by John Pearson
As a book-loving intellectual he could permit himself the luxury of being an extreme radical in his political beliefs. Utrecht had long been a stronghold of Dutch republicanism and Jonathan Swift, who got to know him soon after his return, claims that he was a convinced republican who, despite his lineage, hated lords as well as kings. This hostility to the peerage, though topical today, was unusual at the time, even his Republican great-uncle, Algernon Sidney, having valued the aristocracy, provided it was independent of the court. But he apparently believed that ‘the worst republic was better than the noblest of kingdoms’, and Swift describes how, among his friends, Spencer refused to use the title ‘lord’. He ‘swore he would never be called otherwise than Charles Spencer, and hoped to see the day when there would not be a peer in England’.
Even in Parliament, which he entered in 1695 as member for Tiverton, ‘Mr Spencer’ made no secret of his extreme beliefs. This clearly was a man of passionate conviction, and one senses something of his personal frustration when interrupted in the course of a debate by someone who invoked the authority of the House of Lords. ‘Sir, I would p-ss upon your House of Lords,’ he shouted. This irritated that most cynical of men, his father, who heard about it later; even his mother said that at times Charles did ‘show too much heat and over-earnestness in polities’.
The one person who unfailingly agreed with him was his young wife, Anne. Loving him, she shared eagerly in his political beliefs and was herself known as ‘the Little Whig’.
In fact, her husband was the last person anyone would have picked on to become a successful politician. He was far too passionate, too tactless, too disinclined to suffer fools gladly, and there was more than a touch of silliness about this heir to a rich eighteenth-century earldom who dreamed of abolishing the peerage and the royal family.
In an ideal world he should have been allowed to study in his library, enjoy his family, and make the most of the earthly paradise his father had created up at Althorp.
But thanks to the Marlborough connection none of this would happen. Like it or not, the Marlboroughs would involve him in the practical pursuit of power. Because of their support, combined with his considerable intelligence, he would become surprisingly successful, but in the process even he would inevitably be corrupted. Just as inevitably, he and his children would become entangled with the vast inheritance of the Marlboroughs, and the Spencers would finally emerge enormously enriched, but with the dynasty split, and its members fighting one another. As for Charles Spencer himself, the Marlborough connection, which empowered and enriched him, would finally destroy him.
As it happened, Charles and his wife were lucky to enjoy two peaceful years of marriage before the great upheaval in their lives engulfed them. This occurred in the spring of 1702, when King William, thrown from his horse in Windsor Park, caught pneumonia and died three weeks later. He was succeeded on the throne by his sister-in-law, James IPs younger daughter, Princess Anne, who helped to make her dearest friends, the Marlboroughs, one of the richest and most influential couples in the kingdom.
Both had waited long for this joyous moment to arrive. Indeed, until now, Churchill himself had led a curiously frustrating life for a military genius. Born in 1650, son of the eccentric royalist historian Sir Winston Churchill, he had served his military apprenticeship with the English garrison in Tangiers, then joined the court of Charles II in the entourage of his brother, James, Duke of York.
With his faultless manners and appearance, John Churchill always seemed as much a courtier as a soldier. According to his wife, as a young man he was ‘handsome as an angel’. Early portraits show a dark, long, handsome face, with soulful, slightly feminine brown eyes, making ail-too predictable his dangerous love affair in his early twenties with Charles IPs voracious mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland. This ended only when that easy-going monarch caught the lovers in flagrante. It was probably the famous Churchill charm that saved him.
‘You are a rascal but I forgive you, for you do it for your bread,’ the King remarked, a reference to the rumour that the Duchess had paid him £5,000 for his services. For even then John Churchill was notoriously keen on money.
Then at the age of twenty-five he fell in love with Sarah Jenyns, a fifteen-year-old maid-of-honour in the service of King James’s new wife, Mary of Modena - and more than met his match.
