Marlborough (54 page)

The discreet understanding that sympathetic field deputies would be selected henceforth paved the way for a remarkable period of Anglo-Dutch military cooperation. Indeed, almost as if to point the way ahead, the Allies snatched the fortress of Zandvliet, on the Scheldt between Antwerp and Bergen op Zoom, before going into winter quarters.

Throughout the tense summer of 1705 Marlborough had dealt with coalition politics well beyond the borders of Brabant. He ensured that the new emperor, Joseph I, who had just succeeded his father Leopold I, understood the significance of his piercing the Lines, sending a senior aide ‘to inform Your Imperial Majesty of the peculiarities of this affair, which I do not doubt will have very advantageous results for the common cause and for the interests of Your Imperial Majesty, for which I will always have a special attention’.
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He thanked the King of Prussia for his generosity in ensuring that the Prussian contingent destined for the Rhine could now serve in Brabant, though he warned Raby, ambassador in Berlin, that Prince Louis was now in such an awkward mood that he would probably use the non-arrival of these troops as an excuse to do nothing. Yet to read his letters to Prince Louis one would never guess how that gentleman’s slow progress exasperated Marlborough, and when the prince at last succeeded in forcing the Lines of Haguenau, ‘I could not wait for the arrival of the full details to congratulate you, with all my heart, on such a happy event.’
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He commiserated with the Ordnance Board on ‘the ill condition of the stores of ordnance’, and, alerted to the shortage of saltpetre, an essential ingredient of gunpowder, told the board that there was currently plenty in Holland, where five shiploads had recently arrived. There was interest to be dispensed. Lady Oglethorpe was assured that her son could have his promised ensigncy in the Foot Guards, and ‘If you please to send me the young gentleman’s Christian name, his commission shall be dispatched immediately.’
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He was less open-handed to the Earl of Dalhousie, who hoped to succeed a kinsman as colonel of the Scots Guards, saying that he would do his best for him, but gently adding (for he must have guessed that the outcome would not be to the
earl’s advantage) that in this case the queen would be advised by ‘her ministers in Scotland’.

Sarah, pressed by the Earl of Essex’s sister, Lady Carlisle, to do something for the cash-strapped earl, asked Marlborough to get him made constable of the Tower of London. Marlborough knew his wife’s temper too well to disappoint her, but it created another problem, for Charles Churchill was lieutenant of the Tower, and would thus become Essex’s nominal subordinate, which would never do.

Would it not be barbarous to put my Lord Essex, that is but a major general, over my brother that is Lieutenant of the Tower and General of the Foot? I write to Lady Marlborough to the same purpose by this post, and if this were said to Lord Essex, he would not expect it …

Essex was eventually appointed, but only after Charles Churchill had been moved on to be governor of Guernsey, an appointment he coveted: Cadogan replaced him as lieutenant of the Tower, a post which brought income but no duties, and everybody was happy.
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There were other family obligations too. When Marlborough heard that Sarah’s sister Frances wished to cross the lines to visit Aix, he obtained a pass from the French, and wrote to tell her: ‘I have likewise ordered eight dragoons to attend on you on your coming to the Bosch; these will wait on you to Maastricht, where the governor will give you another escort on to Aix. I heartily wish you a good journey, and all the success you can desire with the waters.’ He politely recognised her Jacobite title, addressing her as Duchess of Tyrconnell.
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Lastly, despite his lack of ministerial office, Marlborough continued to play a central role in government. The issues of fixing the succession and pursuing a union between England and Scotland were uppermost in the minds of Westminster politicians, and that autumn’s session of Parliament passed both a Regency Act and legislation authorising the appointment of commissioners to negotiate a Union with Scotland. Godolphin was anxious to continue removing Tories from the ministry, a process which Harley rightly feared would lead to his own replacement and which ran contrary to the queen’s desire to have a broadly-based government. She continued to value Marlborough’s advice, but even before the summer’s exhausting wrangling with the Dutch he expressed a wish to retire at the end of the campaign, and clearly felt that his
headaches and associated problems with his vision were the harbingers of something fatal.

