This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  Marlborough began secret preparations to move part of his army away from the Netherlands towards the Danube. He didn’t want the French to know what he was doing but, more than that, he didn’t want the Dutch to realize what he was doing: they would not have agreed. They would have seen it as leaving them undefended. But the Danube was a 250-mile march across Europe, with French troops heavily entrenched west of the Rhine. Marlborough had 21,000 men, a very obvious force and difficult to hide. On 20 May 1703 he left Bedburg, saying that he was going to fight on the Moselle, which he wasn’t. He picked up 5,000 Hanoverians at Koblenz and 14,000 Danish and Germans at Mainz, eleven days later.

  The marvel of this march was Marlborough’s logistical planning. The weather was appalling: rain and mud. He marched his men for four days, then rested for one. Fresh boots and equipment were pre-positioned. Marlborough was a calculating tactician, marshal and quartermaster-general rolled into one man. By the end of June, Marlborough had 40,000 men, had lost only 900 and had Prince Eugene of Savoy at his side. In September, at Höchstadt on the Danube, Marlborough earned his most memorable victory. The English attacked a small village called Blindheim. It is now remembered as Blenheim. After setbacks and advances, Marlborough’s forces savaged thousands of French troops. That night he wrote to his wife: ‘I have not time to say more, but to beg you will give my duty to the Queen, and let her know her army has had a glorious victory. Monsieur Tallard and the two other Generals are in my coach and I am following the rest.’ Tens of thousands lay dead or wounded.

  This wasn’t simply a terrible battle. Before it, there had been a sense that France was invincible. Now there was shock in the court of Louis XIV. Blenheim was more than a defeat, it was the ruin of a greater part of Louis XIV’s army. And there was more to come. In May 1704, the English Admiral George Rooke arrived in the Mediterranean with his Anglo–Dutch fleet. In July, he was joined by a squadron commanded by Sir Cloudesley Shovell. Reinforced by a land assault, Rooke bombarded a garrison at the mouth of the Mediterranean. This was the prelude to the famous battle for Gibraltar. And, after mixed fortunes, an event occurred in 1706 that was to have even greater consequences than Blenheim. The arena this time was the Low Countries, in what is now Belgium. Near the village of Ramillies on 23 May, Marlborough launched 25,000 of his British, Dutch and Danish troops against the French army. It broke and so was won for the Alliance the whole of Belgium. Yet there was, for Marlborough, a harder campaign to come. It would not take place in Flanders but in a bloodier cockpit: the trenches, defiles and ramparts of Whitehall and Westminster. Marlborough’s honeymoon with the Queen’s inner circle was coming to an end.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  1707–14

  It is now 1707. The war against France and Spain continued, but an event whose consequences have lasted to the present day occurred in these islands. 1707 was the year the Act of Union with England and Scotland became law; or, more accurately, the Act linked Scotland with the 1536 Union of England and Wales. Although James I had, in 1603, styled himself King of Great Britain in the Union of the Crowns (Scotland and England) and anyone born in Scotland was also an English citizen, it had taken a full century for Great Britain to become a legal fact.

  The Act of Union, 104 years after James I’s succession, united the two Parliaments. As long as Scotland and England had separate Parliaments it was always possible that the Scottish Parliament could follow, for instance, a totally different foreign policy. And, at the time of the War of the Spanish Succession, this was important. Imagine the difficulties if Scotland chose to support a different side, particularly as it had always enjoyed a special understanding with France.

  Also, and perhaps more significant, the Scottish Parliament could choose a different monarch if it so wished – and it might well. In 1701, the Act of Settlement promised the throne to the Hanoverians once Queen Anne was dead. (Elizabeth, daughter of James I and Anne of Denmark, married Frederick, Elector Palatine. Their daughter married Ernest-Augustus of Hanover; George – later George I – a Protestant, was their son.) But the Scottish Parliament didn’t accept that at all and many in the English Parliament thought that the Scots might support Anne’s half-brother, James Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, even though he was a Catholic, because first and foremost he was a Stuart.

