Marlborough (39 page)

Robert Parker thought that the partisans were ‘more intent on booty than making prisoners’, and let them pass ‘when they had received a handsome present’.
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The official bulletin declared that the attackers ‘examined the several passports, without knowing my Lord Marlborough’. However, Farewell immediately slipped away from his party and appeared at The Hague, where he received a free pardon and a captaincy in the Dutch army. The Earl of Ailesbury believed that he had betrayed his trust, and would have deservedly been broken on the
wheel if the French had ever caught him. He hinted that Marlborough had simply bought off Farewell: ‘No doubt he had not the spirit of thrift at the time.’
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Marlborough certainly rewarded the quick-thinking Gell with a pension of £50 a year, and obtained him a post in the Exchange of Prisoners Office. The last of the letters printed in Murray’s five-volume edition of his dispatches was written in March 1712 when Marlborough was out of office. In it he told Grand Pensionary Heinsius:

Mr Gill has, I believe, the honour of being known to you, having served us all the war as a commissioner for the exchange of prisoners. Having particular obligations to him as he helped save me from enemy hands when I was captured on the Meuse, I would have much wished to do something for him; but as it is not in my power, please permit me to recommend him to the honour of your protection so that he can obtain some small employment or subsistence at the Hague, where he has lived for forty years.
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Marlborough was never a man to forget old obligations.

Shortly before Marlborough set off for England, Queen Anne had told Sarah that she knew that her husband ‘deserves all that a rich crown can give. But since there is nothing else at this time, I hope you will give me leave as soon as he comes to make him a duke.’
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Sarah was not convinced that it would be wise to accept. She did not think the family was rich enough to support the title, especially should she produce the numerous sons she might yet be blessed with, which tells us much about her private hopes. ‘Though at the time I had myself but one,’ she wrote later, ‘yet I might have had more, and the next generation a great many.’
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She told her husband of her misgivings in a letter which has not survived, and he replied from The Hague on 4 November OS: ‘I shall have a mind to do nothing but as it may be easy with you. I do agree with you that we ought not to wish for a greater title until we have a better estate.’
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Two days later he told her that he had broached the matter with Heinsius, who suggested that he should accept the offer now that it was so clearly connected to a military success, rather than wait till the end of the war. ‘He said if it were not done now in the heat of everybody’s being
pleased with what I had done,’ wrote Marlborough, ‘it would at any other time be thought the effect of favour, which would not be so great an honour to my family, nor to the Queen’s service.’
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Sarah met Marlborough when he arrived at Margate on 28 November, and they travelled up to London together. The following day the queen told the cabinet that she intended to make Marlborough a duke, and to grant him, for her lifetime, an annual pension of £5,000 from Post Office revenue to enable him to support the dignity, hoping that Parliament would vote him a similar sum. On 2 December she made his promotion public, and eight days later the proposed pension was debated by the Commons.

The Tory majority in the new Parliament had already shown its teeth by voting a congratulatory address which affirmed that ‘the vigorous support of Your Majesty’s Allies and the wonderful progress of Your Majesty’s armies under the conduct of the Earl of Marlborough have signally retrieved the ancient honour and glory of the English nation’. This was anti-Williamite and thus anti-Whig, and a similar address commending the navy’s descent on Vigo Bay, where the Spanish treasure fleet was taken, was regarded by Sarah as an affront: how could one naval action take station with a string of successes on land? There was even more to it than that. By commending naval commanders alongside Marlborough, the Tories were making clear their presence for the ‘traditional’ British strategy based on seapower, rather than a Continental commitment. The queen responded by ordering a victory procession through the City, and Bishop Trelawney preached on Joshua 22: 8–9, ‘Return with much riches unto your tents, and with very much cattle, with silver, and with gold, and with brass, and with iron, and with very much raiment: divide the spoil of your enemies with your brethren.’
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No amount of public rejoicing could blunt the Tories’ assault on the pension proposals, and on 15 December the measure was withdrawn. Anne generously offered the Marlboroughs £2,000 a year from her privy purse, but Sarah, arguing that they had had enough already, turned it down. The episode did much to confirm Sarah in her hatred of the Tories. Her correspondence with Anne already revealed that they were in different political camps. Although Anne ‘would never have you & your poor unfortunate faithful Morley differ in opinion in the least thing’, she went on to tell Sarah, unusually forcefully, that she quite misunderstood the character of the Whigs and would do better to ‘show more countenance’ to ‘the Church party’. Godolphin regretted that the
defeat had been brought about by men he had trusted, Rochester amongst them, and lamented to Harley that he had been beaten in the Commons by ‘those of whom I thought we had deserved better’.

