policy of war against the Dutch in alliance with the French was not popular, not least because many Englishmen regarded the Dutch as good fellow-Protestants who were, into the bargain, the doughtiest of adversaries at sea. England pulled out of the Third Dutch War in 1674, and with the fall of the cabal soon afterwards the Earl of Danby, the king’s new chief minister, gradually redefined foreign policy so as to align England with Holland and against France. Charles was uneasy about the arrangement, but his sister Henriette’s untimely death removed what might have proved an insuperable obstacle. In 1677 the Dutch stadholder William of Orange, fast emerging as the chief obstacle to Louis’ ambitions, married the Duke of York’s daughter Mary. The jocular Charles was on hand to help the happy couple to their bridal bed, and as he drew the curtains around it he improved the tender moment with his expert advice: ‘Now, nephew, to your work! Hey! St George for England!’²⁶

On 31 December 1677 England signed a treaty with the Dutch, agreeing to work towards a general peace on the basis of French surrender of key fortresses in the Low Countries, to recall British troops from French service, and to send men to fight alongside the Dutch and their allies the Spanish, who were, through most of the period covered by this book, de jure rulers of the Spanish Netherlands, that broad and often contested strip of territory between France and Holland. A further treaty was not ratified by the English, and Charles then characteristically attempted to avoid both breaking his agreement with France and actually entering the war on the other side. Eventually, in 1678, a force of almost 18,000 men was ready, part of it composed of regiments recalled from French service, and part from regiments newly raised for the war. The force was disbanded in 1679 without having been in action, but the experience of getting it to Flanders, sustaining it in the theatre of operations and bringing it back to England was useful for the future. In addition to this expeditionary force, genuinely part of the British army, there were also British troops, including a high proportion of Scots, in Dutch service too.

We can already discern, from the very beginning of John Churchill’s career, the second reason for Charles’s expansion of his army. He was besieged by Civil War royalists, many of them awash with extended families, who sought places for themselves and their adherents as a reward for past services and, by unspoken implication, a guarantee of future loyalty. Although in 1661 Parliament had undertaken to raise £60,000 to pay former officers of the royalist armies, there was precious little available for those who had served as junior officers. John Gwyn had been a captain in the Civil War and then a lieutenant in the royalist army in Flanders before the Restoration. After it he found himself on half-pay in Dunkirk, in a garrison full of ex-parliamentarians, and with two of his ‘familiar associates’ decided to visit the governor and offer to serve as private soldiers. At that stage infantry regiments contained both pikemen and musketeers, and a gentleman would naturally prefer, as Shakespeare had put it, to ‘trail the puissant pike’.

Then I went with them to the Governor, as he was marching at the head of fifteen hundred men, and told him they were officers of His Majesty’s Regiment of Guards, gentlemen, and brave fellows; and that they and myself would own it an honour to take our pikes upon our shoulders, and wait upon him that day. He returned as many grateful expressions unto us, as if it had been the highest obligation that was ever put upon him, and he would not take us from our command.²⁷

By the time Gwyn wrote his memoirs, though, he was serving as a gentleman trooper in the King’s Troop of Life Guards, then commanded by the Duke of Monmouth. Although a trooper in the Life Guards received four shillings a day, compared to the 2s.6d paid to a trooper in a line cavalry regiment, it is clear that Gwyn hoped for promotion, and that the prefatory letters opening his memoirs were (apparently fruitless) pleas for assistance. He told Charles II that he had ‘faithfully spent my prime years in your service’, and evidently hoped for more than a billet in the Life Guards. There were thousands of John Gwyns in the England of the 1660s (one contemporary survey identified 5,353 former officers), all clamouring for jobs, and the expansion of the army could gratify at least some of them.

Much as they might have resented the comparison, army officers had at least something in common with the keeper of Newgate prison, for their offices, like his, were generally bought and sold. Indeed, one historian has suggested that the purchase of commissions ‘operated to its greatest extent’ in the Restoration army.²⁸ Any appointment or promotion required royal permission, and an officer either joining for the first time or being promoted paid a set fee to the secretary at war and negotiated the price payable to the officer he replaced. Commissions in units raised for short conflicts like the 1677–78 expedition were cheap but a poor long-term investment, while, at the other extreme, colonelcies of well-established regiments were hugely expensive. Charles gave Colonel John Russell £5,100 for the 1st Foot Guards in 1672, and then presented the regiment to one of his illegitimate brood, the Duke of Grafton, who had no military experience at all but rather enjoyed being a colonel.

The rules governing the purchase of commissions changed from time to time, and in 1684 the whole practice was outlawed, but with or without official approval it clinked cheerfully on. There was no reason why young men needed to understand their profession before buying their way into it: some young officers could not ‘relieve a guard without arousing the merry glee of spectators’. Moreover, there were many gentlemen ‘whom nothing but captaincies would contest’, thus leaving a residue of subalterns who frequently saw ignorant men buy their way in above them. One of the disappointed tells us that:

the subaltern … let him be never so diligent, faithful and industrious; nay never so successful too; and although he has spent so much of his own money in carrying arms … or in small posts, as would have bought a company; yet if he has not the ready – he must be sure to find one that has put over his head; and too often one that neither is, nor ever will make a soldier.²⁹

However, the system, such as it was, was in a state of evolution, and during John Churchill’s career there were attempts to prevent the worst abuses: for instance, the commissioning of youths and children was theoretically banned in 1705. Churchill, as we shall see, had his own firm views on the subject, and it was at least in part thanks to his efforts that, between the reigns of Charles II and George I, a career in the army came increasingly to offer genuine professional advancement rather than sporadic achievement based on money and patronage, inflated by wartime promotion but imperilled by peacetime reductions. Yet throughout the period many officers, especially those in the most recently raised regiments, which would be the first to go on the outbreak of peace, were uncomfortably aware that the spectre of compulsory retirement on half-pay always beckoned:

This week we shine in scarlet and in gold

The next, the cloak is pawned, the watch is sold.

Court and Garrison

None of this was yet of much concern to Ensign Churchill of the 1st Foot Guards, commissioned without purchase by the kindly intervention of James, Duke of York. He carried his company’s colour (until about 1690 each company of foot had a colour of its own, and thereafter most regiments had a royal colour and a colonel’s colour) and watched the pikemen and musketeers of his company, now in the proportion of about one pikeman to four musketeers, stepping through their stately evolutions. Their captain enjoined them to ‘Have a care: shoulder your pikes and muskets; to your right hand, face; to your front, march.’ Off they stepped, stiff-legged, slow, and mighty proud of themselves, with the captain and half the musketeers at their head, the ensign and his colour in the middle with the pikes, then the remainder of the musketeers and last of all the lieutenant, with a keen eye on the alignment of the ranks and the behaviour of the men.

The foot guards were quartered in and around the capital, even then easily the largest city in the kingdom, with a population of more than 300,000 souls (almost one in sixteen of the total English population of over five million), and growing all the time to outstrip Paris in 1700 and Constantinople in 1750.³⁰ It straggled along the north bank of the Thames, then crossed only at London Bridge, though there was a ferry between Westminster and Lambeth, long replaced by Lambeth Bridge but remembered by Horseferry Road, that now leads onto it. The City itself, the ancient commercial heart of London, comprised the original square mile bounded by the Roman walls, with Blackfriars to its west and Southwark just across London Bridge. To its west lay Westminster, approached by the Strand, which took the traveller to Charing Cross, whence King Street ran slightly north of the line of the modern Whitehall to Westminster Hall, where Parliament met.

The palace of Whitehall, frequented by John Churchill for much of this period, was the monarch’s principal residence. It stretched along the river for about half a mile, just a little to the north of the present Embankment, which was reclaimed in the nineteenth century. The traveller arriving by King Street from the City would enter the precincts of the palace by the Holbein Gate, with the Banqueting House to his left and a muddle of galleries and apartments around the little Pebble Court behind it. As he passed on through Holbein Gate our traveller would cross the north side of the Privy Garden, with a run of buildings on his right which from 1664 included quarters for a permanent guard of fifty private gentlemen of the Life Guards. Entry to St James’s Park, where the king loved to walk briskly with a selection of his dogs and to which access was strictly controlled, was monitored by these troopers, and passes to the park were much coveted.

This cavalry guardhouse stood for nearly a century; the present one, called Horse Guards like its predecessor, dates from the 1750s. Leaving through King Street Gate, and now conscious of Westminster Hall and the Abbey filling his horizon, the traveller would see a scattering of more apartments and the royal bowling green to his left. The whole place was a mixture of medieval and more modern, with Inigo Jones’s great Banqueting House, built for Charles’s grandfather James I to replace an earlier building destroyed by fire, as its most striking feature.

Court life mixed formality and practicality. Samuel Pepys was predictably gratified to see a royal mistress’s petticoats hanging out to dry in the Privy Garden, though the vision gave him rather lurid dreams. Privacy could be rare. When Margaret, wife of John Churchill’s future political ally Sidney Godolphin, was dying of puerperal fever in 1678, her shrieks rang out right across the palace’s riverfront. Many marriages of the period were made by conniving old men in smoky rooms, but this had been a love-match, and the distraught Godolphin wrote that his loss was ‘never to be supplied this side of heaven’.³¹ He never remarried.

John Evelyn admired Charles, that ‘prince of many virtues’, but complained that:

He took delight in having a number of little spaniels follow him and lie in his bed-chamber, where he often suffered the bitches to puppy and give suck, which rendered it very offensive, and indeed made the whole court nasty and stinking.³²

Royal mistresses, in ‘unimaginable profusion’, according to the straitlaced Evelyn, might be ushered in via Whitehall Stairs from the river, or up the backstairs from Pebble Court, with the more permanent fixtures actually housed within the palace, though safely away from the queen’s apartment, just off the gallery where Pebble Court and the Privy Garden met. The place was full of courtiers, place-holders and hangers-on, sleeping (and sometimes pissing) where they could, and hoping to make themselves indispensable to Charles. He was ‘easy of access’, and

had a particular talent in telling a story, and facetious passages, of which he had innumerable; this made some buffoons and vicious wretches too presumptuous and familiar, not worth the favour they abused.³³

Gilbert Burnet was less impressed by the monarch’s skill as a raconteur. ‘Though a room might be full when the king began one of his stories,’ he wrote, ‘it was generally almost empty before he finished it.’³⁴

This royal rabbit-warren was badly damaged by fire in January 1698, and the Banqueting House was one of the few buildings to survive. Christopher Wren was told that ‘His Majesty desires to make it a noble palace, which by computation may be finished in four years.’ But there was never enough money, and although ‘the spectre of a grand palace at Whitehall haunts English architectural history in the seventeenth century’, the ghost never assumed substantial form.³⁵ After the destruction of Whitehall the court moved to St James’s and Kensington Palaces in London. Charles liked Windsor Castle, with its romantic wooded surroundings, and William III was very taken by Hampton Court, where he was able to create gardens like those he so loved at Het Loo.

As a page John Churchill was a regular visitor to the Duke of York’s apartments, at the palace’s south-west corner. He also called on his second cousin once removed, conveniently lodged nearby. Barbara Villiers had been born in 1640, the second child of Lord Grandison, and in 1659 she married the lawyer Roger Palmer, later Lord Castlemaine. She had already enjoyed a vigorous affair with the Earl of Chesterfield (‘the joy I have of being with you last night, has made me do nothing but dream of you’), and in February 1661 she gave birth to her first daughter by Charles II. John Churchill was often to be found in her lodgings (alongside the King Street Gate till 1663, and near the Holbein Gate thereafter), eating sweets and chatting. Winston S. Churchill is at pains to persuade us that:

Very likely she had known him from his childhood. Naturally she was nice to him, and extended her powerful protection to her young and sprightly relation. Naturally, too, she aroused his schoolboy’s admiration. There is not … the slightest ground for suggesting that the beginning of their affection was not perfectly innocent and such as would normally subsist between a well-established woman of the world and a boy of sixteen, newly arrived at the Court where she was dominant.³⁶

Much later in Marlborough’s life, when his enemies were anxious to do him whatever damage they could, the author of a scurrilous account of the court life of the period suggested that even at this stage Barbara Villiers aroused a good deal more than John Churchill’s admiration. We cannot be sure when his relationship with Barbara became more than neighbourly, and it may well be that things began perfectly innocently, as Winston S. Churchill suggests. But we can be sure of two things. Firstly, John Churchill was not simply one of the most attractive men of his day, but became an ardent lover whose correspondence with his wife testifies to a healthy sexual appetite, even if we cannot produce a respectable source for Sarah’s enthusiastic: ‘My Lord home from the wars this day, and pleasured me, his boots still on.’³⁷ Secondly, his relationship with Barbara did indeed blossom into an affair, and she was to bear him a daughter, also called Barbara, in July 1672.

To the Tuck of Drum

By that time, however, John Churchill had most certainly become a man of the world. It was common for young officers to serve on campaign or on warships of the fleet as volunteers, even if their own regiments were not involved. There is circumstantial evidence that in 1668–70 he served in the garrison of Tangier. Some contemporaries believed that either the roving eye of the Duchess of York or Churchill’s relationship with Barbara Villiers caused tension at court, and that ‘the jealousy of one of the royal brothers was the cause of his temporary banishment’. Archdeacon Coxe thought the story absurd, for Churchill was not away from court for long, and was, so Coxe argued, recalled by the Duke of York.³⁸

Tangier lay in a hollow under the hills of the Barbary coast in North Africa, and came under intermittent attack by local Moors, as cunning as they were cruel. In 1663 the governor, the Earl of Teviot, was killed when a hitherto-successful sortie pushed on too far and was swamped by superior numbers. In 1678 the Moors took two outlying forts, but in 1680 the beleaguered garrison sallied out to inflict such a serious defeat on the Moors that they were able to negotiate a truce that lasted four years. Yet it was clear that the place had no lasting value, and the 1683 mission led by Lord Dartmouth, with Pepys as his henchman, concluded that the city should be given up, and so it was, after the destruction of the Mole, built with much trouble and expense in a vain effort to turn the place into a usable port.

Tangier was hot and uncomfortable: when Pepys was there he was ‘infinitely bit by chinchies’, presumably the local mosquitoes, from whom he gained some refuge only by covering his face and hands before going to sleep. He hated the place. There was ‘no going by a door but you hear people swearing and damning, and the women as much as the men’.³⁹ The behaviour of the governor, Colonel Percy Kirke, appalled him.

I heard Kirke, with my own ears walking with him and two others to the Mole … ask the young controller whether he had had a whore yet, since he came into the town, and that he must do it quickly or they would all be gone on board the ships, and that he would help him to a little one of his own size … ⁴⁰

When a drunken soldier reeled into the governor as he walked in the street, Kirke simply said, ‘ “God damn me, the fellow has got a good morning’s draught already,” and so let him go without a word of reprehension.’⁴¹

Apart from a letter of 1707 in which he complained that Brabant in flaming June was as hot as the Mediterranean in August, we have no idea what Churchill made of the place. We do know, however, that there was fighting afoot, and it is reasonable to assume that his baptism of fire came in skirmishes under the walls of the city. In August 1671 Sir Hugh Cholmley described how:

[The Moors] lodge their ambushes within our very lines, and sometimes they killed our men as they passed to discover, which they continually do without any other danger than hazarding a few shots, whilst they leap over the lines and run into the fields of their own country. This insecurity makes men all the more shy in passing about the fields, and cannot be prevented but by walling the lines about.⁴²

Life was decidedly martial. The whole garrison paraded at seven or eight in the morning for an hour’s drill, after which guards were posted and duties allocated. The young Churchill would have grasped the essentials of his profession in a way that would scarcely have been possible with the staid finery of 1st Foot Guards in St James’s Park or at the Tower of London. In March 1670 Lord Castlemaine, Barbara Villiers’ husband, told Lord Arlington that he had great hopes that Tangier might become ‘a bridle for the pirates of Barbary’, and ‘neither is it a little honour for the Crown to have a nursery of its own soldiers, without being altogether beholding to our neighbours for their education and breeding’.⁴³

On 21 March 1670 Charles signed a document acknowledging that Sir Winston Churchill was still owed £140 for his work in Ireland, noting that Winston had given John precisely this sum ‘for & towards his equipage & other expenses in the employment he is now forthwith by our command to undertake on board the fleet in the Mediterranean sea’. Charles wished ‘to give all due encouragement to the forwardness of the early affections of John Churchill’, and ordered that Sir Winston’s arrears should be paid forthwith.⁴⁴ We can see from this that Sir Winston was yet again short of money, and that John Churchill was certainly not out of royal favour.

One of the illusory attractions of Tangier was that it might provide a base for putting pressure on the rulers of Algiers and Salee, whose enterprising corsairs ravaged trade in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and in 1687 even pushed up into the Channel, where they took two mail packets and carried a hundred passengers off into slavery. In 1669 Sir Thomas Allen blockaded Algiers, and he tried again in 1670; this time John Churchill was embarked with the fleet. The Lord High Admiral’s Regiment of Foot, its colonel James, Duke of York, had been formed in 1664, but other marine regiments were no sooner raised than disbanded: two had been sharply cut back after the humiliating Dutch raid into the Medway in 1667. In 1672 Prince Rupert raised a marine regiment for the Third Dutch War, but it was disbanded in 1674.

This meant that the task of providing marines to the fleet had to be shared out amongst the army’s infantry regiments, and normally every one of them had two of its companies embarked, rotating them from time to time. The soldiers provided unskilled labour (and no doubt much innocent mirth) during voyages, lined ships’ rails with their muskets in action, and could be sent ashore to destroy fortifications or harbour facilities. The practice seems to have been popular with sailors but less so with soldiers, not least because the army and navy ran incompatible accounting systems, leading to repeated difficulties over pay, allowances and rations.⁴⁵

Thomas Allen’s blockade of Algiers in 1670 was no more fruitful than his efforts the previous years. Indeed, it was to take another century and a half for the menace of Barbary pirates to be brought under control by repeated international action which, amongst other things, put ‘the shores of Tripoli’ into the US Marine Corps’ hymn. We cannot say whether John Churchill saw any action or not, and certainly he was back in England by 1671, when Sir Edward Spagge caught seven Algerine cruisers in Bougie Bay and burnt them all.

My Lady Castlemaine

Perhaps John Churchill and Barbara Castlemaine had already become lovers before he set off for Tangier, but more probably, as Winston S. Churchill suggests, it was his reappearance at Whitehall ‘bronzed by African sunshine, close-knit by active service and tempered by discipline and danger’ that did the trick. He certainly fought a duel with the future Lord Herbert of Cherbury at this time, getting run through the arm but pinking his opponent in the thigh. Whatever the reason for the fight, Churchill had the best of the propaganda. Sir Charles Lyttelton told a friend: ‘Churchill has so spoke of it, that the King and the Duke are angry with Herbert. I know not what he [Churchill] has done to justify himself.’⁴⁶

Barbara Castlemaine had a hearty sexual appetite. Even in her sixties, by then Duchess of Cleveland in her own right, she conducted what turned out to be a bigamous marriage with Robert ‘Beau’ Fielding. She had not lost her taste for elegant men. For his part Fielding hoped to marry money, somehow forgetting that he had recently wed a Mary Wadsworth, imagining her to be a wealthy widow called Mrs Deleau. He certainly did not help matters by sleeping with Barbara’s granddaughter Charlotte Calvert, and the furious duchess duly sued him for adultery, ensuring that his explicit love letters were read out in court and subsequently published.

By the time of John’s return to court Barbara Castlemaine had lost her place as the king’s acknowledged mistress. Charles had insisted on her appointment as lady of the bedchamber to Catherine of Braganza when she arrived from Portugal, warning: ‘Whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his enemy as long as I live.’⁴⁷ She played a leading role at court, formed an alliance of mutual self-promotion with Sir Peter Lely (some of whose impact upon English portraiture we have already seen), and bore the king several children: Anne (b.1661), Charles, 2nd Duke of Cleveland and 1st Duke of Southampton (b.1662), Henry, Duke of Grafton (b.1663, though the king seems to have harboured some reservations about his paternity), Charlotte (b.1664) and George, Duke of Northumberland (b.1665). Charles was fond of his children, and had Catherine of Braganza been able to give him any, this story might have been very different. ‘He loves not the queen at all,’ thought Pepys, ‘but is rather sullen to her, and she by all accounts incapable of any children.’ In contrast, ‘The king is mighty kind to these bastard children and at this day will go at midnight to my Lady Castlemaine’s nurses and take the child and dance it in his arms.’⁴⁸

By 1667 Barbara Castlemaine’s name had been linked with that of Henry Jermyn, courtier, dandy and successful property developer, and what one royal biographer calls Charles’s ‘generous affection’ had been warmly engaged by a maid of honour, Frances Stuart.⁴⁹ That year Barbara was rumoured to be pregnant, and demanded that the king acknowledge the child, but he protested that he had not slept with her for the past six months. There was also a court rumour that he had nearly caught her with Henry Jermyn, who ‘was fain to creep under the bed into her closet’ to avoid royal detection. In January 1668 the king’s affair with the actress Mary Davis was widely known, but although Lady Castlemaine moved out of Whitehall into Berkshire House, opposite St James’s Palace, bought for her by the king, she remained on good terms with Charles, who paid her frequent visits. Her lovers during this period seem to have included the rope-dancer Jacob Hall, the actor Charles Hart, the playwright William Wycherley and, last but not least, Ensign John Churchill.

