On about 9 June Marlborough told Viscount Molyneux of yet another twist: there would be no Queen Sophie. He had arrived at Herrenhausen, the country retreat of the Electoral court,
And there the first thing I heard was that the good old electress was dying in one of the public walks. I ran up there, and found her just expiring in the arms of the poor electoral princess, and amidst the tears of a great many of her servants, who endeavoured in vain to help her … No princess ever died more regretted, and I infinitely pity those servants that have known her a long time, when I, that have had the honour to know her but a month, can scarce refrain from tears in relating this.182
Marlborough thought that the electress’s death had been brought on by receiving letters from Oxford saying that, despite her hope that her grandson would be summoned to Parliament by virtue of his British dukedom, so as to be on hand when Anne died, no member of her family would be allowed to enter the kingdom while the queen still lived. Anne at once ordered that ‘The Princess Sophia’ should be replaced by ‘the Elector of Hanover’ in the appropriate part of The Book of Common Prayer. The Elector, now heir apparent to the throne of Great Britain, repeated his request for a senior member of his family to reside in England, and replaced his envoy there with Baron von Bothmar, not only his close confidant but an enemy of Oxford’s.
On 9 July Marlborough, writing from Antwerp, told Robethon that ‘the arrival of Mons Bothmar may be of great use’. He added that he would not leave for England till the end of the month, and was confident that the British troops at Dunkirk ‘are all well inclined apart from the two battalions of Orkney’s [Regiment]’.
Although Winston S. Churchill argues that Marlborough’s determination to return home was a bold personal decision, we now know that he had written to the queen through the medium of his daughter and her godchild Lady Sunderland. Although the contents of the letter are unknown, it is possible that the queen may have summoned him home, using Cadogan as her point of contact. In any event, Bolingbroke had been in touch with James Craggs, Marlborough’s man of affairs, and it seems to have been agreed that Marlborough would be reinstated in his former offices, with Ormonde becoming viceroy of Ireland by way of compensation. Adverse winds delayed Marlborough’s arrival in London, where he had been expected on 21 July, and this probably thwarted Anne’s hope that Marlborough and Bolingbroke between them would assume the reins of government, ensuring a smooth succession on her death.
On 7 July Anne dismissed Oxford, leaving Bolingbroke, directionless at the moment of supreme crisis, in effective charge of the ministry. On the thirtieth, barely conscious, she passed the lord treasurer’s white staff to the Duke of Shrewsbury, one of the middle party who had brought Oxford to power in 1710, and she died at 7.45 on the morning of Sunday, 1 August. She was forty-nine years old. The Elector of Hanover was proclaimed King George I at St James’s Palace at four o’clock that afternoon, and the Marlboroughs reached Dover on the following morning. The Flying Post reported from Rochester that:
The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough passed through this city; they were received with great expressions of joy from the people, especially those at Chatham, who strewed their way with flowers, as they adorned their houses with green boughs, and welcomed them with repeated shouts and acclamations.183
They arrived in London later that day, and rode through the streets of the city in their coach, escorted by a great body of gentlemen on horseback, the civic authorities and a detachment of grenadiers, to the accompaniment of cheers leavened with the occasional boo. Marlborough was irritated to discover that his name was not on the list of regents kept by Bothmar, but as he was abroad when the list was made out his absence from it is not surprising. George had decreed that he wished Anne’s funeral to have taken place before he arrived, and she was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the presence, amongst others, of both Henrietta Godolphin and Mary Montagu.
King George arrived in London on 18 September. He had already dismissed Bolingbroke and ordered the seizure of his papers, and received Oxford ‘with a most distinguishing contempt’. Now the Tories were out and the Whigs were in, and when a parliamentary committee investigated the Utrecht negotiations Bolingbroke fled to France, and though he was eventually allowed to return to England he never again held office. Oxford was impeached and lodged in the Tower, but although the case against him was dropped he too never again held office. Marlborough, in contrast, was received by the new king with the greatest cordiality. ‘My Lord Duke,’ he said, ‘I hope your troubles are now all over.’184 The first warrant signed by George I reinstated Marlborough as captain general, master general of the ordnance, and colonel of 1st Foot Guards. The first knighthood of the new reign was bestowed on the king’s physician, Dr Samuel Garth. He asked to have the ceremony performed with Marlborough’s sword, and the king was happy to agree. A Whig majority was returned at the new election: the Tories were to be out of power for almost forty years.
