Marlborough (26 page)

There was to be no kidnap, for no sooner had James agreed to the visit than he was overwhelmed by another nosebleed, and muttered, through his bloody handkerchief, that he was going back to London. Until that moment Churchill, for all his treasonable correspondence with William, may still have suspected that the royal army would receive the forceful leadership which might even now have enabled it to shake off its
malaise. But it was now abundantly clear that James could not provide that leadership. He had abandoned his only reasonable war plan, and was about to abandon his army.

Yet even in his despair James could still lash out. When Percy Kirke, commanding a mixed brigade of horse and foot at Warminster, refused, with a temporising excuse, to obey an order to fall back on Devizes, James had him arrested and sent back under escort to Andover. Many of the brigade’s officers, including Lieutenant Colonel Charles Churchill and his colonel, Charles Trelawney, deserted anyway. There was now no doubt that James was going to lose, and with Kirke under suspicion and his own brother gone, John Churchill cannot have hoped to escape arrest much longer. Early on the morning of Sunday, 24 November, Churchill, the Duke of Grafton and Colonel John Berkeley, with perhaps four hundred officers and men, set off for Crewkerne, some fifty miles away. It was about twelve miles from William’s headquarters at Axminster, so close to Churchill’s birthplace. Prince George and the Duke of Ormonde joined them the following night. Although James bravely quipped that the loss of a stout trooper would have hurt him more than the defection of Prince George, the Danish envoy reported that when he interrupted mass to give James the bad news he was profoundly shocked.

Churchill left a letter for James trying to explain his decision.

Sir,

Since men are seldom suspected of sincerity, when they act contrary to their interests, and though my dutiful behaviour to Your Majesty in the worst of times (for which I acknowledge my service is much overpaid) may not be sufficient to incline you to charitable interpretation of my actions, yet I hope the great advantage I enjoy under Your Majesty, which I own I would never expect in any other change of government, may reasonably convince your majesty and the world that I am actuated by a higher principle, when I offer that violence to my inclination and interest as to desert Your Majesty at a time when your affairs seem to challenge the strictest obedience from all your subjects, much more from one who lies under the greatest personal obligations to Your Majesty. This, sir, could proceed from nothing but the inviolable dictates of my conscience, and a necessary concern for my religion, (which no good man can oppose), and with which I am instructed nothing can come in competition. Heaven knows with what partiality
my dutiful opinion of Your Majesty has hitherto represented those unhappy designs which inconsiderate and self-interested men have framed against Your Majesty’s true interest and the Protestant religion; but as I can no longer join with such to give a pretence of conquest to bring them to effect, so I will always with the hazard of my life and fortune (so much Your Majesty’s due) to preserve your royal person and lawful rights, with all the tender concerns and dutiful respect that becomes, sir, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and most obliged subject and servant,

CHURCHILL
¹⁵

It must, by any standards, have been an agonising letter to write. In it Churchill acknowledged that he was James’s creature, and surmised that he could not expect to prosper as well under any future government, although at the time nobody can have been sure what that might be. It was then perfectly possible that James might have remained king, though with sharply circumscribed powers, and in that case Churchill’s desertion must have been fatal to his prospects, as he himself implied: had he been certain that William and Mary would indeed succeed James then the first part of the letter would have been palpably absurd. His supporters would maintain that he was sincere in stressing the inviolable dictates of conscience and a necessary concern for religion, while his critics saw the whole document as transparent cover for self-seeking treason. ‘Churchill, as if to add something ideal to his imitation of Iscariot,’ thundered G.K. Chesterton (who, as a Roman Catholic, was
parti pris
in this debate), ‘went to James with wanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth in arms as if to defend the country from invasion, and then calmly handed the country over to the invader.’
¹⁶

