Marlborough (58 page)

With hindsight we can now see that if 1706 was the year that secured Brabant for the Allies, it was also the year that the war in Spain slid quietly from their grasp. Nor was there much comfort from the amphibious ‘descent’ on the French coast in which Marlborough invested so much confidence. After Ramillies he was busy arranging for the dispatch of British troops, and in June he successfully negotiated with the Dutch for ‘three battalions and ten troops of dragoons mounted’. However, in August a first attempt was driven back into Torbay by severe storms, and a second attempt, after as severe a battering, refitted in Lisbon, whence its commander, Lord Rivers, beset by contradictory instructions, was eventually persuaded to join Galway in Seville. Thus a descent which was meant to complicate French decision-making and probably compel the withdrawal of troops from Flanders became the simple reinforcement of what was beginning to look like Allied failure.

The arrival of Lord Rivers complicated the question of command in the Peninsula, an issue which went to the heart of Marlborough’s responsibilities as captain general. He warned Godolphin that it was not healthy to have Galway, Peterborough and Rivers all enjoying the status
of independent commanders in the same theatre of war. Galway, he feared, was now definitely past his best, and ‘continues so very pressing to retire and come home, that I really think it would be too great a barbarity to refuse him’. However, Galway had recommended Peterborough as his successor, a suggestion that Marlborough found amazing.
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The matter was eventually resolved by persuading Galway to soldier on. In April 1707 Godolphin reported him ‘in good heart at the letters he had received from his friends in England, and resolved to stay in the chief command’.
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As the campaigning year wound to its breathless close, Marlborough looked forward to returning home. Godolphin told him that the work at Woodstock was coming along well.

The garden is already very fine and in perfect shape, the turf all laid, and the first coat of the gravel, the greens high and thriving, and all the hedges pretty well grown.

The building is so advanced, as that one may see perfectly how it will be when it is done. The side where you intend to live is the most forward part. My Lady Marlborough is most prying into it, and has really not only found a great many errors, but very well mended such of them, as could not stay for your decision. I am apt to think she has made Mr Vanbrugh a little annoyed.
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However, it soon transpired that Godolphin had been at Woodstock with Sarah because the duchess had withdrawn there in a huff after a row with Anne over the queen’s determination to govern with an all-party ministry and Sarah’s equally strong convictions that Tories were a menace to the public safety and that her son-in-law Sunderland should be appointed to a high office of state. With an unusual flash of diplomacy Sarah begged leave ‘to revive the names of Mrs Morley and your faithful Freeman’, but the old spells no longer wove their charm.

Marlborough was hauled unwillingly into the dispute, like some great gun required to breach a fortress wall, peppered by a volley of sharp letters from Sarah (‘I find when you writ most of them you had very much the spleen …’) warning him that he was not taking a sufficiently firm line with the queen. While Marlborough genuinely believed that the queen’s government could not go on without Godolphin, he was less worried than his great ally about the presence in it of Tories like Harley, and was drawn into the battle with a heavy heart. At the end of this remarkable campaign he found himself mired deep in politics and
accused, once more, of weakness by his wife. He wrote glumly that he would never live to see Blenheim Palace finished,

for I had flattered myself that if the war should happily have ended this next year, that I might the next after have lived in it, for I am resolved on being neither minister nor courtier, not doubting the Queen will allow of it; but these are idle dreams, for while the war lasts I must serve and will do it with all my heart; and if I am at last rewarded with your love and esteem, I shall end my days happily …
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These were poignant words from a commander at the very height of his powers.