She was definitively supplanted in the king’s affection by Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, in 1671–72, but succeeded, largely because of the king’s regard for his children, in retaining significant influence at court. She was created Duchess of Cleveland in 1670, and her boys were granted arms testifying to their royal connection. In 1676 she left for Paris, to oversee the education of her daughters, and on her return to England in 1682 she found that her former power had evaporated. An ill-starred affair with the actor Cardell Goodman, not long before the no less unlucky marriage to Beau Fielding, made her something of a figure of ridicule. She died of dropsy in October 1709.

Some of John Churchill’s biographers see his affair with Barbara Castlemaine as simply a young man’s dalliance with an attractive and experienced older woman, but there is much more to it than that. Castlemaine was strong-willed and hot-tempered, capable of telling Charles that she would bring a child ‘into Whitehall gallery and dash the brains of it out before the King’s face’ unless he acknowledged paternity. She was a major political figure, deploying her formidable interest against all who crossed her. Castlemaine was an implacable enemy of Lord Clarendon, who as lord chancellor repeatedly opposed the king’s largesse towards her. When he left Whitehall in disgrace he saw her with Arlington and Bab May ‘looking out of her open window with great gaiety and triumph, which all people observed’.⁵⁰

Her relationship with her kinsman George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was more changeable, and was enlivened by a public spat in 1668–69 when Buckingham engaged Lady Hervey to undermine Castlemaine, only to be decisively outmanoeuvred himself. She had declared her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1663, and favoured the French party at court, giving the French ambassador useful information on the attitude of the king and his ministers. Finally, she was a consummate accumulator of grants and pensions, and by 1674 she was worth, in theory, £12,000 a year. We should not concern ourselves with speculation about what Ensign Churchill might have learnt in the bedroom, though A.L. Rowse is doubtless right to call it ‘a very liberal education’, but he was certainly in a position to learn much about the manipulation of interest at court.⁵¹

Despite the family’s first successes after the Restoration, the Churchills were not well off, and John had not been able to buy promotion in the army. His relationship with Barbara changed all that. She gave him a present of £5,000, which he immediately converted into an annuity of £500 a year. The 4th Earl of Chesterfield, whose grandfather had been one of Barbara’s first lovers, benevolently attributed the gift simply to Churchill’s delightful manners and appearance.

Of all the men that I ever knew in my life (and I knew him extremely well) the late Duke of Marlborough possessed all the graces in the highest degree, not to say engrossed them; and indeed, he got the most by them, for I will venture (contrary to the custom of profound historians, who always assign deep causes for great events) to ascribe the better half of the Duke of Marlborough’s greatness and riches to those graces … while he was an Ensign of the Guard, the Duchess of Cleveland … struck by those very graces, gave him five thousand pounds, with which he immediately bought an annuity for his life, of five hundred pounds a year of my grandfather [the Marquess of] Halifax, which was the foundation of his subsequent fortune. His figure was beautiful, but his manner was irresistible, by either man or woman.⁵²

Others ascribe the gift to an occasion when Churchill’s quick-wittedness prevented embarrassment. He was in bed with Barbara when the king arrived, and immediately jumped out of her window and made off across the courtyard: thus the payment was less for services rendered in bed than for alacrity in getting out of it. A similar version of the story has the Duke of Buckingham, then at odds with Barbara, pay a servant £100 for information on the lovers’ next tryst, and ensure that the king called on her at the worst possible moment. After Barbara’s prevarication over lost keys, Churchill was discovered naked in her wardrobe, and both he and Barbara knelt to beseech the monarch’s forgiveness. ‘Go; you are a rascal,’ said Charles, ‘but I forgive you because you do it for your bread.’ Winston S. Churchill speculates that ‘It may be that the two stories are one, and that untrue.’ But there is nothing inherently improbable in the encounter, and the words are very much in Charles’s tone. Moreover, by this stage his relationship with Barbara had cooled to one of friendship for the mother of part of his extensive brood, and, a serial adulterer himself, he could be generous in accepting the infidelities of others.⁵³ Yet there is room to doubt just how far this generosity went in Churchill’s case, for we will see very shortly that he was in ‘the king’s displeasure’ at just this time.

Churchill never formally acknowledged his daughter with Barbara Castlemaine. She was styled Lady Barbara Palmer (for she was, in theory, an earl’s daughter, even if Roger Palmer did not actually sire any of his wife’s brood), though she was sometimes called Lady Barbara Fitzroy. However, Charles II never bestowed on her the surname which he gave to the acknowledged bastards that Barbara bore him, deliberately leaving her ‘without a token of royal bounty’. Her mother was either remarkably thick-skinned or had a broad sense of humour, because she took the child to Paris in 1676 and installed her in the Convent of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady in the rue Charenton. There, as the years went by, this witty and well-connected nun was visited by British travellers. Among them was James Douglas, Earl of Arran, heir to the Duke of Hamilton. Douglas had married Lady Susan Spencer in 1688, and John Evelyn thought him ‘a sober and worthy gentleman’. When he visited the convent in 1690 the lure of young Barbara, who had evidently inherited some of her mother’s temperament, proved too much for him, and she bore him a son, Charles Hamilton, on 20 March 1691. The boy (who took to styling himself the comte d’Arran) was sent off to live with his grandmother in Walpole House, Chiswick Mall, and Barbara ended her days as abbess of the Priory of St Nicolas in the Normandy town of Pontoise. James Douglas duly succeeded to his father’s dukedom, but was killed in that desperate duel with Lord Mohun.⁵⁴

The Dutch War

John Churchill’s affair with Barbara Castlemaine took place against a background of rising international tension. The Treaty of Dover had, as we have seen, bound Charles to support Louis XIV in his attack on the Dutch. Louis was characteristically pleased with himself in poising a mighty war machine over the heads of the Dutch. ‘After having taken precautions of all sorts,’ he wrote with his usual immodesty,

as much by alliances as raising troops, magazines, warships, and great sums of money … I made treaties with England, the Elector of Cologne, the bishop of Munster … also with Sweden, and to hold Germany in check, with the Dukes of Hanover and of Neuburg and with the Emperor … I made my enemies tremble, astounded my neighbours, and brought despair to my foes … All my subjects supported my intentions … in the army with their valour, in the kingdom with their zeal, in foreign lands with their industry and skill; France has demonstrated the difference between herself and other nations.⁵⁵

It is easy to be attracted by the splendour of Versailles, the spectacle of the French court, or the saga of Louis and his mistresses, and to forget just what a challenge this devout and opinionated monarch presented to Europe.⁵⁶ By invading Holland in the spring of 1672 he sought to improve upon the terms of the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle of 1668, which had given France useful gains on her northern frontier but had also left Dutch garrisons in Spanish-owned ‘barrier fortresses’ in an effort to restrict further French expansion. Louis’ apologists suggest that he launched the Dutch War in 1672 not simply because of ‘wounded pride or … insupportable arrogance’, though even they can scarcely deny a fair measure of both these commodities, but because France had good reason to control the ‘gates’ of the kingdom, especially Antwerp, and to achieve the ‘annihilation’ of the Dutch commercial fleet.⁵⁷

To do this he presided over a nation whose nobility was largely exempt from taxation, and where famines (long unknown in England) regularly killed tens of thousands: perhaps 800,000 were to die in the severe winter of 1709. Judicial torture, outlawed in England and soon to be abolished in Scotland too, was routine in French criminal investigations. A shocked John Evelyn watched a suspect who had refused to confess to theft racked, a process which ‘severed the fellow’s joints in a miserable sort, drawing him out at length in an extraordinary manner’. The victim then had two buckets of water poured down his throat ‘with a horn (just such as they use to drench horses with)’, but still denied his guilt. The affronted investigator told Evelyn that under these circumstances they could not hang the fellow, but could at least pack him off as a galley-slave, ‘which is as bad as death’.⁵⁸

The ‘affair of the poisons’, which diverted Louis’ court in the 1670s, eventually saw thirty-four people executed and almost as many sent to the galleys or banished. When the marquise de Brinvilliers was executed for widespread poisoning, after the customary tortures, the cultured Madame de Sévigné complained that the crowd around her pyre was so great that she had, disappointingly, only been able to catch a glimpse of the victim’s mobcap.⁵⁹ A sketch by Charles le Brun of the marquise on her way to execution shows a plump face exhausted by pain. Nancy Mitford suggested that Mme de Brinvilliers’ ‘appalling tortures’ were ‘probably no worse … than those she had inflicted’.⁶⁰ But one did not have to be a murderer to come to a bad end: a scurrilous cartoon of Louis’ equestrian statue in the place des Victoires, depicting the king being led in chains by four mistresses, earned hanging for the printer, the bookseller and, for good measure, the printer’s apprentice too.⁶¹

The republic which so affronted Louis was a federation of seven of the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries which had been under Spanish rule, and was governed by the States-General of the United Provinces, to which individual provinces sent delegates. The grand pensionary was its chief executive, and for some time successive ruling princes of Orange had been both stadholder (effectively an appointed constitutional monarch) and captain general. The British are fond of calling William of Orange, formally given both these offices in 1672, ‘Dutch William’. However, his principality of Orange was actually on the southern Rhône, his mother was Mary, daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, he had inherited some German blood from his grandfather William the Silent, French blood came through his maternal grandfather, Scots blood from his maternal great-grandfather, James I, and Danish blood through the latter’s wife, Anne of Denmark. If he was Dutch it was by birth, residence and the most passionate conviction. Some have hailed him as ‘the First European’, and it was certainly thanks in part to his efforts that Louis’ imperial dreams were to evaporate.

The first French attacks went unsurprisingly well, the Dutch frontier garrisons being overwhelmed with scarcely a shot fired. The Dutch government offered to make peace on generous terms, but Louis, beset by the blindness that so often afflicts dictators, rejected its offer. A riot in The Hague saw the grand pensionary, Jan de Witt, and his brother murdered by the mob, and now, under the determined leadership of William, the Dutch settled to their task. They opened their dykes, flooding thousands of acres of fertile land, and when the French began the systematic destruction of Dutch towns resistance only deepened.

If the Dutch had begun the war at a disadvantage on land, they enjoyed a comfortable supremacy over the French at sea, and this is what the Treaty of Dover was intended to counteract. Charles repudiated his debts by declaring a Stop of the Exchequer in January 1672, issued a Declaration of Indulgence, granting toleration to both dissenters and Roman Catholics, the following month, and looked forward to the French subsidies which would enable him to fight a war, and, so he hoped, strengthen his army, without needing to ask Parliament for funds. The English and French fleets met at Portsmouth in May, and then cruised round to the coast of Suffolk, hoping to bring the Dutch to battle and then land troops in Zealand.

Ensign Churchill’s company of 1st Foot Guards, one of those embarked on the fleet, was aboard the Duke of York’s flagship Prince. On 28 May the Dutch under Admiral de Ruyter found the Allies at anchor in Southwold Bay, expecting an attack, with the French in a single squadron on the south of the line and two English squadrons to the north, and the wind coming in from the east-north-east, giving the Dutch the advantage. When the Dutch came into sight, with sixty-four ships to the Allies’ eighty-two, the Duke of York led the English off northwards against the main body of the Dutch, but failed to make his intentions clear to the French, who sailed southwards and engaged the weaker Dutch vanguard.

The English lost their battle. Lord Sandwich, vice-admiral of the kingdom and Samuel Pepys’s patron, who commanded the leading squadron, was killed, and his flagship Royal James was burnt. Prince was in the thick of things, as Captain John Narborough tells us.

His Royal Highness went fore and aft in the ship and cheered up the men to fight, which did encourage them very much … Presently when [Captain] Sir John Cox was slain I commanded as captain, observing his Royal Highness’s commands in working the ship, striving to get the wind of the enemy. I do absolutely believe no prince upon earth can compare with his Royal Highness in gallant resolution in fighting his enemy, and with so great conduct and knowledge in navigation as never any general understood before him. He is better acquainted in these seas than many masters which are now in the fleet; he is general, soldier, pilot, master, seaman; to say all, he is everything that man can be, and most pleasant when the great shot are thundering about his ears.⁶²

Prince lost her captain and a third of her complement, and was so badly damaged that James shifted his flag to St Michael, and when she too was too badly mauled to serve as flagship he shifted it again to London. The French had done rather better, but there was a bitter dispute between two French admirals, and the whole episode was discouraging.

We might pause to consider how the battle reflected on James. That he had been brave is beyond question. But the fleet he commanded, drawn up in the expectation of battle, had been beaten, with loss, by a significantly inferior force. When he set off on the port tack with his two northernmost squadrons he did not order the French to follow. Perhaps, as the naval historian N.A.M. Rodger surmises, he might have thought it too obvious to suggest. However, it was his duty to have either agreed on a standard operating procedure or to have sent the appropriate signals. John Narborough became Rear Admiral Sir John Narborough soon after the action thanks to James’s patronage, and we can scarcely blame him for describing his patron’s behaviour in the best possible light. After the battle there was a disagreeable bout of ‘blame the foreigner’, and what was evidently a lost battle could be attributed to French negligence or cowardice. In fact James’s behaviour should not escape censure: one does not become a successful admiral simply by being brave.

Whatever the reasons for the defeat in Southwold Bay, it is evident that John Churchill, war hero or not, did not stand high in royal favour. On 25 October 1672 Sir Winston Churchill told the Duke of Richmond that:

My poor son Jack, that should have waited on Your Excellency thither, has been very unfortunate ever since in the continuation of the king’s displeasure, who, notwithstanding the service he did in the last fight, whereof the Duke [of York] was pleased to give the King a particular character, would not give him leave to be of the Duke’s bedchamber, although his highness declared he would not dispose of it to anyone else. He has been pleased since to let him have my cousin Vaughan’s company, but with confinement to his country quarters at Yarmouth.⁶³

The Lord Admiral’s Regiment had lost four of its captains at Southwold Bay, and on 13 June John Churchill was commissioned into one of the vacancies. This left the unlucky Lieutenant Pick, once his superior in his company of 1st Foot Guards, pressing Lord Arlington’s under-secretary for a captaincy, promising him £400 once his commission arrived, though there is no evidence that it ever did.

Captain John Churchill was now confined to his regiment’s garrison at Great Yarmouth, which was convenient for rapid embarkation aboard the fleet but rather less handy for access to the capital, and had been denied the post as gentleman of the bedchamber to the Duke of York. The inference is clear: Charles wanted him out of Whitehall. Barbara might no longer be the king’s favourite, but for a handsome young officer to get her with child was too much even for the merry monarch. Years later the Duchess of Portsmouth sent Churchill a rich snuffbox in memory of their (unspecified) association, and it is possible that the young cavalier had been fishing in forbidden waters again. Promoting Churchill out of the Foot Guards and into the Lord Admiral’s Regiment also made perfect sense, for the Lord Admiral’s was already warned for foreign service. Even so, John set off for the Continent well in advance of his regiment, and in June 1673 he was with the Duke of Monmouth’s party of gentleman volunteers, supported by thirty troopers of the Life Guards, in the trenches before Maastricht, besieged by Louis in person. There, a determined garrison disposed of a variety of ingenious contrivances which were a good deal more unpleasant even than the disapproval of Charles II.

The Imminent Deadly Breach

Fortification and siegecraft had a grammar of their own, which John Churchill was now beginning to learn. The military historian David Chandler has observed that during the period 1680–1748 there were 167 sieges to 144 land engagements in Europe, and the Earl of Orrery affirmed in 1677: ‘We make war more like foxes than lions; and you have twenty sieges for one battle.’⁶⁴ The high walls of medieval castles had offered but a poor defence against gunpowder, and this period saw the apogee of the new artillery fortification, the speciality of military engineers like the Frenchman Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban and his Dutch rival Menno van Coehoorn. The bastion, an arrow-shaped work jutting out from the main curtain wall of a fortress, was the key to the system. The cannon mounted on it could fire, from its flanking ramparts, along the wall and, from the ramparts on its angled faces, could sweep the gently-sloping glacis on the other side of the broad ditch protecting the brick or ashlar scarp, the wall which shored up the squat, solid mass of bastion and curtain. A ‘covered way’ enabled men to walk in safety along the top of the counterscarp, the wall which propped up the far side of the ditch, and a palisade of sharpened stakes protected the covered way against an enemy who might have fought his way up the glacis.

Outworks, like the half-moon-shaped demi-lune or ravelin, could be used to keep the attacker out of reach of bastion and curtain, and the hornwork, sometimes called a crownwork because of its spiky plan, might cover an attractive approach or an exposed suburb. A variety of ingenuity was employed to make life unpleasant for the attacker. Caponiers, hutch-like works whose name came from the Spanish for chicken house, sat smugly in the ditch, ready to blast storming parties who hoped to cross it. Tenailles were banks of earth rising up out of the ditch just in front of the curtain to prevent the attacker’s artillery pounding the base of the wall. Ditches themselves might be wet, which made it hard for attackers to mine beneath them, but were prone to icing over in the winter and were smelly in the summer. Or they might be dry, in which case they were often provided with countermine galleries sneaking off below the glacis in the hope of allowing the defending engineers to interrupt the attackers’ attempts at mining.

Faced with this intractable low-lying geometry, the attacker, having first ensured that he had his slow-moving battering train of siege guns to hand, would encircle the fortress, digging ‘lines of circumvallation’ to keep off raiding parties from the outside. At an early stage he would summon the fortress to surrender, but a cool-headed governor would usually reject such impertinence. When the Dutch were besieging Maastricht in 1676 the governor, Count Calvo, entered into the spirit of the witty exchanges that were common at this stage in the siege. George Carleton, then serving as a gentleman volunteer in the Prince of Orange’s Foot Guards, tells us that:

The governor, by a messenger, intimating his sorrow that we had pawned our guns for ammunition bread [the siege train was late in arriving], answer was made that in a few days we hoped to give him a taste of the loaves which he should find would be sent him into the town in extraordinary plenty … I remembered another piece of raillery which passed some days after between the Rhinegrave and the same Calvo. The former sending him word that he hoped within three weeks to salute the governor’s mistress within the place, Calvo replied that he would give him leave to kiss her all over if he kissed her anywhere in three months.⁶⁵

The attacker formally began the siege by ‘breaking ground’ (tranchée ouverte), commencing his first line of trenches facing the part of the fortress he planned to assail. From this ‘first parallel’ zig-zag saps were pushed out, until a second parallel could be dug; more sapping would lead to a third. While the attacker’s engineers were busy grubbing their way forward, cannon would be mounted just forward of the parallels to bring fire to bear on the chosen front. A clear bell-like ring announced a direct hit on the exposed muzzle of a defending cannon, probably sending it spinning from its carriage, to the discomfiture of its detachment. Eventually, having first sent gusts of grapeshot scudding up the glacis to weaken the palisade, the attacker would try to storm the covered way.

This is where grenadiers came into their own. The hand grenade, its name deriving from the Spanish for pomegranate, which the little projectile resembled, was carried by specialist infantrymen who wore crownless caps rather than the more common tricorn hats, which made it easier for them to sling their muskets across their backs, leaving both hands free to light the fuse on their grenade before hurling it. The process required strength and courage, and by this time grenadiers, usually recruited on the basis of one company in each battalion, were the elite of the infantry. Although grenades could be used in a variety of circumstances, it was in the attack on the covered way that they were indispensable. The song ‘The British Grenadiers’ describes the process perfectly.

Whene’er we are commanded to storm the palisades

Our leaders march with fusees and we with hand grenades

We throw them from the glacis, about our enemies’ ears,

Sing tow row, row, row, row, the British Grenadiers.

A good deal could go amiss long before the victorious grenadiers fell to ‘drowning bumpers’ and tow-row-rowing. A Scots grenadier, Private Donald McBane, was about to hurl his grenade over the palisades at Maastricht when it exploded

in my hands, killing several about me, and blew me over the palisades; burnt my clothes so that the skin came off me. I … fell among Murray’s Company of Grenadiers, flayed like an old dead horse from head to foot. They cast me into the water to put out the fire about me.⁶⁶

George Carleton was part of a ‘forlorn hope’ (two sergeants and twenty grenadiers, a captain and fifty musketeers, and then a party carrying empty sandbags) sent to rush a breach in one of Maastricht’s bastions. They got into the work well enough, but then:

One of our own soldiers aiming to throw one [grenade] over the wall into the counterscarp among the enemy, it so happened that he unfortunately missed his aim, and the grenade fell down again on our side of the wall, very near the person who fired it. He, starting back to save himself, and some others who saw it fall doing the like, those who knew nothing of the matter fell into a sudden confusion … everybody was struck with a panic fear, and endeavoured to be the first who should quit the bastion … ⁶⁷

There was, though, a silver lining to this dark cloud: an ensign in Sir John Fenwick’s Regiment was killed in the scuffle, and Carleton received the vacancy.

