Marlborough (4 page)

I am just old enough to remember turnpike roads, few and bad; and when travelling was slow, difficult and, in carriages, dangerous … In the days of bad roads the country could not be stripped of its timber or despoiled of its honesty, cheapness, ancient customs and civility; every gentleman, then, was bowed to with reverence, and ‘A good morning to you, master. Good evening. Good journey to you, sir,’ were always presented; with every old-fashioned wish, and compliment of the season …

Even till lately, there were hollow ways from Grays Inn Lane to Kentish Town, and a long deep water to be waded through from Mother red-Caps in the road to Highgate. All the Hertfordshire roads were deep ravines.
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The first breaths of the wind of change could already be felt. The swash and buckle of Restoration drama was light years away from the masques of the early part of the century. The witty and elegant essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele are, suggests one editor, like old silver, whose fashion is still well regarded even if its weight is negligible.
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Political thought was also changing fast. In 1690 John Locke affirmed that ‘All men are naturally in a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit without asking the leave or depending upon the will of any man.’ Locke could get away with this in Britain, but these were dangerous ideas elsewhere: the Enlightenment was still two generations away, and few contemporary European monarchs would have tolerated such words.

For some historians the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw James II replaced by William and Mary, is the real turning point, although it accomplished less than many contemporaries hoped. For others, though, the real break comes with the Hanoverian succession, which brought George I bloodlessly to the throne in 1714, even though Jacobitism was to remain a threat until the defeat of Charles Edward Stuart, James’s grandson the ‘Young Pretender’, in 1745–46. Were our focus here European rather than more narrowly British then we might see the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession, and with it the more extravagant ambitions of Louis XIV, as a sharp bend in history’s long and rutted road.

It is not my purpose to answer the undergraduate question as to whether the seventeenth century really ended in 1688 or 1714. Suffice it to say, though, that the most important years of Marlborough’s active career lay between these dates, and that he lived through a period of quite extraordinary change and uncertainty. This was much more the case with the military profession than most biographers acknowledge. He was commissioned into an army which, with its pikes, matchlock muskets and lobster-tail helmets, would not have surprised Oliver Cromwell, and he died as captain general of a force whose infantry had made its reputation with those measured volleys that Wellington so admired.

What is history to us was an unknown and challenging future to John Churchill; even to begin to grasp him we must break from what some historians call ‘presentism’, the inability to see anything save through the lens of the present moment. None of the events of 1688–1714 was predestined. A more adroit James II might have retained the kingdom bequeathed to him by his more supple brother; the ‘Protestant Wind’ of 1688 might so easily have blown up into a Catholic gale; the cannonball which grazed William III at the Boyne in 1690 might have killed him just as surely as another ball decapitated the very capable Jacobite commander, the marquis de St Ruth, at the deciding moment at the battle of Aughrim the following year.

There were no certainties for a man like John Churchill. He was stripped of all his offices twice in his career, imprisoned in the Tower on the first occasion and effectively exiled on the second. He ran the risk of the battlefield death that snatched so many of his comrades and opponents: at Ramillies a cannonball took the head off his equerry as he held the duke’s stirrup for him to mount a fresh charger. He lived in a world where disease was rife and today’s hero was tomorrow’s corpse. Smallpox was no respecter of persons: King William lost his parents and his wife to the disease, and it carried off Queen Anne’s only surviving son the Duke of Gloucester and Marlborough’s own heir the Marquess of Blandford. Indeed, of the five children in that carefully posed Clostermann painting of Marlborough’s family only two lived beyond their twenties. We must judge Marlborough in the light of his times, not our own, and a biographer’s first task must be to sketch out the background to the portrait he is painting.

