Marlborough (29 page)

Although the battle of the Boyne has now attained iconic status, it was not then decisive. Indeed, although it had advanced William’s cause in Ireland, a naval battle off Beachy Head, fought the day before, had seen Admiral Herbert (now Viscount Torrington) and his Dutch comrades beaten by the French. The balance of power at sea was not reversed until the Anglo-Dutch naval victory off La Hougue in May 1692 rendered any French-backed Jacobite invasion of England unlikely for the moment. In June William, writing in his usual execrable French, told Marlborough that he did not fear a landing because his intelligence had told him that there were no troops embarked on the French fleet, but expected that French frigates would snap up his transports. The fact that the French had burned the pretty little town of Teignmouth but dared not attempt a major landing seemed to confirm this.

In August 1690, with William bogged down in the siege of Limerick,
Marlborough suggested a project which, he believed, would win the war in Ireland. He asked the Council to be allowed to take most of the regular troops out of the country and attack the main Jacobite ports of Cork and Kinsale, thus cutting off Tyrconnell from further French reinforcements. Marlborough had already fallen out with Danby, the Council’s leading member, who opposed his attempt to get his sailor brother George promoted to rear admiral. ‘If Churchill have a flag,’ he said, ‘it will be called flag by favour, as his brother is called the general of favour.’
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The Council turned down his plan, but the queen forwarded it to William, who on 14 August approved the scheme, authorising Marlborough to take 4,900 infantry. He would have to take his own supply of ammunition and use the ships’ guns, for none could be spared from Limerick, although sufficient cavalry would be sent down. The weather, William emphasised, was the thing to watch.

Mary was deeply concerned, telling her husband that although she hoped the expedition would succeed, ‘I find, if it do not, those who have advised it will have an ill time, all except Lord Nottingham being very much against it.’
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Marlborough left on 17 September, reached Cork on the twenty-first and, after his ship’s guns had silenced a battery, landed safely at West Passage, seven miles east of the city. He quickly pushed on to encircle it.

He now found that the operation’s complexion had darkened. William had abandoned the siege of Limerick after the enterprising Patrick Sarsfield raided his artillery park, and returned to England. Marlborough had asked particularly to be reinforced by English troops under Kirke, and there were plenty available. However the Dutch general Godert de Ginkel, left in command, sent 5,000 Danish, Dutch and Huguenot troops, and with the Danes came their commander, Prince Ferdinand William of Württemberg, junior to Marlborough as a lieutenant general but claiming, by virtue of his birth, to take command. Marlborough (or perhaps a Huguenot brigadier) suggested a compromise whereby the two generals would command on alternate days, and on his first day in command courteously gave ‘Württemberg’ as the password.

Winston S. Churchill maintains that the arrival of foreign troops was simply a ploy to prevent the English from carrying off the glory. The historian Matthew Glozier, however, with better access to the documents, goes further. The presence of the foreign troops, he argues, ‘was as much political as strategic. William’s cabinet had resolved to ruin Churchill if the Irish campaign failed, and it was partly the result of this antipathy which
demanded the presence of foreign troops.’
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Either way, Marlborough was engaged upon his first independent command with an Irish winter on its way, the French fleet at sea, and grudging political support.

With Württemberg duly mollified the siege of Cork went on apace. A breaching battery was speedily established, and it soon knocked a hole in the eastern wall. Early on the afternoon of 27 September, when the tide had receded, enabling his forlorn hope to cross the south branch of the River Lee with its fast-flowing water up to their armpits, Marlborough ordered an attack. The attackers reached a ditch close under the city walls, and were at once reinforced by the bulk of the English foot. The Danes, attacking across the north branch of the Lee, also made good progress. Cannon pecked away at the walls, mortars on bomb-vessels lobbed their shells into the town, and the defenders knew that an assault could not be far away. The city’s governor, Roger Macelligott, mindful of the fate of Drogheda a generation before, surrendered on terms which left his 4,000-man garrison prisoners of war but guaranteed the safety of the Roman Catholic clergy in Cork and ensured that most of the Williamite army would not enter the city. There was an echo of the past. The forlorn hope had been commanded by the Duke of Grafton, and his officers included Lord Colchester, Charles Churchill, Colonel John Greville and Captain Stafford Fairburne, all army conspirators in 1688. Grafton was mortally wounded, and died eleven days later.

