The process inevitably had political overtones. Regimental colonelcies were potentially lucrative appointments, coveted by the government’s friends, real or imagined. When Lord Essex’s death left the colonelcy of his dragoon regiment vacant, Marlborough hoped to fill it with Lord Hertford, son of the Duke of Somerset, who the ministry was eager to please. Jack Hill, the queen’s candidate for the post, was actually far better qualified from a purely military point of view. Because generals did not receive pay for the rank they held, but only for the post they filled, command appointments were also useful ways of rewarding the government’s supporters and punishing its opponents. Marlborough was certainly not immune to personal or political favouritism. There were some officers, like his brother Charles or the capable Philip Honeywood, whose interests he looked after, and others, like Jack Hill and Sam Masham, who were elevated despite his attempt to rig the lists for a periodic promotion so that the elevation of brigadiers stopped just short of Hill and that of new colonels just short of Masham. Marlborough professed friendship for Lord Raby, a major general and colonel of a dragoon regiment, whose old schoolfriend Cadogan assured him: ‘I hope that I shall soon wish your Lordship the joy of being lieutenant general.’114 Marlborough, however, had no intention of making somebody he regarded as a Harley supporter a lieutenant general, and was anxious that Raby should not join him and Lord Townshend as a plenipotentiary in the 1710 peace talks. Once Harley gained control of the government he did his best, not wholly successfully, to deprive the captain general of his patronage by setting up a board under Ormonde, later Marlborough’s successor, which began its work by dismissing all the captain general’s brigadiers.
Brevet promotion, which gave its holder rank in the army but not in his regiment (and thus conferred status but not necessarily employment consistent with that rank) was a cheap and widely used way in which, in an age where decorations were not available, commanders-in-chief could reward the successful or the favoured. It inevitably produced confusion, which Marlborough did his best to mitigate. ‘Besides Colonel Hollins having a commission of brigadier,’ wrote Marlborough, ‘does nowise exempt him from his duty as major, there are older captains in the first regiment to whom it would be a prejudice when they come to roll together.’115 However, attempts to sort out the rank structure created almost as many problems as they solved, and officers who were passed over often responded by blaming political interference.
Ormonde’s board of general officers produced a set of regulations intended to govern officer appointments and promotions. No officer who had retired by selling his commission could serve again; sales of commissions could take place only with the crown’s consent; officers could normally sell after twenty years’ service, disablement, or ‘on some extraordinary occasion’, and twelve pence in the pound would be payable, by both buyer and seller alike, to help run the Royal Hospital. Although the work of the board inpinged (as Harley had intended) on what might have been regarded as his legitimate interest, Marlborough at once told St John that he would ensure that the new regulations would ‘be duly observed by those under his command’, although he had some suggestions for minor modifications. First, it would be wiser to allow subalterns to sell out without the need to obtain prior royal approval, as many ‘by misfortune in their recruits or otherwise, have run themselves so far behindhand as not to be able to continue the service, so that, unless they have the liberty to dispose of their commissions, the debt must fall on the regiment’. Next, officers who died in service often had ‘great families in a starving condition’ who deserved the sale price of their relative’s commission. Finally, regimental colonels should be able ‘to have officers out of other regiments whom they judge better qualified than those in the next rank in their own’, and in a distant theatre of war it was simply impractical to await what would inevitably be a lengthy process of approval for cross-posting between regiments. Marlborough’s suggestions were practical and humane.116
Not all Marlborough’s work consisted of promoting the few and apologising to the many. There were lists to be furnished of French officers on parole, Scots recruiting officers to be transported from Ostend to Leith, Lieutenant General Ross’s regiment of dragoons to have 720 guilders charged to its account and payment of the same sum made to the inhabitants of Steesch, near Bois-le-Duc, who had complained of ‘exactions committed … in their march to winter quarters’.117