Once the grenadiers had duly taken the covered way, the attacker would ‘crown’ the spot with gabions, great wicker baskets filled with earth, and would then haul up his heavy guns to thunder out across the ditch at the base of the scarp. His gunners would try to adjust their fire so as to make a cannelure – a long groove – cutting through the retaining masonry, and eventually gravity would assert itself and the whole mass of scarp and rampart would tumble down into the ditch. To be deemed practicable for assault the breach had to be wide enough for two men to walk up it side by side without using their hands. The great Vauban would often check practicability himself, creeping forward after dark and scrambling back like some great earthy badger, muttering, ‘C’est mûre, c’est bien mûre.’⁶⁸

The establishment of a practicable breach was usually the sign for the defender’s drummers to beat the chamade, requesting a parley, or for the attacker to formally warn the governor that, with a practicable breach in his wall and assault imminent, he should give in at once to avoid a needless effusion of blood. If a town was taken by storm the attacking troops could not be expected to respect either the possessions of the inhabitants or the virtue of their womenfolk, and a sensible governor would make what terms he could, although usually the longer he left the negotiation the worse the deal he could expect. The garrison of a fortress taken by storm could expect no mercy, a practice designed to discourage pointless last-ditch defence and reflecting the very real difficulty of controlling maddened troops who had just come boiling into the town through a defended breach.

Of course there were variations to this theme. A fortress might be taken by a coup de main, perhaps with a group of picked men in civilian clothes making their way covertly into the place and then suddenly opening a gate to admit troops hiding just outside. In 1702 the Bavarians took Ulm by this method, but a subsequent Austrian attempt against Maubeuge miscarried when a French sentry beat a particularly sullen ‘peasant’ in a line of carts awaiting entry, only for the man (in fact an infantry major) to lose his temper and grab a musket from under the hay on his cart, killing the sentry but alerting the garrison. While the siege was in progress each side would drop mortar bombs onto the other, and sometimes a lucky hit on a magazine would end the struggle at a stroke: in 1687 the Venetian siege of the Acropolis at Athens was decided by two mortar bombs which caused extensive damage to the Parthenon, then used by the Turks to store gunpowder. Sorties might set back the progress of the siege by wrecking trenches and carrying off or breaking engineers’ tools; mines could engulf whole bastions and discourage even the stoutest governor, or either side might run out of food or water.

In general, though, a siege, as Captain Churchill was now beginning to discover in the trenches before Maastricht, was rather like a formal dance, in which everyone stepped out to a rhythm they understood, with engineers calling out the time and gunners providing the percussion. Vauban reckoned that the average siege, if there was such a thing, would run for thirty-nine days from tranchée ouverte to the attacker’s formal entry after terms had been agreed. In April 1705 Louis XIV gently reminded his governors that they were expected to put up a proper defence, not merely surrender on terms as soon as the outworks were lost:

Despite the satisfaction I have derived from the fine and vigorous defence of some of my fortresses besieged during this war, as well as from those of my governors who have held their outworks for more than two months – which is more than the commanders of enemy fortresses have managed when besieged by my arms; nevertheless, as I consider that the main defences of my towns can be held equally as long as the outworks … I write you this letter to inform you that in the circumstances of your being besieged by the enemy it is my intention that you should not surrender until there is a breach in the main body of the enceinte, and until you have withstood at least one assault … ⁶⁹

On the other side of the lines, Brigadier General Richard Kane commended Captain Withers of Calthorp’s Regiment, who in 1696, ‘being posted in a chateau with only six men’, faced the French off for several hours. When he saw that they were preparing to storm, he beat the chamade and received the same terms as much bigger garrisons which had surrendered without firing a shot. This ought to show officers, declared Kane,

that they be not too forward in delivering up places committed to their charge; nor yet too foolhardy in standing out till an attack is begun, for then it will be too late. I mean, the attacking a breach, or such works as may be easily carried, especially when there is not a considerable force to oppose.

In 1695 the Allied governors of Dixmude and Diest were court-martialled for premature surrender. Nobody expected ‘that they should stand a general assault, for the design … was only to keep the enemy employed as long as they could’. The Danish Major General Elnberger, governor of Dixmude, admitted that ‘a panic seized him, which he could not get over, nor account for’, and he was beheaded ‘by the common executioner of the Danish forces’ in November, after William of Orange had confirmed his sentence. He had served blamelessly for forty years until this single error of judgement cost him his life. The commanding officers who signed the capitulation with him lost their commissions, as did Brigadier O’Farrell, ‘a man of long service, who had always behaved well’ but had surrendered tiny Diest without even a show of resistance.⁷⁰

Besiegers had their own hierarchy, with a general of the trenches doing duty for a day at a time, assisted by a trench major to oversee daily routine. The French, with their British allies, opened their trenches before the Tongres gate of Maastricht on the night of 17–18 June 1673, and a week later they were ready to assault a hornwork and ravelin in front of the gate. The Duke of Monmouth was trench general that day, and his contingent took part in the assault: Captain Churchill, it was said, planted a colour on the ramparts of the outwork. The night was spent consolidating the captured position, and Monmouth’s men had scarcely retired to their tents after dawn the next day when the thud of a mine and an outbreak of firing announced that the governor, Jacques de Fariaux, a French gentleman in Dutch service, had mounted a sortie and recaptured the ravelin. Monmouth at once sent word to a nearby company of the French king’s Mousquetaires Gris, commanded by Charles de Batz de Castelmore, comte d’Artagnan, and set off hot-foot for the ravelin.

Colonel Lord Alington was an eyewitness to what happened next, as he told Lord Arlington.

After the duke had put on his arms [i.e. body armour], we went not out at the ordinary place, but leapt over the bank of the trenches, in the face of our enemy. Those that happened to be with the duke were Mr Charles O’Brien, Mr Villiers, Lord Rockingham’s two sons, and Capt Watson their kinsman, Sir Tho Armstrong, Capt Churchill, Capt Godfrey, Mr Roe and myself, with the duke’s two pages and three or four more of his servants, thus we marched with our swords in our hands to a barricade of the enemy’s, where only one man could pass at a time. There was Monsieur d’Artagnan with his musketeers who did very bravely. This gentleman was one of the greatest reputation in the army, and he would have persuaded the duke not to have passed that place, but that being not to be done, this gentleman would go along with him, but in passing that narrow place was killed with a shot in his head, upon which the duke and we passed there where Mr O’Brien had a shot through his legs. The soldiers at this took heart the duke twice leading them on with great courage; when his grace found the enemy begin to retire, he was prevailed with to retire to the trench, the better to give his commands as there should be occasion. Then he sent Mr Villiers to the king for 500 fresh men and to give him an account of what had passed. When those men came, the enemy left us without any further disturbance … Some old commanders say, this was the bravest and briskest action that they had seen in their lives, and our duke did the part of a much older and more experienced general, and the king was very kind to him last night.⁷¹

Fariaux was a wily campaigner, and had stood siege five or six times before. Louis, in overall command, noted that he ‘was used to dealing with narrow approach trenches which were untenable against the smallest sortie’ – which had probably encouraged his sortie against the Tongres gate outworks – but saw that he could not cope with Vauban’s new technique of moving forward in sweeping parallels ‘almost as if we were drawn up for a field battle’. Having secured the outworks in front of the Tongres gate the French allowed Fariaux to capitulate, and on 1 July his 3,000 survivors marched out with the honours of war – drums beating, colours flying, musketeers with their slow-matches alight and bullets in their mouths, and all ranks with their ‘bag and baggage’ – with safe conduct to the nearest Dutch garrison.⁷²

The Handsome Englishman

On their return to Whitehall at the close of the campaigning season that autumn Monmouth presented John Churchill to the king as ‘the brave man who saved my life’, which seems to have been instrumental in restoring him to royal favour. As succeeding events were to show, Monmouth was not the brightest of Charles’s bastards. Although Monmouth was the monarch’s eldest son, by the ‘actress’ Lucy Walter (who even Charles could not bring himself to ennoble), when Gilbert Burnet asked the king if it might not be wise to legitimise him and make him his successor instead of his Roman Catholic brother James, Charles ‘answered him quick that, well as he loved him, he had rather see him hanged’.⁷³ However, Monmouth’s approval strengthened Churchill’s hand. Barbara Castlemaine had borne him a daughter the previous summer and, we may conclude, was now helping him financially; the Duke of York, already favourably disposed to his former page and having an affair with his sister, had seen him fight bravely at Southwold Bay; and now Monmouth told his indulgent father that John Churchill had saved his life. This was interest in full spate, and it would have been astonishing had our hero not been swept onwards by it.

There was, though, a sudden faltering in the flood. Early in 1673 Charles had to summon his Parliament to ask it for money to fight the Dutch War. He found it in a predictably curmudgeonly frame of mind. The war and the French alliance were unpopular, and the Declaration of Indulgence, which Charles had issued by virtue of his royal prerogative, was seen (perfectly rightly, in view of what we now know of the Treaty of Dover) to be giving encouragement to Roman Catholics. Although Parliament was prepared to grant him funds for the war, it did so at the price of his withdrawal of the Declaration of Indulgence and, even worse from the royal standpoint, passed the Test Act. The Corporation Act of 1671 had already prescribed that all members of corporations, besides taking the Oath of Supremacy, were to take communion according to the rites of the Church of England. The Test Act compelled all office-holders, military or civil, to ‘declare that I do believe that there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’, and to take Anglican communion within three months. In 1678 the Act was extended, compelling all peers and MPs to make a declaration against transubstantiation and invocation of saints.

The Duke of York was an early casualty, and resigned all his offices. Prince Rupert headed the commission which took on his work as lord high admiral, and was already at sea with the fleet. He had failed to defeat the Dutch in two clashes in the Schoonevelt, and on 11 August his Allied fleet had the worst of a two-day battle against de Ruyter off Texel. Rupert had never much liked the French alliance, and lost little time in telling his countrymen what they already believed: that the French were useless at sea. Admiral d’Estrées had let him down, and the spectacle of d’Estrées blaming failure on his own second in command (who, in the great tradition of punishing the poorly-connected guiltless, was promptly clapped into the Bastille) made matters worse. The alliance was dead on its feet, but it was not until early 1674 that peace was made, although its terms allowed British troops who were serving as French-paid auxiliaries to remain on the Continent.

While all this was in progress the cabal fragmented, and by the end of the year Charles’s new chief minister was his lord treasurer, Sir Thomas Osborne, known to posterity, by the title he soon acquired, as the Earl of Danby. Parliament, irritated by James’s marriage to Mary of Modena, a Roman Catholic princess, and by the news of his conversion to Catholicism, debated a Bill for securing the Protestant religion by preventing any royal prince from marrying a Catholic without its consent. That summer Charles prorogued it, declaring that he would rather be a poor king than no king, and relying on the attentive Danby to improve his finances.

Charles had sent 6,000 men to France after the outbreak of the Dutch War, and after the conclusion of peace in 1674 much of this force remained in France, now under French pay and command, and connected with Britain only through recruiting. Its plight was made even more bizarre by the fact that the old Anglo-Dutch brigade in Dutch service, its members formally summoned back by Charles in 1672, was still soldiering on, with many of its British-born officers and men having become naturalised Dutchmen. There were awkward scenes in Brussels in 1679 when officers of the Anglo-Dutch brigade tried to find recruits amongst the British battalions that were then leaving for home after their stint in French service.

The British brigade sent to France in 1672 was commanded by the Duke of Monmouth, commissioned as a French lieutenant general, but, much as he enjoyed diverting scrambles like the siege of Maastricht, he exercised no overall command, for the regiments of his brigade were spread out across the Flanders and Rhine fronts. His colonels were, in consequence, very powerful men, and Robert Scott of the Royal English Regiment held his own courts-martial, appointed officers as he pleased, and happily swindled officers and men of their pay. Amalgamations and reductions were frequent, and in early 1674 Bevil Skelton’s Regiment was merged with the Earl of Peterborough’s Regiment to emerge as the 1st Battalion of the Royal English Regiment.⁷⁴ On 19 March 1674 a newsletter from Paris announced:

Lord Peterborough’s Regiment, now in France, is to be broken up and some companies of it joined to the companies that went out of the Guards last summer, and to be incorporated into one regiment, and to remain there for the present under the command of Captain Churchill, son of Sir Winston.⁷⁵

His colonelcy, of course, was French, and his English rank did not begin to catch up for almost another year, when he became lieutenant colonel of the Duke of York’s Regiment.

Much of the British brigade was destined to serve on France’s eastern borders against the German coalition forces of the Emperor Leopold I and the Elector of Brandenburg, whose entry into what had begun as a Dutch war reflected the way in which it was tilting out of Louis’ control. The French army on this front was commanded by Marshal Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne. Turenne was arguably the greatest captain of his age, and might have done even better during this war had it not been for his long-standing quarrel with the marquis de Louvois, Louis’ formidable war minister.

When Field Marshal Lord Wolseley wrote his biography of Marlborough more than a century ago, he concluded that Turenne had been ‘tutor in war’ to the young Jack Churchill.⁷⁶ We know that Turenne called him ‘the handsome Englishman’. There is also a story, widely repeated though without a reliable primary source to back it up, that, when a French colonel was forced back from a position, Turenne bet that Churchill, with fewer men under his command, would retake it: he won his money.⁷⁷

On 16 June 1674 Turenne fought the emperor’s army at Sinsheim, roughly midway between Philippsburg on the Rhine and Heilbronn on the Neckar. Both sides were roughly equal in numbers, and the Imperialists were strongly posted behind the River Breusch, on a slab of high ground. Turenne managed to turn both enemy flanks by making good use of unpromising terrain, getting his men onto the plateau by ‘a narrow defile on one side and a steep climb on the other’.⁷⁸ Even French sources suggest that it was the disciplined fire of the British infantry that checked the counterattacks of Imperialist cuirassiers.⁷⁹ The careful historian C.T. Atkinson noted that Churchill’s regiment was not present at the battle, but it is clear that both Churchill and his fellow colonel, George Hamilton of the Irish Regiment, accompanied Lord George Douglas, who had been sent off to reconnoitre with 1,500 musketeers and six light guns.

Serving as a volunteer, with no formal command responsibility, Churchill would have had the opportunity to see just how Turenne went about his business, and the French army, at around 25,000 men, was small enough for a well-mounted observer to follow its movements closely. The essence of Turenne’s success at Sinsheim was his swift reading of the ground to see what chance it gave him to get at the enemy, and the routes he selected had not been identified by the Imperialists as likely avenues of approach. The French commemorative medal for the battle bore the words Vis et Celeritas (vigour and speed), which might so easily have been Churchill’s own watchwords.⁸⁰

By the time that Turenne had moved south to fight the battle of Ensheim, on 4 October 1674, in weather which worsened from drizzle to a downpour, Churchill’s regiment was indeed present with the main French army. The fight hinged on possession of a little wood on the Imperialist left, eventually carried by the French, though with great bloodshed. Churchill’s men fought their way through it, overran a battery, and cleared the Imperialist infantry from ‘a very good ditch’ which they then occupied, obeying the orders of ‘M. de Vaubrun, one of our lieutenant generals’ to hold that ground and advance no further. ‘I durst not brag too much of our victory,’ wrote our young colonel, ‘but it is certain that they left the field as soon as we. We have three of their cannon, several of their colours and some prisoners.’ Louis de Duras (later Earl of Feversham) commanded a troop of Life Guards at that battle, and was eventually to assume command of the British brigade. He declared that ‘No one in the world could have done better than Mr Churchill could have done and M de Turenne is indeed very well pleased with all our nation,’ and Turenne’s official dispatch paid handsome tribute to Churchill and his men.⁸¹ In his report to Monmouth, Churchill recorded the loss of eleven of his twenty-two officers, but added that Monmouth’s own regiment of horse had fared far worse, losing its lieutenant colonel and almost all its officers killed or wounded, as well as half the troopers and several standards. He was anything but an uncritical admirer of Turenne’s, though, and admitted that ‘half our foot was posted so that they did not fight at all’.⁸²

On 5 January 1675 Turenne won the battle that decided the campaign. He pulled back from the Rhine near Haguenau, and allowed many of his officers (including Louis de Duras) to take leave in Paris, giving the impression that he had ended the campaign, for armies usually slunk into winter quarters in October and emerged from their hibernation in April. But in fact he swung in a long fish-hook march round the Vosges, through Epinal and the Belfort gap, to find his opponents relaxed in their winter quarters near Colmar – and what better place to relax, with so much of the golden bitter-sweet Gewürztraminer conveniently to hand? Although the Imperialists managed to rally and face him at Turckheim, he kept them pinned to their position by frontal pressure before sending an outflanking force through the rough country on their left. Turenne took the village of Turckheim after a stiff tussle in which British musketry proved decisive, and went on to drive his opponents from Alsace. In July that year Turenne was killed by a cannonball, a loss that France could ill afford.

The campaign certainly showed Churchill the crueller side of war. In the summer of 1674 Turenne’s men ravaged the Palatinate as they marched through it. This was done partly to obtain supplies and partly to prevent the Imperialists from obtaining them, but also, as Turenne told the Elector Palatine, who complained about the sufferings of his people, because the local populace attacked stragglers and isolated groups, murdering soldiers with the most appalling cruelty.⁸³ Turenne’s harsh treatment of the Palatinate was not on the same scale as the deliberate destruction of the whole area seven years later, on the specific orders of Louis XIV, but even so the damage was frightful. Archdeacon Coxe quotes a letter written to Churchill from Metz in 1711 in which the widow Saint-Just thanks him because ‘The troops who came and burnt everything around my land at Mezeray in the plain spared my estate, saying that they were so ordered by high authority.’⁸⁴

If there had been any doubts about where John Churchill stood in royal favour, his campaigning under Turenne resolved them. His English lieutenant colonelcy had materialised in early 1675, and three years later he was appointed colonel of one of the regiments of foot to be raised, not this time to support the French, but to help defend the Dutch: the realignment of English foreign policy was now complete. There is, though, no evidence that Churchill’s new regiment was ever actually formed. His colonelcy (carefully dated a day after that of George Legge, who was to be Pepys’s master on the Tangier mission) was simply a device to ensure that John Churchill had ‘precedence and pay equivalent to the very important work he was now called upon to discharge’. He had reached a key break in his career, and was striding out to bridge the narrow gap between soldiering and diplomacy: the young cavalier had come of age.

* In the seventeenth century the regiment’s ancestor, Hepburn’s Regiment, in French service, was in dispute with the Regiment de Picardie over the dates of their respective foundations. In the process, the Scots claimed to have been on duty when Christ was crucified.

2
From Court to Coup
Love and Colonel Churchill

John Churchill was in love. Sarah Jennings, the object of his affections, had been born on 5 June 1660, the week after Charles II returned from exile.¹ Her father, Richard Jennings, came from a family of Somerset gentry which had moved up to Hertfordshire and lived at Holywell House near St Albans. Richard’s father had been high sheriff of the county and MP for St Albans. He himself sat for the same constituency, and had supported John Pym, one of the leaders of the opposition to Charles I in the early days of the Long Parliament, but had later, as a member of the Convention Parliament, backed the return of Charles II.

Although Richard Jennings was in theory a wealthy man, with perhaps £4,000 a year from property in Hertfordshire, Somerset and Kent, his estates were encumbered with debt and he had many younger siblings who had to be provided for. Sarah was the youngest of five children, with two brothers and two sisters, and it may have been the strains of a large family and hopeless debts that drove her parents to split. She moved to London with her mother Frances, who sought (unavailingly) to rescue her dowry from the shipwreck of Richard’s finances. In 1673 Sarah followed her sister Frances into the household of the Duchess of York. Frances had served James’s first wife Anne Hyde until her death in 1671, and soon became a maid of honour to Mary of Modena. The comte de Gramont called her ‘la belle Jenyns’, who was as lovely as ‘Aurora or the promise of spring’. It speaks volumes for her determination that she resisted the Duke of York’s roving eye and busy hands, but remained on sufficiently good terms to get her sister a place in the household.

In 1668 Richard Jennings died, and Sarah’s mother, who inherited little but his creditors, moved into an apartment in St James’s Palace with her daughters. The scurrilous Mrs Manley, author of The New Atlantis, a Tory scandal-sheet, was later to accuse her of witchcraft. She was like ‘the famous Mother Shipton, who by the power and influence of her magic art had placed her daughter in the Court’.² There are too many contemporary complaints about Mrs Jennings for us to attribute them simply to political malice. She was certainly evil-tempered, may actually have been unhinged, and some suggested that she dabbled in the black arts and the procurement of that commodity most sought after by the court, pretty girls. In any case, the maids of honour were hardly above suspicion. Samuel Pepys grumbled that they bestowed their favours as they pleased without anyone taking any notice, and Frances and a friend once amused themselves by dressing up as orange sellers (a common cover for prostitution) and standing outside a playhouse to accost two gentlemen of their acquaintance. They were given away by their expensive shoes.

Sarah met John towards the end of 1675, and they began to dance together at balls and parties. Sarah had a blazing row with her mother at about this time, and eventually Mrs Jennings was ‘commanded to leave the court and her daughter in it, notwithstanding the mother’s petition, that she might have her girl with her, the girl saying she is a mad woman’. Theirs was a relationship which prospered only at a distance, and attempts at reunion regularly resulted in hot words. Some time after her marriage, after yet another furious argument in which she urged her mother to get into the coach and not freeze to death outside it, Sarah affirmed that ‘I will ever be your most dutiful daughter, whatever you are to me.’³

Just as John Churchill’s character was shaped by growing up in straitened circumstances, so Sarah’s was influenced by her own experience of poverty, genteel though it was, and by her inability to tolerate her mother’s company, however much both of them genuinely hoped that their next meeting would bury bad feelings for ever. We often pay out in adult life the coins we receive as children, and in Sarah’s tumultuous relationship with her mother we have a foretaste of her dealings with her own daughters. Sarah was certainly beautiful, not with the classical good looks of her sister Frances, but with that thin edge of imperfection that men often find even more attractive. She had long fair hair that she always made the most of, full, firm lips, a naturally pink complexion, and a nose that turned up, ever so slightly, at its tip.