A wilful girl with pale skin, bright blue eyes and ‘golden hair that people said she washed in honey’, almost everyone remarked on Sarah’s boundless energy and determination. Unlike the High Tory Churchills, the Jenynses were a Roundhead family who in the Civil War supported parliament. Churchill himself described his wife as ‘a true-born Whig’, and from childhood she seems to have imbibed an innate distrust of kings and courts and anyone who tried to stop her doing as she wanted. At fifteen she made it plain that she intended to control her private life completely.
Brushing aside the young Colonel’s valiant efforts to seduce her, she told him that marriage was his only option. This was the one occasion when John Churchill knowingly surrendered; and having done so, the great hero of his age remained domestically under Sarah’s thumb for the rest of his life. As he put it, ‘A man must bear with a good deal to be quiet at home.’ On this basis one of the richest husband-and-wife partnerships in English history began.
While not in the Shameless Sunderland league, Churchill was a very cool careerist who relied on charm and looks to advance his fortunes as a military commander. When the Duke of York became King James II, he gave him a peerage, and it was as Lord Churchill that he effectively commanded the royal forces that destroyed the Monmouth Rebellion. Then, in 1688, seeing how the wind was blowing, he rapidly switched kings and helped Dutch William to suppress King James’s followers in Ireland - for which he was made Earl of Marlborough.
By now he and Sarah had five children - four daughters, Henrietta, Anne, Mary and Elizabeth, and the all-important male heir, John Churchill who, on his father’s elevation, was called by the courtesy title of Lord Blandford. But throughout these early years of marriage Sarah never let her husband or her children come between her and the strange relationship on which the hopes of the family now depended - her passionate friendship with King James’s daughter, Princess Anne.
As younger daughter of King James II, by his first wife, Anne Hyde, Princess Anne was in direct succession to the throne, but in spite of this she lived a fairly miserable existence. A solid, unappealing child, she was left motherless at the age of six and, being brought up an Anglican, was largely ignored by her Catholic father. Neglected and unloved, the sad princess appeared ‘a pathetic little soul in that false and glittering court’ of Charles II.
Later she was in the unenviable position of royalty-in-waiting; one day she might be Queen of England, but until this happened she would always be potentially a source of trouble and annoyance to the reigning monarch. Even her marriage in 1683 to the amiably stupid Prince George of Denmark, though affectionate, gave Anne little in the way of consolation, since every year it brought her yet another failed pregnancy. Between 1683 and 1700, she had twelve miscarriages and a still-born child. All of her five children who did survive birth died in infancy of encephalitis.
Pity must have played its part when Sarah Churchill first befriended Princess Anne, but Sarah was also thinking of the future. As her recent biographer, Frances Harris, puts it, what Sarah Churchill really wanted out of Anne was not so much ‘the personal intimacy of this rather dull girl, five years her junior, but the tangible benefits of royal favour for herself, her husband and her children’.
Vivacious Sarah cannot have found it difficult to captivate this vulnerable princess, whose body was becoming bloated with so many pregnancies and whose unsophisticated nature yearned for the sympathy her husband could not give her. What Anne needed was a lover, but without the physical demands of sex. And with Sarah this was precisely what she got. Where Sarah was strong-willed and masterful, Anne was devoted and profoundly grateful. When Anne was lon
ely and defeated, Sarah was passionate and full of life. To all intents and purposes the result was a long and utterly absorbing love affair.
It had one curious feature. As a ‘true-born Whig’, Sarah had a deep distrust of royalty, which she overcame within their friendship by acting as if Anne were not a future queen at all, but a simple homely body she addressed as ‘Mrs Morley’. Sarah in return was known as ‘Mrs Freeman’, and by dispensing with her royal status Princess Anne could actually enjoy the rare illusion of equality and everyday humanity. Within this strangely serious game of royal make-believe, gentle Mrs Morley was usually the supplicant, while strong Mrs Freeman, as dominant and carefree as her name, was very much the male partner.