Marlborough assured Lord Halifax that he was determined that his recent misfortunes should not ‘lessen my zeal for the public, nor my endeavours to carry on this war with all possible vigour while I have the honour to command the army’.118 He corresponded with the new ministers with all the energy he had shown in his dealings with the old, and told Heinsius that an augmentation of the British contingent by ten squadrons was a new mark of the queen’s enthusiasm for the common cause. He certainly considered resignation, but decided against it, partly because of pressure from leading Whigs and the Elector of Hanover. He told Baron Bothmar, who was shortly to become the Elector’s envoy to London, that ‘I will never be able to applaud and recognise sufficiently the manner with which Monseigneur the Elector has used me on this occasion.’119 The end of the campaign found him ‘a sick man, desirous and believing still to find ease in another place’, but determined above all ‘to act as becomes an honest Englishman’.120
No sooner had Marlborough returned to England in December 1710 than the humiliation began afresh. Before she met him, the queen had a long conversation with Hamilton, making it clear that not only must Sarah be dismissed from all her offices, but her daughters must go too, for none was suitable to be at court. Anne Sunderland was ‘cunning and dangerous’, and the ‘silly and imprudent’ Henrietta Godolphin had ‘lost her reputation’, a process she was to continue with a relationship with the poet William Congreve, who was probably the father of Lady Mary Godolphin – thanks, some said, to the waters of Bath, which had ‘a wonderful influence on barren ladies, who often prove with child, even in their husbands’ absence’.121 Mary Montagu was worst of all, for ‘she was just like her mother’.122
In one sense Anne was perfectly correct. Just as Sarah’s character was heavily influenced by her own difficult relationship with her mother, so too her daughters were marked by their stormy relationship with Sarah. She even fell out with Henrietta’s son, the odious Willigo, who became Marquess of Blandford, despite the fact that Willigo’s ‘drunken habits and partiality for low company put him on bad terms with his mother, which in itself was probably sufficient to commend him to his grandmother’. When in 1731 Willigo died ‘of a drunken fit or fever’ in the wholly apt surroundings of Oxford, Lord Hervey
could not help reflecting how peculiar it was, that the only remaining branch of such a family as the Lord Treasurer Godolphin, and the head of such a family as the late Duke of Marlborough’s, should go off so universally unregretted, especially when nobody ever pretended to say that he had not sense, good nature and honesty.123
On 28 December 1710, when Marlborough had his first meeting with the queen, she told him that he must not expect the thanks of Parliament for the year’s not inconsiderable achievements, and he took the news calmly. Hamilton passed the queen’s message to the duke on the twenty-ninth, and on the following day reported that Marlborough had offered his ‘duty and submission’, adding that ‘he longed to have his wife quiet’. This encouraged Hamilton, who should have known better, to suggest a three-phase reconciliation, first between Marlborough and Harley, then between Sarah and the queen, and finally and most ludicrously, between Sarah and Abigail. The queen recognised that this would never work, and was determined to sack Sarah, though she would not risk a meeting because of the display of bad temper that would inevitably ensue.
On the evening of 5 January 1711 Hamilton discussed the matter with Marlborough and Godolphin. This was apparently the first time that Marlborough was made aware of the full details of Sarah’s correspondence with the queen, and Hamilton told Anne ‘how angry my
Lord Duke was to hear that the Duchess had spoke so to her Majesty’, adding unsurprisingly that Anne was ‘extremely pleased’ to hear this.124 In one of his addenda to Burnet’s History, Lord Dartmouth maintained that Marlborough had ‘complained of his wife who, he said, acted strangely, but there was no help for that, and a man must bear with a good deal, to be quiet at home’.125 Lord Cowper, who had heard Sarah ‘railing in the most extravagant manner against the Queen, and said she had always hated and despised her’, was assured by the duke that ‘he should not mind what she said, for she was used to talk at that rate when she was in a passion, which was a thing she was very apt to fall into, and there was no way to help it’.126
We cannot be sure whether Marlborough’s astonishment at hearing just how bad things had become was real or feigned, for he remained, even now, a consummate courtier. Over the next few days, however, it became clear that Sarah would have to go. At first she blustered, announcing that ‘such things are in my power, that if known by a man that would apprehend, and was a right politician, would lose a crown’.127 Bothmar, now the Hanoverian envoy, was assured by Shrewsbury and St John that Sarah’s departure was the price of Marlborough’s remaining in command. He passed the news on to Sarah, who agreed to submit. She made a last attempt to save herself by writing a letter of apology to the queen, but when Marlborough tried to deliver it, Anne would not receive it. Instead, she told Marlborough that he had two weeks in which to procure Sarah’s resignation.