Over the winter of 1706–07 the Duumvirs – Marlborough and Godolphin – strengthened their position, at last persuading the queen to make Sunderland a secretary of state, having both Tom Wharton and Godolphin himself promoted to earldoms, and getting most of the remaining Tories (save St John, Harley and two others) removed from office. They accomplished this at the expense of the ‘unquestioning allegiance’ of a queen who resented being exposed to the rapacity of the ‘Lords of the Junto’, as the Whig grandees were known.
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There was also a continuing decline in relations between Anne and Sarah. Anne herself was now overweight, dropsical and frequently in pain. Early in 1707 Sir John Clerk of Penicuick, one of the commissioners for the Union with Scotland, described her as

the most despicable mortal I had seen in any station. The poor Lady, as I saw her twice before, was again under a very severe fit of the gout, ill dressed, blotted in her countenance, and surrounded with plasters, cataplasms, and dirty rags. The extremity of her pain was not then upon her, and it diverted her a little to see company with whom she was not to use ceremonies, otherwise I had not been allowed access to her.

However, I believe she was not displeased to see anybody, for no court attenders ever came near her. All the incense and adoration offered at court were to her ministers, particularly the Earl of Godolphin, her chief minister, and the two secretaries of state [Harley and Sunderland], her palace at Kensington, where she commonly resided, was a perfect solitude … I had many occasions to think that few houses in England belonging to persons of quality
were kept in a more private way than the Queen’s royal palace of Kensington.
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Yet Anne had lost none of her determination, and now, as an experienced monarch, was far less amenable to influence than she had been at the beginning of her reign. With her passionate affection for Sarah ‘rapidly decaying into aversion’, isolated, in increasing pain, and aware of her husband’s declining health, she slipped naturally into a friendship with Abigail Hill. For all sorts of reasons this never equalled her passion for Sarah, which had been as close to a relationship between equals as any friendship between monarch and subject could ever be. When Abigail married Colonel Sam Masham, groom of the bedchamber to Prince George, in Kensington Palace, probably in the early summer of 1707, Sarah was not informed, though she quickly concluded that the £2,000 drawn by the queen from her privy purse, of which she was the custodian, was a dowry. Had Sarah been balanced in her judgements, a virtue no one could ever ascribe to her, she might have reflected that this was the merest trickle of fortune by comparison with the powerful jets of royal favour which had played upon her own family, but she characteristically responded with an outburst of fury at Abigail’s ingratitude.

Sarah even ventured a comment on the ‘strange and unaccountable’ fact of the queen’s ‘having no inclination for any but of one’s own sex’, which does something to suggest that her own relationship with Anne had never been physical. It certainly shows that she wholly misjudged Anne’s relationship with Abigail, who was always (even after Sam was ennobled) servant, nurse and social inferior. Sarah would spend the rest of her days ranting on about Abigail’s ‘insolence and anger’, and the way she ‘spread with malicious zeal all manner of the greatest falsehoods about her’.
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At about this time Sarah fell under the influence of Arthur Maynwaring, a Whig playwright and pamphleteer who called himself her secretary but was adviser and publicist too. His own contributions to the dispute between the two women were predictably unhelpful, with
A New Ballad to the tune of Fair Rosamond
implying that Abigail’s hold on the queen was based on ‘Some Dark deeds at Night’.
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Yet there is no doubt that Abigail was dangerous to the Marlboroughs and Godolphin, because Robert Harley was her second cousin on her father’s side. Anne liked Harley, and used him to help secure a regimental colonelcy for Sam Masham, taking care that the regiment should remain in Ireland so that Sam could stay at court. As the war went on there was increasing concern about regimental colonels who enjoyed
life in London while their men were on active service. In June 1706 Godolphin warned Marlborough:

There’s one thing more relating to the army I can’t observe to you without some indignation. Here is Major General Harvey and my Lord Mohun, a brigadier, walking in St James’s Park and every day in the chocolate house, while both their regiments are serving abroad. Though I instance only these two, I believe there may be a great many others in the same circumstances.
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However, with his regiment in Ireland Sam Masham was safe enough.

Abigail was never in fact ‘the great and supreme favourite’, as Sarah maintained.
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Harley was quite right to see that her influence with the queen was essentially negative. ‘You cannot set anyone up,’ he told her, ‘you can pull anyone down.’
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After Harley’s resignation in early 1708 Abigail proved invaluable as his eyes and ears at court. He was, though, a skilful politician in his own right, and popular with the queen because, as she thought, he supported her desire to see a broadly-based non-partisan government. Abigail Hill had far less impact upon his eventual political triumph than Sarah Marlborough, well aware of the influence she herself had wielded, ever imagined.