Even at the age of sixteen she had unstoppable determination and a flaming temper. There is a great deal about Sarah Marlborough that is hard to admire, but the three centuries that separate us cannot dull the impact of this outspoken, uncontrollable and self-willed beauty. One can see why, once John Churchill had met her, he never thought seriously about marrying anybody else, and we can never practically separate John Churchill, soldier and politician, from John Churchill, husband and lover, nor usefully speculate on what he might or might not have become without Sarah. One incident throws their relationship into sharp perspective. When Marlborough was captain general of Queen Anne’s armies and one of the most important men in the kingdom, he entered Sarah’s dressing room to tell her that Sidney Godolphin, the lord treasurer, was going to dine with them. She was brushing a hank of her yellow hair over one shoulder and, furious at having her evening spoiled, seized a pair of scissors and cut it off, then flounced out in a fury. He picked up the severed tress, tied it up with ribbon, and kept it in his strongbox until he died. She found it there, and it broke her heart.

Some of the letters written during their courtship have survived. All are undated, most are from John to Sarah, and she herself assures us that the correspondence started when she was not more than fifteen. She told him to burn her letters, and he seems to have obeyed her, because the eight that survive are only copies. Sarah, in contrast, kept his letters and read them from time to time, and when she had only a year to live, wrote on one: ‘Read over in 1743 desiring to burn them, but I could not do it.’ His letters, in black ink and a slightly sloping hand, show all the symptoms of courtly love. ‘You are, and ever shall be, the dear object of my life,’ he tells her, ‘for by heavens I will never love anybody but yourself.’ In another he assures her:

If your happiness can depend upon the esteem and love I have for you, you ought to be the happiest thing breathing, for I have never loved anybody to the height I do you. I love you so well that your happiness I prefer much above my own; and if you think meeting me is what you ought not to do, or that it will disquiet you, I promise you I will never press you more to do it. As I prefer your happiness above my own, so I hope you will sometimes think how well I love you; and what you can do without doing yourself an injury, I hope you will be so kind as to do it – I mean in letting me see that you wish me better than the rest of mankind; and in return I swear to you that I never will love anything but your dear self, which has made so sure a conquest of me that, had I the will, I will not have the power ever to break my chains. Pray let me hear from you, and know if I shall be so happy as to see you tonight.⁴

He gave her presents. First she had a choice of two puppies, and then he sent her a waistcoat: ‘I do assure you there is not such another to be had in England.’⁵ From what we already know of Sarah we will not be surprised to hear that there were rows. ‘To show you how unreasonable you are in accusing me,’ he wrote, in a letter which still bears red seals and threads of green ribbon,

I dare swear you yourself will own that your going from me in the Duchess’s drawing-room did show as much contempt as was possible. I may grieve at it, but I will no more complain when you do it, for I suppose it is what pleases your humour … Could you see my heart you would not be so cruel to say I do not love you, for by all that is good I love you and only you. If I may have the pleasure of seeing you tonight, please let me know, and believe that I am never truly pleased but when I am with you.⁶

This correspondence dates from 1675–76, after John’s service under Turenne in Alsace and the Palatinate. However, it is hard to be sure of exact dates. Courtin, the French ambassador in London, had kept Louvois apprised of the goings-on at court, and when there was first talk of John Churchill commanding a French regiment, Louvois advised against it, arguing that Churchill’s real concern at that moment was ‘to give more satisfaction to a rich and faded mistress’ rather than to serve his own royal master, undoubtedly a reference to his relationship with Barbara Castlemaine. Some time later, Courtin reported that ‘Mr Churchill prefers to serve the very pretty sister of Lady Hamilton than to be lieutenant colonel of Monmouth’s regiment.’ In 1665 Frances Jennings had married Sir George Hamilton, Marlborough’s fellow colonel, who commanded the Irish Regiment until his death in action in 1676. Winston S. Churchill dates Courtin’s second letter to November 1676. It raises the question as to why Churchill might have been interested in being lieutenant colonel to Monmouth, at best a sideways move in the hierarchy, but it does suggest that he was now so heavily preoccupied with Sarah that he was unwilling to accept a full-time command appointment.⁷

Several things blocked the path of true love. First, John Churchill’s relationship with Barbara Castlemaine was common knowledge at court, and Courtin reported to Paris that Sarah’s parents had refused their consent to her marriage with John. This cannot be true, for Sarah’s father was long dead, but it may well reflect the opposition of Sarah’s mother. Next, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill were firmly against the union. They hoped that John would marry another of the maids of honour, Catherine Sedley, daughter and heiress to the wealthy Sir Charles Sedley. Her portrait suggests that she was by no means as attractive as Sarah (the attentive Courtin called her ‘very rich and very ugly’), and she certainly had a caustic wit. It may be that rumours linking her name with John’s were the reason for Sarah’s accusation in the last of his letters quoted above. Catherine eventually became yet another of James’s mistresses, though when Queen Mary reminded her of the fact after 1688 she riposted: ‘Remember, ma’am, if I broke one of the commandments with your father, you have broken another against him.’⁸

Mrs Manley, writing long after the event, with the intention of damaging the Marlboroughs’ reputation and making money, provided two alternative versions of how John ended his relationship with Barbara Castlemaine and married Sarah. The first has him provide a virile ‘body double’ who, his face concealed, tumbled the ever-ready Barbara, enabling a supposedly furious John to catch the lovers in flagrante. The second has Sarah replace Barbara in bed before one of John’s visits. This time the lovers are caught by Sarah’s mother, who insists upon marriage to save her daughter’s honour and promptly produces a priest. Both stories are wholly improbable. Barbara had enjoyed a long sexual relationship with John and borne him a child, so the story of the body double is scarcely convincing. The stage-managing of the second scenario would have been difficult: how did Sarah gain access to Barbara’s bed, and where were priest and mother concealed?

The truth of this blazing courtship may actually be gleaned from the surviving love letters. Sarah told John that: ‘If it were true that you have that passion for me which you say you have, you would find out some way to make yourself happy – it is in your power.’⁹ In other words, if he really loved her then he should marry her or end the relationship. This clearly failed to move him (perhaps his parents, at this very moment, were reminding him how Catherine Sedley’s fortune would secure his future), and in another letter Sarah warned him: ‘As for seeing you, I am resolved I never will in private nor in public if I could help it.’¹⁰ Things went from bad to worse, and the affronted colonel wrote to Elizabeth Mowdie, Sarah’s waiting woman:

Your mistress’s usage to me is so barbarous that sure she must be the worst woman in the world, or else she would not be thus ill-natured. I have sent a letter which I desire you will give her. It is very reasonable for her to take it, because it will then be in her power never to be troubled with me more, if she pleases. I do love her with all my soul, but will not trouble her, for if I cannot have her love, I shall despise her pity. For the sake of what she has already done, let her read my letter and answer it, and not use me thus like a footman.¹¹

Sarah responded that she had done nothing to deserve the sort of letter he had written her, and told him that it was entirely up to him whether or not he saw her, though she would be ‘extremely pleased’ if he decided against it.

The correspondence thundered on like the most obdurate battle between resolute opponents, with Sarah yielding nothing and John returning to the attack with as much determination. Even when they seemed to have agreed on marriage, John feared that the sudden reappearance of Sarah’s sister Lady Hamilton would wreck his plans; but Sarah assured him that he had nothing to fear if his intentions were honourable, and he should not worry that her sister’s arrival could ‘make any change in me, or that it is in the power of anybody to alter me but yourself’.¹² We know that John formally asked the Duchess of York to consent to the marriage, and we can presume that both Sarah’s mother and his own parents agreed.

Sir Winston had his own reasons for giving consent, just as he had for pressing the advantages of the Sedley connection. The old cavalier was broke again, and could survive only if John agreed to give up his inheritance so that Sir Winston could sell off some property to pay his debts. A Sedley marriage would have prevented the need for this, and if we need further evidence of the intensity of John’s love for Sarah it is that he was prepared to give up his family estate for her. Even Macaulay was reluctantly prepared to admit that he must have been ‘enamoured indeed’ to let so much money slip past him. True, their poverty was relative, for he had his army pay and the £500 a year interest on the ‘infamous wages’ he had received from Barbara. Moreover, Mary of Modena had been charmed by the couple, and with her interest firmly engaged they married, probably in her apartments, in the winter of 1677–78. Colonel and Mrs Churchill could not afford to buy a suitable house, so they stayed in his lodgings in Jermyn Street (five doors along from St James’s, not far from where Wilton’s restaurant now dispenses its matchless Dover Sole) when he was in London, and she spent a good deal of time in Dorset with Sir Winston and Lady Churchill. Although her circumstances were not precisely the same as those in which her husband had grown up, it is not hard to see how the episode helped sharpen her desire to make money.

John Churchill, a full colonel in the English army from early 1678, was now a senior liaison officer, his tasks part-military and part-diplomatic, negotiating with the Dutch about arrangements for accommodating the British troops who were now on their way to Flanders to fight against the French as a result of the English government’s political realignment. He was very much in the Duke of York’s mind, and enjoyed a measure of devolved authority. In April that year the Duke of York told William of Orange, concerned about a French attack on Bruges, held by four British battalions, that ‘Churchill will speak to you more at large about it.’ Churchill was well aware that although the majority of Englishmen, and indeed the Duke of York himself, were in favour of vigorous prosecution of the war, the king himself was not.

In September 1678 he was back in Flanders, this time as a brigadier of foot, his command consisting of two battalions of foot guards, and a battalion each of the Holland, the Duchess’s and Lord Arlington’s regiments. However, he knew that peace negotiations were under way at Nijmegen, and doubted if he would actually get into action. ‘You may rest satisfied that there will be certain peace in a very few days,’ he told Sarah.

The news I do assure you is true; therefore be not concerned when I tell you that I am ordered over and that tomorrow I go. You shall be sure by all opportunities to hear from me, for I do, if possible, love you better than I ever did. I believe it will be about the beginning of October before I shall get back, which time will appear like an age to me, since in all that time I shall not be made happy with the sight of you. Pray write constantly to me. Send your letters as you did before to my house, and there I will take order how they shall be sent off to me. So, dearest soul of my life, farewell.

My duty to my father and mother and remember me to everybody else. Tuesday night. My will I have here sent you for fear of accident.

Sarah later endorsed the letter: ‘Lord Marlborough to ease me when I might be frightened at his going into danger.’¹³ Her sister’s husband, George Hamilton, had been killed in action, and she knew that status was no guarantor of safety.

Politics, Foreign and Domestic

John was perfectly right about the peace. The Treaty of Nijmegen ended Louis’ Dutch War. If he fell short of his aim of ‘annihilating’ the Dutch, Louis had improved his position along the frontier with the Spanish Netherlands, annexed Franche-Comté, and made important gains in Lorraine. Moreover, although Europe was to remain at peace for the next ten years, during this time Louis strengthened his hand by a variety of means. Some territories were declared to be réunis à la couronne, often on flimsy legal pretext; others were purchased from local rulers anxious to deal soon rather than fight later, and still others were simply occupied. Of special importance were Strasbourg, and its bridgehead Kehl, just across the Rhine, gateway into the Empire, and Casale on the Po, bought from the Duke of Mantua, on the edge of the Spanish-held Duchy of Milan. The industrious Vauban busied himself remodelling captured fortresses, and laying out his pré carré, a double line of strongholds, on the northern frontier. Although the army was reduced after the peace, thirty-six battalions were ready for immediate service and cadres were kept in place to aid rapid expansion. Louis believed that his ambitions had been checked temporarily, not halted for ever, and at once began to use diplomacy in an effort to dismantle the hostile coalition before he tried again. His interventions in English politics were designed to break the link between England and Holland. Nijmegen was not really a peace, more a ten years’ truce.

The historian Keith Feiling affirmed that the Earl of Danby’s four years in office were ‘the most constructive of the reign, illustrating the forces which, beneath the surface of faction, were making a real advance’.¹⁴ Danby did wonders for the English royal finances, and helped lay the foundations of a civil service, with Samuel Pepys rebuilding the fleet and William Blathwayt bringing the beginnings of order to the administration of the army. The foundation of the Royal Hospitals at Chelsea and Kilmainham, in 1682 and 1684 respectively, showed that the nation was beginning to glimpse the debt it owed to its soldiers, though to this day it has never recognised it fully.

Danby was close to being a real prime minister, and based himself on support in a carefully-managed Parliament, where interest was slapped on with a trowel, and in the wider nation. But if he could usually push through the king’s business, he could not prevent politics from becoming rancorously factional, and the terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ date from about this period. The Whigs were named after the radical kirk faction in Scotland, the word itself deriving from the shout of whiggam used by drovers to hasten their horses. A Tory was an Irish outlaw, for it was alleged that the Duke of York relied for his support on Irish papists.

Louis may not have beaten the Dutch, but he certainly did for Danby. The ink was no sooner dry on the Treaty of Nijmegen than the Whigs, fearing that Charles would use his army to enforce Catholicism at home, demanded its disbandment. Danby’s opponents Shaftesbury and Russell were liberally provided with French gold and used it to buy votes, while the French ambassador helped them discredit Danby by demonstrating that, for all his anti-French and Protestant rhetoric, he had actually been receiving French subsidies. It was the end of Danby, at least for the moment: he was impeached for intriguing with foreign powers and imprisoned in the Tower, where he remained till 1684, when Charles granted him a pardon.

The fall of Danby was subsumed within a greater crisis. In September 1678 a clergyman turned adventurer named Titus Oates revealed details of a ‘Popish Plot’ to murder the king and install the Duke of York in his place. Some fragments of truth seemed to make the rest of the story credible, and a new Parliament met in 1679 in a mood of Protestant hysteria. Charles tried to govern through a council that now included Monmouth and the opposition leaders. It produced a plan designed to limit the powers of a Catholic monarch, but the Commons went further, and drew up a Bill to exclude James from the succession. Monmouth, ‘our beloved Protestant Duke’, was the darling of the opposition: he hinted that there was a ‘black box’ whose contents proved that Charles had married his mother in exile. Charles’s latest mistress, Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, was seen as further evidence of francophilia at court, and when Nell Gwyn was held up by the mob at Oxford in 1681 she went straight to the crowd’s heart by yelling: ‘Pray, good people, be civil. I am the Protestant whore.’

The Popish Plot and the Exclusion crisis dominated politics till 1683, and there were times when it did indeed seem as if ‘’41 is come again’. Charles weathered the storm because of his courage and sharp political acumen, so often cloaked in indolence or the pursuit of pleasure. The Earl of Ailesbury thought that the king ‘knew men better than any that hath reigned over us, and when he gave himself time to think, no man ever judged better of men and of things’.¹⁵ Although Charles may be censured for letting innocent men face a traitor’s death when he knew them to be guiltless, perhaps their lives were the price he paid for his throne. In 1681 he deftly summoned a new Parliament to the old royalist stronghold of Oxford, broke the back of the opposition, and dissolved Parliament: he did not summon another. A supportive public reaction enabled him to attack some of his most prominent opponents, and the fictitious Popish Plot was replaced, in 1683, by real attempts on his life. The Earl of Shaftesbury, the most dangerous of the opposition leaders, fled abroad, and the discovery of the Rye House conspiracy to murder Charles and his brother on their way back from Newmarket races saw the Earl of Essex kill himself in the Tower and Lord Russell leave it to be beheaded on Tower Hill.

None of this was comfortable for John Churchill, and we must now see how his own career flew in these gusty winds. He had been made gentleman of the bedchamber to the Duke of York in 1673, and master of his wardrobe in 1679. He and Sarah were too firmly linked to the Yorks not to share the battering they took, and in 1679 they joined James, judiciously exiled by his brother, first in The Hague and then in Brussels, where they lived in the same house that had been occupied by Charles before his restoration. James began to make plans to settle there indefinitely, first calling for his fox-hounds and then for his daughter, Princess Anne. When Charles fell ill that autumn his advisers felt that James should be on hand in case he died, and Churchill, in England at the time, was sent to bring him over. No sooner did they arrive than Charles recovered, and his advisers now determined that James should return to Brussels.

John, in the meantime, was sent to Paris to further negotiations for a subsidy from Louis, which would help Charles survive without calling another Parliament, and thus reduce the risk of an Exclusion Bill being passed. He was authorised to tell the French that his master would henceforth support the interests of Louis, and apologise for his support for William of Orange, not least for letting his daughter Mary marry the man. The negotiations failed because Louis would not offer sufficient money, for he was doing perfectly well in suborning the opposition, and John was soon back with his master in Brussels. But James had had enough of the place, and obtained his brother’s leave to live in Scotland. He travelled to London, and then went overland to Edinburgh, taking thirty-eight days for the journey. John accompanied him, but Sarah, heavily pregnant, stayed behind in their Jermyn Street apartment.

They corresponded fondly. John unsuccessfully begged Sarah not to let her sister Frances marry a former suitor, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Talbot, an Irish Roman Catholic gentleman who had the character-forming distinction of having escaped from Drogheda when Cromwell stormed the place in 1649, and was himself caught up on the fringes of the Popish Plot. James later made Dick Talbot Earl of Tyrconnell and his viceroy in Ireland, and with the defeat of the Jacobites the Tyrconnells went into exile.¹⁶ Lady Tyrconnell makes one more brief entry on history’s stage. When James was beaten by William of Orange on the Boyne in 1690 he rode hard for Dublin, where Frances congratulated him on arriving so well in advance of his men, and offered him food. He replied that after such a breakfast he had no stomach for his dinner.

When James was summoned south by his brother in early 1680 John went with him, and urged Sarah to:

Pray for fair winds, so that we may not stay here, nor be long at sea, for should we be long at sea, and very sick, I am afraid it would do me great hurt, for really I am not well, for in my whole lifetime I never had so long a fit of headaching as now: I hope the red spots of the child will be gone against I see her, and her nose straight, so that I may fancy it be like the mother, so I would have her be like you in all things else.¹⁷

They were destined for cruel disappointment, for little Harriet (or Hariote, as her delighted father spelt her name) died in infancy, whether because those red spots were harbingers of something sinister, or for one of a dozen other reasons we cannot say.

James spent the summer of 1680 in London, and Charles hoped that he might be able not to order his brother into exile again. The Duke of York’s uncertain future made it hard for him to secure an appointment for his young protégé. Although the governorship of Sheerness, command of the Lord Admiral’s Regiment, and even the post of ambassador to France or Holland were spoken of, James was determined not to be separated from Churchill if he went into exile again. He was right to be concerned, for Charles feared that a new Parliament, due to meet on 21 October, would prepare a second Exclusion Act, and might even impeach his brother. The council was divided in its opinion, and James himself was all for facing down the opposition, and blamed the Earl of Halifax and the Duchess of Portsmouth for recommending his departure, but he reluctantly heeded his brother’s command to go back to Scotland. This time the Churchills could go north together, and they reached Leith after five days’ voyage.

James was not simply exiled to Edinburgh but was, by virtue of letters patent which John Churchill brought up to him in June 1681, the king’s commissioner in Scotland and effectively its viceroy. He had arrived in the aftermath of a rising by Covenanters, Lowland opponents of the episcopacy which had returned to Scotland with the Restoration. Monmouth had beaten them decisively at Bothwell Bridge near Glasgow in June 1679, doing much for his own reputation south of the border, but not snuffing out their resistance, which remained especially strong in the south-west. Many leading Covenanters fled to Holland, where they joined English opposition leaders who had escaped Charles’s reassertion of his authority, and, ironically, were soon joined by Monmouth himself, exiled at last by his exasperated father.

James persevered in the persecution of the Covenanters, often using Catholic highlanders as his chosen instruments, and there are those who see in his policy in Scotland in 1681–82 a foretaste of what he would have done in England after 1685 had he been given the chance. Judicial torture was still legal in Scotland, although it had to be authorised by the council. Gilbert Burnet, no unbiased critic, suggested that while most members of the council would have avoided watching a man being ‘struck in the boots’, as wedges were hammered in between an iron boot and his foot, James observed the process with ‘unmoved indifference’. The martyrology inevitably generated by this sort of conflict inflated some of the atrocities committed by the government and its supporters, but there is no doubt that some of James’s adherents plied boot, thumbscrews and smouldering cord with inventive zeal.

Churchill’s attitude to James’s policy in Scotland at this time helps us understand the process which was to lead to his decisive breach with his patron in 1688. James was anxious to be permitted to return to England, and early in 1681 sent Churchill to London to urge Charles not to allow Parliament to sit, to make an alliance with France, whose resultant subsidy would enable him to rule without Parliament, and then to summon him homewards. Churchill did his best for his master, but made it clear that he did not support James’s blustering threats to raise Catholic Scots and Irish to support him, which, after all, was precisely what many of his English opponents expected him to do.