The only surviving account of Sarah’s giving up the golden key of office as keeper of the privy purse is Dartmouth’s, and so must be treated with caution, though it is wholly in character. ‘When the Duke of Marlborough told her the Queen expected the gold key,’ he wrote, ‘she took it from her side, and threw it into the middle of the room, and bid him take it up, and carry it to whom he pleased.’128 Marlborough returned it to the queen the next morning. Sarah later maintained that she had agreed not to publish the queen’s letters in return for retrospectively accepting the 1704 offer of a pension of £2,000 a year, deducting the resultant £18,000 from the money she owed the privy purse.129 In the absence of proper accounts it is impossible to be sure quite how Sarah left the privy purse, though Edward Gregg suggests that in all ‘Sarah gained £32,800 above her normal salary and prerequisites [sic].’130 There was a last undignified spat when Sarah asked to store her furniture at St James’s Palace until Marlborough House was finished, and the queen retorted that she would charge her ten shillings a week for the privilege. Sarah responded by having all fixtures and fittings, including the fireplaces, removed from her apartments, and Anne duly ceased paying for work at Blenheim. It was a dreadful end to a remarkable friendship.
Last Campaigns
While he faltered at home, Marlborough remained reasonably successful abroad. In 1710 he began well by taking the field before Villars, forcing the French to withdraw from the line of the River Scarpe and besieging Douai. Villars held a council of war which promptly decided against offering battle (the bellicose marshal was outvoted by all his generals), and Marlborough’s intelligence service produced a copy of its deliberations only two days after the document was sent to Paris. Douai, without support from the French field army, surrendered on 29 June. Immediately afterwards Marlborough was still confident that ‘the intention of Monsieur de Villars is not to risk a battle’, so the best the Allies could do was to ‘put all the country on both sides of the Somme, and home to the sea, under contribution, and make such sieges as the Dutch may think worth the expense they must make’.131 When he moved on to besiege Béthune he again believed that ‘they do not intend venturing a battle’, and he was right: the governor duly beat the chamade on 28 August and capitulated on the twenty-ninth. Marlborough then besieged St-Venant and Aire-sur-la-Lys simultaneously, taking the former on 30 September but the latter not till 9 November.
Both sieges had been held up by a successful French attack on an ammunition convoy at St-Eloois-Vijve, on the Lys just upstream of Ghent, on 18 September. The escort blew up the powder and sank the store-boats to prevent their capture, but Marlborough sent Walter Colyear, a Scots lieutenant general in Dutch service, to the scene of the action, and he managed to recover many of the unfilled mortar bombs.132 Pioneers had to raise the sunken craft and dredge the river before it could be reopened to traffic. Marlborough had clearly hoped that he would be able to move on to attack Calais, which might indeed have unravelled the French defence of the northern frontier: ‘I never was more fond of any project since this war,’ he announced.133 However, the protracted defence of Aire was aided by ‘the continual rains … Our poor men are up to their knees in mud and water, which is a most grievous sight, and will occasion great sickness.’134 It was now obvious that nothing else could be accomplished before the troops went into winter quarters, for they had ‘suffered much by the late ill season’.135
By the time Marlborough returned to the Continent in March 1711 the political landscape of Britain had, as we have seen, been transformed. He was now so concerned about the interception of his mail by agents of the new government that he urged Sarah to ‘be careful in your discourse as well as in your letters’. Marlborough was always sensitive to press criticism, and now lamented that ‘the villainous way of printing … stabs me to the heart’.136 He was also unwell, with what might have been a recurrence of the familiar migraine, or something more akin to labyrinthitis, a disease of the inner ear. ‘I found myself in the night so out of order,’ he told Sarah, ‘that I have been obliged for some days [to] keep at home … I let you know this fearing you might hear it from others, and think it worse than it is. My illness was giddiness and swimmings in my head, which gave me often sickness in my stomach.’137
