The Spencer Family

by Charles Spencer

  I think anyone that has common sense or honesty must needs to be very weary of everything one meets with in Courts ... I protest I was never pleased but when I was a child, and after I had been a Maid of Honour some time, at fourteen I wished myself out of the Court as much as I had desired to come into it before I knew what it was.

  If court life did have one invaluable consolation for Sarah, it was in fulfilling the hopes of the family that had sent her there. She met, fell in love with and married a man who would rise to high rank and huge fortune, but his successes would be as much thanks to his wife’s abilities as to his own. Indeed, his gifts may well have been largely ignored were it not for Sarah’s unstinting efforts on behalf of both of them.

  John Churchill was twenty-five, and Sarah Jennings fifteen, when they met. He was one of the eleven children of a Dorset gentleman, Sir Winston Churchill. As a young man of twenty-two, John Churchill had been caught in bed with the Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles II’s mistresses, who had taken a liking to the handsome youth ten years her junior. Banished from court by the furious King, Churchill embarked on a military career which Napoleon himself later esteemed one of the seven most distinguished in world history.

  Ironically, given the fact that Churchill’s later successes were to be against Louis XIV, he served what was effectively his military apprenticeship under the French marshal, Turenne. From 1672 to 1674, Churchill developed his huge talents in the service of this great general, and particularly distinguished himself at Maastricht. Even more ironic was the fact that Louis XIV, watching this engagement, personally congratulated Captain Churchill for his bravery at the head of his troops, and promised that he would commend Churchill to Charles II. On his return to England, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the Duke of York’s regiment, a step closer to the commander-in-chief’s role that was to cost Louis’s army so dear thirty years on. He was also awarded the court position of Groom of the Bedchamber, in which role he was to meet the ravishing Miss Jennings, who described her beloved as ‘handsome as an angel’. They married in 1681.

  The secret to Sarah’s power lay in the closeness of her friendship with Princess Anne. Where Sarah was beautiful, Anne was plain; where Sarah was a life-enhancing force, Anne was plodding and dull. Anne, as princess and queen, craved the approval and support other glamorous friend, and made her her most intimate confidante. Sarah used her favour to secure posts in the court, politics and the army for her wider family and friends, enriching herself considerably in the process — chiefly through the custom of selling favours and positions.

  There was something of the schoolgirl crush about the Anne-Sarah relationship. The letters they wrote to one another were very intimate, and the two women even used pseudonyms for one another, to heighten the feeling of conspiratorial intimacy: Anne was ‘Mrs Morley’, while Sarah was ‘Mrs Freeman’.

  Sarah and John Churchill, despite the material benefits they had derived from the goodwill of James II, were prepared to side with the invading William of Orange in 1688’s ‘Glorious Revolution’. To James, this was a betrayal almost on a par with that of Robert, Second Earl of Sunderland’s. Whereas Sunderland had been a key political adviser, Churchill was one of his senior army officers, as well as a companion who had accompanied James in his exiles to Scotland and Flanders, prior to his accession to the throne. It was also Churchill who had, during Monmouth’s rebellion, been largely instrumental in the decisive royal victory at Sedgemoor.

  Sarah justified her decision to side with William by choosing to present it as one of religious principle, rather than the pursuit of further advancement for her and her husband under the new regime; a regime under which, it was already evident by the mid-1680s, Princess Anne was probably to be heir, since William and Mary were childless. ‘I had seen so much of the cheats and nonsense of that religion,’ she claimed in 1704, when blaming James’s overt Catholicism for his unacceptability as monarch, ‘that it gave me a greater prejudice to it, than it is possible for any body to have that has never been in a Catholic country.’

  Sarah’s Whig beliefs also made her implacable in her hatred of Charles II’s and James II’s abuses of royal power, in particular their treacherous acceptance of secret ‘pensions’ from the French Crown. As Dr Frances Harris observed of Sarah, ‘It was her lifelong conviction that no sovereign was to be trusted and that Parliament remained the true guardian of the constitution by its power to punish erring ministers ...’ The manner in which the later Stuart kings behaved only reinforced her beliefs in this regard.

  Sarah strengthened her position further with Anne during the revolution, by helping her to escape the guards that James had had posted outside his own daughter’s quarters. It was a key moment in the success of the Glorious Revolution and, in 1689, grateful for the support shown to his cause by the couple, William made the Churchills the Earl and Countess of Marlborough.

  William III’s readiness to accept the invitation of the English throne was largely tied in with his own ambition to stop Louis XIV of France becoming Catholic conqueror of Europe. The French armies had to be stopped, and the Netherlands and England were the cornerstone of an alliance that needed inspirational leadership if it was to withstand Louis’s expansionist aims.

  Marlborough was to be a key figure in the allied forces, and he left with William for the Low Countries in 1691, to take up his command. However, his and Sarah’s positions were severely damaged early in 1692 when Marlborough was discovered to have been corresponding with the Jacobite sympathizers of the deposed James II. William took the opportunity to dismiss Marlborough from all his posts, and briefly send him to the Tower of London as a prisoner. It was not just the supposed Jacobite link that led to this, but also Marlborough’s outspoken criticism of the Dutch monarch’s promotion of his compatriots and other non-Englishmen to senior posts in the English military.

