Authors: Richard Holmes
Marlborough (80 page)
We cannot say with any certainty what John Churchill would have been like without Sarah Jennings, though perhaps the indolence observed by that shrewd judge Charles II might have become his dominant trait. He might have reverted to bucolic type, sitting for a pocket borough in the Tory interest, worrying about his hunters and his partridges, riding into town for the quarter sessions, and earning the admiration of the
Spectator
for kicking Bully Dawson down St James’s Street. Sarah not only helped give him dynastic ambitions (so cruelly blighted by young Blandford’s untimely death), but also produced the contacts that helped realise them. There were occasional tales of his infidelity – with Lady Southwell in early 1705, and later with the dancer Hester Santlow – but there is no surviving evidence. Marlborough’s early conduct at court, mud-slinging by his detractors and Sarah’s own constant jealousy (she admitted that she was ‘tormented by fears of losing him’) all helped generate smoke where there was, at least as far as a historian can tell, no fire.
206
There comes a time when a biographer can make as much of a judgement about his subject as he might about a close friend, and the Marlboroughs’ marriage seems a shining example of a love-match (interspersed, let it be said, with the crashes and bangs from
which even the happiest of marriages are not immune), not only across the political divide, for she was always a firm Whig and he an instinctive Tory, but between different personalities. John was affable and courtly but always guarded, and Sarah passionate and intense, her opinions never understated, her sincerity at once her greatest virtue and her most striking liability.
Even Marlborough’s enemies could not deny that there was something very special about the man. When his old adversary Bolingbroke was in exile in France, some of his friends began to criticise Marlborough’s tight-fistedness, hoping to please him. ‘I am the last person in the world to be told this,’ Bolingbroke replied. ‘I knew the Duke of Marlborough better than any of you; and he was so great a man that I have entirely forgotten any of his failings.’ In his
Letters on the Study of History
, published in 1752, after his death, Bolingbroke declared: ‘I take with pleasure this opportunity of doing justice to that great man, whose faults I knew, whose virtues I admired, and whose memory, as the greatest general, and as the greatest minister that our country, or perhaps any other has produced, I honour.’
207
AUTHOR’S NOTE
1
Amiable Renegade: The Memoirs of Captain Peter Drake
(Stanford, California 1960) p.58.
2
The Private Papers of William First Earl Cowper
(Eton 1833) pp.1, 3, 59.
3
Continuation of the review of a late treatise …
(London 1742) bound in with Marlborough
Account
pp.67–8.
4
‘Gregory King’s Tables 1688’ in Charles Davenant
Works
(London 1771) II p.184.
5
G.M. Trevelyan
English Social History
(London 1948) pp.312–13.
6
Drake
Amiable Renegade
pp.136, 141.
7
‘Account Book of Isabella, Duchess of Grafton’ in
The Correspondence of Sir Thomas Hanmer Bart
(London 1838).
8
Major R.E. Scouller
The Armies of Queen Anne
(Oxford 1966) pp.131–2.
9
Drake
Amiable Renegade
p.312.
10
B.R. Mitchell
Abstract of British Historical Statistics
(Cambridge 1962) p.468.
11
Maureen Waller
1700: Scenes from London Life
(London 2000) p.253.
12
Sir William Beveridge et al.
Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century
(London 1939) pp.199, 292, 313.
13
Robert Latham (ed.)
The Shorter Pepys
(London 1985) p.923.
14
The Wentworth Papers
(London 1883) pp.47, 64, 147.
15
Frederick Shobel (ed.)
Memoirs of Prince Eugène of Savoy Written by Himself
(London 1811) p.xl.
INTRODUCTION
:
Portrait of an Age
1
John Keegan and Andrew Wheatcroft
Who’s Who in Military History
(London 1976) pp.216–17.
2
Winston S. Churchill
Marlborough: His Life and Times
(6 vols, New York 1938) VI p.652. I use this author’s middle initial (as he himself preferred to do) to avoid confusion with Winston Churchill, my subject’s father.
3
H.J. and E.A. Edwards
A Short Life of Marlborough
(London 1926) pp.299–300.
4
W.A. Coxe
Memoirs of the Duke of Marlborough
(3 vols, London 1896) III p.437.
5
J.W. Fortescue
A History of the British Army
(20 vols, London 1910) I p.590.
6
Ibid. p.591.
7
Sir John Fortescue ‘A Junior Officer of Marlborough’s Staff’ in
Historical and Military Essays
(London 1928) p.184.
8
Fortescue
History
I p.590.
9
Charles Spencer
Blenheim: Battle for Europe
(London 2004) p.341.
10
G.K. Chesterton
A Short History of England
(London 1917) p.189.
11
Sir Tresham Lever
Godolphin, His Life and Times
(London 1952) p.127.
12
G.M. Trevelyan
England Under Queen Anne: Blenheim
(London 1946) p.182.
13
Ibid. p.178.
14
Thomas Babington Macaulay
History of England
(8 vols, London 1858) Vol. II
passim.
15
John Paget
The New ‘Examen’
(London 1934) p.31.
16
I would not wish to seem churlish to my old mentor, who wrote in a ‘military commanders’ series. But the notion is still a preposterous one.
17
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough
Private Correspondence of the Duchess of Marlborough
(2 vols, London 1838) II pp.119–20.
18
David Chandler and Christopher L. Scott (eds) ‘The Journal of John Wilson …’ in David Chandler et al. (eds)
Military Miscellany II
(Stroud, Gloucestershire 2005) p.43.