  However, before the Act of Union could become law, there were differences to resolve. For the Scots, the massacre at Glencoe, which took place in 1692, had done little to convince them that anything much would be gained by the Union. Campbell of Glenlyon had slaughtered nearly forty MacDonalds, including the Jacobite chieftain, Alexander MacDonald. The Scots believed the Glencoe massacre was carried out on the orders of King William and so Union was impossible under him.

  The English Parliament was dominated by High Church Tories. For those Tories, the Scottish Presbyterian Church was beyond the Pale and they did not want its followers in the English, or single, Parliament. So they did not want the Union. Equally the Scottish Parliament was dominated by the Country party and the extreme views of the Episcopalians, who were Jacobites, and the Presbyterians.

  The Scottish Parliament forced through four Acts which the Queen’s men could never accept. The first Act more or less outlawed the Episcopalians. The second stopped the Queen going to war without the Scottish Parliament’s agreement. The third allowed French wines to be imported, thus breaking the trade embargo on the French with whom England were at war. The fourth was the ultimate hold over England – in theory at least. It said that if the Queen died without an heir, then Parliament could appoint her successor. Queen Anne was told to veto this fourth Act, the Act of Security. She was advised that if she didn’t, there could be two monarchs after her death. The veto secure, the Scottish Parliament adjourned for a month but in the following year, 1704, the Bill came up again, and the Scots refused to pay taxes unless it went through. For hundreds of years English monarchs had paid lip-service to the crudest forms of democracy for the simple reason that monarchs need money for war. And at the point when the Scots were refusing to pay taxes unless the Act of Security was passed, Marlborough was planning his great campaign against the French. So the Queen, and her advisers, backed down. The Act was passed just as Marlborough was beating the French at Blenheim. However, in 1705 the English Parliament passed the Alien Act.

  The Alien Act stated precisely what would happen if the Scottish Parliament refused to pass its own Act along the lines of the English Act of Settlement: one nation, one monarch. It said that a commissioner would be appointed to negotiate a Union of Scotland and England and unless the Scots produced such a law, then, after Christmas Day 1705, Scots would become aliens in England with all that meant for citizenship and trade. The success of this Act was helped by the disunity among the Scots themselves. The English government agent in Scotland was the man who, fifteen years later, would win lasting memory as the author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe.

  Defoe reported back that he thought the Act would succeed. ‘There is,’ he reported cynically, ‘an entire harmony in this country, consisting in universal discords.’ Very simply, the Presbyterians and Episcopalians may have disliked Union with England and Wales, but they disliked each other even more. However, when a Bill was passed which secured the Protestant religion and Presbyterian Church government within the kingdom of Scotland, the Scottish Parliament agreed to the Act of Union.

  Many believed that unless the differences between the two kingdoms were sorted out, then there could be another war, not with France and Spain, but between England and Scotland. And so it was that on 16 January 1707 the Scottish Parliament, as E. N. William, the historian, wrote, ‘signed its own death warrant by passing the Treaty of Union’. Scotland was to be united with England and Wales. After Anne’s death, the throne was to descend to the Hanoverians. There was to be but one Parliament in which the Scots were to be represented by forty-five Members (only one more than Cornwall) and sixteen peers. The Scots would keep their own legal system, including the feudal p
rivate law courts and, most attractive to many in Scotland, the Scots would now have the freedom to trade on equal terms with England and the colonies. And in June, 1707, a famous proclamation was issued.

  Anne Regina

  Whereas in pursuance of the two and twentieth article of the Treaty of Union, as the same hath been ratified and confirmed by two Acts of Parliament, the one passed by the Parliament of England and the other in the Parliament of Scotland, we, for many weighty reasons, have thought fit to declare by our royal proclamations . . . do hereby appoint our first Parliament of Great Britain shall meet and be holden at our City of Westminster on Thursday the twenty-third day of October next, whereof the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and knights, citizens and burgesses, and the commissioners for the shires and burghs of our said first Parliament of Great Britain, and all others whom it may concern, are hereby required to take notice.