Marlborough’s natural good nature had been somewhat bruised by the treatment he had received, and when, with the aid of Cadogan and Argyll, he remodelled the army in 1714–15 he reinstated his friends and evicted many of his enemies. During the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 Argyll and Cadogan commanded the army in the field, and Marlborough presided over the campaign from London. Documents in the Cadogan papers show that there was nothing nominal in his exercise of authority. He helped ensure that the Dutch sent a lieutenant general and six battalions, six Flemish and six Swiss, to help government forces, and Cadogan relied on him to get the exchequer to open its stopcock. ‘I beg your Grace to press the giving orders for the payment of my bills,’ begged Cadogan; ‘the least failure in that point would ruin my credit entirely.’185
Like so many Jacobite attempts on the throne, the ’Fifteen suffered from abysmal leadership. The proverbial unsteadiness of the Earl of Mar, James Stuart’s chosen instrument in Scotland, had already gained him the nickname ‘Bobbin’ John’, and although he raised around 8,000 men and seized Perth, he failed to take swift and potentially decisive action. He sent a detachment to join other Jacobites in the Lowlands, and although this little army got as far as Preston it was overwhelmed in November. His main force, over twice the size of the government army, had the better of a battle against Argyll at Sheriffmuir near Perth on 13 November, but did little to exploit this success. When James landed in Scotland and established himself at Scone he did no better, consumed by melancholy and bouts of fever which were an ominous echo of his father’s misfortunes in 1688. He departed for France early in 1716, advising his followers to shift for themselves. Three years later a small Spanish fleet was providentially scattered by storms before it could land the troops it carried, and the handful who reached Scotland found little local support and soon surrendered. In 1715 intended risings in Wales and the West Country had been quickly snuffed out by the arrests of their leaders.
The government sought to strengthen its grip on Scotland by passing the Disarming Acts, building forts and barracks linked by military roads, and, in 1725, raising local independent companies soon known, from the dark hue of their plaids, as the Black Watch. However, it would have taken an unusually prescient man to write off Jacobitism, for the ’Forty-Five rebellion, which was to end in drizzle, blood and powder smoke at Culloden, got as far as Derby, just 125 miles from London, and enjoyed a tantalising prospect of success. As long as Marlborough lived a Jacobite restoration could not be ruled out, and he continued to entertain Jacobite agents until shortly before his death.
That ‘ease and quiet’ which had been the subject of so many wistful letters was denied Marlborough. He had already lost Elizabeth Bridgewater during his exile, and in April 1716 Anne Sunderland died of ‘pleuritic fever’ – probably septicaemia after blood-letting. Sarah complained that the doctor ‘did as certainly murder my dear Lady Sunderland as surely as if he had shot her through the head’.186
Soon afterwards, at Holywell on 28 May 1716, Marlborough suffered the first of his strokes, losi
ng the power of both speech and movement. Thanks to (or perhaps despite) the efforts of his physician Samuel Garth he improved sufficiently to go to Bath in mid-July, where Sarah thought him ‘vastly better in his head and his speech’, although ‘he can’t come upstairs without uneasiness’. Sometimes he felt well enough for a hand or two of ombre, but he was often gloomy about his health, and complained that his belly had grown hard: Sarah agreed that his coat, roomy when they went down to Bath, no longer buttoned easily. She had him fed vipers boiled in broth, and the Duchess of Shrewsbury assured her that the best viper broth came from Montpellier. Although Sarah hoped that the vipers might ‘mend his blood and take off the lowness of his spirits’, she soon decided that hartshorn and calvesfoot jelly would be much better.
In November, while staying in a house on the Blenheim estate, Marlborough had another, more severe stroke. The diarist Dudley Ryder was shocked by what he saw.
The Duke of Marlborough is very ill and has lost much of his senses that he often falls into fits of crying. Methinks the frailty and mortality of human nature never appeared in a more moving and affecting light than in him. To see a man that was but just now the glory and pride of a nation, the hero of the world, of such vast abilities and knowledge and consequence sink almost below a rational creature, all his fine qualities disappear and fall away.187
Marlborough recovered well enough to ride again, and his mind was as sharp as ever, but his speech remained impaired, and his inability to manage certain words kept him increasingly confined within the family circle, though he attended the Lords to vote for Oxford’s impeachment, and wept with frustration when he escaped without punishment.
