Marlborough

by Richard Holmes

  When Henrietta died Sarah was far more unhappy than she had ever expected, and told a goddaughter that Henrietta had begun by being sweet-natured, but ‘wretched’ friends like Congreve and John Gay were responsible for corrupting her. ‘But,’ she added perceptively, ‘families seldom agree to live easily together.’197 In contrast, she could not find a good word for Mary Montagu, and returned all her letters unopened. When the Duke of Montagu wrote to Sarah to complain ‘upon her daughter’s F[ucking] with M. Craggs’, Sarah promptly replied: ‘Milord, I have received your gracious letter. I am sorry you are a cuckold, my daughter a whore … and my niece such a bawd: I am your Grace’s etc.’198

  Sarah spent her last two decades supervising accounts of her husband’s life, drawing up twenty-six drafts of her will, and working, with the assistance of various ghosts, on successive versions of her own political role. She lived so long that somehow people forgot how exasperating she had been. As the historian Christopher Hibbert put it, by the time of George II’s coronation, when, exhausted by trudging to Westminster Abbey in her robes, she sat on a drum to recover herself, ‘she had long been accepted as a kind of national institution’.199

  She died in 1744, ‘immensely rich’, wrote Tobias Smollett, ‘and very little regretted by either her own family or by the world in general’.200 Frances Harris’s luminous prose tells us that ‘she went into the unknown not hoping or fearing very much; only trusting, in spite of everything, that the sincerity on which she had so long prided herself would be her saving grace if any were needed’.201 She had long finished Blenheim, first jettisoning Vanbrugh, and then taking little notice of his successor Hawksmoor, but dealing direct with several of the master craftsmen working there. Economy and simplicity coloured much of what she did, but she spent £2,200 on a tomb in the chapel, designed by William Kent and carved by William Rysbrack. She had left instructions that Marlborough should be exhumed from Westminster Abbey to join her at Blenheim, and on 1 November 1744 their bodies were laid side by side in the vault beneath the chapel.

  Sarah had never much liked the place, and John had not lived to see it completed. Yet there is good reason for him to rest in that overstated pile for eternity. It had been built to commemorate a battle that changed the fate of Europe. No reasonable observer, glancing at the Continent in 1700, could have predicted anything other than its domination by the French. And yet the same observer, looking at the world in 1722, the year Marlborough died, could not have ignored the rise of Great Britain to European stature and the beginnings of world power.

  The process owed a good deal to men in dirty shirts and powderburnt red coats, too often reviled by their countrymen and cast aside once the need for them had passed. The British army came of age under Marlborough’s tutelage. The Dictionary of National Biography entry on that stormy petrel George Macartney, who rose, fell, rose, fell and rose again, makes the point perfectly. Macartney ‘was a man of no great note on his own account, but he belonged to a band of fighting-men who built an army that … altered the course of European history’.202 Some of them have tramped across these pages: Salamander Cutts and Charles Churchill, little Lord Lumley and Jemmy Campbell, the Duke of Argyll (‘Red John of the battles’), Sergeant Millner, Corporal Bishop and Private Deane, drinking more than was good for them and not doing all their fighting against the Queen’s enemies, but standing steady in rank and file when the drums beat up and their colours gleamed through the smoke. It was an army whose tactics leaned forward to Wellington rather than back to Oliver Cromwell and Prince Rupert, and whose regimental identity still strikes a chord (its tone, sadly, more muted than it once was) with the British army of the early twenty-first century.

  Marlborough firmly grasped the essentials of his three combat arms. His infantry achieved its effect primarily by fire and his cavalry by shock. He recognised that artillery had the power to shape battle: at Blenheim, pushing his cannon across the Nebel helped tilt the balance in his favour; at Ramillies the French lamented the damage done to their battalions around the village by the Allied guns; and even at Malplaquet, where so much went wrong, the massed guns in his centre helped pave the way for the decisive stroke.

  Marlborough knew that effectiveness on the battlefield depended on solid training, and that this could not simply be left to regimental commanders: standardisation was required. In December 1706 Lieutenant General Richard Ingoldsby wrote from Ghent:

  My Lord, I have begun to exercise all the adjutants, sergeants and corporals, who are already pretty perfect, and [am] mightily pleased that your Grace has thought fit to put them upon exercise.