  Given at our Court at St James’s, the fifth day of June 1707, in the sixth year of our reign.

  On 23 October 1707, the first ever Parliament of Great Britain met at Westminster. The Act of Union brought together Churches, politics and religion, albeit shakily.

  In that same year, 1707, the War of Spanish Succession rumbled across Europe until it appeared finally to conclude and so, for the moment at least, Marlborough was a national hero. The nation gave him his own palace, Blenheim, at Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Later, Capability Brown designed the gardens to resemble the layout of the troops, their regiments and squadrons, as they formed up for the Battle of Blenheim itself.

  Meanwhile, the British had captured Gibraltar and the Earl of Peterborough had captured Barcelona. Families were leaving for the New World to join the children of the Pilgrim Fathers who had sailed for America more than eighty years earlier. Daniel Defoe was now editing his own newspaper, the Review, and masons were working on John Vanbrugh’s Castle Howard in Yorkshire. A treaty had been signed with Portugal to allow port wine to be brought into England at reduced customs rates. Commerce had expanded and harvests were good. Trade was gaining an importance that had not always been there and it was uniting people’s interests even if religion split them. Rivers were deepened and widened and locks were built, which suggests that roads were poor and trade good, although the first canal, the Bridgewater, was not cut until 1761.

  The people lived much as before: the north tended to be poor, the south prosperous. Defoe thought the Lake District wild, barren and frightful. People lived in buildings little better than cowsheds, yet this was changing. Cloth weaving was bringing a new prosperity to the region and child labour was not seen as a disgrace, but a sign of industry. Defoe wrote about one town where, ‘There was not a child in the town or in the villages round it of about five years old, but, if it was not neglected by its parents and untaught, could earn its bread.’

  And poverty shouldn’t be confused with early eighteenth-century ignorance. Further north, in Northumberland for example, more of the population could read than in the financially secure south. The Scots produced more books and, not surprisingly, the Lowlands had more in common with the north than did the southern counties.

  Wherever the traveller went in the kingdom, the one thing to be found was beer. It was certainly safer than the water and drunkenness was commonplace. The more prosperous of London had other pastimes. Since Charles II, the fashionable had taken coffee, tea and, later, chocolate. By Queen Anne’s time it was possible to pick and choose company at the different houses in St James’s. Whigs were to be found at the St James’s Coffee House, Tories at the Cocoa Tree, the clergy went to Truby’s, the very smart to White’s. Here then was the beginning of the London gentlemen’s club. And there was one chocolate house that was to become greater than them all; it was run for the commercially minded in Lombard Street by a man called Edward Lloyd.

  London may have been fashionable, but it was disgusting to some, including the monarch. The population of England was about five million, nearly 700,000 of whom lived in London. And the city, with its huge coal fires, was a hellhole for almost every invalid. Anne suffered from gout and preferred Bath of Windsor. She certainly avoided having every sore joint shaken by official carriage rides through London’s roughly laid streets. John Macadam, although born in the eighteenth century, wouldn’t be laying his smooth roads for another 100 years – and then he chose Bristol anyway.

  Whitehall itself was in a sorry state; almost every building had been burned to a shell in 1698; only the Banqueting House had survived. But Parliament had grown stronger, power had shifted and the monarchy was weaker. The result was that the power of the court (but not yet of the monarchy) was waning.

