Marlborough (25 page)

I hope you don’t doubt that I will ever be firm to my religion whatever happens … I must tell you that I abhor the principles of the Church of Rome as much as it is possible for any to do, and I as much value the doctrine of the Church of England. And certainly there is the greatest
reason in the world to do so, for the doctrine of the Church of Rome is wicked and dangerous, and directly contrary to the Scriptures, and their ceremonies – most of them – plain, downright idolatry.
¹¹⁰

Anne was already as close to Sarah Churchill as she was distant from her father, and the events of the mid-1680s strengthened the former tie as they further unravelled the latter. Anne’s two young daughters, Anne and Mary, died from smallpox early in 1687, and for some weeks Prince George hovered on the brink of following them. The Catholic faction at court began to discuss her remarriage to a suitable Catholic prince, and when the distraught Anne asked her father for permission to visit Mary at The Hague, James, with a typical show of paternal firmness which emerged as intolerance, refused it. Anne immediately warned her sister, in just the tone used by the army conspirators, that if things went on like this no Protestant would be able to live in England. Anne had also come to hate her stepmother, not least because of her evangelising zeal for her religion, and in May 1697 she told Mary: ‘She pretends to have a good deal of kindness to me but I doubt it is not real, for I never see proofs of it, but rather the contrary.’
¹¹¹

Suspecting that their father’s agents would interfere with their letters, the royal sisters took to corresponding through the Dutch ambassador Everaarde van Weede, Heer van Dijkveld, who was himself hard at work gleaning news of English political opinion for his master, and who maintained contact with Princess Anne through the medium of John Churchill. By now James suspected both Anne’s increasing political influence and the strength of her affection, which he called ‘a boundless passion’, for Sarah. In mid-1687 Louis XIV’s special envoy reported that Anne’s main advisers were now working for William, and Churchill, in his opinion, ‘exerts himself more than anyone for the Prince of Orange. Lord Godolphin, who is in all the secret councils, opposes nothing, but plays the good Protestant and always keeps a back door open for access to the Prince of Orange.’
¹¹²

Her stepmother’s successful pregnancy, which came to term on 10 June, infuriated Anne, who had by now lost her own two daughters and suffered two miscarriages, and she saw in the infant Prince James Francis Edward an heir who would not only supplant the claims of Mary and herself, but who might also continue James’s policy. She complained to Mary that simply being in London was an agony, because ‘The Papists are all so very insolent that it is insupportable living with them.’
¹¹³
By this
time Anne’s resentment of her father’s policies had gone beyond mere criticism, and the Cockpit circle had a conspiracy of its own, aimed at ensuring that Anne escaped from London to join one of the provincial risings planned to accompany a Dutch invasion.

Although Sarah Churchill was later to argue in
The Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough
that the princess’s hurried departure from London in the middle of the 1688 campaign was ‘a thing sudden and unconcerted’, it is clear that she and her husband had thrown their hands in with the plotters some time before.
¹¹⁴
Sarah admitted that John ‘made settlements to secure his family in case of misfortunes’, and in a letter he sent to the Prince of Orange by way of Henry Sidney on 27 July 1688 he formally bound himself to William:

Mr Sidney will let you know how I intend to behave myself: I think it is what I owe to God and my country. My honour I take leave to put into your Royal Highness’s hands, in which I think it safe. If you think there is anything else that I ought to do, you have but to command me, and I shall pay an entire obedience to it, being resolved to die in that religion that it has pleased God to give you both the will and power to protect.
¹¹⁵

There are times when a nation holds its breath. In the autumn of 1688 England was gripped by rumour and counter-rumour. The French, hands imbued with the blood of Huguenots, were on their way; the Irish were poised to invade. There would be a general massacre of Protestants, and the Church and the constitution would be toppled. Only the arrival of that Protestant hero, William of Orange, could avert catastrophe. On 7 October John Evelyn inhaled the stink of panic:

Hourly expectation of the Prince of Orange’s invasion heightened to that degree that his Majesty saw fit to abrogate the commissions for the dispensing power (but retaining his right still to dispense with all laws) and restore the ejected Fellows of Magdalen College. In the mean time he called over 5000 Irish, and 4000 Scots, and continued to remove Protestants and put in Papists at Portsmouth and other places of trust, and retained the Jesuits about him, increasing the universal discontent. It brought people to so desperate a pass, that they seemed passionately to long for and desire the landing of that Prince whom they looked on to be their deliverer, praying
incessantly for an east wind, which was said to be the only hindrance of his expedition …
¹¹⁶

A popular song honed the edge of unrest. Its snappy little tune is often ascribed, without evidence, to Henry Purcell, and the lyrics are attributed, with as little solid basis, to Lords Wharton and Dorset. If we imagine Tom Wharton scratching a quill in the fug of the Rose Tavern, trying out the couplets on his cronies, then we are stretching history, though not conjecture, too far. The words, which come in many versions, are in cod-Irish, and are meant to be those of a Catholic welcoming recent changes. The doggerel
Lillibulero bullen a la
was repeated after each line, and the refrain
Lero, lero, lillibulero/lillibulero bullen a la/Lero, lero, lillibulero/lillibelero bullen a la
followed each couplet.