  It is impossible to tell your Grace the disorder they were in, no two regiments exercising alike, nor any one company of grenadiers able to exercise with the battalion [from which it came] so that if your Lordship had a mind to see the Line exercise, all the grenadiers of the army must have stood still.

  I must not forget to tell your Grace that the Duke of Argyll’s Regiment never had any pouches, or slings, but are trusting to a little cartouche-box which will not contain half the ammunition necessary for a day of action … 203

  It speaks volumes for Marlborough that he could attend to the detail of grenade drill and cartridge boxes while commanding the biggest army that Britain had ever put into the field and presiding over a large and complex coalition.

  Marlborough’s soldiers knew that they owed much to the man they liked to call ‘Corporal John’. He bore a greater burden, military and political, than any British commander before or since, and of him alone could it be said that he never besieged a town he did not take, or fought a battle he did not win. In some respects Marlborough was a child of his times. He tried to give his men a day’s rest on Sunday if the tempo of operations allowed it (though both Blenheim and Ramillies were fought on the Lord’s day), and his courteous behaviour to his opponents betokened an age which strove, not altogether successfully, to introduce something of the first stirrings of the Enlightenment into war.

  The German military thinker Carl von Clausewitz, who lived a century later, told his readers that in a coalition war the very cohesion of the coalition was of fundamental importance, and Marlborough was, first to last, a coalition general, supremely skilled at holding the Grand Alliance together, and at devising what a recent commentator calls ‘agreed “systems” of orders, staffwork and movement’.204 He was always keen to attack the cohesion of his enemies while at the same time protecting his own, and recognised that wars were not won by resolute defence, but by offensive action against the enemy’s army in the field. If that was beaten, then territory could be taken and fortresses must inevitably fall. Of his contemporaries only Charles XII of Sweden grasped the importance of offensive action to the same degree, but he lacked Marlborough’s sense of judgement, and owed his decisive defeat at Poltava to launching his marvellous infantry against a position which even they could never hope to take.

  On the battlefield, Marlborough’s methods embodied all the ingredients of the best modern military doctrine. The acquisition and analysis of intelligence underlay everything he did. He had a remarkable eye for the ground, quickly identifying the potential it offered. At Blenheim, he knew that his infantry could form up on the Nebel in relative safety, because the French guns could not hit them if they lay down, and at Ramillies he spotted the covered route that enabled him to shift his weight from right to centre. Once battle was joined, he attacked on one part of the front to pin his opponent to the ground, before jinking elsewhere to strike an enemy who had now lost his balance, like a skilled judoka who uses his opponent’s weight to throw him all the more heavily.

  Marlborough was essentially manoeuvrist, always trying to apply his own strength to an enemy’s weakness. There were, though, times when, by accident or design, attrition trumped manoeuvre. He launched a doggedly attritional frontal assault on the Schellenberg because he had no time for subtlety (one needs both time and space to manoeuvre), and knew that a speedy victory, even if dearly bought, must tilt the b
alance of the campaign in his favour. At Malplaquet he badly misjudged the strength of French resistance, and although his customary technique of unbalancing his opponent in order to create a fatal weakness ultimately worked, it did so at appalling cost. Though it might have helped him politically, he made no attempt to shift the blame, but his biographers have not always been as generous. He had a gentle streak: he begged Queen Anne that a man convicted of libelling him should be remitted the prescribed period in the pillory. The prospect of men lying out on wet straw upset him, but he did not hesitate to send the same men into the cannon’s mouth if he had to. Soldiers know that their trade requires them to risk death. They often mind this far less than civilians imagine: what they resent is the risk of pointless death, of purposeless sacrifice. Marlborough was never vindictive towards his opponents: the harrying of Bavaria before Blenheim was the cruellest of necessities, intended to bring about a decisive confrontation, and it is evident from his letters that he hated it.

