Marlborough (68 page)

Marlborough’s concerns about Blenheim, whose completion depended on the grant of public money, reflected a deeper worry about the future. The Whigs were at the height of their ascendancy, but the Duumvirs knew that they had prejudiced their relationship with the queen, who still craved a balanced administration, by packing the government with Whigs. The death of Prince George and the increasing alienation of Sarah worsened matters, and although the Harley – Masham back door into the queen’s closet was not yet fully open, it was evidently ajar.

In the spring of 1709 Marlborough tried to tighten his grip on royal favour and gain public affirmation of his status as military leader of the Grand Alliance by persuading the queen to appoint him captain general for life. Unusually, he does not seem to have consulted Godolphin, his closest political associate; possibly because he knew that Godolphin’s own hold on power was weakening, and that securing the captain generalcy might enable him to swim while Godolphin sank. Neither did he speak to Sarah, probably because he deduced that any interventions she might make would be counterproductive. He weeded his own papers of most of the references which might have helped historians, but the painstaking forensic work of Henry L. Snyder, doyen of Marlburian scholars, now enables us to go well beyond the surmises of Marlborough’s early biographers.

Marlborough had always disliked party politics, but the Harley affair of early 1708 had, in the view of Arthur Maynwaring, shown him that ‘it will not be enough hereafter, to make no enemies. Something more of warmth and zeal will be requisite towards those men that will always applaud his actions and who, I verily believe, though they are sometimes a little forward and angry, do yet really love his person.’
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In short, urged Maynwaring, Marlborough should recognise his true friends and give more support to the Whigs, and he did indeed make a special trip to England to get Anne to include Lords Somers and Wharton in her cabinet. That autumn, stuck fast at Lille, Marlborough could only see, as Professor Snyder relates, ‘dismal prospects for the future. His support of the Whigs had placed him in a more vulnerable position, and he knew that if the Queen and her secret counsellors ever found the strength to turn out the ministry he too would suffer the loss of his places.’
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The Tories had used their parliamentary congratulation of Major General Webb to disparage the duke, and Maynwaring suggested that Marlborough’s supporters should riposte with some ‘Addition of honour … and not of wealth’. The somewhat sketchy evidence suggests that Marlborough made his first request for the captain generalcy for life when he was in England in early 1709, and, after the queen’s temporising response, for there was no precedent for the grant, repeated it later that year. Of the four letters he wrote to Anne on the subject only one, of 10 October NS, has survived.

God Almighty knows with what zeal and duty I have served you for all this many years, and all Europe as well as yourself are witnesses how far God has blessed my endeavours ever since your accession to the Crown.
I have for some time with the greatest mortification imaginable observed your Majesty’s change from Lady Marlborough to Mrs Masham, and the several indignities Mrs Masham has made her suffer, of which I am much more sensible than of any misfortune that could have befallen myself, which has made me to take the resolution of retiring as soon as this war shall be ended. I was assured last winter of what I am convinced is true, that Mrs Masham has assured Mr Harley and some of his wretches that let my services or success be whatever they would, from thenceforward I should receive no encouragement from your Majesty … In order to know how far your Majesty’s intentions went in this project, I acquainted you of the desire I had of having that mark of your favour that my commission might be for life. You were pleased to judge it not proper.
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The queen replied on 25 October OS by telling Marlborough that she was not surprised to see him ‘so incensed against poor Masham since the Duchess of Marlborough is so’. She thought she had told him, in a previous letter, why she had refused his request, but concluded by saying that if he was of the same mind when he returned to England at the campaign’s close, ‘I will comply with your desires.’
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By the time he returned, however, the Junto peer Lord Orford had been forced upon the queen, and the influential clergyman Dr Henry Sacheverell had preached two inflammatory sermons attacking the government, the 1688 settlement and ‘by implication the Hanoverian succession’.
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The government duly impeached Sacheverell, and although he was found guilty after a divisive trial, his punishment was nominal, and it was in effect a defeat for the Whigs. When Godolphin told Marlborough that Sacheverell had been ‘found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours’ by a mere seventeen votes in the Lords, he added that the Duke of Somerset, a great lord of the middle party, always high in the queen’s esteem since he had loaned her Syon House half a lifetime ago, had not voted. Somerset had claimed to be sick, said Godolphin, ‘but I fancy ’twas only profound wisdom kept him away from the House’. ‘So all this bustle and fatigue,’ he lamented, ‘ends in no more but a suspension for 3 years from the pulpit, and the burning of his sermons at the old Exchange.’
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By the time of the Sacheverell verdict worse was already afoot. Early in 1710, when the Earl of Essex died, the queen gave his post of constable of the Tower to Lord Rivers, and his colonelcy of a regiment of dragoons to Abigail’s brother Jack Hill, without consulting Marlborough, her captain
general. After a period of intense political crisis the queen gave way over Jack Hill, encouraging Marlborough to set the seal on his victory by again requesting the captain generalcy for life, this time demanding both the appointment and Abigail Masham’s removal from court by means of a parliamentary address. The scheme misfired grotesquely. The Tories in both Houses opposed the measure on principle, and many moderates were swayed by strong personal loyalty to the monarch. The Duke of Argyll, Marlborough’s political opponent and personal rival (though also a general serving under his command), declared that ‘her Majesty need not be in pain; for he would undertake, whenever she commanded, to seize the Duke at the head of his troops, and bring him away either dead or alive’.
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Marlborough did his best to pretend that he had never supported the measure, but was forced to leave for the 1710 campaign in February, unusually early, to spare himself further humiliation.