When she was an old woman, Sarah recalled how much she and her husband had hated the persecution of the Covenanters.

I have cried at some of these trials, to see the cruelty that was done to some of these men only for their choosing to die rather than tell a lie. How happy would this country be if we had more of these sort of men! I remember the Duke of Marlborough was mightily grieved one day at a conversation he had heard between the Earl of Argyll … and the Duke of York. The Duke of Marlborough told me he never heard a man speak more reason than he [i.e. Argyll] did to the Duke and after he had said what he at first resolved, the Duke would never make an answer to anything, but ‘You shall excuse me, my Lord, You shall excuse me, my Lord,’ and continued so for a long time … I remember the Duke of Marlborough told me when we were in Scotland, there came a letter from Lewis the Grand to the Duke of York, writ by himself; which put all the family [i.e. household] into a great disorder, for nobody could read it. But it was enough to show that there was a strict correspondence between the Duke and the King of France.¹⁸

We must be cautious about accepting Sarah’s recollections at face value, for she could see, just as well as we can, how evidence of John’s growing concern at James’s policy might mitigate his action in 1688.

Yet her words cannot be brushed aside as the mutterings of a partisan octogenarian, for they are corroborated by those of John himself. James’s chief advisers at this time were Churchill, George Legge, later Lord Dartmouth, and the Duke’s brother-in-law Laurence Hyde, later Earl of Rochester.¹⁹ All agreed that James’s position would be much improved if he would consent to attend Anglican service, and the Earl of Halifax, the most supple of Charles’s ministers, warned that unless James complied ‘his friends would be obliged to leave him like a garrison one could no longer defend’. In September 1681 Churchill told Legge that they had failed to persuade James. ‘You will find,’ he wrote glumly, ‘that nothing is done in what was so much desired, so that sooner or later we must all be undone … My heart is very full, so that should I write to you of the sad prospect I fear we have, I should try your patience.’²⁰

James soon found himself in conflict with the Earl of Argyll, who made his feelings clear by opposing a clause in the Scottish Test Act which sought to exempt members of the royal household from taking the Protestant oath of allegiance. Argyll swore the oath of allegiance himself, but qualified it by adding ‘so far as is consistent with the Protestant religion’, and went on to put his objections to the Test in writing. In December 1681 he was tried for treason, and James helped ensure that he was condemned to death. Churchill wrote at once to James’s private secretary Sir John Werden, an old friend, urging that James should show mercy, and received a hopeful reply: ‘now (in regard to your old friendship, which you put me in mind of) I hope he will have the King’s pardon and the effects of his bounty, and hereafter in some measure deserve both’.²¹ Argyll escaped from Edinburgh Castle shortly afterwards, and Churchill wrote at once to George Legge, hoping that the escape would not be taken too seriously. It was certainly not in the government’s interest to execute Argyll, for a treason conviction meant that his lands and hereditary jurisdictions were already forfeit. But now, in the Low Countries with so many of the opposition leaders, he was another of James’s embittered opponents, and when Monmouth rose against James II in 1685 he led a rebellion in the western Highlands but was speedily captured and, this time, beheaded.

As early as 1681 Churchill grasped the essence of what would eventually ruin James. He was usually physically courageous and, as a recent biographer observes, ‘had high standards of honour and integrity, from which he deviated only rarely’.²² Yet the Earl of Ailesbury, who risked life and fortune for James, wrote that Charles II ‘was a great master of kingcraft and I wish to God that his royal father and brother had been endowed with the same talent and for the same motives’. James, he thought, ‘wanted for nothing but the talent of his royal brother’.²³ His religious conviction hardened moral courage but dissolved pliability, and as king he was to display ‘political incompetence’ laced with ‘sheer bad luck’.²⁴ Ultimately he lacked judgement, and those who, like John Churchill, owed their rise to his patronage, feared even before he ascended the throne that his fall would eventually encompass their own. James was impossible to steer, and much later, in the draft of a memoir ghosted by Gilbert Burnet, Sarah argued that he had been undone by flattery: ‘I saw poor K James ruined by this that nobody would honestly tell him of his danger till he was past recovery: and that for fear of displeasing him.’²⁵

James was allowed to return to England in the spring of 1682, and set off from Leith for Yarmouth on 4 May, with Churchill among his entourage. Sarah remained in Edinburgh. On 19 July 1681 she had given birth to a daughter, Henrietta, who was baptised at St Martin-in-the-Fields on the twenty-ninth, and then left in Jermyn Street in the care of a nurse. John Churchill had not yet seen her. After a stormy four-day voyage they arrived in Yarmouth, and went by road to Norwich and thence to Newmarket, where Charles was enjoying the horseracing. While they were there John wrote to tell Sarah, still in Edinburgh, that he had just received a letter from London saying that Henrietta was very well. ‘Everybody seems to be very kind to the Duke,’ he added, hoping that his recall would be permanent, enabling the Churchills to move back to London. Indeed it was. Charles asked his brother to return to Scotland, wind up his affairs there and return with his wife and youngest daughter, Anne.

The ducal party sailed from Margate on the frigate Gloucester on 4 May accompanied by a small squadron, including the yacht Catherine with Samuel Pepys aboard: he had hoped to sail with the duke but the cramped conditions aboard Gloucester made this impossible. Early on the morning of their second day at sea, while most of the passengers were asleep, Gloucester struck the sandbank known as Lemon and Ore off Cromer on the Norfolk coast. After hanging on to the sandbank for some time she slipped off into deep water and sank almost immediately. The ship’s pilot, Captain Ayres, was court-martialled and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment for negligence, and Pepys told his old associate Will Hewer that Ayres was doubly guilty because ‘Sir John Berry, his master, mates, Col Legge, the Duke himself’ had all agreed that the squadron should stand out further from the land. Although the sea was calm and there were ships in close company, there may have been as few as forty survivors from perhaps three hundred passengers and crew.

The loss of the Gloucester was soon politicised. Some, of a Tory persuasion, maintained that James did his best to save the vessel, and Sir John Berry, the vessel’s captain, affirmed that his sailors were so devoted to the duke that ‘in the midst of their affliction and dying condition [they] did rejoice and thank God that his royal highness was preserved’. Others, of a more whiggish view, had James leading the rush for the only available lifeboat, shouting, ‘Save the dogs and Colonel Churchill.’ Gilbert Burnet, in this latter camp, wrote:

The Duke got into the boat: and took good care of his dogs and some unknown persons who were taken, from that earnest care of his, to be his priests: the long boat went off with very few in her, though she might have carried off above eighty persons more than she did. One hundred and fifty persons perished, some of them men of great quality.²⁶

Lord Ailesbury, writing from the opposite viewpoint and with personal knowledge of many of the key players, also thought things were mishandled: ‘The Duke went into the shallop, calling out for Churchill, he being so greatly in favour.’ Ailesbury agreed that the boat could certainly have taken more passengers. Thomas Jermy, foot huntsman to the duke, managed to creep under the stern seat where he lay doggo and was mistaken for baggage. When the oarsmen discovered him they were so furious that they would have thrown him overboard had James not interceded.²⁷

Samuel Pepys was an eyewitness, and saw that the one available boat, which had been taken astern below the windows of the duke’s cabin, was sent off with the duke and John Churchill in her ‘to prevent his being oppressed with men labouring their escapes’. George Legge told his son that there had certainly been avoidable delay. He had pressed the duke to get into the boat, but James first argued that he needed to stay to help save the ship, and then ordered his heavy strongbox to be loaded. The resolute Legge, who had been responsible for getting the boat round to the ship’s stern, bluntly asked James what the box might contain that could possibly be worth a man’s life, and James replied that he would rather hazard his own life than lose the box. Eventually only a few of the duke’s closest adherents got into the boat, and it is unlikely that there were many priests amongst them: Father Ronché, the queen’s almoner, swam for his life and found a plank to cling to. There may indeed have been dogs in the lifeboat, but we know that at least one went overboard, for the duke’s physician, Sir Charles Scarburgh, found himself earnestly disputing the possession of a plank with the creature Mumper (evidently not a King Charles spaniel, but something of a more martial stamp), who was eventually rescued.

Sarah, commenting on Thomas Lediard’s biography of her late husband, recalled that John had

blamed the Duke to me excessively for his obstinacy and cruelty. For if he would have been persuaded to go off himself at first, when it was certain the ship could not be saved, the Duke of Marlborough was of the opinion that there would not have been a man lost. For though there was not enough boats to carry them all away, all those he mentions were drowned by the Duke’s obstinacy in not coming away sooner.²⁸

Sarah remembered that John had told her that the duke had given him his sword to prevent the boat from being stormed by panic-stricken men, and Sir John Berry agreed that Churchill had kept the boat free from intruders.

James himself told William of Orange that ‘considering the little time the ship was above water after she struck first’, the loss of life might reasonably have been greater, and if he had known that Ayres had survived the wreck he would ‘have been hanged up immediately, according to the custom of the sea’. Some other accounts emphasise that there was a delay between first impact and sinking, and if this is so one might conclude that James’s hesitation prevented more passengers from getting aboard the lifeboat, and his insistence that the ship might yet be saved probably delayed the issuing of an early order to abandon her. However, we cannot be certain how long Gloucester remained on the sandbank before slipping to her doom. Winston S. Churchill, with his own reasons for emphasising the delay, suggests that it was ‘about an hour’, but Sir John Berry, an eyewitness, though with a reputation at risk, recalled how ‘for a moment or two she beat upon the sands; then a terrible blow knocked off her rudder and tore her side open’.²⁹

The loss of life was certainly not all James’s fault: more seamen and passengers might have survived had they been able to swim. The tubby Sir John stayed on his quarterdeck until the vessel sank, and then swam to the Happy Return, which had anchored just short of the sands. The duke’s equerry Edward Griffin saved himself by clinging to a chicken-coop, and the Marquis of Montrose was hauled from the sea into James’s boat. Among those lost were Lords Roxborough and O’Brien and a number of gentlemen, including Laurence Hyde’s brother James, the ship’s lieutenant, and it was this loss of genteel life (almost like a microcosm of the Titanic) that struck contemporaries. Pepys was ‘sensible of God’s infinite mercy’, for he had no doubt that he would have drowned had he been aboard Gloucester: ‘For many will … be found lost as well or better qualified to save themselves by swimming than I might have been.’³⁰ James ordered donations to the widows and orphans of the drowned seamen, but there can be no doubt that the episode had done little to enhance his status in the eyes of many of those close to him.

The duke and his party set off for England aboard the aptly named Happy Return on 15 May. The journey was an unpleasant one for Mary of Modena, so heavily pregnant that she had to be hoisted aboard in a chair-lift. The homeward voyage took twelve days, and it may be that its discomfort contributed to the premature birth of Charlotte Mary, who lived only till October. Just over a month after her death, on 21 December 1682, John was rewarded for his services with the barony of Churchill of Aynmouth in the peerage of Scotland. This made him a Member of the Edinburgh Parliament, which then sat in the great hall known as the Parliament House off the High Street. There the three estates, nobles, barons and burgesses, debated and voted together as a single chamber.³¹ In view of Churchill’s work over the past three years the grant of a Scots peerage was not as puzzling as it might seem. Although it was not of as much practical value as a seat in the English House of Lords, it was certainly more dignified than an Irish peerage, proverbially the cheapest coinage available to reward supporters of the government.

Domestic Bliss, Public Prosperity

Lord and Lady Churchill settled in Holywell House, Sarah’s family home near St Albans. John’s income – now increased by his appointment to the virtual sinecure of command of the Third Troop of Life Guards on £1 a day – had been sufficient to enable him to buy Frances Tyrconnell’s share of the Jennings family home in 1681, and three years later the Churchills demolished the old house and built a new one, with elegant gardens and fish ponds. It was their favourite home. Sarah said in 1714 that however ordinary it might be, she would not part with it for any she had seen on her travels, and on St George’s Day 1703 John wrote whimsically to her that: ‘This being the season I hear the nightingales as I lie in my bed I have wished them with all my heart with you, knowing how you love them.’³²

Churchill resumed court life with enthusiasm. Charles had long forgiven him for his affair with Barbara Castlemaine, and he was now one of the king’s regular tennis partners. He shared this honour with Louis de Duras, his comrade in arms from the Alsace campaign, who had now inherited his father-in-law’s peerage and become Earl of Feversham, and Sidney Godolphin: they were ‘all so excellent players that if one beat the other ’tis alternatively’. Godolphin, born on the family estate at Helston in Cornwall in 1645, was a short, ungainly and rather taciturn man. His poet grandfather had died fighting for the king in a West Country skirmish, and his father Francis – who sired no fewer than sixteen children – had raised a regiment of royalist foot.³³ Like Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Francis Godolphin was rewarded after the Restoration, and in 1662 young Sidney became a royal page. He had married Margaret Blagge in 1675, though he lost her, all too early, to puerperal fever. John Evelyn wrote that ‘She was the best wife, the best friend, the best mistress, that husband ever had,’ and he saw how Sidney, ‘struck with unspeakable affliction, fell down as dead’.³⁴ Their surviving child, Francis, was to marry the Marlboroughs’ daughter Henrietta in 1698.

Godolphin became MP for the family borough of Helston in 1668, and cut his teeth on a variety of diplomatic missions over the next decade. He was at once unobtrusive and indispensable: Charles II quipped that he was ‘never in the way and never out of the way’. In 1679 he joined Sunderland and Laurence Hyde in the short-lived governing group unkindly known as ‘the chits’ for the youth and inexperience of its members, but he managed to retain royal favour during the Exclusion crisis, possibly because he was ill at several crucial moments. Hyde, holding the important post of lord treasurer, became Earl of Rochester in 1682, and two years later he was, as Halifax put it, ‘kicked upstairs’ to the less demanding job of lord president of the council. Godolphin, raised to the peerage as Baron Godolphin of Rialton, replaced him. With the accession of James II in 1685 he became lord chamberlain to the queen, and when she attended chapel was ‘accustomed … to give her his arm as far as the door’. He sided with James in 1688 but soon made his peace with William and Mary.

Godolphin was to become Churchill’s principal political ally, and the Marlborough – Godolphin correspondence, so painstakingly transcribed by Henry L. Snyder, remains ‘one of the most famous and important in English history’.³⁵ Snyder’s work corrects most of the errors in dating and transcription which, initially made by Archdeacon Coxe, were sometimes perpetuated by Winston S. Churchill. The letters illuminate several non-martial aspects of Churchill’s career, not least in his dealings with the Dutch, and reveal what Snyder calls his ‘essential timidity and the extreme care he took to obtain authority for his every action’.³⁶ This correspondence did not begin in earnest till 1701, when both Churchill and Godolphin were in positions of substantial influence, but it is surely right to see in the correspondence of prime minister and commander-in-chief a reflection of a much earlier friendship.³⁷

A measure of Churchill’s favour was his appointment, on 19 November 1683, as colonel of a regiment which had begun its life as the Tangier Horse and was now known as the King’s Own Regiment of Dragoons. The post, held in plurality with command of the Life Guards troop and the colonelcy of foot, was worth another fifteen shillings a day in pay and allowances. Dragoons derived their name from the fact that they originally carried a ‘fire and cock’ musket – a weapon, like its users, called dragon in French – which was a primitive form of flintlock, rather than the matchlock musket of Civil War infantry. They were mounted, though traditionally on cheaper steeds than cavalry proper: the New Model’s cavalry horses cost £8–£10 apiece, but half that sum would buy a dragoon nag.

Dragoons originally fought on foot, with their horses simply providing them with tactical mobility or, as their enemies alleged, enabling them ‘to be fitter to rob and to pillage’.³⁸ They sometimes fought on horseback even during the Civil War, and after it they gradually ascended to be cavalry proper, although the whole process was to take them at least a century. The Military Dictionary of 1702 described them as:

Musketeers mounted, who sometimes serve a-foot, and sometimes a-horseback, being always ready upon anything that requires expedition, as being able to keep pace with the horse, and do the service of foot. In battle, or upon attacks, they are commonly the Enfants Perdus, or Forlorn [Hope], being the first that fall on. In the field they commonly encamp either at the head of the army, or on the wings, to cover the others, and be the first at their arms.³⁹

Churchill was an infantry officer, and his appointment as a colonel of dragoons was seen by his enemies almost as a breach of natural law. There was some whinnying:

Let’s cut our meat with spoons!

The sense is as good

As that Churchill should

Be put to command the Dragoons. ⁴⁰

He made a good start with his regiment, however, issuing the men with new red coats faced with blue, and keeping the annual cost of each troop down to £2,200, evidence of his ‘careful administration’. Churchill’s lieutenant colonel was Lord Cornbury, grandson of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Charles’s first chancellor, and so nephew to the Duke of York’s deceased wife Anne Hyde. It was to prove a portentous connection.

There were limits to royal benevolence. When somebody suggested that Churchill might make a good ministerial colleague for Sunderland, Charles replied bluntly that ‘he was resolved not to have two idle Secretaries of State’. Churchill was certainly much preoccupied with rebuilding Holywell House, and with his growing family. Another daughter, Anne, was born in 1684, John (a son at last) followed in 1686, Elizabeth in 1687, Mary in 1689 and Charles, who lived for only two years, in 1690. There is no evidence, during the early 1680s, of a man eaten up by ambition. He had his peerage and a colonelcy, stood high in royal favour, and perhaps Charles’s suggestion of temporary indolence is not unfair, for he was still a young man but not now in much of a hurry. Indeed, if anyone in the family was making the running at this period it was not John, but Sarah.

Sarah Jennings had first met Lady Anne, youngest daughter of James, Duke of York and Anne Hyde, at Whitehall when Sarah was ten and Anne only six, and they appeared together in a court production of the masque Calisto in December 1674. They had seen a good deal of one another in Scotland, and in 1680 Sarah was on hand when Anne was involved in a controversial relationship with John Sheffield, Lord Mulgrave, a great favourite of the king’s but, at thirty-five, almost twice her age. Although London gossips suggested that Mulgrave had seduced her ‘so far as to spoil her marrying to anyone else’, Mulgrave had probably done no more than write letters ‘intimating too near an address to her’. He was exiled to Tangier, but went on to hold high office under James II, William III, who made him Marquess of Normanby, and Queen Anne herself, who created him Duke of Buckingham.⁴¹

The Mulgrave affair both accelerated efforts to get Anne suitably married, and, as the historian Edward Gregg is right to suggest, ‘underlined – and perhaps contributed to’ a growing divergence between Anne and her elder sister Mary, whose hints of displeasure at Anne risking her reputation were not welcomed by someone who did not believe that she had done anything at all to contribute to the scandal. Bruised by her sister’s priggishness, and thrust on inexorably towards an arranged marriage, Anne became increasingly attracted to the beautiful, intelligent and witty Sarah. Their friendship was to be so closely interwoven with John Churchill’s own rise that we cannot hope to tease the strands apart. Nor can we be certain of the precise nature of the relationship, because Sarah, who wrote most about it, did so mainly after the burning affection of its early years had frozen into mutual contempt.

We have two main difficulties. The first is that it is never easy for men to grasp the depth and intensity of the love that can exist between women. Even the most heterosexual of men usually know that they have bonds of affection with other men that are indeed ‘passing the love of women’, even if they are not always comfortable in talking about them. Yet it is hard for them to acknowledge that women can have relationships which are as profound, partly because of men’s fear that women’s affection is in some way finite, and that the emotion which binds them to other women must necessarily limit that available for commitment to men.

Our second problem is that the relationship between Anne and Sarah has now become part of the battlefield of sexual politics. Some lesbian authors have suggested that the relationship was indeed lesbian, and that it is only the gender-centric perversity of the historical establishment that has prevented a proper acknowledgement of the fact that European courts at this time were full of girls and women in loving physical relationships, and historians who deny it are simply revealing their inherent homophobia.

It is important to understand that correspondence may mislead us. In a letter whose sheer nobility mists one’s eyes even today, Margaret Godolphin told Jael Boscawen, her sister-in-law, ‘My dear, believe me, that of all earthly things you were and are most dear to me.’ She evidently did not mean that she loved Jael more than she loved Sidney, for ‘Nobody ever had a better or half so good a husband.’ Yet her affection for Jael went beyond this happiest of marriages. So: ‘Not knowing how God Almighty may deal with me … as in case I be to leave the world, no earthly thing may take up my thoughts,’ it was to Jael she wrote just before her confinement, bidding farewell to mortality and putting her affairs in order.⁴² When Anne’s sister Mary wrote breathlessly, ‘What can I say more to persuade you that I love you with more zeal than any lover and I love you with a love that was never known by man I have for you an excess of friendship more of love than woman can for woman and more love ever than the constant lover had for his mistress …’ she was in fact writing to Frances Apsley, daughter of the Duke of York’s treasurer.⁴³ Both women enjoyed happy marriages. Just before her own marriage Anne also wrote to Frances, in a letter veiled in classical allegory: ‘Your Ziphares [Anne] changes his condition yet nothing shall ever alter him from being the same to his dear Semandra [Frances] as he ever was.’

Women often wrote passionately to one another, even if there was nothing physical in their relationship. One of Sarah’s biographers, Ophelia Field, declares that ‘it can never be certain what unlabelled feelings – feelings which Sarah would manipulate skilfully in later life – existed between the two. For now, it is enough to emphasise that Sarah and Anne were not entirely innocent of what their words might mean if history happened to eavesdrop.’⁴⁴ When we do listen at history’s keyholes, let us do so as honestly as we can, neither making the easy assumptions that such whispers might imply today, nor putting our characters on a political stage which is our creation, not theirs.