Kinsale was a different matter. Marlborough arrived there on 29 September, and by 15 October his breaching batteries had done good work. But the place was very much stronger than he had expected, winter was closing in, and there were rumours that Sarsfield was on his way with a relieving force. By mid-October Marlborough had successfully stormed a ‘weak old fort’ across the River Bandon from the main defences, and breached the walls of Fort Charles; he was, though, happy enough to let the garrison of 11,000 men march out with the honours of war, and to proceed unmolested to Limerick, before he attempted a storm. The governor, Sir Edward Scott, who had been governor of Portsmouth in 1688, was driven through the breach in his carriage to make the point that the gap was indeed practicable and his surrender was not in the least premature.

Although Marlborough’s capture of Cork and Kinsale did serious damage to Jacobite ambitions in Ireland, it did not end the war. Tyrconnell returned in May 1691 with a new French commander, the marquis de St Ruth. It was ‘like pouring brandy down the throat of a dying
man’, and the Jacobite cause flared back into life. On 12 July St Ruth, with the whole Jacobite army of 20,000 men, took up a well-chosen position at Aughrim, where he faced Ginkel with about 17,400 men.

Aughrim was no easy victory. Ginkel’s frontal attack bogged down in the face of dogged resistance, for the Jacobite infantry, holding a line of ditches, ‘would maintain one side until our men put their pieces over the other, and then, having lines of communication from one ditch to another, they would presently post themselves again and flank us’. When a counterattack rolled Ginkel’s centre right back to his gun-line the exuberant St Ruth yelled, ‘
Le jour est à nous, mes enfants
,’ words of encouragement which might have cheered his Irish peasant infantry less than he expected. The Williamites then staked everything on an attack on St Ruth’s right, and as he was galloping across the peat to meet it a cannonball clipped off his head. His lifeguard wheeled about and left the field at once, followed by the rest of the horse: it may be no accident that their commander later received a pension from William. ‘And so,’ wrote a bitter infantryman, ‘let them keep their priding cavalry to stop bottles with.’ The Jacobites were cut to pieces as they fled: one Williamite saw their dead lying ‘like a great flock of sheep scattered up and down the country for almost four miles round’.
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The Jacobite survivors fell back to Limerick, where Tyrconnell was felled by a stroke. Early in October Ginkel gave them generous terms, allowing the French to go home, accompanied by Irish Jacobites who wished to serve King Louis. He agreed that Jacobite estates would not be confiscated, and that Roman Catholics would endure ‘not less toleration’ than they had enjoyed under Charles II. The Treaty of Limerick was not ratified: a million and a half acres were confiscated, and penal laws were to bear down harshly on Catholics and Protestant dissenters alike.

Marlborough hoped that his successes at Cork and Kinsale would bring him the office of master general of the ordnance, left vacant by Schomberg’s death, but it went instead, for no clearly discernible reason, to the civilian Henry Sidney. There was talk of a dukedom, although at this stage Marlborough felt that he lacked sufficient estate to support the title. He certainly hoped to receive the Garter, for Anne begged it on his behalf, though without success. William maintained that ‘No officer now living who has seen so little service as my Lord Marlborough is so fit for great commands,’ but there was no visible sign of royal favour. C.T. Atkinson argues that Marlborough ‘bitterly resented’ the lack of additional tangible reward as ‘a further proof of
ingratitude, if not jealousy’, and that it was this that drove him ‘to make his peace with the man to whose overthrow he had contributed so largely’.
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Like many other senior officers, Marlborough resented the preeminence of foreign generals, just as English peers complained at the influx of foreigners into the Lords: Bentinck became Earl of Portland; Ginkel, Earl of Athlone; Ruvigny, Viscount Galway; and Zulestein, Earl of Rochford. ‘Under James,’ maintains Winston S. Churchill, ‘he saw his path blocked by Papists: under William by Dutchmen.’
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William only really trusted British officers who had served under him in the Anglo-Dutch Brigade. Thus he was prepared to appoint Hugh Mackay – ‘the most pious man that I ever knew in a military way’, says Burnet – commander-in-chief in Scotland. Mackay was beaten by Viscount Dundee’s Jacobites at Killiekrankie in July 1689. This mishap occurred partly because the plug bayonet then in use had to be rammed into the musket’s muzzle, and a government foot soldier thus armed was no match for a charging Highlander with broadsword and targe. Happily for Mackay, Dundee was killed in the moment of victory, and with his death the rebellion lost direction: Mackay subdued the Highlands that summer, and went on to distinguish himself at Aughrim.