  William was also wary of Sarah Marlborough because of her influence over his sister-in-law, Anne. With some reason, William saw Sarah as being behind Anne’s increasing distance from, and hostility to, his court, while pressing her employer to establish her own party of politicians, along Whig lines.

  And yet William’s attempt to sideline the Marlboroughs was unsustainable. Sarah was so much her mistress’s favourite that Anne proclaimed to Sarah that she herself ‘had rather live in a cottage with you than reign empress of the world without you’. As long as Sarah could receive such love and loyalty from Anne, then there could be no ignoring the Marlboroughs. Consequently, they remained a force throughout the 1690s, and it was at the end of that decade that William agreed to allow Marlborough to become governor to Anne’s son, the Duke of Gloucester, telling Marlborough, ‘My lord, teach him to be what you are, and my nephew cannot want accomplishments.’

  Indeed, William himself was forced to turn to Marlborough in 1701, when an army of 10,000 English troops was sent to the Continent to fight Louis XIV. Despite not trusting the moral integrity of Marlborough, William made him his commander-in-chief, and also invested him with powers to negotiate any peace treaty that might result from the military campaign. In William’s reign the indispensability of Sunderland and Marlborough could not be ignored, whatever the King’s misgivings about the loyalty of both.

  The royal favour enjoyed by both members of the golden Marlborough couple was increased tenfold when Anne came to the throne on 8 March 1702. Within five days, Marlborough was made a Knight of the Garter — an honour pointedly refused him by William, who did not think Marlborough worthy of England’s highest order of chivalry — as well as, the following day, receiving the appointment of captain-general of the country’s military forces.

  Meanwhile, Sarah’s elevation was similarly dramatic. She became ranger of Windsor Park, a position which gave her a beautiful house within the grounds surrounding Windsor Castle. In addition she received the two senior court positions of Groom of the Stole and Mistress of the Robes, while also becoming Keeper of the Privy Purse. This marked the peak of
Sarah’s favour through Anne, for the basic differences between the two women — both in terms of temperament and of politics — began not only to be clear now, but, thanks to Sarah’s power and pre-eminence, could no longer be ignored as eccentricities of little consequence.

  Politically the two most powerful women in the kingdom were now further apart than ever. Whereas Anne felt secure with Tory support, with the ancillary bolstering she received from the Church of England, Sarah was convinced that the Tories were closet Jacobites, eager to restore the line of James II through his son, the Old Pretender, the one-time Prince of Wales. Sarah’s other great fear was the French. However, while her husband was dealing so effectively with them on the battlefield, Sarah and Anne’s differences could be subsumed through the mutual joy and relief they felt through Marlborough’s great victories.

  The first of these, Blenheim, in 1704, was the most devastating defeat ever suffered by Louis XIV. A combined French and Bavarian force was poised to overrun Vienna, and to knock the Austrians out of the War of the Spanish Succession. But Marlborough’s allied forces swooped down through central Europe and annihilated the enemy, driving many of them to their death in the waters of the River Danube, and capturing the two French commanders, Marshals Tallard and Marsin.

  A grateful nation thanked Marlborough for delivering the balance of power in Europe to England by granting him and his heirs a pension for life, and by giving him what was to become the magnificent Blenheim Palace. The inscription on the monumental pillar in the grounds talks of Marlborough as ‘the hero, not only of his nation, but his age’, and goes on to describe how he ‘became the fixed important centre, which united in one common cause, the principal states of Europe, who, by military knowledge, and irresistible valour, in a long series of uninterrupted triumphs, broke the power of France, when raised to the highest, when exerted the most, rescued the empire from desolation, asserted, and confirmed the liberties of Europe.’

  Two years after the Battle of Blenheim, in 1706, Marlborough brought about the surrender of the greater part of the Spanish Netherlands by defeating the French at the Battle of Ramillies, although the duke was nearly killed during the two-hour engagement.

  These were Marlborough’s two greatest military achievements. One of the reasons why he had been able to act so decisively in both campaigns was because he knew, through his wife’s unrivalled position, that he enjoyed enormous power and prestige, and this was respected by his allied opposite numbers. Similarly he had the undoubted support of Godolphin, a very close personal friend of his and Sarah’s, and a minister whom Anne trusted and relied on above all others.

  But the whole issue of Anne and Sarah’s relationship, along with their political differences, was to be highlighted in 1706, a few months after Ramillies, through the question of how best to deal with the political ambitions of Charles Spencer, Third Earl of Sunderland.

  By this stage, Charles Sunderland had established himself as a political force in his own right, having succeeded his notorious father in the House of Lords in 1702, after seven years in the Commons. Anne had recognized his growing importance in June 1705, when she sent him as Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Emperor of Germany, to present her condolences on the death of Emperor Leopold I. In this role Charles had attempted to help sort out the differences between the new emperor and his subjects in Hungary. Out of these negotiations evolved the Treaty of Tyrnau.