There can be no doubting Anne’s need for female affection. Sarah became her lady of the bedchamber in 1683 on Anne’s marriage to Prince George of Denmark, replacing Mary Cornwallis, of whom Charles II said that ‘No man ever loved his mistress as his niece Anne did Mrs Cornwallis.’⁴⁵ When Sarah lost her hold on Anne’s affection she did not simply alienate Anne by her filthy temper and overbearing behaviour, but because she was insidiously outmanoeuvred by Abigail Masham.

Sarah’s own account of her friendship with Anne is best encapsulated in An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough from her first coming to court …, although so much of what she wrote in later life, on her own account or in collaboration with associates like Bishop Burnet, in some way reflects the catastrophic end of that relationship. She claimed that she wrote the book knowing that ‘I am coming near my end, and very soon there will be nothing of me but a name’, and wanted to comment on ‘the successful artifice of Mr Harley and Mrs Masham in taking advantage of the Queen’s passion for what she called the church to undermine me in her affections’.⁴⁶

Sarah made much of her early friendship with Anne: ‘We used to play together when she was a child, and even then she expressed a particular fondness for me.’ This gave her an important advantage, accentuated by the fact that the manners of the Countess of Clarendon, first lady of the bedchamber, ‘could not possibly recommend her to so young a mistress: for she looked like a mad-woman, and talked like a scholar’.⁴⁷ Sarah maintained that flattery was ‘falsehood to my trust, and ingratitude to my greatest friend; and that I did not deserve so much favour, if I could not venture the loss of it by speaking the truth’. Kings and princes, she believed, generally thought that the dignity of their position would be eroded by friendship with an inferior. ‘The Princess had a different taste,’ she wrote. ‘A friend was what she most coveted: and for the sake of friendship (a relation which she did not disdain to have with me) she was fond even of that equality which she thought belonged to it.’ They eventually decided to address one another by assumed names.

Morley and Freeman were the names her fancy hit upon; and she left me to choose by which of these I would be called. My frank, open temperament naturally led me to pitch upon Freeman, and the Princess took the other; and from time to time Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman began to converse as equals, made so by affection and friendship.⁴⁸

There were other nicknames too: William of Orange, whom neither much liked, was ‘Mr Caliban’.

An unpublished account of this period written in the third person by Sarah much later tells us how:

she now began to employ all her wit and all her vivacity and almost all her time to divert, entertain and serve the Princess; and to fix that favour, which one might now easily observe to be increasing more towards her each day. This favour quickly became a passion; and a passion which possessed the heart of the Princess too much to be hid. They were shut up together for many hours daily. Every moment of absence was counted a sort of tedious, lifeless state. To see the Duchess was a constant joy; and to part with her for never so short a time, a constant uneasiness; as the Princess’s own frequent expressions were. This worked even to the jealousy of a lover. She used to say that she desired to possess her wholly: and could hardly bear that she could escape, from this confinement, into other company.⁴⁹

In another account, this time part of Sarah’s published campaign to defend her reputation, she maintains that all Anne’s friendships ‘were flames of extravagant passion, ending in indifference or aversion’. She ‘seemed to inherit a good deal of her father’s moroseness’, thought Sarah, ‘which naturally produced in her the same sort of stubborn positiveness in many cases, both ordinary and extraordinary, as well as the same sort of bigotry in religion’.⁵⁰

In July 1683 the eighteen-year-old Anne was married to Prince George of Denmark. John Evelyn thought that ‘He had the Danish countenance, blonde, of few words, spoke French but ill, seemed somewhat heavy, but reported to be valiant, and indeed he had bravely rescued and brought off his brother the King of Denmark in a battle against the Swedes.’⁵¹ The arrangement suited Louis XIV, who hoped to see the two naval powers united against the Dutch, as well as James, who was trying to limit the influence of his other son-in-law, William of Orange. Negotiations were handled by Anne’s uncle Laurence, now Earl of Rochester, and secretary of state Sunderland. They drove a hard bargain: James gave the couple £40,000 in capital and £5,000 a year. Anything else had to come from Prince George’s personal estates, and he was expected to reside in England. The Danish ambassador suggested to his French colleague that it would suit them all if Anne and George could be given precedence in the succession over William and Mary, but the Frenchman replied that hereditary right could not be brushed aside like this.

Charles II deftly summed up George, saying: ‘I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober and there is nothing in him.’ He was indolent and good-natured, devoutly Protestant (a Lutheran, and so, in English terms, a dissenter rather than an Anglican, which made him an ‘occasional conformist’ to the services of the established Church), wholly free from scandal, and as wholly devoted to Anne, who bore him child after stillborn child in an almost annual succession of perhaps as many as seventeen pregnancies, although Anne’s predisposition towards false pregnancies make it impossible to be sure. The best estimate is probably twelve miscarriages, one stillbirth and four children who died young. Only one of their children, William, Duke of Gloucester (1689–1700), survived early childhood. Notwithstanding Anne’s relationship with Sarah this was a happy marriage, and Anne always acknowledged that though she might be queen, George was head of the household. In 1708 she nursed him through his last illness, and his death

flung the queen into an unspeakable grief. She never left him till he was dead, but continued kissing him till the very moment the breath went out of his body, and ’twas with a very great deal of difficulty my Lady Marlborough prevailed upon her to leave him.⁵²

Just as there is no reason to doubt Anne’s affection for her husband, so too we can see why Anne expected more emotional engagement than he was able to offer, and understand how Sarah fitted into this relationship. Ophelia Field’s suggestion that ‘the marriage contained many of the qualities of a friendship while Sarah’s relationship with Anne was developing into a fraught romance’ seems exactly right.⁵³

It is an index of the Churchills’ position that John had been sent to Denmark to bring George to England for his wedding, and when it was decided that the prince’s prickly private secretary, Christian Siegfried von Plessen, should be sent back to Denmark, it was John who made the arrangements and Sarah’s brother-in-law Colonel Edward Griffith who replaced Plessen. Anne and her husband were given apartments known as the Cockpit in the Palace of Whitehall, across King Street from the Privy Garden, just to the west of Horse Guards. Adjacent parts of the palace were occupied by the secretaries of state, and it is no coincidence that Downing Street, so close to the Cockpit, has now assumed its importance. With King Street acting as a firebreak the Cockpit survived successive fires, and Anne remained there until ordered to quit by her sister.

A Cockpit circle was quickly scribed out. Near its centre were John and Sarah Churchill, with John’s brothers, Captain George Churchill of the Royal Navy and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Churchill (who had once served as a page to Prince George’s brother King Christian), Colonel John Berkeley, of Anne’s dragoon regiment, and his wife Barbara, daughter of Lady Villiers, who had been the princess’s governess. Sir Benjamin Bathurst, comptroller of the household, was now married to Frances Apsley. The Duke of Grafton, one of Charles’s bastards by Barbara Castlemaine, was a regular visitor, as were the Marquess of Ossory (who succeeded as Duke of Ormonde in 1688) and the Earl of Drumlanrig (Marquess of Queensberry in 1695). Robert and Anne Spencer, Earl and Countess of Sunderland, were on the outer edge of the circle. They were close to the Churchills, and Anne Churchill was to marry their eldest son Charles, but, because of Sunderland’s support for the Exclusion Bill, Anne never really trusted him.⁵⁴ Sarah was promoted to first lady of the bedchamber when Lady Clarendon went off to Ireland with her husband, who had been made its lord lieutenant.

Because Sarah travelled with Anne, and John with the Duke of York, they were often separated, and some of their letters survive. In a note which seems to predate the birth of their daughter Anne on 27 February 1684 by perhaps six months, sent by an ‘express’ courier rather than a regular post, John wrote:

I had writ to you by the post, but that I was persuaded this would be with you sooner. You see I am very just in writing, and I hope that I shall find by the daily receiving of yours that you are so. I hope in God you are out of all danger of any miscarrying, for I swear to you I love you better than all the rest of the world put together, wherefore you ought to be so just as to make me a kind return, which will make me much happier than aught else in this world can do. If I can get a passage a Sunday I will come, but if I cannot I shall be with you a Monday morning by nine of the clock; for the Duke will leave this place by six. Pray [give] my most humble respects to your fair daughter, and believe me what I am with all my heart and soul,

Yours … ⁵⁵

The Churchills’ settled world was rocked by the king’s unexpected death. In the winter of 1684–85 Charles had been troubled with the gout and could not take his usual exercise, but spent a good deal of time in his laboratory, trying to find a process for the fixing of mercury. He ate less than he once had and ‘drank only for his thirst’, but still took a turn to the Duchess of Portsmouth’s apartments after his supper. On the morning of 2 February 1685 he rose after a restless night, and sat down to the barber, ‘it being shaving day’ – even monarchs were shaved only two or three times a week. He had scarcely sat down when he had ‘an apoplectic fit’ and fell into Lord Ailesbury’s arms. Dr Edmund King, on hand to deal with a sore heel, bled him at once. Charles endured the ministrations of his doctors, which almost certainly accelerated his death, for five days.

On 5 February, when it was clear that his brother was dying, James asked him if he wished to be reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church, and Charles eagerly assented. Finding an English-speaking priest was not easy, for all Queen Catherine’s priests were Portuguese. Quite fortuitously, Father John Huddlestone, who had helped Charles escape after the battle of Worcester in 1651, was in the palace and was brought into Charles’s bedchamber by a secret door which, in its time, had doubtless fulfilled less noble purposes.⁵⁶

Charles died well. He apologised to the crowd of assembled courtiers and functionaries for being such an unconscionably long time about it, begged the queen’s forgiveness, commended the Duchess of Portsmouth to James’s care and urged his listeners: ‘Let not poor Nelly starve.’ Early on the morning of 6 February he asked for his curtains to be drawn so that he might see one more dawn, and he died at noon. ‘He was ever kind to me,’ lamented John Evelyn, ‘and very gracious upon all occasions, and therefore I cannot, without ingratitude, but deplore his loss, which for many respects as well as duty I do with all my soul.’⁵⁷

The Churchills stood high in the favour of the new king, James II. John was confirmed in his appointments and sent off to Paris, ostensibly to formally notify Louis XIV of the succession but actually to ask for money. In fact Paul Barillon, the French ambassador, had already presented James with 500,000 livres (perhaps £10 million), so John’s instructions were changed while he was on his way, and he was simply to thank Louis for this handsome gift. Gilbert Burnet maintains that while he was in France John Churchill met the Protestant soldier and diplomat Henri de Massue, marquis de Ruvigny, whom he already knew from Charles’s negotiations with the French in 1678, and warned him that ‘If the King was ever prevailed upon to alter our religion he would serve him no longer, but would withdraw from him.’⁵⁸

We must be as cautious about Burnet’s assertions, made from the Whig standpoint, as we should be about Lord Ailesbury’s, imbued as they are with Jacobite sympathies. However, it is evident that religion was already an issue dividing the Cockpit circle from James’s court. Sarah maintains that James had tried to shift Anne from her firm Anglicanism ‘by putting into her hands some books and papers’, and in 1679 Dick Talbot, now her brother-in-law, ‘took pains with me, but without any effect, to persuade me to bring over the Princess to their Catholic purpose’.⁵⁹ A secret French report of 1687 was to suggest that Anne was heavily influenced by Sarah, ‘whom she loves tenderly’, and this helped keep her away from court so that her father could not speak to her about religion.⁶⁰

Monmouth’s Rebellion

Even if there was palpable tension between court and Cockpit in early 1685, it did not prevent James from settling old debts. On 14 May that year John Churchill was created Baron Churchill of Sandridge in Hertfordshire, and so had a seat in the House of Lords, which was to meet later that month for the first time in the new reign. He also became a governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The first session of the new, staunchly Tory-Anglican English Parliament was overshadowed by rebellion, led in Scotland by the Earl of Argyll, who had lived in the Low Countries since his escape from Edinburgh Castle, and in England by the Duke of Monmouth, also in exile, but likely to have been allowed back home had Charles not died. Monmouth, born in Rotterdam in April 1649, was an experienced soldier, handsome and staunchly Protestant. He maintained that Charles had actually been married to his mother, Lucy Walter, but he had never been the Whigs’ candidate to supplant James at the time of the Exclusion Crisis: they preferred his niece Mary. Exiled following his involvement in the Rye House plot of 1683, Monmouth had been at the centre of a web of radical discontent in the Low Countries, and his invasion in 1685 was widely expected. Argyll and Monmouth might have had a better chance had they been able to coordinate their activities, but even so neither insurrection attracted the widespread popular support that might have posed a serious challenge to the government. Argyll may have assembled as many as 2,500 men, and Monmouth perhaps 7,000 at the peak of his success.

When we are considering John Churchill’s motivation in 1685 and 1688 it is important to recognise some simple truths. In 1685 James had not attracted the suspicion which dogged him by 1688. The army was loyal to its leaders, and they were loyal to James. Neither Argyll’s nor Monmouth’s expedition was a well-planned military invasion with reserves of arms to equip supporters, or serious external support. In 1685 neither invasion had a realistic prospect of success, and men like John Churchill, who lived their lives on the basis of rational calculation, would not support Monmouth or Argyll. Furthermore, Churchill had served under Monmouth, and this experience, far from increasing his regard for ‘the Protestant duke’, had demonstrated some of Monmouth’s frightening unsteadiness.

Monmouth arrived in Lyme Bay on 11 June, to be told that the Somerset militia were already in arms and the Duke of Albemarle (George Monck’s son), lord lieutenant of Devon, was calling out his militiamen. An attempt to fire a warning shot from the guns protecting Lyme Regis had failed ridiculously when it transpired that neither powder nor shot was available. Soon Monmouth himself landed on the beach that now bears his name, thanked God for his safe arrival, and ordered his banner – with the words Fear nothing but GOD on a background of Leveller green – to be unfurled. The town’s mayor set off for Honiton, whence he wrote to the king to say that he thought Monmouth was ashore with three hundred men, and went on to report to Albemarle. Two local royalists saw what had happened and rode hard for London, where they sought out their MP.

By a remarkable coincidence Sir Winston Churchill was Member for Lyme, and so it was that James was roused at four on the morning of 13 June by John Churchill, who, as a lord of the bedchamber, had ready access to the royal bedroom, accompanied by his father and the two loyalists. The latter were rewarded with £20 apiece, and even before he had taken any formal advice, James ordered Churchill to ride westwards with four troops of the Oxford Blues and four of his own regiment of dragoons. Percy Kirke, of Tangier fame, was to join him with five companies of the Queen Dowager’s Regiment of Foot as soon as he could.

Whatever his personal failings, Monmouth was a competent soldier. He realised that he needed to raise troops as quickly as he could, and spent the first few days issuing the weapons he had landed with and procuring more locally. There was a clash with some militia horse in Bridport, but the militia proved less aggressive than Monmouth had feared. This gave him the opportunity to form his infantry into five regiments, known (like the regiments of the London Trained Bands) as Red (the Duke of Monmouth’s own), White, Blue, Green and Yellow, with an independent company of Lyme men. The horse formed a single body under Lord Grey, who had been handicapped by having his second in command, Andrew Fletcher, arrested for murder after pistolling Monmouth’s treasurer, Thomas Dare, in a squabble over a requisitioned charger.

Although the insurrection is now locally described as ‘the Pitchfork Rebellion’, many of the rebels were decently armed with matchlock muskets brought across from Holland, or seized from militia armouries and private houses. Scythe blades were requisitioned and mounted on eight-foot poles, and James himself believed that each of the rebel regiments had a company of scythe-men taking the place of grenadiers. The historian Peter Earle points out that the rank and file of Monmouth’s army tended to be ‘tradesmen, such as shopkeepers or artisans’, solid West Country dissenting folk, rather than general or farm labourers. Most were well established in their professions, and it was rare for father and son to enlist together, or for brothers to serve side by side: wise families insured against failure.

There were exceptions. Abraham Holmes, a former officer of the New Model Army, commanded the Green Regiment. He was to lose his son, a captain in his own regiment, in a skirmish at Norton St Philip, and was badly wounded at Sedgemoor, where he cut off his own mangled arm. He scorned to plead for his life, telling his judges: ‘I am an aged man, and what remains to me of life is not worth a falsehood or a baseness. I have always been a republican, and I am one still.’ When the horses which were to have dragged him to the place of execution would not budge (Holmes thought that an angel was blocking their way) he walked to his death with a firm step. He apologised to the spectators, whose mood quickly changed from derision to admiration, for his slowness in mounting the scaffold. ‘You see,’ said the old warrior, ‘I have but one arm.’

Cobbling together an army, however promising some of its raw material, is never an easy task. One of Monmouth’s colonels, Nathaniel Wade, tells us just how hard things were even when his opponents were simply those good-natured countryfolk of the Dorset militia. On 14 June he took about five hundred infantry, notionally supported by Lord Grey with forty horse, to attack Bridport.

We advanced to the attack of the bridge, to the defence of which, the [militia] officers had with much ado prevailed with their soldiers to stand. Our foot fired one volley upon them, which they answered with another, and killed us two men of the foot; at which my Lord Grey and the horse ran till they came to Lyme, where they reported me to be slain, and all the foot to be cut off. This flight of Lord Grey so discouraged the vanguard of the foot, that they threw down their arms and began to run; but I bringing up another body to their succour, they were persuaded to take up their arms again … [The enemy] contented themselves to repossess the town, and shout at us out of musket-shot; and we answered them alike, and by this bravo having a little established the staggering courage of our soldiers we retreated in pretty good order with 12 or 14 prisoners and about 30 horses.⁶¹

The first clash of a campaign often sets the tone of what follows, and here we see in microcosm the story of Monmouth’s defeat. His cavalry was poor, which tells us more about the difficulty of getting untrained horses to fight in rank and file than it does about the courage of the rebel troopers or the quality of some of their officers. His infantry was better, but only massed formation and brave leadership would nerve it to its task. Monmouth must have recognised that his men could not face regular troops in open field in broad daylight. Like a powerful but clumsy fighter facing a more skilled opponent, his only chance was to move fast and get in close: inaction would ruin him.

On 15 June Monmouth pounced on Axminster, dispersing the Devon and Somerset militia who were trying to rendezvous there before moving on to attack Lyme. He then marched north to Chard and Ilminster, his ranks swelled by local volunteers and disenchanted militiamen, reaching Taunton, where he was proclaimed king in the marketplace, on the eighteenth. Optimistically signing himself ‘James R’, he asked both Albemarle and Churchill to join him. Monmouth and Albemarle were old drinking companions, but Albemarle’s dignified reply informed Monmouth that ‘I never was, nor ever will be, a rebel to my lawful King, who is James the second.’⁶² John Churchill did not enter into a correspondence which, one way or another, might have been misconstrued, but sent Monmouth’s letter on to London.

Churchill had reached Bridport with his weary cavalry and dragoons on the seventeenth. His first report, written that day, warned James very frankly that:

we are likely to lose this country [i.e. the West Country] to the rebels, for we have those two [Devon and Somerset militia] regiments run away a second time … there is not any relying on these regiments that are left unless we had some of your Majesty’s standing forces to lead them on and encourage them; for at this unfortunate news I never saw people so much daunted in my life.⁶³

He also drafted a letter to the Duke of Somerset, lord lieutenant of that county, urging him to send 4,000 men to Chard and Crewkerne, and saying that he would do his best to support them if Monmouth took advantage of the collapse of the militia by marching straight for London. The government was already doing its best to guard against a sudden thrust at the capital, concentrating the militia of Surrey, Oxfordshire and Berkshire at Reading to cover the Great West Road, and ordering the Duke of Beaufort to assemble the militia of Gloucestershire, Hereford and Monmouthshire to protect Bristol, which was believed to be Monmouth’s preferred target.

None of this would beat Monmouth, but it would give the royal army time to concentrate. The Earl of Dumbarton’s Regiment set off with a train of artillery from the Tower of London, and Colonel Charles Trelawney’s Regiment, commanded by its lieutenant colonel, Charles Churchill, accompanied a smaller train from Portsmouth. James recalled the English and Scots regiments in Dutch service: William of Orange was not only happy to release them but, possibly fearing that his own prospects in England would be compromised if Monmouth succeeded, volunteered to command them himself, an offer James felt able to decline.

Churchill, with his advance guard, hung on to the rebels like a terrier locked on to a burglar’s ankle. He reached Chard on 19 June, and sent out a strong patrol of the Blues under Lieutenant Philip Munnocks. Near Ashill, three miles from Ilminster, it met ‘about the like number of sturdy rebels, well armed, between whom there happened a very brisk encounter’. Churchill’s men had the best of the first clash, but the rebel patrol was supported by a stronger force and the Blues fell back, leaving their officer ‘upon the place, shot in the head and killed on the first charge’.⁶⁴ Churchill told the Duke of Somerset that he intended to follow Monmouth ‘so close as I can upon his marches’, and suggested that the duke should get Albemarle to join him because the latter’s militiamen would not be able to keep pace with Churchill’s horse.