There was more to the queen’s repeated refusal to grant Marlborough the captain generalcy for life than her antipathy towards Sarah or her desire not to be bullied. She believed that any grant would be unconstitutional unless ratified by Parliament, and thought that the creation of a permanent captain general by a Whig-dominated Parliament was a most dangerous precedent. Even the Whig leader Lord Somers, lord president of the council and a distinguished lawyer, warned the queen of the danger she ran if Marlborough’s friends managed to force their way by parliamentary address. The Tories, with their traditional antipathy to a standing army and readiness to see their own times in the light of the 1640s, began to snipe at Marlborough as ‘Oliver’ or ‘King John’. The ensuing propaganda war did Marlborough significant damage, though there is not a jot of evidence to suggest that his ambitions went beyond the captain generalcy.

Although the squabble went on from early 1709 till the beginning of 1710, even in its early stages the queen began to flex her muscles and to take a personal hand in senior army appointments. Early in 1709 the experienced Major General George Macartney, one of Marlborough’s favourite commanders, was appointed governor of Jamaica and selected to command an expedition to Newfoundland, part of which had been taken by the French. In May, however, he was accused of raping his housekeeper, a clergyman’s widow. Rape was then a capital offence, and although Macartney escaped the full penalty of the law, the queen, who took the advice of the Bishop of London, saw that he was cashiered for ‘disgraceful conduct’, though he was allowed to sell his regiment. Marlborough made his own feelings in the matter clear by letting
Macartney stay with the army as a volunteer, and he fought so valiantly at Malplaquet with Sir Thomas Prendergast’s Regiment that the queen forgave him, giving him the colonelcy made vacant by Prendergast’s death in the battle. He did not stay forgiven for long, for he was one of the three senior officers dismissed for drinking damnation to the new ministry in November 1710. ‘The orders for their stripping were passed through Marlborough,’ writes Scouller, ‘who had to deliver them unopened.’
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So far had the mighty fallen.

In mid-1709 Marlborough felt that his powers as captain general were not what they had been. From his camp before Tournai he wrote to Robert Walpole, the Secretary at War, enclosing

a memorial delivered to me by Captain Chudleigh of Colonel Bretton’s regiment, complaining of the great hardship he lies under by a much younger officer being made major over his head during his absence in France.