Building at Blenheim, which had stopped in 1712, began again in 1716. Many of the craftsmen who had previously worked there were reluctant to return, fearing that the lumbering venture would stall yet again. Left to her own devices Sarah would not have pressed on with it. She thought that it had already cost a quarter of a million pounds, and that the whole business was ‘a ridiculous madness’. Vanbrugh did his best to persuade her that the expense would be justified by its result, but she was not in the least convinced, and had a final row with him just before Marlborough suffered his second stroke.
With death now almost audibly falling into step behind him, Marlborough was more determined than ever to see Blenheim finished. Sarah’s biographer Frances Harris argues cogently that ‘Nothing demonstrates the limitation of her influence with him … more clearly than the continued slow rise of his baroque palace in the Oxfordshire countryside, in spite of all she could do or say to hinder it.’188 Now the project became an obligation laid upon Sarah by her husband’s burning desire to see the palace completed at last. They spent part of their time at Holywell, part in the Lodge at Windsor Great Park, and part on the Blenheim estate. Marlborough often rode out to watch the workmen, or sat by Vanbrugh’s ornamental bridge (a particular dislike of Sarah’s) to see work on house and estate proceed. The Marlboroughs moved into rooms in the east wing in the summer of 1719. The duke was delighted, although many contemporaries agreed with the waspish Alexander Pope that it could be no fun actually to live in the place: ‘I find, by all you have been telling,/That ’tis a house, but not a dwelling.’
Marlborough enjoyed playing cards with his grandchildren: whist was his favourite, but he liked basset, ombre and piquet too. He took particular pleasure in watching Lady Anne and Lady Diana Spencer act in John Dryden’s All for Love (the story of Antony and Cleopatra, thoughtfully censored by Sarah) at Blenheim, and walked with difficulty through the house and the park, once stopping to gaze up at his portrait by Kneller and murmuring wistfully: ‘That was once a man.’
Storms flashed and flickered over his head. Sarah fell out with Sunderland, who she thought had remarried beneath him. His new wife, Judith Tichborne, was an Irish heiress. She was ‘about fifteen’, complained Sarah, with ‘a squinty look’ to boot, a wholly unsuitable match for a man of forty-two. It was like ‘marrying a kitten’, and he would doubtless be persuaded ‘to come out of his library to play with puss’. Although Sunderland’s new wife’s character was unblemished, Sarah doubted if it would remain so for long, and she feared that his second litter would be ‘beggars with the titles of lords and ladies’, who could only be provided for at the expense of his first children.189 She invested in the South Sea Bubble but, with what Winston S. Churchill called ‘her almost repellent common sense’, got her money out well before the bubble popped, made £100,000 and then proceeded to lambast the stupidity of those who had not realised that ‘the project must burst in a little while and fall to nothing’.
Sarah not only fell out with James Craggs (she thought him ‘wicked enough to do anything’), but with his flamboyant son, James Craggs Junior. She might have forgiven him for misconduct with a servant at Holywell, but he went too far when, on his way to a masquerade disguised as a friar, he cautioned her against issuing a general invitation to other folk in disguise because her enemies might arrive pretending to be her friends, and ‘the Duchess of Montagu or my Lady Godolphin may come, and … you may give them a cup of tea or a dish of coffee’.190 Sarah did not care to have it known that she had quarrelled with her daughters, Henrietta Godolphin and Mary Montagu, but it was all too true. Winston S. Churchill suggests that the fault was theirs, but it is fairer to say that there was blame on both sides, and Sarah, like her mother before her, had never been one to kiss and make up. Both daughters would come to visit their father, not in the morning, when they might have seen him alone, ‘but at the hours when company was there’. They would, complained Sarah, go straight to him without paying any attention to her, ‘as if they had a pleasure in showing everybody that they insulted me’.191 Marlborough was offended by their behaviour, and told Mary: ‘I observe that you take no manner of notice of your mother; and certainly when you consider of that, you can’t imagine that any company can be very agreeable to me, who have not a right behaviour to her.’ Early in 1721 he wrote, in a faltering hand, to lament: ‘I am the worse to see my children live so ill with a mother for whom I must have the greatest tenderness and regard.’192
Even now Marlborough still dallied with the Jacobites. In June 1718 the Jacobite agent James Hamilton reported to the Earl of Mar:
Lord Portmore was last Saturday with Marlborough. After several things passing the latter advised him to draw all his effects out of the stocks, which he did that day. Marlborough entertained him with railing against Cadogan and the measures of his directors, notwithstanding few doubt of Marlborough being the mainspring of the club, though he still affects the reverse. Lord Portmore looks on his head to be as sound as he has known it for some years … 193
In mid-June 1722 Sarah was warned that Marlborough, in the Lodge at Windsor, was dying. She summoned her children and grandchildren to his sickbed, but there was the usual row. Sarah tells us:
I am sure it is impossible for any tongue to express what I felt at the time, but I believe anybody that ever loved another so tenderly as I did the Duke of Marlborough may have some feeling of what it was to have one’s children come in, in those last hours, who I knew did it not to comfort me, but like enemies that would report to others whatever I did in a wrong way.