Although Anne resented Godolphin’s apparent partiality for the Whigs, neither he nor Marlborough was, strictly speaking, a party man. The death, in November 1706, of Dr Peter Mews, Bishop of Winchester, sometime captain of royalist horse and amateur artillery driver at Sedgemoor, created a minor political storm. Winchester was England’s richest diocese, and the Whigs hoped to see the appointment of one of their clerics. Godolphin had, however, promised the post to the Tory Bishop Trelawney of Exeter in return for his electoral help in 1705. The furious Whigs hoped for recompense by the appointment of their friends to Exeter, as well as to the providentially vacated see of Chester and the Regius chair of divinity at Oxford. The queen proceeded to nominate suitable candidates without asking Godolphin’s advice, though the Whigs at once blamed minister rather than monarch. Marlborough was involved, as he had his own (now disappointed) candidate for the Oxford chair, and the question of ecclesiastical appointments joined the business of the Board of Ordnance and the captaincy general amongst his papers for the following campaign.

Getting votes for the continuation of the war through Parliament proved easy, thanks to Ramillies and general confidence in the war’s
successful outcome. The Scots had already ratified the Act of Union, but it was unpopular with High Tories, who resented the fact that the Act established Presbyterianism in Scotland, and who raised their familiar cry that the Church of England was under threat. They could not prevent the Union, which came into being on 1 May 1707, and saw the separate governments of England and Scotland replaced by a reconstituted government of Great Britain.

The French had much to fear from 1707. Blenheim had dashed their hopes in Bavaria, Ramillies had lost them most of the Spanish Netherlands, and in the early autumn of 1706 Eugène had swept them from northern Italy. While the Alliance, its creaking machinery lubricated by English and Dutch gold, remained intact, France was visibly drained by the cost of a war which had been meant to be short but had already lasted for five years. Yet although Louis might weep bitter tears alone with Madame de Maintenon in her apartment, his public demeanour radiated regal fortitude, and early in the new campaigning season his armies won a victory which went to the very heart of French and Allied war aims.

On 25 April Galway was severely defeated by Berwick at Almanza, in south-east Spain. This was not in itself surprising, for Galway, with 15,000 men, was outnumbered by Berwick, with 25,000, and boldly attacked him after a wearing approach march. The attack was going perhaps better than it deserved when the Portuguese on Galway’s right broke, and Galway was badly beaten, losing over 4,000 killed and wounded and perhaps another 12,000 taken prisoner.
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Major General James Stanhope’s elegantly written report, sent to Marlborough from Barcelona, makes melancholy reading:

I cannot learn that five hundred men are escaped out of the whole body of the foot, which consisted of forty-three battalions, whereof I know not whether sixteen or seventeen were English, nineteen Portuguese, and the remainder Dutch. Of our horse, about three thousand five hundred are come off, but very few English or Dutch … My Lord Galway was wounded with a sword over the eye at the beginning of the action, charging with the horse. The accident contributed much to the confusion which followed. Our foot is by everybody said to have done wonders, which makes the loss of it so much the more
sensible. I send this letter by a felucca, which is dispatched by the King to Italy, to ask for succours. I do not know what effect his solicitations will have, nor, indeed, do I know what to wish. If your Grace commanded the armies in Italy, I should not yet think our game desperate; for I should believe it possible for him who marched from Holland to the Danube to save the Empire, to march through Provence and Languedoc to save Spain. I know nothing else that can do it.
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Although Almanza did not signal the end of the war in Spain, which may more fairly be dated to Stanhope’s own undeserved defeat at Brihuega in December 1710, it was as decisive a blow to Allied aspirations in the Peninsula as Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim had been to Louis XIV’s hopes for hegemony in Europe. However, ‘No victory without Spain’ was to become a key plank of the Duumvirs’ foreign policy, and Marlborough certainly believed that the best way to Spain was, metaphorically, through France: if Louis XIV was reduced to the last extremity by military defeat elsewhere, then he would relinquish his support for Philip V. This conviction, far more than any desire on Marlborough’s part to retain active military employment, helped ensure the continuation of the war until both sides faced exhaustion.