There are indeed moments when the immediacy of the spoken word strips away the years. The Reverend Andrew Paschall, rector of the Somerset village of Chedzoy, tells us how, when the rebel Duke of
Monmouth’s men were first detected in their night attack on the royal army’s bivouac at Sedgemoor in 1686, a trooper of the Horse Guards galloped

full speed to the camp, calls with all imaginable earnestness, 20 times at least, ‘Beat your drums, the enemy is come. For the Lord’s sake beat your drums.’ He then rode back with the like speed the way he had come … Now the drums beat, the drummers running to it, even barefoot for haste. All fly to arms.
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Yet there are as many times when the period seems more ancient than modern. It is easy to forget how deep the iron of Charles I’s execution had entered into the royalist soul. On 17 September 1661 (with young John Churchill still unbreeched) John Evelyn wrote:

Scot, Scroope, Cook and Jones, suffered for reward of their iniquities at Charing Cross, in sight of the place where they put to death their natural Prince, and in the presence of the King his son who they also sought to kill. I saw not their execution, but met their quarters mangled and cut and reeking as they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle. Oh the miraculous providence of God!
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Male traitors were hanged, drawn and quartered, a gruesome process that involved being dragged through the streets on a hurdle, partially strangled, and then castrated and disembowelled. The victim’s guts were ‘burnt before his face’ before he was beheaded and quartered. By 1745 the executioner would customarily leave his victim hanging long enough for him to be unconscious, but as late as 1715 some men were ‘bowelled alive and seeing’. The victim’s quarters, duly pickled for longevity, were stuck up at suitable points to ensure that the message was widely distributed. When Captain-Lieutenant Sir Thomas Armstrong of the Life Guards was executed as a traitor in 1683 one of his quarters was sent off to Stafford, where he had been Member of Parliament. The monarch might, by exercise of his prerogative, remit the punishment to beheading or simple hanging. At the time of the Popish Plot (1678–81), William, Lord Russell, had argued that the king did not have it in his power to show such leniency, and when he himself was convicted of treason in 1683 he bravely made no personal appeal for clemency. He was granted the favour of the axe, although the executioner botched his job.

Female traitors, whether they were guilty of high treason towards the monarch or petty treason – an act against what was perceived as being the natural order of things, like the murder of a husband or employer – were burnt at the stake. This too might be commuted to beheading (as it was for Alice Lisle, executed in the square at Winchester in 1685), or the executioner might be privately ordered by the sheriff to stab or strangle his victim before the fire took hold. The devout and philanthropic Elizabeth Gaunt, convicted of harbouring rebels after Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685, probably has the dreadful distinction of being the last woman in Britain to be burnt alive by judicial process. She met her end with exemplary courage, but the spectacle was profoundly shocking even to spectators used to brutality. Gilbert Burnet wrote that ‘Penn, the Quaker, told me, he saw her die. She laid the straw about her for burning her speedily, and behaved herself in such a manner, that all the spectators melted in tears.’
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There was a widespread feeling that such savagery went against the spirit of the age, and James II’s inability to understand this was not least amongst the causes of his failure as a monarch. It also ran squarely against what seemed to be natural justice. Lord Grey of Wark, who had commanded Monmouth’s cavalry with towering ineptitude, bought his life for a full confession, the surrender of large parts of his estates, and the promise to give evidence against other prominent members of the rebellion. When he testified against Lord Delamere, arraigned before his peers on 16 January 1686, he proved such a poor witness that Delamere got off. The first peer to give his verdict that day was John, Lord Churchill, the junior baron present, who announced: ‘Not Guilty, upon my honour.’

The barbarity of gallows, pyre, block and pillory sits uncomfortably alongside the poetry of John Dryden or the witty dramas of Aphra Behn. It was there in the background when Steele sketched out that genial baronet, Sir Roger de Coverly.