By the vexation and trouble I undergo, I find a daily decay, which may deprive me of the honour of serving Your Majesty any more, which thought makes me take the liberty to beg of Your Majesty, that for your own sake and for the happiness of both kingdoms, you will never suffer anybody to do the Lord Treasurer an ill office. For besides his integrity for your service, his temper and abilities are such, that he is the only man in England capable of giving such advice as may keep you out of the hands of both parties, which may at last make you happy, if quietness can be had in a country where there is so much faction.
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Edward Gregg, Anne’s distinguished biographer, identifies here ‘a maudlin note which was to be repeated later in his correspondence and which the Queen was to find increasingly grating’.
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Marlborough’s correspondence with Sarah and Godolphin testifies to the fact that there was nothing political in his desire to retire: indeed, he rarely mentioned Blenheim Palace save in the context of a place where he might live out his days in peace. Although he had suffered from headaches for many years, their frequency and severity in 1705, together with the appearance of stomach trouble and gout, left him fearing that, as he told Heinsius that autumn, ‘I am really ill.’

Despite the closeness of his relationship with Godolphin, Marlborough was often a reluctant participant in the lord treasurer’s campaign against the Tories, and was far from sharing his wife’s Whig principles. But there was no more escaping his requirement to support Godolphin than his need to keep propping up the alliance. Welded into his myriad of concerns at the close of a difficult year was the need to dissuade the Elector of Hanover from allowing the dowager Electress Sophia, the Tories’ preferred candidate to succeed Anne, from settling in England, something that the queen told him ‘gives me a great deal of uneasiness’.
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The twenty-first century is too often prepared to diagnose stress as a universal illness, but by any reasonable assessment the pressures bearing down upon Marlborough at the close of 1705 were almost intolerable. It was the cruellest of ironies that he was able to sustain them largely because of his relationship with Sarah, but Sarah’s own views and attitudes were by now contributing to his burden. His occasional
attempts to steer her towards a less confrontational relationship with Anne, or to dissuade her from inciting Godolphin into fresh attacks on the Tories in government, could not be pressed too far without the risk of the sort of marital crisis that had disfigured the early months of 1704. In short, Marlborough could not survive without Sarah, but had come to realise that surviving with her was increasingly hard.

One year tumbled into another. Marlborough spent November and December 1705 visiting Allied capitals. The new emperor urgently needed money to sustain the war in Italy, and Marlborough pressed the bankers of Vienna to supply an immediate 100,000 crowns on Dutch and English security. He undertook to arrange a loan of £250,000, on the security of the silver mines in Silesia, and did so as soon as he returned to England, putting up £10,000 himself: the sum was raised in full by early March 1706. In Berlin he was presented with a diamond-encrusted sword, but found the King of Prussia so irritated by the irregular payment of his troops that he would not, at that time, guarantee to keep them under Prince Louis’ command. Finally he went to Hanover, whence he wrote to Godolphin that the Elector ‘has commanded me to assure Her Majesty that he will never have any thoughts but what may be agreeable to hers’. He had just heard that the Lords had passed the Regency Act, and later that month the queen gave her assent to an act naturalising the Electress Sophia and her heirs.
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This bout of diplomacy ended with him prostrate with migraine: ‘My head aches to that degree that I can say no more …’ It was wholly typical of this curmudgeonly year that he did not manage to return to England until late on the evening of Sunday, 29 December.

Marlborough returned to a nation making the greatest military effort of its history so far. In the Iberian Peninsula the Allies had scored significant successes, capturing Gibraltar and Barcelona, overrunning Catalonia, and being poised for an attack on Madrid from Catalonia and Portugal. The threat to the Empire had been blunted at Blenheim, the Duke of Savoy’s defection to the Allies had widened the Italian theatre. Marlborough had seventeen British battalions in 1702, and twenty from 1703; maritime enterprises consumed twelve in 1702, eleven in 1703 and six from 1704. The Peninsula gobbled up ten battalions in 1704, fifteen in 1705 and nineteen in the winter of 1705–06. In 1706 the war in Flanders and Brabant cost £1,255,000, and operations in the
Peninsula £829,000 from a military budget of £2,112,000. Even Italy absorbed £334,000 in assorted loans to the emperor, the Duke of Savoy and German princes providing troops.
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Parliament, now narrowly under Whig control, was prepared to vote unprecedented sums of money for a war which the Allies now seemed to be within measurable distance of winning.