You have likewise a memorial of Major Wedderburn of Colonel Sutton’s regiment. There are so many more instances of the like nature, which deserve to be considered and redressed, that I know not what to advise on it: but I hope that when I come home in the winter, H.M. will think it fit to refer all these matters to the general officers, that proper measures may be taken to relieve those that are prejudiced, and make the officers of the army more easy in the service.
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Even without the painful recognition that his hold on the queen’s affections had been loosened, Marlborough would have begun the campaign of 1709 at a disadvantage, because he had genuinely believed that the French would accept the Allied peace terms. Yet the early spring was not wasted, and Cadogan was ready to put the army into the field, whether to fight or to occupy territory given up by the French under the terms of the peace. On 22 April he cheerfully reported that he could ‘assemble the army at the time your Grace is pleased to direct it … Fine weather has forwarded everything, and a great deal of the corn which was thought dead begins to spring out again, so that suffering the assembly of the army for eight or ten days is as long as any may require.’
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On the following day Marlborough told Major General Palmes, then at Vienna, to meet the Duke of Savoy and ‘press H.R.H. in his preparations to take the field’, for if the French did not make peace, then ‘if we neglect the
opportunity of this campaign, while the enemy’s circumstances are reduced to so low an ebb, it is to be doubted whether we may ever have the like again of reducing them to reason’.
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He was doomed, yet again, to be disappointed in the Duke of Savoy, who took so long to agree arrangements with the Imperialists that French troops were able to redeploy from Spain to Dauphiné to parry his thrust.

By the time the Allied army did actually need to assemble, though, both time and weather had worked in favour of the French. ‘We have rain every day,’ Marlborough told Godolphin, ‘which gives us the spleen, and is of great advantage to Marshal Villars, since it gives him time to finish his lines, which he is working at the head of his army.’ Villars was closer to his soldiers than his illustrious predecessors, and knew just how near to starvation they were. ‘I am humble,’ he told Louis’ wife Madame de Maintenon, ‘when I see the backbreaking labour men perform without food.’
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When Marlborough took the field in June, Villars had already been hard at work. He had some 128 battalions and 247 squadrons arrayed in a strong line of field defences between the fortresses of Douai on the Scarpe and St-Venant on the Lys. Much of his infantry was in a strong fortified camp at La Bassée, with most of his cavalry drawn up behind it and a strong detachment thrown out to watch his right flank. ‘He has La Bassée on his front leaving Lens to his rear,’ Marlborough wrote to Godolphin.

His flanks are covered by two little rivers which have marshy grounds to them. By this situation you will see that he has no mind to offer battle but on very advantageous terms … Their people are in great misery, but by what we hear from Paris all the money they have will be employed for the subsisting of their armies. And I think it is plain by the entrenching of Monsieur de Villars’ army that they will be upon the defensive, which they would not do, were they not sure of subsistence. If we should be so fortunate as to have an occasion of beating them, we could not, for want of forage and provisions enter into France, but by the sea coast, and then we should be in want of your assistance.
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Godolphin assured him that he could indeed help with supplies. If Marlborough took his army to the coast it could be supplied with bread for 40–50,000 men with little notice, and agreed that a move along the Channel coast offered better prospects than a thrust into Artois, ‘where the enemy has eaten or destroyed the greatest part of it’.
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In late June Marlborough had 164 battalions and 271 squadrons in the plain of Lens, outnumbering Villars by 110,000 men to about 90,000, and far better sustained. The general dearth, however, made life uncomfortable even for the Allies. Although the weather had now improved, ‘there is no straw in this country, so that the poor men have been obliged to lie on the wet ground’.
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On 24 June Marlborough and Eugène looked at the French position, and their conclusions, as he admitted to Sarah, were unsurprising. ‘If it had been reasonable,’ he wrote,

this letter would have brought you the news of a battle, but Prince Eugène, myself and all the generals did not think it advisable to run so great a hazard, considering their camp, as well as their having strengthened it so by their entrenchments, so that we have resolved on the siege of Tournai, and accordingly marched last night, and have invested it when they expected our going to another place, [so] that they have not half the troops in the town that they should have to defend themselves well, which makes us hope it will not cost us dear. I am so sleepy that I can say no more but that [I] am entirely yours.
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