19
David Chandler (ed.)
A Journal of Marlborough’s Campaigns … by John Marshall Deane, Private Sentinel in Queen Anne’s First Regiment of Foot Guards
(London 1984) p.7.
20
Frances Harris ‘The Authorship of the Manuscript Blenheim Journal’ in
Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research
LV 1982.
21
Tallard to Chamillart 4 September 1704 in G.M. Trevelyan (ed.)
Select Documents from Queen Anne’s Reign Down to the Union with Scotland
(Cambridge 1929) pp.120, 122.
22
Baron de Montigny-Languet ibid. p.133.
23
Sicco van Goslinga
Mémoires relatifs à la Guerre de Succession de 1706–1709 et 1711
(Leeuwarden 1857) p.44.
24
Edwin Chappell (ed.)
The Tangier Papers of Samuel Pepys
(London 1935) p.311.
25
William Bray (ed.)
The Diary of John Evelyn Esq FRS from 1641 to 1705–6
(London 1890) p.586.
26
Ibid. p.598.
27
Margaret Whinney and Oliver Millar
English Art 1625–1714
(Oxford 1957) p.174.
28
Donald Adamson (ed.)
Rides Round Britain: John Byng, Viscount Torrington
(London 1996) p.161.
29
Arthur Symonds (ed.)
Sir Roger de Coverly and other essays from The Spectator
(London 1905) p.vii.
30
John Tincey
Sedgemoor 1685: Marlborough’s First Victory
(Barnsley 2005) p.110.
31
Evelyn
Diary
p.268.
32
Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Times
(6 vols, Oxford 1833) III p.62.
33
Symonds
Sir Roger de Coverly
p.7.
34
The Spectator
13 July 1711.
35
Drake
Amiable Renegade
p.319.
36
Ibid. p.49.
37
Ibid. p.83.
38
John Childs
The British Army of William III
(Manchester 1979) pp.45–6.
39
Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research
Vol. 4 1925 pp.11–12.
40
Sir George Murray (ed.)
Letters and Dispatches of John Churchill …
(5 vols, London 1845) IV p.499. See, in contrast, some desperate Marlburian stonewalling in his letter to Sir John Shaw of 16 December 1708 in Murray V p.359. There is no doubt where the duke’s sympathies lay, and one wonders how Sinclair
‘found means to get away’. He later received a royal pardon, but joined the Jacobite rebellion in 1715, was attainted and never succeeded to the peerage.
41
Evelyn
Diary
p.52.
42
The Craftsman
Collected Edition (London 1737) Vol XI p.16.
43
Whinney and Millar
English Art
p.331.
44
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough
An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough from her first coming to court to the year 1710
(London 1742) pp.180–1.
45
Sarah Duchess of Marlborough
Private Correspondence
II p.81.
46
Wentworth Papers
p.197.
47
Ibid. p.121.
48
Ibid. p.165.
49
Ibid. pp.198–9.
50
Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury
(2 vols, London 1890) I p.23.
51
The Earl of Dumbarton’s Regiment, lineal ancestor of the 1st of Foot, the Royal Scots.
52
Ailesbury
I p.20.
53
Ibid. p.87.
54
Pepys
Diary
p.847.
55
This unlovely cul de sac culminates in the back entrance to my club, and often eludes even those knowledgeable folk of the London licensed cab trade.
56
Ailesbury
I p.215.
57
Marlborough
Account of the Conduct
p.110.
58
Peerages of Great Britain appeared after the Union with Scotland.
59
Oxford was restored to his offices after the fall of James. He died without male heirs, leaving his ancient title extinct, but his daughter Diana married Charles Beauclerk, Earl of Burford and Duke of St Albans.
60
Ailesbury
I p.286.
61
Mark Bence-Jones and Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd
The British Aristocracy
(London 1979) p.22. In 1799 Richard, Earl of Mornington, the future Duke of Wellington’s elder brother, was created Marquess Wellesley for his services as governor-general of India. It was an Irish peerage, and he referred to it scornfully as ‘my double-gilt potato’. But his earldom was Irish, so the promotion was not wholly unreasonable.
62
John Laffin
Brassey’s Battles
(London 1986) p.42.
63
G.M. Trevelyan
England Under Queen Anne: The Peace and the Protestant Succession
(London 1946) pp.197–8.
64
Lever
Godolphin
p.269.
65
A member of the great ducal house of Northumberland, and thus very much a lady in her own right.
66
Lt Gen the Hon Sir James Campbell of Lawes ‘A Scots Fusilier and Dragoon under Marlborough’
Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research
No. 58 (summer 1936).
67
Cadogan to Marlborough 23 February 1716, Cadogan Papers.
68
Letters Patent in the Cadogan Papers.
69
Historical Manuscripts Commission
MSS of the Duke of Somerset, the Marquess of Ailesbury …
(London 1888) p.188.
70
HMC Somerset pp.191, 195–6, 204.
71
Ibid. p.105.
72
Quoted in Trevelyan
Blenheim
pp.195–6.
73
Private Correspondence
I p.xix.
74
Trevelyan
Blenheim
p.190.
75
Trevelyan, with scrupulous fairness, initially suspected that the accusation that Wharton had ‘indecently profaned a church’ was the work of Tory pamphleteers. He later concluded that the story – based on an incident when Wharton led a group of late-night revellers into Barrington church, Gloucestershire – was in fact true.
76
Tim Harris
Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720
(London 2006) p.16.
77
The Spectator
20 July 1711.