This advance guard of cavalry was ‘to be commanded by our trusty and wellbeloved John Lord Churchill in all things according to the rules and discipline of war’, and Churchill had been appointed brigadier general for the purpose.⁶⁵ However, he was not entitled to give orders to the lords lieutenant, magnates like the Dukes of Somerset and Albemarle who were responsible for the county militias and commissioned their officers. He may have had a professional soldier’s grasp of tactics, but as the most junior baron in the House of Lords he was simply not in their league. On or about the eighteenth James decided to appoint Louis de Duras, Earl of Feversham, his lieutenant general for the campaign. Feversham was ‘to command in chief wherever he is, the militia as well as the King’s forces’.⁶⁶

There is no foundation for suggestions that this reflected a sudden loss of confidence in Churchill on James’s part. Churchill had only been appointed to head the advance guard, and command of the whole royal army evidently required a more senior officer. Not only has Winston S. Churchill’s assertion that Churchill ‘resented his supersession, and he knew it could only come from mistrust’ little contemporary foundation, but to maintain that ‘this snub … eventually turned Churchill from loyalty to the Stuart kings’ stretches the evidence to breaking point.⁶⁷ It was only later in the campaign, when he thought that Feversham was inclined to favour Colonel Theophilus Oglethorpe and to ignore his own contribution to the early stages of the campaign, that Churchill’s irritation can be detected.

On 21 June Percy Kirke joined a wholly unsnubbed Churchill at Chard with five companies of his regiment, having marched 140 miles in eight days. This now gave Churchill a small combined-arms brigade, and he told the Duke of Somerset that ‘I have enough forces not to apprehend [fear] the Duke of Monmouth, but on the contrary should be glad to meet with him and my men are in so good heart.’⁶⁸ Although Churchill was not to know it at the time, Feversham was making good speed into the West Country, travelling with the remaining troops of the Life Guards and Royals, as well as the Horse Grenadiers, who looked ‘very fierce and fantastical’ with their moustaches and grenadier caps, even if their complicated drill made experienced officers grumble that no good would come from combining grenade-throwing with galloping about on horseback.

Feversham marched from London to Maidenhead on 20 June, reached Newbury the next day and joined the Dukes of Beaufort and Somerset at Bristol on the twenty-third. He had slipped Colonel Oglethorpe, with a party of Life Guards and Horse Grenadiers, off to his left flank by way of Andover and Warminster in case Monmouth tried to break eastwards between Churchill and his own force. There can be no faulting Feversham’s performance in the early stages of the campaign. He reached Bristol in time to thwart Monmouth, and screened his open flank as he marched. We cannot say for certain how close the militia were to total collapse, but a fragmentary undated letter from the Duke of Somerset to either Albemarle or Churchill shows the state he was in:

I do desire your Lordship to come away towards me with what forces you have, for I have only one regiment and one troop of horse which I am afraid will hardly stand because the others have showed them the way to run, the enemy is now at Bridgwater, which is ten miles of where I am, and that if your Lordship does not march to Somerton … ⁶⁹

Monmouth might conceivably have beaten Feversham to Bristol, but he was raising troops as he advanced, so could not achieve Feversham’s turn of speed. As generations of holiday-makers know to their cost, the dryness of West Country summers cannot be guaranteed, and now the weather conspired against the soldiers on both sides. Nathaniel Wade recorded that on 22 June the rebels marched to Glastonbury on ‘an exceeding rainy day’ and quartered their infantry in the abbey and churches, making ‘very great fires’ to dry them out. On that day a patrol of the Oxford Blues, scouting out from Langport, met a stronger party of rebel horse and ‘beat them into their camp’, and the Portsmouth train of artillery, which had reached Sherborne with its escorting infantry of Trelawney’s Regiment, was ordered forward to Somerton by Churchill. This further increased the strength of his brigade, and on 23 June he told the nervous Duke of Somerset that he hoped to persuade Feversham to join him at Wells and fight Monmouth before he reached Bristol.

Feversham, however, had decided to head straight for Bristol, and reached it with his leading horse on the twenty-third, leaving the bulk of his infantry slogging out behind him along the Great West Road. Then, on the twenty-fourth, still before Bristol was firmly secured, the leading cavalry troop of Monmouth’s advance guard rushed the Avon bridge at Keynsham, only five miles away, and drove off the party of militia horse protecting civilian workmen who were damaging the bridge so as to prevent the rebels from crossing. It took Monmouth’s inexperienced officers the best part of twenty-four hours to get their men across the river and formed up in Sydenham Mead on the far bank. Monmouth decided to attack Bristol that night, and we cannot tell how its defenders, the Duke of Beaufort’s Gloucester militia, would have performed if put to the test. But the filthy weather induced Monmouth’s men to recross the river: a local royalist heard shouts of ‘Horse and away’ as they broke for cover. Those who could took shelter in the houses of Keynsham, and others were in the nearby fields ‘refreshing themselves’. The posting of sentries was not accorded high priority.

Feversham had spent much of the twenty-fourth at Bath, and when he heard that Monmouth had seized Keynsham bridge he sent Oglethorpe, who had commanded his flank-guard on the march west, to investigate. The Horse Grenadiers, at the head of Oglethorpe’s detachment, were as poor at their scouting as Monmouth’s men were at their sentry duty, and had actually reached the centre of Keynsham before the rebels turned out of the houses and opened fire. The royalists eventually had the better of the skirmish, with an anonymous rebel reporting: ‘They did us mischief, killed and wounded about twenty men, whereas we killed none of theirs, only took four prisoners and their horses, and wounded my Lord Newburgh, that it was thought mortal.’⁷⁰ Oglethorpe, who had immediately charged to rescue the beleaguered Horse Grenadiers, actually lost two men killed and four wounded, and was in no position to force the issue. However, one of the captured troopers told Monmouth that Feversham’s main body was not far behind, and Monmouth resolved to fall back, along the south bank of the Avon, to Bath.

Monmouth reached Bath on the twenty-fifth, but the militia garrison refused to open the gates, and shot his messenger. He then headed south, for Frome, and on the evening of the twenty-sixth the royal army, now lacking only the guns from the Tower of London and their escorting companies of Dumbarton’s Regiment, linked up in the city. Churchill had marched in from the west, pausing briefly near Pensford to hang ‘Jarvis the feltmaker’, a Yeovil radical whose commission as a captain in the rebel army did not save him, though he died ‘obstinately and impenitently’, and we should remember him for that.

The astute historian John Tincey complains that Churchill had not managed to stop Monmouth’s march on Keynsham, and that had Bristol fallen its loss might have been laid at his door. Yet from the start of the campaign it had been Churchill’s plan to hang on to Monmouth’s flanks and rear: his getting ahead of the rebels only made sense if Feversham joined him, which is precisely what he had hoped for on 23 June. When Feversham decided instead to head straight for Bristol it was reasonable for Churchill to assume that the earl would watch his own front. The fact that Feversham had indeed begun to break down Keynsham bridge shows that he understood its importance, even if those hapless lads of the Gloucester militia did not.

The campaign was now reaching its climax. Monmouth’s first option had been to march straight for London, sustained as he hoped by a vast and unstoppable popular rising. When, disobligingly, this support failed to materialise, he sought to base himself on Bristol (whence he could communicate with supporters elsewhere in the country), strengthen and train his army, and only then head for the capital. With the swing away from Bristol his campaign had teetered beyond its culminating point, and he was fast running out of options. Feversham, for his part, had never planned to fight until his army was complete, and time was now on his side.

Poor scouting led the royal army, heading south on Monmouth’s heels, into an unplanned clash at Norton St Philip on 27 June. Its advance guard received a bloody nose, staunched only by the arrival of Churchill, who ‘secured the mouth of the lane with his dragoons and lined the hedges on each side with foot’, providing a secure base which enabled Feversham to extricate himself. Despite this brief setback, Feversham remained determined to maintain close contact with Monmouth, whose army, suffering the effects of repeated bad weather and evident failure, was haemorrhaging deserters. Monmouth briefly considered trying to sidestep Feversham by making for Warminster and then heading for London, but Feversham got wind of this from sympathisers and deserters, and marched from Bradford on Avon early on 29 June to block the rebels’ route at ‘Westbury under the Plain’.

The train of artillery at last arrived on the thirtieth, and Feversham then edged south-westwards, gently shadowing Monmouth, whose numbers shrank daily. On 4 July Churchill wrote to Lord Clarendon from Somerton. He was now evidently as anxious about his career as he was about the outcome of the campaign. He told Clarendon that:

nobody living can have been more observant than I have been to my Lord Feversham … in so much that he did tell me he would write to the King, to let him know how diligent I was, and I should be glad if you would let me know if he has done me that justice. I find, by the enemy’s warrant to the constables, that they have more mind to get horses and saddles than anything else, which looks as if he has a mind to break away with his horse to some other place and leave his foot entrenched at Bridgwater, but of this and all other things you will have it more at large from my Lord Feversham, who has the sole command here, so that I know nothing but what it is in his pleasure to tell me, so that I am afraid of giving my opinion freely, for fear it should not agree with what is the King’s intentions, and so expose myself. But as to the taking care of the men and all other things that is my duty, I am sure nobody can be more careful than I am; and as for my obedience, I am sure Mr Oglethorpe is not more dutiful than I am … ⁷¹

Oglethorpe, scion of a Yorkshire royalist family, also enjoyed the personal favour of James II. His conduct so far had kept him in Feversham’s eye, and at this juncture there was every chance that he would emerge with at least as much credit as Churchill. In the event Oglethorpe made significant mistakes at Sedgemoor but did indeed prosper. He stayed loyal to James in 1688 and refused to swear allegiance to William till 1696, thus destroying his military and political career. One of his sons, James Edward, went on to found the American state of Georgia; another, Lewis, was mortally wounded when Marlborough stormed the Schellenberg in 1704.

However, in 1685 all this lay in the future. When Churchill told Clarendon, ‘I see plainly that the trouble is all mine and the honour will be another’s,’ he was at least as suspicious of Oglethorpe as he was of Feversham. He was Feversham’s second in command, but was kept in the dark as to his plans, while the cavalry pursuit was entrusted to Oglethorpe, leaving Churchill with command of the foot. He was actually promoted major general in July, though he probably did not know of his good fortune till after Sedgemoor had been fought.

It was to Sedgemoor that Churchill’s steps now turned. While the royal army was at Somerton news arrived that the rebels were fortifying Bridgwater, where they had arrived on 3 July, as if they proposed to make their stand there. One of Feversham’s officers had ridden over the moor, and suggested that there was a good campsite on its edge, near the village of Westonzoyland. The royal army arrived there on Sunday, 5 July, and William Sparke, a local farmer, climbed the tower of Chedzoy church to see it moving into camp. He dispatched his herdsman, Benjamin Godfrey, to tell the Duke of Monmouth what had happened.⁷² The citizens of Taunton had firmly informed Monmouth that he would not now be welcome to return, and he had decided to march northwards once more, heading yet again for Keynsham bridge and Bristol. However, Godfrey’s news induced him to change his mind. He determined to mount a night attack on the royal army, interviewed Godfrey, and may well have spoken to William Sparke and climbed Chedzoy tower to see the ground for himself. So much of what happened that busy afternoon has become the stuff of legend, but one credible story has Monmouth spot the colours of Dumbarton’s Regiment, which had fought under his command in France and ‘by which he had been extremely beloved’. He told one of his officers, ‘I know these men will fight and if I had them I would not doubt of success.’⁷³

The field of Sedgemoor is a squarish slab of tussocky lowland, each of its sides roughly three miles long. The Bussex Rhine, marking its south-east border, oozed into the River Parrett, its south-west edge, two miles from Westonzoyland. North-east of the village the Bussex Rhine joined the Black Ditch, the north-eastern boundary of the battlefield. The smaller Langport Rhine curled out like a comma from the Black Ditch just south of the cornfields bordering Chedzoy. The main road to Bristol from Bridgwater, marking the north-west edge of the field, ran across the moor via the ‘Long Causeway’. Just over two miles from the town the ‘Short Causeway’ carried a track to Chedzoy, out on the moor. Another metalled road curled from Westonzoyland to Bridgwater by way of Panzoy Farm.

On 4 July Captain Coy’s troop of the Royal Dragoons flicked forward towards Bridgwater, met a strong body of Monmouth’s horse and got off ‘without any considerable damage on either side’. Feversham seems to have believed that the main body of the rebels would stand siege in Bridgwater, for he sent word to Bath to hasten the arrival of his ‘mortar piece’, no real use to him in the field but able to pitch its explosive shells over walls. His men went into camp just north of Westonzoyland, with the Bussex Rhine between them and Bridgwater, a little over three miles away. Recent research suggests that the Bussex Rhine was perhaps eight and a half metres wide but, in the area of the battlefield, only thirty centimetres deep. Much bigger rivers have had less momentous consequences.

Feversham’s infantry pitched their tents in a single line behind the Bussex Rhine, leaving enough ground between camp and ditch for them to form up in line of battle. The cannon were on the infantry’s left, ‘fronting the great road’ to make it easier to get them on the move again next morning, and the horse and dragoons were quartered in Westonzoyland. The official account of the battle emphasises the trouble that Feversham took to guard against surprise. Captain Coy’s dragoons watched the crossings of the River Parrett at Barrow Bridge and Langport to the army’s left rear. The road to Bridgwater was soundly

picketed. Captain Upcott of the Oxford Blues had a ‘grand guard’ of forty troopers, essentially a stationary sentry-party, out on the moor beyond Panzoy Farm. There were forty musketeers of the Foot Guards behind the walls of a sheep fold (‘walled man-high’) further towards Bridgwater, with plenty of sheep ticks and few opportunities for tow-row-rowing. Finally, a party of a hundred men of the Blues and fifty dragoons under Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Compton was further forward still, providing sentries and small patrols to screen the moor and able to fall back onto the musketeers and the cavalry grand guard if they came under pressure.

Given Feversham’s assumption, shared by Churchill, that the rebels might try to get their horse away, probably to the north, Theophilus Oglethorpe had put a small patrol out onto the Bridgwater – Bristol road, and posted another party on the Langmoor Rhine, and then rode up to the top of Knowle Hill. Feversham visited ‘his sentries, together with his grand and out guards’, at about eleven and then retired to his quarters in Westonzoyland, where he was to sleep on a camp bed set up in the parlour at Weston Court. He had every reason to turn in with confidence: perhaps 250 of his seven hundred horse and dragoons were now on duty, and he had taken all reasonable precautions against surprise.

His infantry battalions were camped in order of seniority. Dumbarton’s was the senior line regiment in the field but junior to the guards regiments present, two battalions of 1st Foot Guards and a single battalion of the Coldstream.⁷⁴ However, Dumbarton’s took station at the post of honour on the right of the line, almost certainly because it furnished the infantry grand guard, with perhaps a hundred of its soldiers standing to their arms all night. This party would provide the little force’s right markers if the infantry had to assemble during the night. The vicar of Chedzoy maintained that one of Dumbarton’s company commanders was sure that the rebels would attack, and had paced out the ground between tents and Bussex Rhine and warned his men to be ready.

There seems, however, to have been little sense that there was any real danger. Edward Dummer, a gunner in the artillery train, recorded that ‘a preposterous confidence of ourselves with an undervaluing of the rebels that many days before had made us make such tedious marches had put us into the worst circumstances of surprise’. Writing in 1718, an officer of the Blues declared that ‘On Sunday night most of the officers were drunk and had no manner of apprehension of the enemy.’⁷⁵ We may doubt whether a tiny village like Westonzoyland actually contained sufficient alcohol to induce widespread drunkenness, even if the royal army was unfamiliar with the foot-tangling attributes of the local cider. But it is safe to assume that, apart from the occasional edgy Scot, most of Feversham’s officers yawned confidently to their beds.

Monmouth’s army moved out of Bridgwater on the Long Causeway at about eleven o’clock that night. It did not take the Short Causeway out to Chedzoy, the easiest route onto the moor, but turned eastwards in the direction of Peasy Farm to march parallel with the Black Ditch towards the royal army’s right flank. Theophilus Oglethorpe, up on Knowle Hill and preoccupied with the Bristol road, saw nothing of this. To make matters worse, after dark he had pulled in his standing patrol from the Langmoor Rhine, leaving a gap through which Monmouth slipped. He discovered what had happened some time later, when he took a patrol towards Bridgwater to satisfy himself that the rebels were still there. He just missed the tail end of Monmouth’s marching army, and only when he reached Bridgwater did he learn that the rebels had left the town.

At about the same time that Oglethorpe realised the scale of his failure, Monmouth was getting his men across the Langmoor Rhine, and confirming his plan with his senior commanders. Lord Grey was to take the cavalry over the northern plungeon (ford) over the Bussex Rhine, swing round into Westonzoyland and spread havoc through the royal camp. The infantry, marching onwards in column, would halt opposite the royalist foot, turn left into line, and attack a camp already rocked by the irruption of the rebel horse. It was not a bad plan, and even in the small hours of 6 July it might still have worked. However, as the rebels picked their way over the Langmoor Rhine in the misty half-light, a shot rang out.

We cannot be sure who fired it. Captain John Hucker of Monmouth’s horse maintained at his trial that he shot deliberately, to betray the attack, but his tale was as unconvincing then as it is now, and they hanged him anyway. It was probably one of Compton’s troopers, out creasing the moor, who fired his pistol in the air the minute he saw columns of rebel infantry on the move, and then rode towards Chedzoy to find Compton himself. Compton sent at least one trooper to camp to raise the alarm, and as he spurred towards Westonzoyland he collided with part of the rebel horse. Lord Grey had predictably missed the northern plungeon and had turned north of the Bussex Rhine rather than south of it, so was now separated from the royal camp by a belt of water which was effectively impassable to poorly trained cavalry in the dark.⁷⁶ There was an inconclusive scuffle in which Compton was shot in the chest, but the damage was done.

Behind the Bussex Rhine the king’s infantry had turned out of their tents to form up on the open ground south of the ditch. Their drums were now beating. Some regiments had been issued with new flintlock fusil, but others had the older matchlock, and the glow of match-cord flickered out along the line as the corporals, whose job it was to keep a light handy, lit their men’s matches. The official account tells of ‘my Lord Churchill having command of the foot and seeing every man at his post doing his duty’, and the infantry’s swift response to the alarm speaks loudly for its training and discipline, and his precautions. All chance of surprise, and with it Monmouth’s battle, was now lost.

Most of Grey’s horsemen crossed Dumbarton’s front unengaged by yelling out that they were militia horse under Albemarle. But when challenged by 1st Foot Guards (commanded by Monmouth’s half-brother the Duke of Grafton), some replied with the rebel field-word ‘Monmouth and God with us,’ and both battalions of 1st Foot Guards in turn replied with a volley, as did the right-hand companies of the Coldstream. This was too much for Grey’s men, who broke back across the moor, some of them colliding with the two rearmost regiments of foot, the Blue and the White, which were forming up after crossing the Langmoor Rhine. The three remaining regiments, Red, Yellow and Green, managed to get into line ‘but not in good order’, just across the Bussex Rhine from the royal army’s right flank.

The rebel gunners had trundled three small field guns all the way from Bridgwater, and now swung them into action between the Yellow and Green regiments towards the left of Monmouth’s line. The rebels got to within ‘half musket shot’ of their enemies (Nathaniel Wade thought that the Red Regiment was within thirty or forty paces of the Bussex Rhine), stood their ground, and fired. Monmouth’s cannon, manned by Dutch professionals, made better practice than his infantry, most of whom, like many soldiers in battle for the first time, shot too high. Sending blasts of case-shot across the Bussex Rhine, the guns were soon doing serious damage to Dumbarton’s men and the right-hand battalion of 1st Foot Guards. Churchill, having satisfied himself that his line was properly drawn up, sent one troop of the Royal Dragoons across to the southern plungeon, and directed Lord Cornbury to take two more across to the right to support Dumbarton’s. He also ordered three light field guns to take station on the right of Dumbarton’s and pushed another three forward to join the first battalion of 1st Foot Guards. There is a pleasing story that Dr Peter Mews, Bishop of Winchester, a Dorset man who was accompanying the army, used his carriage horses to tug at least one of the guns into action. He had been a royalist captain during the Civil War and had fought in Holland after it, and was just the sort of prelate who saw no harm in praising God and passing the ammunition, but it is impossible to confirm the tale.

Cornbury’s dragoons, probably dismounted, were in action against the Green regiment on Monmouth’s left. They hit its colonel, Abraham Holmes, killing his horse beneath him and leaving him badly wounded on the ground. Churchill crossed the ditch nearby when the infantry eventually moved forward and asked Holmes, ‘Who art thou?’ Holmes replied glumly that he was not in a condition to tell. By this time some of the royal horse had mounted and ridden out of Westonzoyland to attack the right flank of Monmouth’s infantry. There is a possibility that they missed their way in the dark, swung back too close to the royal line and were duly shot at by their own infantry, but we cannot be sure.