There was more choppy water ahead. Parliament quickly granted the queen’s request that Prince George should receive £100,000 a year, cheerfully demonstrating that its grudge against Marlborough was political rather than financial. The Whigs in the Lords then attacked a measure which excepted the Prince of Denmark from a clause in the Act of Settlement which would bar naturalised subjects sitting in Parliament or on the Privy Council after a Hanoverian succession. They were led by the Marlboroughs’ son-in-law the Earl of Sunderland, and Anne was incandescent. Eventually the clause squeaked by in the Lords by only four votes, and Anne thanked the Marlboroughs for all that they had done to help.

Anne gave a practical sign of her gratitude when the Marlboroughs’ daughter Lady Elizabeth Churchill was married to the immensely wealthy Scrope Egerton, 4th Earl of Bridgewater. The queen gave a dowry of £10,000, and Bridgewater was made a gentleman of the horse to Prince George. The Marlboroughs aimed at the senior post of master of the horse, but they failed to secure it for Bridgwater till 1705, when it became all too evident that the incumbent, the Earl of Sandwich, was mentally deranged. The queen also did something for the Duumvirs, as Marlborough and Godolphin were now becoming known, by ordering Rochester to go to Ireland to take up his duties as lord lieutenant, not to reappear at cabinet. When he refused she dismissed him and appointed the Duke of Ormonde in his stead. Rochester at once threw in his lot with the opposition, and inserted a ‘tendentious introduction’ to the second volume of his father Clarendon’s
History of the Great Rebellion
, which appeared in 1703, warning Anne that only adherence to Tory principles could prevent her from sharing the fate of Charles I.

At the beginning of 1703, despite the failure of the attempt to gain a pension from Parliament and some crumbling of Godolphin’s political power-base, all seemed set fair for the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. In February, however, they were struck by a blow from which they never fully recovered. Their eldest son John, so recently made Marquess of Blandford by courtesy title that his proud father still called him ‘Lord Churchill’, was a sixteen-year-old undergraduate at King’s College Cambridge. Even the Marlboroughs’ subsequent unpopularity could never induce their many opponents to rake up any mud about young Blandford. ‘Notwithstanding his high birth, splendid
prospects and courtly education,’ says Archdeacon Coxe, ‘he set an example of affability, regularity, and steadiness, above his years.’
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His best friend was Horace Walpole, also of King’s, and the two young men spoke about serving together in the cavalry. Blandford wrote to Marlborough asking for a commission in the summer of 1702, and Marlborough sent the letter on to Godolphin, characteristically asking him not to show it to Sarah if he thought it would ‘vex’ her, but saying that he would ‘write what answer she shall think best’. Sarah, like many a worried mother before and since, could not let her son go while he was still so young.

In the winter of 1702–03 Blandford often rode across from Cambridge to stay with Godolphin at Newmarket. Early in 1703 there was smallpox in Newmarket, but Godolphin was sure that the Marlboroughs’ son, ‘going into no house but mine, will I hope be more defended from it by air and riding, without any violent exercise, than he could be anywhere else’. But shortly after returning to Cambridge from Newmarket in February John was struck down by the disease. Sarah rushed to Cambridge as soon as she heard the news, and the queen, no stranger to this fell illness, sent her own doctors at once. Marlborough wrote to Sarah immediately, dating his letter only ‘Thursday, nine in the morning’.