The Emperor Joseph I died of smallpox in April and was succeeded by his brother, Charles III of Spain. Villars cheerfully assured a trumpeter of Marlborough’s that this would ‘occasion great disorders amongst the Allies’, and he was perfectly right, for to press on with ‘No Peace without Spain’ would now risk creating a Hapsburg super-state of Spain linked with the Holy Roman Empire, and it was precisely the fear of a French super-state being created that had drawn Britain into the war in the first place.138 Whatever his political concerns, though, Marlborough noted that Villars was doing all he could to strengthen his position along the Rivers Scarpe and Sensée and, for all his gasconading, was again unlikely to offer battle. However little he liked the new ministry, Marlborough had come to terms with it, and, fighting the last campaign of his career, he rose to the very peak of his form.
For the 1711 campaign the Allies made their major effort in Flanders, where the captures of 1710 had left them with only the rearmost belt of Vauban’s pré carré between themselves and Paris. Eugène’s Imperialists brought Marlborough’s field army up to 142 battalions and 269 squadrons. The death of Joseph I, however, produced a change in strategy. The French sought to use it as an opportunity to intervene in Germany once more, and Vienna decided to switch Eugène’s command from Flanders to the Rhine to parry any thrust. Marlborough feared that this would lead to the Allies failing to concentrate on what he saw as the war’s decisive theatre. He did all he could to prevent it, and enlisted the help of Heinsius:
We are assured the King of France is coming to a resolution of sending troops from hence for the reinforcing of his army on the Rhine. What I fear is, that he may send a detachment thither which may occasion Prince Eugène’s marching there with the Imperial and Palatine troops, by which we shall lose so great a body of horse as may give Marshal Villars the superiority in the horse as well as in the foot.139
Two weeks later he told Heinsius that the French had already sent a detachment to the Rhine, and that he expected the whole of the Bavarian contingent to follow soon. But Eugène had also gone with his own Imperial and Palatine troops, and he had just heard from the Prince of Anhalt, commander of the Prussian contingent, that his king, who had a territorial claim against the Prince of Orange, would recall them unless he obtained s
atisfaction during his current visit to The Hague. Marlborough urged Heinsius not to say anything ‘that may hurt the Prince of Anhalt’, but it was essential not to let the King of Prussia depart without an agreement which would leave his troops in Flanders ‘for at least this campaign’.140 The Prince of Orange’s untimely death while crossing the Rhine estuary on his way to The Hague to discuss the issue did indeed produce a settlement in favour of the Prussians, who took part in the campaign.
Marlborough’s relationship with Anhalt, which had given him early warning of the danger of Prussian withdrawal, testifies to his skill as an alliance manager. On one occasion Anhalt decided that the duke had offended him, and set off for Marlborough’s quarters to expostulate.
Upon his admittance, his eyes darting fire, the Duke received him with open arms, and, embracing him, said, ‘My dear Prince, you have prevented me. I was just sending to beg the favour of your company in order to have your opinions upon a design I have formed for attacking the enemy, which I cannot undertake without your approbation, and assistance in the execution, for there are no troops I depend upon like those you command, nor any general in the army but yourself whose head and heart I can trust so in the conduct of an enterprise of such importance. If your Highness will be pleased to sit down, I will inform you of the particulars of my scheme …’ When the Prince returned, he said to his friends, whom he had informed of his intentions to insult the Duke of Marlborough, ‘The ascendancy of that man is inconceivable. I was unable to utter an angry word; he totally disarmed me in an instant.’141
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