Ho! Brother Teague, dost hear the decree?

Dat we shall have a new deputy?

Ho! By my shoul, it is de Talbot,

And he will cut all de Englishmen’s throats …

And de good Talbot is made a Lord,

And with brave lads is coming abroad.

Who all in France have taken a sware,

Dat day will have no Protestant heir.

Arragh! But why does he stay behind?

Ho! By my shoul, ’tis a Protestant wind!

But see, de Tyrconnell is now come ashore,

And we shall have commissions galore.

And he dat will not go to mass,

Shall be turned out, and look like an ass.

But now de heretics all go down,

By Creish and St Patrick, the nation’s our own.

Dare was an old prophesy found in a bog,

Dat we shall be ruled by an ass and a dog.

And now dis prophesy is come to pass,

For Talbot’s de dog, and James is de ass.

‘Lillibulero’ was sung in taverns, brayed tunelessly in the street, and whistled by folk with time on their hands. Two and a half centuries later, when the BBC World Service wanted a signature tune it chose ‘Lillibulero’. It is said that James really knew that there was a military conspiracy when he heard the sentry at his door quietly whistling the song which was to sing him out of three kingdoms. In this atmosphere of incipient panic and growing military preparation John, Lord Churchill, prepared to roll fate’s dice, and knew that anything but a six would ruin him.

On 5 November 1688 William of Orange landed at Torbay. His
Declaration … Of the Reasons Inducing him to Appear in Arms in … England
, issued at The Hague on 30 September, furnished the public justification for his invasion: it accused James’s advisers of seeking to overturn the laws and liberties of the three kingdoms, to introduce arbitrary government and an illegal religion. It affirmed that William did not seek the crown for himself, but sought only to have ‘free and lawful’ Parliaments elected in England and Scotland. He had sailed with a fleet of forty-nine warships and over four hundred transports, many of them very small, commanded by Sir Arthur Herbert, rear admiral of England until replaced earlier that year by the Catholic Roger Strickland.

James’s fleet was commanded by the Earl of Dartmouth, and the military conspiracy had done its best to erode the reliability of his captains. However, the conspiracy appears to have been a good deal less effective afloat than it was ashore, and it seems fair to conclude that James’s navy would have fought had it been given the chance. It was not, because the same Protestant wind that blew William’s fleet along the Channel kept Dartmouth’s warships in the Gunfleet, on the Essex side of the Thames estuary. James had specifically warned him that he risked being ‘surprised while there by the sudden coming of the Dutch fleet, as being a place he cannot well get out to sea from, while the wind remains easterly’, but the cautious Dartmouth stayed where he was. He actually saw the outer fringe of William’s fleet sailing southwards on 3 November, but they were directly to windward and, with the tide at low ebb, Dartmouth could not weather the nearby sandbanks. N.A.M. Rodger is right to attribute William’s success in the naval part of the operation to ‘wind and tide’ rather than to disaffection, although, of course, in the backwash of that success the naval conspiracy grew enormously.
¹

William was taking an extraordinary risk in invading at the season of equinoctal gales, and a rueful Dartmouth told his royal master, ‘’Tis strange that such mad proceedings should have success at this time of year.’
²
The Prince of Orange knew that time was of the essence. That summer Louis XIV had invaded the archbishopric of Cologne and large tracts of the Rhineland, his armies trampling on with that brutal disregard for life and property which had become their hallmark. Louis had already put increasing pressure on the Dutch, seizing Dutch shipping in foreign ports in September, and he eventually issued a formal declaration of war on 26 November. This actually strengthened William’s hand, because even the anti-Orange faction in the States-General now rallied, as good Dutchmen, behind him.

Elsewhere French miscalculation helped ensure that a majority of European states were now opposed to Louis, while his Turkish allies were making heavy weather against the Imperialists. The autumn of 1688 found the major part of the French fleet in the Mediterranean ready to act against Pope Innocent XI (perhaps as odd an opponent for a Most Christian King as the Turks were a puzzling ally) and the French army committed in the Rhineland. This situation would not last, and William knew it. He did not simply need to invade before James had discovered the military conspiracy and proceeded against its leaders: he had to strike before the French had rebalanced so as to attack Holland, compelling him to devote his efforts to domestic defence, not foreign adventures.

