Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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’.

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#ulink_87639f33-6640-5d4d-b379-2a6556678b11)

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.’

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.