At the beginning of the joint reign of Anne’s cousin, William and his wife, her elder sister, now Queen Mary, the Churchills acted as protectors and advisers to Princess Anne, who was on bad terms with the royal couple. Like many public figures of the day, Churchill had taken out political ‘insurance’ by making contact with the exiled former James II at his court in France, just in case he or his son returned to power. His activities discovered, Churchill was briefly imprisoned in the Tower on suspicion of Jacobitism, and although he was rapidly released, it was largely thanks to Sunderland’s support that the Churchills regained a measure of the royal favour. But as soon as Mrs Morley became Queen of England she could show the depth of her affection for the Freemans with all the patronage and honours at a queen’s command.
Once on the throne, the new Queen’s eagerness to shower honours and appointments on the Churchills was extremely touching, but there is something deeply unappealing in the Churchills’ even greater eagerness to seize everything on offer. As Evelyn put it, they were soon ‘ingrossing all that stirred and was profitable at Court’, rather as if, after all those years of hard work fussing over poor dear boring Mrs Morley, they were intent on getting every penny out of their investment.
Sarah was actually appointed, not to one, but to three of the most lucrative and influential posts at court - Mistress of the Robes, Keeper of the Privy Purse, and Groom of the Stole (originally Groom of the Stool, who performed the lowliest of functions at the court. Over the years the resultant intimacy with the royal person had made the Groom one of the most influential members of the court, as his original employment was forgotten.) The income from these three posts alone was in excess of £6,000 a year.
Mr Freeman did still better, his rewards including the Order of the Garter and the immensely profitable positions of Captain General in command of the Army and Master General of the Ordnance, with payments of around £60,000 a year and the opportunity of making even more from military contracts. With all this in addition to the sale of honours and positions from the court, the Marlboroughs were soon enjoying ‘huge joint salaries’ from the Crown of more than £100,000 a year.
This must have made John Churchill happy, but for him the most important royal gift of all was his appointment by Queen Anne to command her army. This had come only just in time. During his period out of favour with King William, Churchill had had to watch himself beginning to grow old for a military commander. Now he was anxious to embark for Holland, where Louis XIV of France, in the first year of the War of the Spanish Succession, was trying to annex the Netherlands. As Captain General of the allied Anglo-Dutch forces opposing him, Marlborough found his last and greatest chance of glory.
As Marlborough sailed for the Netherlands to fight the French, his son-in-law, Charles Spencer, would soon be facing an equally determined enemy at home - his mother-in-law, Sarah Churchill.
When Shameless Sunderland died that autumn, there was no sign of undue grief from his son Charles who, as third Earl of Sunderland, had to take his seat in the hated House of Lords. As a man of principle, he would use the occasion to assert his republican beliefs - but he chose a somewhat tactless moment to proclaim them.
Sarah herself was currently engaged in something close to her ambitious heart - marrying her daughter Elizabeth to Lord Egerton, heir to the vastly rich Earl of Bridgewater - and was counting on Queen Anne for a generous contribution to the marriage settlement. So this was not the moment for the new Earl of Sunderland to lumber to his feet before their lordships, state his precious principles and attack the monarchy. Still less was it the moment to denounce the pension of £100,000 out of public funds being granted to the royal consort, George of Denmark.
Sarah was beside herself with fury on hearing of his speech, for in truth she was in a vulnerable position. As a sort of Whig herself she theoretically disapproved of court corruption, but as the queen’s closest friend she wanted her due share of its benefits. Sarah’s favourite daughter, Anne Sunderland, cannot have helped the situation when she primly told her mother that ‘Lord Sunderland would never do anything against his conscience for any obligation in the world’.
Luckily, warm-hearted Mrs Morley was so deeply attached to her great friend Mrs Freeman that in spite of Sunderland’s behaviour she still produced £10,000 for Elizabeth Churchill’s marriage settlement. But while the Queen was willing to overlook the incident as far as the Churchills were concerned, she did not feel the same about the ‘most uncivil’ Earl of Sunderland, whom she saw as the incarnation of his shameless father, untrustworthy, probably treasonable, and the living embodiment of everything she most disliked about the Whigs.