William’s army consisted of Dutch regulars reinforced by English, Scots, Irish, Huguenot, German, Swiss, Finnish and Swedish regiments; there was even a two-hundred-strong black contingent of Dutch Surinamese soldiers. Nevertheless, with a maximum strength of perhaps 20,000, it was very small, and its cavalry would take some time to reach full efficiency as its horses recovered from the voyage. The royal army was at least one-third bigger, and as the events of 1685 had shown, a landing in the West Country could be effectively contained by troops marching in from the east. The great truth about William’s invasion is simple. It could not rely on seeking decision by battle: William, an experienced general, knew that he could scarcely hope to pull off some stunning masterstroke, with his small polyglot force, against a bigger professional army fighting on home ground. His manifesto to the British army argued that no ‘false notion of honour’ should prevent its members from considering ‘what you owe to Almighty God and your religion, to your country and to yourselves, and to your posterity, which
you, as men of honour, ought to prefer to all private considerations and engagements whatsoever’.
³

William must have been sure, well beyond the balance of probabilities, that the enemy army would disintegrate without fighting. Both Macaulay and Trevelyan argued that his victory was largely a matter of luck. In contrast, George Hilton Jones, writing in 1990, with much more evidence of the military conspiracy at his disposal, argued that James’s ‘religious and foreign policies had isolated him beyond hope of recovery … His nerve would break when he saw his position so unbalanced that a token expedition would suffice to topple it.’
⁴

That was certainly what Captain Isaac Dupont de Bostaquet, a Huguenot cavalry officer with William’s army, thought. His fellow countrymen who had been dispossessed by Louis XIV saw this as a crusade. ‘Most of the refugees bore arms,’ he wrote, ‘and officers as well as others went to The Hague to give their names to be enrolled in this holy war.’ He found south-west England ‘the most inhospitable land in the world’, and was astonished, when he visited his first Anglican church, to see ‘that so much of the outward appearance of Popery had been retained’. However, ‘We had orders to pay wherever we went,’ which he knew from his own former service was not the French army’s way. In Exeter ‘the inhabitants received us with great cheers’, and there was real confidence that James would not intervene. ‘Rumour was that he was marching towards us,’ recalled Bostaquet, ‘but did not dare to attack because he did not trust his army which was deserting him.’ In contrast, on William’s side ‘every man hastened on as if to certain victory’.
⁵

William arrived in Exeter on 9 November. Although the corporation tried to keep him out and the clergy refused to read his
Declaration
from the pulpit, as Bostaquet has told us, the townspeople greeted him rapturously. He remained there for nearly a fortnight, receiving a number of peers and gentlemen, and encircling Plymouth, whose garrison was to surrender without firing a shot. The Duke of Beaufort’s Gloucestershire militia, loyal to James, arrested Lord Lovelace and some of his supporters after a brief fracas, but elsewhere the mood of the West Country, angered but not cowed by the royal reaction to Monmouth’s rising, was very encouraging for William.

James ordered his army to concentrate on Salisbury Plain, with a cavalry screen under Sir John Lanier probing forward to find William’s outposts. By 15 November the Earl of Feversham, James’s captain general, was there with something over 20,000 men, and more still coming in.
Many royal soldiers were already tired, for it was a long march for men from Scotland and Ireland, and it was scarcely encouraging to hear, long before the concentration was complete, that the first desertions had taken place: on 13 November Lord Cornbury and Colonel Thomas Langston, both close associates of Churchill, went over to William.