A middle course might be fairer. All Churchill’s life, both before and after the events of that rainy autumn, shows us a man whose experience of being on the losing side convinced him that it should not be repeated. In this he had much in common with many contemporaries who, like the vicar of Bray, would trim their sails to suit the wind. We have already seen that his suspicions of James’s maladroitness went back at least ten years, and that, whatever we may make of the commitment to Protestantism expressed in his letter, he was not prepared, as some of his countrymen were, to become a Roman Catholic. He thought that James, a winner in 1685, had become a loser by 1688, and was probably close to what Matthew Glozier identified as the bedrock of the army of his age,
those ‘professional gentlemen officers in search of a livelihood, in conditions which did not unduly compromise their religious and social consciences’, who thought much the same.
¹⁷
John Childs has a similar view of the bonds of professional identity which linked the wider army conspirators. Without the contribution made by the deserters in 1688, he suggests, ‘unconscious and vaguely dishonourable though it was, William might very well have been without any English army at all in the spring of 1689’.
¹⁸

Churchill remained in treasonous contact with the Jacobites for the rest of his life. This is not because he was ideologically Jacobite (had he been so, then surely the moment to show his zeal would have been in 1688) but because he was never a man to burn his bridges. Yet we cannot doubt the contact. For instance, in February 1716, not long before Churchill suffered the first of his disabling strokes, an agent wrote to the Earl of Mar, leader of the 1715 Jacobite rebellion, to say that Captain David Lloyd, another agent, had delivered a letter from the Old Pretender, James II’s eldest son, to Churchill,

to whom Davie downright forced his way. Mark [Marlborough] read the letter with respect. Davie urged and enforced the argument with tears, and drew tears from the other, who protested before God that he intended to serve Mr Keith [the Old Pretender] and would do it, and that his nephew [the Duke of Berwick] knew he intended it and in what manner. But that at present he cannot help some things. That he expects his nephew himself will come ere long, and that in the meantime Mr Keith should handsomely parry a little, and avoid a decision, till matters can be prepared.
¹⁹

The Duke of Berwick later confirmed to Mar that: ‘Mark has been, it’s true, for these many years in correspondence with his nephew, and has always given assurances of his zeal for Mr Keith, but to this hour has never explained in what manner he intends it.’
²⁰
Berwick has it in a nutshell. It was never
quite
the right time, and the manner in which Churchill was to offer assistance to exiled king and pretender was never clear: but he was to go to his grave without ever wholly disowning the Jacobites.

In one sense it is not certain that Churchill was so very different to many of the senior army officers of our own generation. Few of these thought that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a good idea, and many went much further in private, arguing that it was possibly illegal and
unlikely to be successful in the long term. But soldiering was their job, and there was certainly ample short-term satisfaction to be had from doing what they were paid to do, deposing a monstrous tyrant, and genuinely trying to make
their
bit of Iraq a better place in the process. Never underestimate the professional soldier’s desire to be exactly that, and do not expect that he will emerge with more credit from his moral contradictions than John Churchill did from his. It may not be easy to admire Churchill’s desertion of James, but it is less hard to understand it, and many, in all soul and conscience, would not have acted differently.

On 25 November James issued orders that Sarah Churchill should be put under house arrest in the Tyrconnells’ lodgings in St James’s Palace, while the wife of Colonel Berkeley, who had also abandoned James, should be confined to her father’s London house. Happily for the conspirators, news that James was on his way back to London reached the capital before the arrest orders. This ‘put the Princess into a great fright’, said Sarah. ‘She sent for me, told me her distress, and declared, that rather than see her father she would jump out of a window.’ Sarah went to Bishop Compton, who was hiding in Suffolk Street, and they arranged an escape plan. The princess retired to bed as usual on the evening of the twenty-fifth, locking the door of her chamber and telling her staff that she was not to be disturbed.