  Officers and men loved him in part because of the care he took in ensuring their well-being. Yet this did not spring simply from his good nature. Like Wellington, he knew that one penalty of logistic failure was the collapse of discipline and the pillaging that inevitably ensued. This not only exasperated friendly rulers but alienated their populations, demanding ever-greater protection for foraging parties and couriers, and making it harder to glean intelligence. Marlborough’s subordinates sensed that he was a natural winner, who set his army on that virtuous spiral of success breeding success, consigning his opponents to the vicious circle of defeat reinforcing defeat. There is a shamanistic quality to great generals which goes beyond wise strategy, solid logistics and successful tactics, enabling them to get straight to the hearts of the soldiers they command. It is one of the intangibles of generalship, what T.E. Lawrence saw as its elusive 10 per cent, like a kingfisher flashing across a pool, and Marlborough had it in abundance. Captain Robert Parker tells us:

  It may perhaps be thought that … I am too sanguine in favour of the Duke of Marlborough, and that my attachment to him may be occasioned by favour received from him. But for my part, I never lay under any private or personal obligation to his Grace; on the contrary he once did me the injustice of putting a captain over my head. This however I knew he could not well avoid doing sometimes, for men in power are not to be disobliged. My zeal for the man is founded on his merit and service, and I do him no more than bare justice. I have been an eyewitness of many of his great actions. I knew that he never slipped an opportunity of fighting the enemy whenever he could come at them; that to the last moment he pushed on the war, with a sincere desire of reducing France within her proper bounds … 205

  Marlborough was unquestionably avaricious in an avaricious age, though even here we must be cautious, for his reputation for tight-fistedness was first earned when he was a young man, simply because he did not share the spendthrift habits of the bewigged gallants at Charles II’s court. He never forgot what it was like to be poor and friendless. Men who rose high often fell hard, and his own career faltered twice, with imprisonment on the first occasion and exile on the second. Despite his material rewards – huge wealth, a dukedom and an Imperial principality – he was often unhappy, a martyr to migraine, and worn to a frazzle by endless scrabbling in the busy ant-heap of coalition warfare. His urge to stay near the top of the greasy pole of British politics was tempered by a deep desire to be rid of it all, and to live quietly in the country with wife, horses and dogs. Far from prolonging the war for his own interest, he became heartily sick of it, and saw, far better than many of his countrymen, that there was much to be lost by pushing France to the last extremity. If, on the one hand, he genuinely feared the expansionist ambitions of Louis XIV, on the other he sought to constrain France, not to cripple her. If there is indeed a tragedy to Marlborough, it is that his retirement was short and racked by ill health, by the loss of two of his daughters and by repeated bickering between Sarah and her surviving offspring.

  We cannot say with any certainty what John Churchill would have been like without Sarah Jennings, though perhaps the indolence observed by that shrewd judge Charles II might have become his dominant trait. He might have reverted to bucolic type, sitting for a pocket borough in the Tory interest, worrying about his hunters and his partridges, riding into town for the quarter sessions, and earning the admiration of the Spectator for kicking Bully Dawson down St James’s Street. Sarah not only helped give him dynastic ambitions (so cruelly blighted by young Blandford’s untimely death), but also produced the contacts that helped realise them. There were occasional tales of his infidelity – with Lady Southwell in early 1705, and later with the dancer Hester Santlow – but there is no surviving evidence. Marlborough’s early conduct at court, mud-slinging by his detractors and Sarah’s own constant jealousy (she admitted that she was ‘tormented by fears of losing him’) all helped generate smoke where there was, at least as far as a historian can tell, no fire.206 There comes a time when a biographer can make as much of a judgement about his subject as he might about a close friend, and the Marlboroughs’ marriage seems a shining example of a love-match (interspersed, let it be said, with the crashes and bangs from which even the happiest of marriages are not immune), not only across the political divide, for she was always a firm Whig and he an instinctive Tory, but between different personalities. John was affable and courtly but always guarded, and Sarah passionate and intense, her opinions never understated, her sincerity at once her greatest virtue and her most striking liability.

  Even Marlborough’s enemies could not deny that there was something very special about the man. When his old adversary Bolingbroke was in exile in France, some of his friends began to criticise Marlborough’s tight-fistedness, hoping to please him. ‘I am the last person in the world to be told this,’ Bolingbroke replied. ‘I knew the Duke of Marlborough better than any of you; and he was so great a man that I have entirely forgotten any of his failings.’ In his Letters on the Study of History, published in 1752, after his death, Bolingbroke declared: ‘I take with pleasure this opportunity of doing justice to that great man, whose faults I knew, whose virtues I admired, and whose memory, as the greatest general, and as the greatest minister that our country, or perhaps any other has produced, I honour.’207

  NOTES

  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.