However, there was no peerage for Mackay, not even an Irish one, and when he commanded the British vanguard against the French at Steenkirk in 1692 he was killed and his men badly mauled because, it was said, Count Solms, a Dutch lieutenant general and William’s greatuncle, failed to support him. William had some regard for Thomas Tollemache, a veteran of Walcourt and Aughrim, but there was a nasty scene when Tollemache told William that he was favouring foreigners, and threatened to resign both his major general’s post and the colonelcy of the Coldstream. William made him a lieutenant general but never forgave him. In November 1692 there was an acrimonious debate on the subject in the Commons, which revealed that around half the generals for the campaign of 1693 were to be British. The dispute showed Englishmen’s suspicions of foreigners and emphasised the way that William was failing to ‘oblige’ the political nation. Marlborough may have been unusually forward in his resentment at the way foreign generals were preferred to British, but he certainly spoke for a substantial constituency which suspected that William saw Britain simply as another stick with which to beat the French.

There can be no doubting William’s need for sticks. That untidy conflict known to historians as the War of the League of Augsburg
rumbled on, with occasional naval clashes, skirmishes in North America (where it was called King William’s War) and the Caribbean, much marching and countermarching in the Low Countries, the war’s main theatre, and rather less in Italy and Spain, subsidiary areas of operations. In many respects it was a forerunner to the War of Spanish Succession, in which Marlborough was to make his reputation, with the French enjoying the advantage of a central position, interior lines of communication, and military reputation, and with William holding together a disparate alliance whose members were always vulnerable to defeat in detail. England’s most significant contribution was her navy, but she also furnished a contingent to the main Allied army, usually under William’s personal command, in the Low Countries.

The 1691 campaign began early with a French attack on the fortress of Mons in March, while William was busy with an Allied conference at The Hague. Marlborough had been left behind in England to raise recruits, and on 17 February he had written William a grumpy letter which went to the very edge of politeness. ‘I here send your majesty a copy of what we have done concerning the recruits,’ he wrote.

I must at the same time take leave to tell your Majesty that I am tired out of my life with the unreasonable way of proceeding of Lord President [Danby], for he is very ignorant of what is fit for an officer, both as to recruits and everything else as to a soldier; so that when I have given such as I think necessary orders, he does what he thinks fit, and enters into the business of tents, arms and the off-reckonings, which were all settled before your Majesty left England, so at this rate business is never done; but I think this all proceeds from, I hope, the unreasonable prejudice he has taken against me, which makes me incapable of doing you that service which I do with all my heart, and should wish to do, for I do with much truth wish both your person and Government to prosper. I hope it will not be long before your majesty will be here, after which I shall beg never to be in England when you are not.
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In May William ordered him to the Continent to command the British contingent, sending Tollemache to Ireland to create the vacancy. It was a thoroughly unsatisfactory campaign, for Marshal Luxembourg was more than a match for William. In September, just after William had given command to Waldeck and retired to Het Loo, Luxembourg unleashed Villars’ cavalry against the Allied rearguard, trudging along
from Leuze to Grammont, cutting it up badly. Marlborough deftly swung the British contingent back to deal with the attack, but the dextrous Luxembourg had disengaged before it could come into action.

This mongrel campaign is noteworthy only because during it William asked Charles Thomas, Prince of Vaudemont, son of the Duke of Lorraine and an experienced Imperialist general, what he made of British commanders. ‘Kirke has fire,’ said Vaudemont,