It certainly encouraged Marlborough to support the Allies’ strategic grand design of 1707, an attack on the French naval base of Toulon by an army under Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy, and Prince Eugène, striking down from Savoy. This had first been bruited in late 1706, primarily as a means of weakening the French position in Spain. In December Marlborough told Heinsius: ‘We hope to make such a diversion that France will not be in any condition to send any considerable succours to Spain.’ The letter concluded: ‘My head aches so that you will excuse my making use of Mr Cardonnel’s hand.’
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Well might Marlborough’s affliction trouble him, for he had completed another round of diplomacy designed, among other things, to persuade German princes to contribute to the 28,000 soldiers in British and Dutch pay who were to join the Imperialists for the Toulon project.

He had also been sent on a mission to Charles XII of Sweden, then at war with Russia, and recently victorious over both Saxony and Poland-Lithuania, whose king Augustus II he had deposed, replacing him with his own man, Stanislas Leszczynski. The headstrong and implacable Swedish monarch – he abstained from women and alcohol, but enjoyed wrestling with bears – was in camp at the village of Altranstädt in Saxony,
and Marlborough travelled there in April by way of Hanover. Louis’ agents had been encouraging Charles to attack the Empire, but his aim of ‘securing and supporting the Protestant religion’ made him an improbable ally even for Louis. However, he had threatened to intervene on behalf of the Protestants in Silesia, which brought him into conflict with Vienna; and Prussia, fearful of a widening of the Northern War, considered withdrawing from its commitment to the Allies.

Marlborough’s undoubted military status, and an opening address so flowery that some historians believed that he could never have brought himself to utter the words (but we must remember what a courtier he was), at once put him on good terms with the king. Charles was content to accept a guarantee from the emperor of freedom of conscience for his Silesian subjects. Marlborough’s mission was wholly successful, though it was not without its moments of tension, not least the problem of how to deal with the dethroned Augustus, a staunch supporter of the Allies, without the news of their meeting giving offence to Charles. The Swedish king did not break camp until he heard of the repulse of the Toulon expedition. There have been suggestions that he would not have tolerated an unequal peace treaty being imposed on Louis had the expedition succeeded, and had put pressure on Victor Amadeus to make it fail.
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In any event, with Toulon secured for the French he turned his back on western Europe and set off on his march into Russia, which ultimately led him to defeat and his army to destruction at Poltava in June 1709.

Marlborough characteristically declined to believe early accounts of Almanza, for they came from the French, and he was wise enough to know that first reports, good or bad, are seldom correct. But by May he was forced to admit that the reverse there ‘is greater than what was first reported’. Nevertheless he assured Heinsius that ‘if the army in Italy enters France early I no way doubt God Almighty will bless this campaign’.
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The expedition did indeed force Berwick to send troops from Spain, helping the Allies retain control of Catalonia. However, it accomplished little else. The emperor wanted to seize Naples, and, deaf to Marlborough’s assertions that it would fall easily enough once Toulon was taken, duly detached 10,000 men to attack it. Eugène did not work well with his ducal cousin, and in mid-July Marlborough admitted to Godolphin that ‘I shall be very uneasy’ if the march did not begin soon. Then he began to worry that Victor Amadeus might attack a more convenient but less advantageous spot, like Antibes. When Marlborough did at last hear from Eugène, in a letter written on the thirteenth, it was to be told that the French already outnumbered him, more were on
their way, and ‘the enterprise is of the most perilous’.
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Marlborough told Godolphin that he should not be too concerned, as Eugène tended to see problems in principle and to overcome them in practice, ‘for it is his way to think everything difficult till he comes to put it into execution. But then he acts with so much vigour that he makes amends for all his desponding.’
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