  Charles’s involvement with European leaders continued when he accompanied Marlborough to the court of Berlin in November 1705. The victor of Blenheim and his Spencer son-in-law were received at the Prussian court with great reverence and respect. A similar trip to the Elector of Hanover’s court was the first occasion on which Sunderland met the man he was later to serve as first minister — the future George I.

  Back home in London, Queen Anne was becoming nervous of the increasing influence that she perceived the Whig party had established; for she believed that this could only be achieved at the cost of her own authority. Her worries were given greater urgency by the insistence that Charles Sunderland be appointed as one of the secretaries of state of the nation. The Whigs wanted this appointment as confirmation that Tory influence could be indefinitely kept in check. As Sarah Marlborough recorded in her memoirs, the Whigs ‘chose to recommend him to Her Majesty, because, as they expressed themselves to me, they imagined it was driving the nail that would go’. The Whigs presented their request to Anne more palatably, as due reward for loyal support for the Crown. It was clearly hinted that such support could not be expected to continue long, without Sunderland’s promotion to a post that had been familiar to his father.

  For all the high regard that Anne had for Godolphin, not even he could initially persuade the Queen to make such a firm signal that she favoured one political faction over the other. In September 1706, Anne wrote to her Treasurer thus:

  I do fear, for the reasons I have told you, we shall never agree long together, and the making him [Sunderland] secretary, I can’t help thinking, is throwing myself into the hands of a party. They desire this thing be done, because else they say they can’t answer that all their friends will go along with them this winter. If this be complied with, you will then in a little time, find they must be gratified in something else, or they will not go on heartily in my business. You say yourself, they will need my authority to assist them, which I take to be the bringing more of their friends into employment, and shall I not then be in their hands? If this is not being in the hands of a party, what is?

  Anne had every justification in writing so strongly, and it is clear she had grasped how important it was for the Crown to remain above parry politics for as long as was possible. Flair and intelligence Anne may have lacked, but her sense of the dignities and privileges attaching to her high office was very strong. The Queen was keen to profess herself an independent and determined lady, and this was one matter where she felt it important to let the strength of her feelings be known. As early as November 1704, she had written to Sarah Marlborough:

  I have the same opinion of Whig and Tory that I ever had, I know both their principles very well, and when I know myself to be in the right nothing can make me alter mine. It is very certain there is good and ill people of both sorts, and I can see the faults of one as well as of the other.

  Her instinctive feelings were reinforced by the subtle encouragement she was receiving from Robert Harley, Sunderland’s enemy, and a self-avowed hater of a political scene comprising strong, self-serving rival parties. Harley claimed his own ambitions extended merely to wanting to promote ‘the Queen’s service’. Although he was later to be seen as one of the architects of the parry political system in England, in 1706 he was able to write that to avoid ‘the rocks on both sides is to be the care of the Government and that it may not be like a door which turns upon its hinges from one side to another, or to shut out always somebody, ought to be the care of those that love the Government: for it is certain in such a country as ours [that] the going over to the extremes of one party only makes way to go again to another. For if a man can be turned out or put in for being of a party, that party is the government and none else.’

  When viewing the case for Charles Sunderland’s promotion, an added worry for both Queen Anne and Harley lay in the fact that Sunderland was not some moderate — like Newcastle or Cowper — but a Junto leader; that is, one of the handful of key, fully committed Whig grandees, whose aims were undoubtedly party political in the modern understanding of the phrase.

  Not being a committed Whig himself, Marlborough, deeply concerned that the question of Sunderland’s appointment might result in his foreign campaigns not receiving the ready funding that they had enjoyed to date, took a conciliatory approach with his Queen, in an attempt to make her see his son-in-law’s promotion as a necessary sacrifice, so that England could continue its pressure on Louis XIV on the field of battle. Marlborough wrote to Anne:

  Madam, the truth is, that the heads of one party h
ave declared against you and your government, as far as it is possible, without going into open rebellion. Now, should your majesty disoblige the others, how is it possible to obtain near five millions for carrying on the war with vigour, without which all is undone?

  Marlborough hoped that the Whig Junto could be appeased by securing Sunderland his secretaryship, which would, in turn, result in him, as captain-general, being able to push ahead with the war. If the price of funding the campaigns was to be the Sunderland concession, then Marlborough was for that course of action.

  Queen Anne saw this matter as a fundamental point of principle. The pressure on her to yield to the Whigs was immense: from the Junto, from Sarah Marlborough and from her two most powerful advisers, Godolphin and Marlborough. She felt the pressure so keenly that it reduced her to tears and nervous exhaustion. However, when Godolphin told the Queen that he would resign if she did not appoint Sunderland, she gave way.

  The major political crisis was over, and Sunderland had achieved his aim on behalf of his fellow Whigs. Indeed, his new status allowed him to take a leading role, as a commissioner, in the union of England and Scotland in 1707. However, the cost was higher than was immediately realized by the triumphant junto for the alienation between the Queen and Sarah Marlborough, from whose friendship the Junto’s ascendancy could be traced, was no longer something lurking in the shadows, but was now out in the open for all to see, and for Sarah’s enemies to begin profiting from.