I have this minute received Mr Godolphin’s letter, and have sent to Mr Morta’s shop [Daniel Malthus, apothecary to the queen] for what is desired, which is what this messenger will bring. I hope Doctor Hans [Edward Hans, physician to the queen] and Dr Collidon [Sir Theodore Colladon] got to you early this morning. I am so troubled at the sad condition this poor child seems to be in, that I know not what I do. I pray God to give you some comfort in this great affliction. If you think anything under heaven can be done, pray let me know it, or if you think my coming can be of the least use let me know it. I beg I may hear as often as is possible, for I have no thought but what is at Cambridge.
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He wrote again that night, telling her:

I hope the doctors were with you early this morning. If we must be so unhappy as to lose this poor child, I pray God enable us to behave with that resignation which we ought to do. If this uneasiness which I now lie under should last long, I do not think I could live. For God’s sake, if there be any hope of recovery let me know it.
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The Marquess of Blandford died on the morning of Saturday, 20 February 1703: Marlborough had arrived just in time to join Sarah at his bedside. The death of any child is a tragedy, and the Marlboroughs, like too many of the parents of their age, were already painfully familiar with loss. It hit Marlborough hard. His hopes of founding a dynasty had perished. He quickly made a new will, and begged the queen to allow his dukedom to descend collaterally, hoping at first that it might eventually go to Godolphin’s son and his descendants, provided they assumed the name and arms of Churchill. Affairs of state were so pressing that he had little enough time to mourn, for although Cardonnel at once told Heinsius what had happened, he emphasised that ‘despite this great misfortune His Excellency will embark in the middle of next week’.
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When Ailesbury saw him at The Hague soon afterwards Marlborough confessed: ‘I’ve lost what is so dear to me, it is fit for me to retire and not toil and labour for I know not who. My daughters are all married.’
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In April he wrote wistfully:

I have seen this day a very great procession, and the thoughts how pleased poor Lord Churchill would have been with such a sight added much to my uneasiness. Since it has pleased God to take him, I do wish from my soul I could think less of him.
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If Marlborough, with the mind-filling solace of hard work, was able to rise above his grief, it was much, much harder for Sarah. On 26 February, Godolphin said that he was pleased to hear that ‘the drops’ seemed to be doing her some good. Marlborough was an even more sedulous correspondent than usual: when he reached Brill after his sea crossing the following month he wrote to say: ‘My letter a Tuesday may come as soon as this, but I would not omit this occasion, nor will I ever any that I think may give you the least satisfaction, for the greatest pleasure of my life will be the endeavouring to make you happy.’
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However, for a time her grief was such that she lost her self-possession: a Westminster schoolboy saw her wandering through the cloisters of the Abbey like a madwoman.

Anne, herself no stranger to this sort of misfortune, did her very best to help. When Sarah left London for Cambridge to attend Blandford, Anne begged her ‘for Christ Jesus sake to have a care of your dear precious self’, and when she heard that the case was hopeless, prayed ‘Christ Jesus comfort & support you under this terrible affliction, & it is his mercy alone that can do it.’
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The tragedy should have drawn the two women closer together in the sisterhood of shared adversity, but it
did not. One contemporary observed: ‘We hear the Duchess of Marlborough bears not her affliction like her mistress, if report be true that it hath near touched her head.’ Edward Gregg, Anne’s masterly biographer, does indeed suggest that the tragedy tipped Sarah’s personality over the edge: ‘Her wit, which had been sharp, became piercing; her humour, which had been biting, became mordant; her convictions, which had been firm, became absolute; her manner, which had been bold and assured, became precipitous and arrogant.’
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There was another element to the tragedy. In her correspondence with Sarah, Anne had always been very forthright about her own periods, sometimes saying that ‘Lady Charlotte’s’ failure to turn up as anticipated suggested that she was pregnant again. We have no evidence that Sarah ever used the same cant with her mistress. Perhaps the letters which did so have simply not survived, but more probably this is yet another example of Anne needing to confide in Sarah far more than Sarah ever needed to confide in her. We cannot describe Sarah’s fertility with absolute certainty, but it is clear that in 1702 she certainly hoped to have more children, and likely that she thought herself pregnant in the spring of 1703: she was by then forty-two years old, so it was not an unreasonable hope. It was certainly a hope shared by her husband. ‘It was a great pleasure to me when I thought we should be blessed with more children; but as all my happiness centres in living quietly with you, I do conjure you by all the kindness I have for you … that you will take the best advice you can for your health,’ he assured her.
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On 17 May he wrote to tell her how delighted he was that ‘the troublesome visit’ she had experienced the day he left had not recurred, though he was unaware of the real significance of its absence.
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