But Sarah soon had something worse than Sunderland to contend with. No sooner was Elizabeth safely married to Lord Egerton than her son Lord Blandford, who had been studying at Cambridge, contracted smallpox. Sarah had always had a morbid fear of illness, and with the pitted face of her son-in-law as a reminder she was terrified to think of what this fell disease might do to her handsome son. But whereas smallpox had merely robbed Lord Sunderland of his looks, Lord Blandford was soon in danger of his life. Frantic with worry Sarah summoned her husband back from Holland, and in early February he was with Sarah at their son’s bedside when he died.
For the Marlboroughs it was the cruellest of blows, and for all their wealth and honours they were suddenly reduced to a middle-aged couple overcome by grief. They did their best to comfort one another in the privacy of Holywell, their house outside St Albans, and told their friends that they were renouncing all the pomp and pleasures of the world. Marlborough would resign as Captain General and Sarah retire from the court.
On hearing this the Queen’s reaction was a cry of horror: ‘Never desert me,’ she implored them, ‘for what is a crown when the support is gone? … We four [by which she meant herself, Prince George, Sarah and Marlborough] must never part till death mows us down with an impartial hand.’
Not entirely surprisingly, the Freemans changed their minds about retiring. But nothing could bring them back their son, and death indeed had shown the hollowness of the great dynastic dream which Marlborough had been planning for the future. Sarah would go on hoping for another son, and a few months later was actually convinced that she was pregnant. But she was forty-three, and when that hope vanished, Marlborough’s dream for his great dynasty seemed to vanish with it.
But even now devoted Mrs Morley offered a solution. Not only did she grant poor Mr Freeman the final honour in her gift, a dukedom; but in order that the dukedom should continue it was arranged by Act of Parliament for the title to pass through the female line to his eldest daughter, Henrietta, making her Duke of Marlborough in her own right on his death.
As Henrietta was married to Lord Godolphin’s son, Francis, their only son, William, known as ‘Willigo’, now stepped into line to inherit the dukedom after his mother. But as Sunderland well knew, after Willigo stood his own first-born son, Robert Spencer. Blandford’s death, and the creation of the dukedom, had happened just as the warlike duke himself was about to add immeasurably to the Marlborough inheritance.
Marlborough was fifty-four. At his age Napoleon would be dead and Wellington would have fought his final battle with the French. But Marlborough seemed untouched by age. In Holland he had been hard at work cre
ating an allied army of 56,000 Dutch and British troops and German mercenaries with which he planned to attack the armies of King Louis, who, in alliance with the Bavarians, was threatening England’s other allies, the Austrians. To do this meant marching his army across Europe ‘from the North Sea to the Danube’, almost to the walls of Vienna. It was there, in mid-August, that he encountered the combined armies of France and Bavaria near the village of Blindheim. At the conclusion of the fearful battle that ensued Marlborough rested briefly in his saddle and, using the back of an inn bill, scribbled his wife one of the great messages of military history:
I have no 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 two other Generals are in my coach.
For once in his life Marlborough was being modest. The battle of Blindheim, or Blenheim as his soldiers called it, was the greatest European victory won by an English commander since Agincourt. By humbling the pride of Louis XIV he had not only saved Vienna but stopped the French king dominating Europe.
He was an instant hero, and among the kings and princes anxious to reward him was the Austrian emperor, who showed his gratitude by showering him with riches - jewelled swords, priceless paintings, gold plate, and what the Duke appreciated most of all, the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and his own small German principality, called Mindelheim, to go with it.
At home, more modestly, Parliament voted his family a £5,000 pension in perpetuity, and endorsed Queen Anne’s grant of the royal manor of Woodstock. She committed the government to pay for erecting there a triumphal palace to be called Blenheim, without placing any limits on its cost - a dangerous omission.