He is now in his Fifty sixth year, cheerful, gay and hearty, keeps a good House both in Town and Country; a great Lover of Mankind; but there is such a mirthful Cast in his Behaviour, that he is rather beloved than esteemed: His Tenants grow rich, his Servants look satisfied, all the young Women profess Love to him, and the young Men are glad of his Company: When he comes into a House he calls the Servants by their Names, and talks all the way up Stairs to a Visit. I must not omit that Sir ROGER is a Justice of the
Quorum
; that he fills a chair at
a Quarter-Sessions with great abilities, and three months ago gain’d universal Applause by explaining a Passage in the Game-Act.
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The Game Act of 1670 limited the right to kill game to those owning property worth £100 a year, perhaps half of one per cent of the population, and was rigidly enforced by justices of the peace like Sir Roger, whose helpful legal explanations might have escaped a defendant who stood to lose the skin off his back if convicted. But it was wholly consistent with the spirit of the age that Sir Roger spent his morning in vigorous pursuit of a hare, only, at the very end, to scoop up his exhausted quarry and release it in his park, where it joined ‘several of these Prisoners of Wars’, for he ‘could not find it in his heart to murder a Creature that had given him so much Diversion’.
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Sir Roger ‘fought a Duel upon his first coming to town’, and there too he was in good company. While Richard Brinsley Sheridan was later to write of ‘sharps and snaps’, in our period the flintlock pistol (‘snap’) had not yet come of age as a duelling weapon, although Major General William Stewart and Captain Thomas Bellew agreed to use pistols when they met in 1700 because both had wounded right hands. Gentlemen usually went at one another with their small swords, either in the relatively formal circumstance of a duel, or the wholly casual surroundings of coffee house, club or street.

Affairs of honour swept up all those who thought, however flimsy the grounds, that they might have honour to defend. Peter Drake rubbed along at the very bottom end of gentility, and when he kept the Queen’s Arms tavern near St Clement Danes he ‘provided bob-wigs, blue aprons, etc, proper for the business of a vintner; these I wore at home, but could not yet leave off the tie-wig and sword when I went abroad’.
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He duelled whenever the mood took him. Scarcely had he reached Holland, with the first of his many regiments, in 1689, than he had cross words with ‘one Butler, who was a quartermaster in a regiment of Dutch horse … I ran him in the sword arm, and he ran me through the left breast, and so we parted, to take care of ourselves.’
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Nearer the top end of the social scale, the most celebrated duel of the age saw the Whig Lord Mohun, a reformed rake who had already twice been tried by his peers for murder, and the Tory grandee the Duke of Hamilton (who had sired an illegitimate child on Marlborough’s own bastard daughter), just appointed ambassador to Versailles, meet in Hyde Park early on the morning of 12 November 1712. Mohun and Hamilton rushed at one another ‘like wild beasts, not fencing or parrying’.
Mohun, run through the chest, was killed on the spot, but he lashed out as he fell and the tip of his small sword opened a vein in Hamilton’s arm, leaving him bleeding to death. Their seconds, Major General Macartney (recently dismissed the service for toasting damnation to the new Tory ministry) for Mohun, and Colonel John Hamilton for the duke, had not let time hang heavy on their hands, and were at it too: Hamilton was pinked in the lower leg. Hamilton later claimed that he was holding his wounded principal when Mohun ran up and stabbed the prostrate man, and although the evidence was uncorroborated, Macartney wisely fled abroad. He reappeared after the accession of George I, stood his trial at the King’s Bench, and was acquitted.

Officers, with their keen sense of honour and arms conveniently to hand, were always ready to lug out, though the British army never reached the quarrelsome pinnacle of its French opponents. De la Colonie fought his first duel when still a cadet, but his opponent, a lieutenant and assistant adjutant of the Régiment de Navarre, summoned help by yelling ‘
À moi, Navarre
,’ and thus unsportingly turning private squabble into public riot. Peter Drake, then serving in a French regiment, was with ‘thirteen friends and bottle companions’ when a dispute arose between two of them. They decided on a mass duel, and as they were walking to a suitable ground Lieutenant de la Salle, observing that the numbers were uneven, cheerfully joined the smaller group. For a moment there was a chance of reconciliation, but de la Salle observed that the wine was drawn and they must drink it.

The fight began, every man tilting at his opponent, and the two principals engaged; and in a short time killed each other. There was another lost on the part for which I fought, and some wounded on both sides; and I had the good fortune to wound and disarm Monsieur de la Salle.
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