What was meant to be the mass desertion of an entire elite cavalry brigade of Lanier’s covering force misfired, partly because neither Cornbury of the Royal Dragoons nor Lieutenant Colonel Compton of the Blues got their men to follow them, although the more forceful Langston took most of the Duke of St Albans’ Horse into the Dutch lines. John Churchill’s nephew and James’s illegitimate son, the nineteen-year-old Duke of Berwick, had just arrived in Salisbury. He galloped after the brigade as soon as he heard that it had left for Warminster and claimed to have ‘rallied the fugitives, and brought the four regiments back to Salisbury, of which there were only about fifty troopers or dragoons, and a dozen officers missing’.
⁶
Burnet calls Berwick ‘a soft and harmless young man … much beloved by the king’, but it is clear that had more of James’s commanders shown his spirit the campaign’s outcome might have been different.
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The fact that billets had been reserved for the entire brigade in William’s lines speaks volumes for the degree of coordination that existed. Even if the Williamites were disappointed by the actual number of deserters, the episode broke the ice, and there was a steady trickle of desertion thereafter, with officers and men slipping away to join William, each separate desertion contributing to the air of mistrust which overhung James’s army like a pestilential miasma. The Whig politician Sir Richard Onslow, whose annotations are printed in the 1833 edition of Burnet’s
History of His Own Times
, maintained that even at this early stage James’s personal morale was crushed by the desertions: ‘This ruined him, for I have been well assured that had he shown any courage and spirit upon the occasion his army would have fought the Prince of Orange.’
⁸
Lord Ailesbury also reckoned that the rot spread from the top, and that the royal army could have fought: ‘Of both horse and foot the common men were well intended to the King’s service, and most of the lower rank of officers, some general officers, colonels, etc, the same.’
⁹

One of the few flashes of resistance was sparked by a man with an abundance of fighting spirit. Patrick Sarsfield was an Irish Catholic Life Guards officer. Berwick called him ‘a man of an amazing stature,
utterly void of sense, very good natured and very brave’. He met an Anglo-Dutch detachment at Wincanton on 20 November. When its officer declared that he was for the Prince of Orange, Sarsfield declared: ‘God damn you! I’ll prince you,’ and promptly pistolled him. He had the better of the fight, but pulled back when enemy reinforcements appeared.

John Churchill had been promoted lieutenant general on 7 November, two days after the landing. He joined the king, who had already been dismayed by the news of the first desertions, at Windsor, and on the seventeenth the royal party set off for Salisbury. Princess Anne was poised to play her own part in the betrayal, and on the eighteenth she told William:

I shall not trouble you with many compliments, only in short assure you, that you have my wishes for your good success in this so just an undertaking; and I hope the Prince [George] will soon be with you to let you see his readiness to join with you … He went yesterday with the King towards Salisbury, intending to go from thence to you as soon as his friends thought it proper. I am not certain if I shall continue here, or remove into the City; that shall depend upon the advice my friends will give me; but wherever I am, I shall be ready to show you how very much I am your humble servant.
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Both Prince George and John Churchill expected that their wives would escape from Whitehall before they themselves abandoned James, but events moved on more quickly than they expected. That autumn James was suffering from repeated nosebleeds, so copious and severe that some saw them as a sign of divine displeasure. Charles II had been similarly afflicted in moments of stress, and they may have been a family weakness. One eyewitness admitted:

I can never forget the confusion the court was in … The king knew not whom to trust and the flight was so great that they were apt to believe an impossible report just brought in that the Prince of Orange was come with twelve thousand horse between Warminster and Salisbury … Everybody in this hurly-burly was thinking of himself and nobody minded the king, who came up to Dr Radcliffe and asked him what he thought was good for the bleeding of the nose.

James was ‘much out of order, looks yellow and takes no natural rest’.
¹¹
A visitor to Salisbury

saw King James ride backwards and forward continually with a languishing look, his hat hanging over his eyes and a handkerchief continually in one hand to dry the blood of his nose for he continually bled. If he and the soldiers did chance to hear a trumpet or even a post-horn they were always upon a surprise, and all fit to run away, and at last they did so. All the nights there was nothing but tumult and every question that was asked ‘Where are the enemy?’ ‘How far off are they? ‘Which way are they going?’ and such like.
¹²

At a council of war on 23 November Churchill and Grafton both recommended an advance, while Feversham spoke in favour of retreat, and James agreed. However, James seems to have accepted Churchill’s offer to go and inspect the outposts that night. Both James and the Duke of Berwick were later to maintain that this was simply an excuse to hand over James to the Williamites, or even to murder him: ‘A scheme was laid, and the measures taken up by Churchill and Kirke, to deliver the king up to the Prince of Orange.’
¹³
We cannot tell whether this is true, although if so it would have required very slick coordination. More seriously, it would have involved Churchill in the face-to-face betrayal of his patron, which would have been wholly out of character.

There was no precedent for such confrontation in his past career, and indeed, he did his best to remain on terms of a kind with James and his son for the rest of his life. Early that December, when Clarendon told Churchill that James had informed his supporters in the House of Lords that a kidnap had been intended, he ‘denied it with many protestations, saying that he would venture his life in defence of his person; that he would never be ungrateful to the King; and that he had never left him, but that he saw our religion and country were in danger of being destroyed’.
¹⁴
It is easy to dismiss this as the self-exculpatory whining of a successful traitor, but it goes straight to the heart of Churchill’s dreadful dilemma.