Early on the morning of 26 November Anne, accompanied by Sarah and Mrs Berkeley, slipped down some newly-built back stairs and walked through the mud of Piccadilly (in which the princess lost a shoe) to a carriage containing that unlikely pair, Bishop Compton and Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset. Dorset had been one of the most notorious rakes at Charles II’s court but remained curiously popular: ‘My Lord Dorset might do anything,’ complained the Earl of Rochester, ‘and is never to blame.’ He had never enjoyed James’s favour, largely because of a vicious lampoon on Catherine Sedley, the girl John Churchill’s parents had so wanted him to marry. Dorset was committed to the plot against James, and the fugitives spent their first day at his house, Copt Hall, near Epping in Essex. They then moved on to Castle Ashby, near Northampton, ancestral home of Compton’s nephew the Earl of Northampton, another of the plotters. They had originally planned to hurry on to York, now secured for William by the Earl of Danby, but by now felt that they had outrun any pursuit, and proceeded to Nottingham by easy stages.
²¹

When James reached London he was shocked to find Anne gone. ‘God help me!’ he cried. ‘Even my children have forsaken me.’
Lord Mulgrave, his chamberlain, argued that even the desertion of James’s officers was as nothing when compared to the evidence of common purpose between Anne, Mary and William. He did not simply nurse a particular grievance against John Churchill, but believed that Anne’s escape had been organised by Sarah. By now it was evident that there would be no real campaign. Orders telling the garrison of Portsmouth to stock up for a siege simply increased the flow of desertions, and James had lost the war he never fought.

Most historians take the view that Feversham, useless from the start, was paralysed by James’s departure. It is, though, possible that Feversham had sniffed the way the wind was blowing. He was a Huguenot, and although he had left France long before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes he could never return there. If he wished to enjoy his English estates, he would need to make his peace with whoever sat on the throne after 1688, and like Churchill, he could not be sure who this might be. When Percy Kirke arrived at his headquarters under arrest, Feversham at once released him and allowed him to join William. This was not the act of an officer who thought that he might yet be on the winning side, but rather of someone anxious to make his peace with the victor, whoever he was.

The campaign ended more in farce than tragedy, with cities, towns and garrisons declaring for William, and marching parties of loyal troops finding themselves swamped in a hostile countryside. By mid-December the remains of James’s army, thoroughly disheartened, was cooped up around Windsor and Uxbridge. Shortly before fleeing to France, James sent Feversham a badly-worded letter which included the sentence, ‘I do not expect you should expose yourselves by resisting a foreign army and a poisoned nation.’ Feversham saw this as an instruction to disband the army, and set about doing so, although his orders reached only a small proportion of the soldiers still loyal to James. Elsewhere there were murderous attacks on Catholic officers and men, and the Protestant residue of Lord Forbes’s Regiment, left behind in Colnbrook after the departure of the disbanded Catholics, averted a large-scale attack by fiercely anti-Catholic local people only by demonstrating, to a helpful local minister, how well the men could recite the responses of the Anglican liturgy. Disintegration was not what William wanted, for he hoped to use the English army in his struggle against Louis XIV, and when Feversham went to Windsor on 18 December to invite William to make his formal entry into London he found himself arrested. William soon forgave him and made him master of the Royal Hospital of St Catherine, near the Tower of London.

James made one attempt to flee to France on 10 November, but was caught by some Faversham fishermen, who, taking him for an escaping Jesuit, behaved with such effrontery that they were later specifically exempted from the general pardons promised by the exiled king. Lord Ailesbury found him with several days’ growth of beard, looking, he thought, like Charles I at his trial. He had James shaved and gave him a clean shirt, and for a moment it seemed that he might just re-establish himself. But most of his former supporters had now abandoned him, William wanted him out of the country, and James himself was anxious to join his queen in France. He repeatedly inveighed against the traitorous Churchill as he travelled from Ambleteuse, on the Channel coast, to St Germain en Laye, which was to house his exiled court.

A Convention Parliament met in January 1689. The Commons eventually concluded that James had effectively abdicated, while some of the Lords maintained that he had deserted, and that Mary was already queen by hereditary right. William and Mary were eventually declared joint monarchs, with succession going to whichever of them survived. Thereafter the crown would pass to their children, though it was most unlikely that they would have any, and then to Anne and her children. Anne later referred to this agreement as her ‘abdication’, and Churchill and Dorset carried word of it to the Lords on 6 February. In conversation with Halifax, now one of his most trusted advisers, William acknowledged that he had depended upon the Churchills to secure this agreement.