  Marlborough, for example, still put great store in his influence with the Queen, which was exercised through his wife, Sarah Churchill. But now, because of the new influences at Westminster, especially the re-emergence of the Whigs, that was changing. By 1707 the arrangement was under considerable strain. The Queen’s dislike for the Whigs was partly taken out on Sarah, probably because Marlborough did not share his monarch’s distaste, if only for very practical reasons. Certainly it was hard to see how any war could be executed without the Whigs, especially as the Tories did not form a powerful enough group to overcome any Whig opposition. This was far more than party politics. The Queen was quite definite in her views about the Whigs – most of whom were to her mind without any religious backbone. Equally she understood perfectly that she had to have the Whigs on side to finance the war. Sarah Churchill was reasonably persistent in her opinion and since she was far more than a lady of the bedchamber – but what we today would call almost a Prime Minister (an appointment that did not then exist) – the stress of the Churchill–Queen relationship was not to be underrated. An almost exhausted Sarah Churchill introduced to Anne’s court her relation, Abigail Hill, who was also a cousin of the Whig Earl of Sunderland. Sunderland was also Marlborough’s son-in-law. The Whigs, knowing they were important to the Queen’s government, wanted a greater say in Cabinet. They put forward Sunderland and Anne most certainly didn’t want him. But the Whigs, by threatening to withdraw their support from the war effort, forced Marlborough and his closest political friend, Godolphin, to insist that Anne should allow Sunderland public office. It was not such a good scheme but she gave way.

  There was now another cousin of the increasingly influential Abigail Hill in the political picture. He was Robert Harley, who had gone into Parliament as a Whig but became a Tory when Anne ascended the throne in 1702 and became her Chancellor of the Exchequer. Within two years there would be what was called a Whig Junto. Junto comes from the Spanish word junta, which means council. Sunderland was part of that Junto, so was Marlborough. Harley soon overhauled them in prominence when, or so it has often been claimed, the Queen sent a message via one of her gardeners to come into her parlour of intrigue. He did so and immediately brought together a group of Tories and Whigs who would support the Queen in Parliament. If this group succeeded, Harley had to assume that Godolphin would fall. Thus, the intrigue and ruthless nature of politics at the start of the eighteenth century and the parts played by long famous men including Marlborough.

  As we saw earlier, Sidney Godolphin had been minister to Charles II, James II and now Queen Anne. He’d been instrumental in getting through the Act of Union with Scotland; but most important to Marlborough, and therefore the Queen, Godolphin was Lord Treasurer, the government’s financial manager, the man who could manage the flow of war expenses. So, and even leaving aside their friendship, of course Marlborough would try to protect Godolphin. In doing so, he knew that Harley, the Queen’s favourite minister, would have to go. Therefore, Marlborough was indirectly challenging the nerve as well as the authority of the monarch.

  All this assumed that Marlborough’s own standing was not challenged. Sarah Churchill, Marlborough’s wife, was no longer an influence with the Queen and it would only take a poor campaigning season at the war to reduce Marlborough’s stock – which is exactly what happened in 1707. On the Rhine, the Frenc
h commander Marshal Villars took and pillaged large parts of Germany. In Spain, the Alliance generals split their forces. It was a disastrous decision. Everything that had been gained the previous year was now lost. In the Low Countries Marlborough was stuck simply trying to hold what he had got. He had allowed many of his forces south for what he’d hoped would be the taking of the French port of Toulon. It failed. Worse still, the British fleet was wrecked off the Scillies and 1,500 sailors drowned. And although he made it ashore, the finest of England’s admirals, Sir Cloudesley Shovell, died. And, at the same time, one of Robert Harley’s clerks passed Harley’s correspondence to a French agent. The clerk swung at Tyburn for it. As for Harley, his was a Parliamentary lynching.

  Marlborough had said that Harley should be dropped from the Queen’s Cabinet. She of course refused this demand. So Marlborough said he could not sit at the same Cabinet table as Harley and left London. Anne had lost Godolphin and Marlborough and this was no private matter; here was an issue which could generate a lack of public confidence in the monarchy. Harley understood this and could no more than step aside, taking with him his closest political ally after the Queen, Henry St John – more famously remembered as the first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751). So Marlborough and Godolphin appeared triumphant but the real winners were the Whigs. From now on there would be increasing distance between the monarch and the man who had once been her favoured general and friend. With this dismal prospect and in some depression, Marlborough returned to the war.