Marlborough was in the unusual position of being Allied commander in a particular theatre of war, captain general of all the queen’s land forces, and strategic adviser to a government prosecuting the closest thing to a world war that history had so far seen. Winston S. Churchill maintains that Marlborough merely tolerated the war in the Peninsula as a sop to the Tories, but on the contrary, it is evident that in the winter of 1705–06 he actually recognised that his own theatre of operations was the least important. A drive on Madrid seemed to offer the prospect of winning the war in a single campaign, but conversely failure to reinforce Allied armies in Italy might lead to a crushing French victory there, and reopen the threat to Vienna. And, in just the same way that the French hoped that disaffected Irish or Scots might be used to spearhead an invasion of Britain, so Marlborough believed that Huguenot ‘refugee regiments’ could be used against France. In March 1706, not long before he left for the Continent, he told Heinsius how he saw the war in the round for the coming campaign.

I am very sensible that there are very just objections to this project [of refugee regiments], but I can’t hinder being of opinion that it ought to be attempted though the success should not be a third part of what is promised; for we should attempt everything that is in our power this campaign, for the troops of France were at no time so divided as they now are. When we shall consider that we have an army in Spain, another in Italy, a third in Germany, and a fourth in Flanders, we may conclude that this is the time, that we ought to do something that they do not expect, and we may be sure, that if they are being surprised, they will find it very difficult to oppose us, their armies being at so great a distance from each other.
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This was a wide strategic view from a general capable of lifting his gaze above the Lines of Brabant.

When Marlborough reached The Hague in late April 1706 he first decided on attacks into France, in concert with Prince Louis, by way of the Moselle and Landau. This scheme did not survive early recognition
that Prince Louis’ army had been too weakened by detachments for Italy to be able to mount a serious offensive. Marlborough then determined to go to Italy himself, where, working in concert with Eugène, he would attack into south-east France, and the Dutch, to his astonishment, agreed to devote troops to the venture. Marlborough had told Heinsius that the French would find it hard to oppose the Allies effectively if they were surprised. However, what applied to one combatant was no less true for the other, and Marlborough was himself surprised by the fact that the French, straining every nerve over the winter, had created a total of eight armies, three of which – under Villars on the Rhine, Villeroi in Brabant, and Marsin on the Moselle – were to attack in unison before the Allies could begin the campaign. Louis had concluded that he was now unable to fulfil his original war aim after Blenheim, but that by mounting a vigorous offensive he could obtain peace on suitable terms.

Marlborough was making preparations for the march to Italy, with the usual problems in getting Allied contingents in on time, when he heard that Villars had attacked Prince Louis and administered what seemed, even from the first unconfirmed reports, to be a considerable defeat. Writing from The Hague, he told Godolphin that:

we have had news of the Prince of Baden retiring over the Rhine, by which he has not only abandoned his lines, but also Haguenau, and whatever the French shall see fit to attack in lower Alsace. These people here are so very angry with Prince Louis that they will never be brought to let any of their troops be under his command, so that I very much apprehend the campaign on that side.
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He was quite right. The Dutch at once deduced that this would enable Villars to send troops to strengthen Villeroi in Brabant, and would allow only 10,000 of their men to go to Italy, and then only if Marlborough himself remained in the north. Worse was to come. Prince Louis was fixed in the Lines of Stollhofen, demanding urgent support. Marsin paused only long enough to ensure that the Allied forces on the Moselle were being sent down to help Louis, and then took most of his troops to join Villeroi. The latter, now far stronger than he had been the previous year, thinned his forces west of Antwerp to a mere eleven battalions, designated sixteen battalions and eight squadrons for the siege of Leau, which, once Marsin’s men had come in, he would be able to cover with eighty battalions and 140 squadrons. It was a good plan, capitalising on ‘interior lines’ which enabled the French to move more quickly than the
Allies. Marlborough would have to let Leau fall, and face subsequent attacks on Huy and Liège, or give battle against a superior force.