Eventually Sarah asked her daughters and granddaughter Harriot to leave the room so that she could lie down beside her husband. Mary Montagu replied:
Will our being here hinder you from lying down? Then I sent Grace [Ridley, her servant] to ask again, to ask if she had such an affliction & was in my condition, whether she would like to have me with her? She said no, but did not go out until I sent her a third time.
With his wife lying beside him, John Churchill slipped away at four o’clock in the morning of 16 June 1722, at the very hour that his armies in Flanders and Brabant had been accustomed to hear the general call to arms rouse them from their tents for a day’s march. Sarah said that she felt the soul tearing from her body as he died.
They buried him, with ‘solemn splendour and m
artial pomp’, in the vault at the east end of Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey. Montagu was chief mourner, and eight dukes who were also Knights of the Garter followed him. Cadogan, who had succeeded Marlborough as commander-in-chief, walked in the procession behind the coffin, but was criticised for being ill-dressed and bumptious. Sarah was determined to pay for the funeral herself, to avoid being criticised for imposing a charge on the public purse when the family was so rich, but was horrified to discover that it had cost over £5,000. She went over the accounts carefully, discovering that she had been charged twice for the horses’ black plumes, and complaining that the forty-eight yards of black cloth for the mourning coach would have been enough to cover her garden.194
Sarah lived on for another twenty-two years. Scarcely was Marlborough cold in his grave than she found herself courted. At sixty-two she was still attractive, although, in the way of ladies of a certain age, she thought herself rather overweight. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said that she had ‘the finest hair imaginable, the colour of which she had preserved by the constant use of honey water’.195 She brushed Lord Coningsby aside, and also rejected the proud and wealthy Duke of Somerset, telling him that ‘I would not marry the Emperor of the world though I were but thirty years old.’ When he persisted, she silenced him by saying, ‘If I were young and handsome as I was, instead of old and faded as I am, and you could lay the empire of the world at my feet, you should never share the heart and hand that once belonged to John Duke of Marlborough.’196
Marlborough’s death did not bring about a family reconciliation. As he had died without male heirs, Henrietta Godolphin became Duchess of Marlborough in her own right. Her relationship with her mother was improved neither by the fact that she produced a child in 1723, after visiting Bath with the dramatist Congreve, nor by her friendship with Marlborough’s sister Arabella, of whom Sarah had always disapproved. Henrietta died in 1733, and was succeeded by her nephew Charles Spencer, second son of her sister Anne and Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland: Charles had already inherited the Sunderland title from his elder brother (his death deeply regretted by Sarah) in 1729. Thereafter the dukedom passed steadily along the male line of the Spencers, and George Spencer, 5th Duke of Marlborough, obtained royal licence to assume the name and arms of Churchill, with the family name formally becoming Spencer-Churchill. Britain’s Second World War leader Winston S. Churchill was a grandson of the 7th Duke, and was, rather unexpectedly, born at Blenheim in November 1874. His arrival was not anticipated for some weeks, but his mother fell while accompanying a shooting party, was rushed back to the palace in a donkey cart, and gave birth in a ground-floor room. His first name was that of John Churchill’s father, and he always had a particular affection for the ancestor he loved to call ‘Duke John’. He was fond of Blenheim too, and in 1908 proposed to Clementine Hozier, who was to become his long-suffering wife, in the Greek temple in its garden.
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