When Feversham reached the field he divided his horse into two groups, and sent them out across the two plungeons to threaten the rebel flanks, probably ordering them not to charge until it was light enough for them to see what they were doing. Oglethorpe, on the right, spurred on anyhow, collided with a party of rebel horse and was then beaten off with loss when he charged one of the rebel foot regiments. While the horse were getting out onto the moor, Churchill shifted Trelawney’s and Kirke’s, who had nothing to shoot at, across to the right, although by the time they came up with Dumbarton’s the sun was beginning to rise and the battle was entering its last phase. With daylight reducing the risk of further ‘friendly fire’ incidents the royalist horse charged the retreating rebel infantry. The guns were swiftly overrun, and the rebel foot, struggling off as best it could, was soon swamped. Churchill quickly pushed the grenadier companies of his infantry across the Bussex Rhine to support the horse. The grenadiers of Dumbarton’s took Monmouth’s own banner, whose motto Fear nothing but GOD might have seemed ironic to the rebel survivors now running for their lives to escape the broadswords of the pursuing horsemen.

Oglethorpe was sent post-haste to London with news of the victory: his mistakes had not cost him Feversham’s favour. Churchill rode straight for Bridgwater, which opened its gates at once. The settling of accounts began early: on 7 July a Dutch gunner and a deserter who had fought for the rebels were hanged in front of the whole army. That hard man Percy Kirke, now appointed brigadier to command both his own regiment and Trelawney’s, was left behind to secure prisoners and ensure that the dead were properly buried. Sedgemoor had cost the royal army about thirty killed, and another 206, most of them from Dumbarton’s and 1st Foot Guards, were to receive pensions for wounds received. At least 1,400 rebels had been killed in the fighting and pursuit.

Monmouth was captured, dressed in shepherd’s clothes, on 8 July. He had already been condemned by Act of Attainder, but cravenly begged the king for his life: James observed that he ‘did not behave himself so well as I expected nor as one ought who had taken upon him to be king’.⁷⁷ He had recovered his courage by the time he was taken to Tower Hill for execution the next day but, despite a substantial tip of six guineas, with the promise of another six from a servant after the job was done, Jack Ketch, the executioner, failed to kill him with his first three hacks. He then threw down his axe and declared that he could not go on, but the furious crowd urged him to put Monmouth out of his misery. Another two blows failed to sever the duke’s head, and the executioner eventually worried it off with his knife. Ketch had to be escorted from the scene to protect him from the mob.

The trials of captured rebels began at Winchester in late August, and thereafter the ‘Bloody Assizes’, supervised by George, Lord Jeffreys, the lord chief justice, worked its sanguinary way across the West Country. Something over three hundred rebels were hanged, drawn and quartered, their executions taking place across the region and their quartered bodies distributed even more widely. Almost nine hundred were sentenced to transportation to the West Indies as unpaid labourers for four years, a term of exile soon increased to ten years. Churchill’s biographers whisk him back to London immediately after the battle, but in late September Jeffreys wrote to tell the king that Churchill, ‘who was upon the place’, would tell him what had been done to snuff out rebellion in Taunton, a comment that makes sense only if Churchill had first witnessed Jeffreys’ bloody handiwork and then returned to London.⁷⁸ The property of traitors was forfeit to the crown, and some of it was passed on as reward to the victors of Sedgemoor. Feversham, made a Knight of the Garter, received the estates of the executed Alice Lisle, and Churchill was given the very considerable property of John Hacker, captain of rebel horse and prosperous Taunton businessman.

Churchill emerged from the campaign with great credit. Of his possible rivals, Theophilus Oglethorpe had not fulfilled his promise as a cavalry leader, and Percy Kirke was to establish an unpleasant (though probably exaggerated) reputation for casual brutality as he snuffed out the embers of the rebellion with his tough Tangier veterans, known ironically, from their paschal lamb emblem, as Kirke’s Lambs. However, Churchill’s role in the battle became politicised almost immediately, and too many of his biographers have taken contemporary polemic for historical fact. Feversham, a royal favourite and a Frenchman by birth, was not popular at a time when the French were seen as natural enemies. His depiction in the Duke of Buckingham’s play The Battle of Sedgemoor (which manages to combine both anti-French and anti-Irish prejudice) is valuable only as evidence of perennial English suspicion of Johnny Foreigner.

A pox take de Towna vid de hard Name: How you call de Towna, De Breeche? … Ay begarra, Breechwater; so Madama we have intelegenta dat de Rebel go to Breechwater; me say to my Mena, Match you Rogua; so we marsha de greata Fielda, beggar, de brave Contra where dey killa de Hare vid de Hawk, beggar, de brav Sport in de Varld.⁷⁹

Feversham was a naturalised Englishman, had lived in England for over twenty years, and spoke the language well.

Thomas Lediard’s whiggish biography of Marlborough (1736) quotes an unknown author who affirms that Feversham ‘had no parties abroad, he got no intelligence, and was almost surprised, and like to be defeated, when he seemed under no apprehension, but was abed without any care or order’. We have already seen how Feversham’s precautions were wholly professional. Had Oglethorpe not shifted the crucial picket Monmouth’s advance would have been detected sooner, but as it was Compton’s screen did precisely what was expected of it. The Reverend Andrew Paschall heard from a church official in Westonzoyland that an unnamed lord sought a local guide to take him away from the battle, but it is impossible to link this firmly to Feversham, though some have tried. There were repeated suggestions that Feversham, a Frenchman and thus by definition a fop, took a long time to dress after the alarm was given and insisted on breakfasting before leaving his quarters. The most that we can say is that he had been injured by a falling timber in one of the Whitehall fires and had subsequently been trepanned: this might have made it harder for his servants to wake him.

Winston S. Churchill claimed that:

Nothing could free the public mind from the fact that Churchill had saved and won the battle. The whole Army knew the facts. The officers included the Household troops, the Guards, and all the most fashionable soldiers about the court. They all said what they thought. Feversham’s martial achievements became a laughing-stock … The impression that this slothful foreigner was slumbering on his couch and that the vigilant Englishman saved the situation had more truth in it than the popular version of many historical events.⁸⁰

If these well-placed officers did indeed know discreditable facts about Feversham, and trailed them about court, we may wonder why James appointed him to command his army in 1688 when the threat was infinitely more serious.

Feversham does not have to be a villain for Churchill to be a hero. Whatever the rumours of drunkenness or lack of vigilance, the royal infantry, his prime responsibility as the army’s second in command, was camped in good order with well-understood alarm drills, and Dumbarton’s provided an alert grand guard which established the right marker for its battle line. Once the fight was joined, Churchill shifted dragoons to both flanks, and paid special attention to his right, where Dumbarton’s Scots were under pressure. He moved his two left-hand regiments off to the right some time afterwards, but by this time the rebel attack was broken. John Tincey, whose recent scholarly account of Sedgemoor comes as close as we can hope to being definitive, reckons that: ‘By the time Feversham arrived the battle was won and he had little to do but, with the dawn, to organise the pursuit of a beaten enemy … Sedgemoor may not have been John Churchill’s most spectacular victory, but it must rightfully be considered to be his first.’⁸¹

Uneasy Lies the Head

Any historian surveying the next three years must account for the fact that the nations which applauded the defeat of Monmouth and Argyll in 1685 offered remarkably little support for James II in 1688. For Churchill’s biographers the task is even more specific: what made a man who acknowledged himself to owe everything to James, and who had helped keep him on the throne in 1685, betray him in his hour of need? We have the usual clash of polemics. James II’s many critics see him as a monster bent on imposing Roman Catholicism on his three kingdoms and obliterating those legal defences which stood in his way. In contrast, the Jacobite Life of James II, based partly on his own memoirs, maintained that James was a benevolent and paternalistic figure who

had given all the marks of love, care and tenderness of his subjects, that could be expected from a true father of his people: he had … encouraged and increased their trade, preserved them from taxes, supported their credit, [and] made them a rich, happy and more powerful people than they had ever appeared in the world.⁸²

It is perhaps easiest to see 1685–88 as a sequence of interlinked royal miscalculations, in which maladroitness and bad luck loomed larger than malice or cruelty; and though James won most of the individual legal battles he lost the war. The Bloody Assizes had the effect (not wholly unlike the Dublin executions of 1916) of alarming many moderate men who had never wished the rebels well but did not relish the severities meted out to them. James’s own overt Roman Catholicism, the arrival in London of a papal nuncio and the apparent influence of James’s Jesuit confessor Father Petre created tension in themselves. They were, though, made far more disturbing to Protestants by the fact that in 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given religious toleration to his Protestant subjects, and embarked upon a policy of forced conversion which drove tens of thousands of Huguenots into exile with dreadful stories to tell.

John Evelyn was shocked by what he heard.

The French persecution of the Protestants raging with the utmost barbarity, exceeded even what the very heathens used; innumerable persons of the greatest birth and riches leaving all their earthly substance and barely escaping with their lives, dispersed through all the countries of Europe. The French tyrant abrogated the Edict of Nantes … on a sudden demolishing all their churches, banishing, imprisoning and sending to the galleys all the ministers; plundering all the common people, and exposing them to all sorts of barbarous usages by soldiers sent to ruin and prey upon them; taking away their children; forcing people to mass, and then executing them as relapsers … ⁸³

In the spring of 1686 English congregations were asked to contribute to a fund for the exiles. This ‘was long expected, and was at last with difficulty procured to be published, the interest of the French ambassador obstructing it’. The government ordered a book detailing the outrages inflicted on the Huguenots to be burnt by the common hangman, but even Evelyn, a committed royalist, thought that this was ‘no refutation of any facts therein’ but simply showed the French ambassador’s ‘great indignation at the pious and truly generous charity of all the nation’.⁸⁴

Between 50,000 and 80,000 Huguenots arrived in England, where they were generally welcomed as fellow Protestants, even by the constrictive guilds of the City of London, for the skills they brought. The tales they told confirmed the worst English fears of an absolute monarchy with the stink of incense in its nostrils. Martha Guiscard of Fleet Street ‘came out of France, because Jean Guiscard, her father, was burnt at Nérac, accused of having irreverently received the host’. A wealthy gentleman who had to ‘abandon a great estate [was] condemned to be hanged: and his house demolished, and his woods destroyed’.⁸⁵ Gilbert Burnet saw all this as ‘a real argument against the cruel and persecuting spirit of popery, wherever it prevailed … the French persecution came very seasonably to awaken the nation’.⁸⁶ Another contemporary observer thought that: ‘The whole of Europe … is inundated with the enemies of Louis XIV since the expulsion of the Huguenots,’ and even Marshal Vauban lamented that France’s loss included ‘sixty millions of money, nine thousand sailors, twelve thousand tried soldiers, six hundred officers, and its most flourishing manufacturers’.⁸⁷

English concern at the persecution of the Huguenots had two specific aspects. First, it was carried out without regard to class or wealth: indeed, it was the threat to ‘their property, rights or privileges’ that persuaded many Huguenot noblemen to give up their religion. To nervous Protestant gentlemen across the Channel, the process posed a revolutionary threat to the established social as well as religious order. Second, the regular army was the chosen instrument of terror. Dragoons were often quartered on Huguenot villages with licence to behave abominably, giving the process the name of the dragonnades and founding the verb ‘to dragoon’ in the English language. Armed resistance was crushed remorselessly: the marquis de Louvois told a military commander to ‘cause such destruction in the area’ that the example would teach other Huguenots ‘how dangerous it is to rise against the King’.⁸⁸

Just as the abused often go on to be abusers, Huguenot exiles were not slow to take vengeance on those they believed responsible for their plight. At the Boyne in 1690 the Duke of Schomberg, himself a Huguenot, and a marshal of France before his exile, shouted to a shaky Huguenot regiment: ‘Allons, messieurs, voilà vos persecuteurs’ – ‘Come, gentlemen, there are your persecutors’ – and it immediately rallied. Conversely, some of the Wild Geese, Irish soldiers who left to serve in France after the collapse of the Jacobite cause in Ireland, behaved just as badly to French Protestants as English Protestants had to them. James’s illegitimate son the Duke of Berwick played a prominent part in suppressing a Protestant insurrection in Languedoc, and assures us that he had a brisk way with prisoners: ‘Revarelle and Catinat, who had been grenadiers in the troop, were burnt alive, on account of the horrid sacrileges they had been guilty of. Villar and Jonquet were broken on the wheel …’⁸⁹

James quickly dissolved Parliament. He then proceeded to use the royal prerogative to dispense Roman Catholics from the Test Act, with a packed bench of judges finding in his favour in the collusive test case of Godden v. Hales in 1686.* He broke the Anglican monopoly of education by enabling Oxford fellows who became Catholics to retain their posts, and then imposed a Catholic president on Magdalen, the richest of Oxford’s colleges. County lieutenancies and magistrates’ benches were disproportionately reinforced by Catholics, and City livery companies and town councils across England saw the government’s opponents ejected. When the Duke of Somerset refused to conduct the public ceremonial for the reception of the papal nuncio on the ground that it was illegal, James replied: ‘I am above the law.’ ‘Your Majesty is so,’ replied the duke, ‘but I am not.’ He was dismissed from all his offices. Although the process worked almost as much to the advantage of Dissenters as it did to that of Catholics, it affronted Tory Anglicans in England and Protestants of the established Church in both Scotland and Ireland.⁹⁰ James was alienating the very people who had backed his brother.

In May 1688 James found himself in a direct confrontation with Archbishop Sancroft and six bishops who refused to have an Indulgence, suspending the Test Act and allowing public Catholic worship, read from every pulpit. Tellingly, they would have been joined by Peter Mews, once a captain of royalist horse and a Sedgemoor veteran, had he been well enough to attend the crucial meeting. The bishops were arrested for seditious libel, and when they refused to give bail, arguing that, as peers, they did not need to do so, they were sent to the Tower. It gave the worst possible impression, and even the soldiers on guard there shouted ‘God bless the bishops.’ At their trial they argued that the Indulgence violated the law, which could only be changed by Parliament, and were acquitted. That night there were bonfires and fireworks across London, and even a number of symbolic pope-burnings. It was a substantial public rebuff for James.

Although James’s approach to his armed forces was but one aspect of his general policy, the importance of the army as a means of repression in both interregnum England and Louis XIV’s France gave it particular prominence. Monmouth’s rebellion had illustrated the frailty of county militias, and James allowed the militia to wither on the vine during his reign, a fact which may actually have worked to his disadvantage in 1688. He maintained his regular English military establishment at just short of 20,000, the figure it had risen to as a result of the rising. He did not substantially raise it till the spring of 1688, when he recalled the Anglo-Dutch brigade, sending one each of its regiments to England, Ireland and Scotland. With the fear of Dutch invasion that autumn he added extra troops to existing establishments and raised new regiments, giving his English army a theoretical strength of something over 34,000 men. Even this was not an unreasonably large force for a country the size of England: the French had some 100,000 regulars at the same time, and even little Hesse-Cassel had more than 10,000.⁹¹ Such comparisons, however, were not uppermost in the minds of James’s parliamentary critics, who were reluctant to maintain the army even at its October 1685 size: this hostility led James to prorogue and eventually to dissolve Parliament.

The establishment of a Roman Catholic troop of Life Guards accorded with James’s policy of assisting his Catholic subjects as best he could, although the Earl of Ailesbury maintained that its captain was so venal that he would gladly have enlisted a Turk if he had the £40 entrance fee to hand. What caused more concern was James’s use of the prerogative to enable Catholic officers to serve, and indeed Sir Edward Hales, defendant in Godden v. Hales, was a colonel of infantry. Modern research has not identified that swelling torrent of Catholic officers described by some contemporaries, and even the 1688 expansion did not take the proportion above 11 per cent. There were, naturally enough, regimental exceptions: Sir Edward Hales’s Regiment had sixteen Catholics out of thirty-seven officers.

Perhaps more serious was James’s practice of depriving officers who opposed him in Parliament in 1685, or who subsequently crossed him, of their commissions. They were not always replaced with Catholics, but lost the money they had paid for their commissions, and he was thus ‘attacking the sanctity of property and acting without tact’.⁹² Overall, between the spring of 1685 and the autumn of 1688 James had increased the size of the English army and done much to improve its efficiency. Yet in the process he had ‘disobliged’ many Protestant career officers. This might not, in and of itself, have turned them into rebels. But as they glanced across St George’s Channel, as Englishmen so often have, they saw a truly alarming process at work: the wholesale purging of the Irish army and its replacement by a Catholic force.

The Irish army was theoretically distinct from its English and Scots cousins. It was not only smaller and far worse equipped than the English army, but traditionally reflected the ascendancy of the Protestant minority over the Roman Catholic majority. James sought to reform it for two reasons: it urgently needed bringing up to date, and it was only fair, as he put it, ‘that the roman catholics, who had tasted so deeply of his sufferings, should now, in his prosperity, have at least a share of his protection’.⁹³ It would have been a dangerous enough task in the first place, and for James to entrust it to Dick Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell and Sarah Churchill’s brother-in-law, made it explosive.

Tyrconnell, appointed lieutenant general in Ireland in 1685, and then lord lieutenant in place of Clarendon in January 1687, was the scion of an ‘old English’ family that had been settled in Ireland for centuries. Proud, prickly and presumptuous, he quickly set about dismissing Protestant officers from the militia and regular army alike and replacing them with ‘old English’ Catholic officers, and jettisoning Protestant rank and file in favour of Catholics. Robert Parker, one of the best witnesses for Marlborough’s campaigns, was a Protestant from Kilkenny who had joined the Irish army as a private in 1683, but in the summer of 1687 Tyrconnell held a great review on the Curragh of Kildare and young Parker found himself dismissed. He was on his way to join the Dutch army in 1688, but a chance encounter with his old company commander in London saw him back in the army after the Glorious Revolution, in Lord Forbes’ Regiment of Foot, later the Royal Regiment of Ireland.⁹⁴

We can be sure that it was never Tyrconnell’s plan to create an Irish Catholic army which could be shipped across to coerce the English. He was far more interested in redistributing power in Ireland, and it is even possible that, after the death of James II, he wished to declare Ireland an independent state. Although his ‘new modelling’ drew in a few experienced professional officers, it had little time to take effect, and so the Irish army of 1688 was in fact far worse trained than the force that Tyrconnell had begun to reform three years before. Moreover, even if James and Tyrconnell never intended to use the Irish Catholic army in England, Protestant Englishmen were wholly unconvinced. Yet again, as they saw it, property rights and religious sensibilities were trampled upon, and God alone knew where the business would stop. Even the London Gazette, the government’s own information organ, became infected by the prevailing sense of near-panic:

Bristol, March 6 [1688]. There are arrived in all these Western parts great multitudes of disaffected English protestants from Ireland, whose condition is most deplorable; from whom we have an account that at Dublin the Protestants were all disarmed. And their horses taken from them, and many of them plundered and cruelly treated by the soldiers, who had likewise seized both the cathedrals and the college; and all ships and passengers bound for England were stopped, and their goods and plate that was found on board taken away. In Munster, Leinster and Connaught the protestants are disseized of their inheritances, as well as plundered of their arms, horses and goods, and many of the chiefest amongst them imprisoned … ⁹⁵

Just as Tyrconnell’s camps on the Curragh were intended to bring his army together for training (as well as to expel Protestants), so James’s annual military camps on Hounslow Heath had a purpose that was in part innocent. The heath, conveniently midway between Windsor and Whitehall, stood at the intersection of the Great West, Great North and Portsmouth roads, and an army based there could respond to landings in any direction. The camp also represented an opportunity to draw regiments together from individual garrisons and carry out standardised drill and some large-scale training. There was a mock fort, stormed regularly to the delight of spectators, and a chance for officers, when they could drag themselves away from London (captains were only expected to inspect their men every three days or so), to grasp the rudiments of An Abridgement of the English Military Discipline, a 1686 update of a drill-book first issued under Charles II. Simply getting regiments from across the land into camp on the right day showed the growing maturity of the army’s fledgling central administration, with William Blathwayt and his clerks coordinating arrivals. Once the troops were in camp, James personally took a close interest in their dress, drill and training.

There was more to Hounslow Heath than solid military preparation. The camp also served to show the City of London that there were troops near at hand, and there were, as John Evelyn tells us, ‘many jealousies and discourses of what was the meaning of this encampment’.⁹⁶ James saw the camp, at least in part, as a means of rattling the coercive power at his disposal in its scabbard. There were certainly times when he was prepared to use his army to dragoon opposition, and we should not be surprised that Londoners feared that they would be next. Trelawney’s Regiment was quartered in Bristol in 1685 and 1686 because of the city’s whiggish sympathy, and dragoons were posted to Lancaster, Warrington, Liverpool and Preston, though not in ‘the honest town of Wigan’. There were cases when soldiers arrived to help towns elect the right Members of Parliament, and were sometimes given voting rights to help the process along.⁹⁷

A combination of factors – amongst them the replacement of some officers of the English army, the purging of the Irish army, fears about the army’s role as a political instrument, and mistrust of James’s policy overall – helped focus a military conspiracy against him. In the case of some officers, like Churchill and the Earl of Craven, colonel of the Coldstream Guards and Carolina proprietor, opposition to the king was sharpened by fears that his policies were damaging their interests in North America. In February 1687 Churchill, as a governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, delivered to the king the company’s formal complaint that nothing was being done to protect the North American colonies from French encroachments. The historian Stephen Saunders Webb may overstate the case when he declares that Churchill was ‘the leading exponent of English imperial expansion’. There is, though, no doubt that his belief that English interests in North America were not well served by royal policy was another significant difference between himself and James, and that his views were shared by the influential, efficient and upwardly mobile Blathwayt.⁹⁸

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