Marlborough (76 page)

The peace signed at Utrecht in early 1713 embodied a number of individual treaties between the belligerents. The Duke of Anjou was recognised as Philip V of Spain, but he renounced, for himself and his descendants, all claims to the throne of France, while various French princes relinquished their own possible claims to the Spanish throne. The Pyrenees had been rebuilt. Archduke Charles, the Hapsburg claimant to Spain, could survive well enough without his pretended throne, for he had in fact succeeded his brother Joseph as Holy Roman Emperor in 1711. At Utrecht he received the Spanish Netherlands, the Kingdom of Naples, Sardinia, and most of the Duchy of Milan. Victor Amadeus of Savoy was rewarded for his adherence to the Allies by gaining the remainder of Milan and the whole of Sicily.

Spain ceded both Gibraltar and Minorca to Britain, enabling Richard Kane of the Royal Irish to set off for the latter as its new governor, and to pen his own account of the war in its pleasant climate. Spain also granted Britain the
asiento de negros
, a thirty-year agreement to sell slaves and five hundred tons of merchandise annually in Spanish colonies. This allowed legitimate traders into the hitherto closed markets of Central and South America, and smugglers immediately followed: disputes, and the alleged mutilation of a British sea captain, led to the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739.

France made extensive concessions in North America, renouncing its claims in Newfoundland, the huge territory of Rupert’s Land (named for the cavalier Prince Rupert) around Hudson’s Bay, and the coastal region of Acadia. Both Île St-Jean (Prince Edward Island) and Île Royale (Cape Breton Island) remained in French hands, and work soon began on building the Vauban-style fortress of Louisbourg on the latter. War between France and the Empire formally lurched on until it was ended by the Treaties of Rastatt and Baden in 1714. In the following year the Treaty of Madrid closed the struggle between Spain and Portugal, although a state of war between Spain and the Empire officially existed till 1720.

There was widespread indignation amongst the Whigs that the French had escaped too lightly, especially in view of the fact that the terms agreed at Utrecht fell well short of those the French had earlier seemed so close to accepting. The Whig politician John Wilkes later said that, like ‘the Peace of God, the treaty passeth all understanding’. The Tories argued that the treaty served British interests well, though there was no denying that the Dutch, who had played such a resolute part in the struggle and then hosted the negotiation that ended it, had gained little. ‘
De vous, chez vous, sans vous
’ (‘About you, at home with you, but without you’), quipped bitter Dutchmen. However, although many of the fortresses captured by the Allies in the last three years of the war were, like the mighty Lille, restored to the French, there was no realistic threat to Dutch sovereignty for the next two generations.

What was undeniably true, though, was that the treaty had removed the danger of a huge Bourbon super-state, comprising not only France and Spain but all the latter’s overseas colonies, whose existence could only have been inimical to British interests. The lesser risk of a Hapsburg super-state had also been averted, and the Tories could claim, with some justice, that the agreement created a European balance of power which it would be hard for a single nation to disrupt.

Marlborough’s position was exceptionally difficult. He had long had reservations about the Whigs’ policy of ‘No Peace without Spain’, but as what Winston S. Churchill calls ‘the soul of the Grand Alliance’, he disliked the notion of abandoning the allies upon whose troops he had relied. He had especially close relations with Hanover, whose Elector, likely to become king of Great Britain in the foreseeable future, was
firmly opposed to the preliminaries. However, he was more Tory than Whig by personal persuasion, and had worked well enough with members of the present ministry, most notably Bolingbroke.

He was certainly convinced that the war could not go on, though he was less sure what constituted reasonable peace terms. In October 1711 he told Oxford that ‘there is nothing upon earth I wish more than an end of the war … I am perfectly convinced that it brings the draining of our nation both of men and money, almost to the last extremity. Our Allies by degrees so shift the burthen of the war upon us, that at the rate they go on, the whole charge must at last fall on England.’
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It would have been hard for Marlborough to keep his head below the political parapet, although the signs are that, tired and beset by an increasing number of headaches, he might well have wished to. In December 1711 the House of Lords debated a Whig amendment to the queen’s speech. It affirmed that ‘No Peace could be safe or honourable to Great Britain or Europe if Spain and the West Indies were allotted to any branch of the House of Bourbon.’ Marlborough supported the amendment, and sealed his fate: the Lords took the same view and sealed their own. Twelve Tory peers were to be created so as to ensure the passage through the Lords of the eventual peace, and the ministry unleashed the commissioners of public accounts, already digging deeply into the parlous state of the nation’s finances, upon Marlborough.

Two of the many irregularities that the commissioners discovered in army accounts affected Marlborough personally. The first was that he had accepted a total of £60,000 in gifts from Antonio Machado and Sir Solomon de Medina, contractors for bread and bread wagons. Medina, testifying in London, agreed that he had indeed given Mr Sweet, the deputy paymaster at Amsterdam, 1 per cent of all the monies he had received for the contracts, and had also paid Cardonnel five hundred ducats a year. As soon as Medina had given his evidence, Marlborough assured the commissioners that ‘this is no more than what has been allowed as a perquisite to the general, or commander-in-chief of the army in the Low Countries, even before the Revolution’. He told them that he had not accepted the money on his own behalf, but that it had been ‘constantly employed for the service of the public, in keeping secret correspondence, and getting intelligence of the enemy’s motions and designs’.
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Cadogan, who produced the papers to assist Marlborough in his defence, went back so far in the accounts that he was sure it was ‘undeniably evident, that for these five and thirty years past it was the established custom to present the grand commander-in-chief
with a considerable annual gratification in proportion to the number of troops of the army’.
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The second accusation against Marlborough was that he had received 2½ per cent of the money paid to foreign troops in British pay. He replied that this was the traditional way in which a commander-in-chief financed his secret intelligence, and added that he had himself negotiated the agreement in the time of William III, and also held a warrant from Queen Anne, dated 6 July 1702, authorising the practice. His defence was not wholly persuasive. William had instituted the scheme to get round Parliament’s tight control over military expenditure during his reign, and the 1702 warrant had lapsed and its existence was not known to the paymaster general or to the exchequer. While Marlborough had undoubtedly spent some of the money on that intelligence service which had served him so well, Ivor Burton is surely right to suggest that ‘nothing like 2½ per cent of the entire cost of 30,000 auxiliary troops could possibly have been needed for this purpose’.
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Nevertheless, the fact that Marlborough’s successor enjoyed the same perquisites emphasises that his conduct was not wholly unreasonable.

The findings of the inquiry were enough for Harley to persuade the queen to dismiss Marlborough from all his military offices on 31 December 1711. The
London Gazette
on New Year’s Day 1712 duly recorded Marlborough’s dismissal. The Duke of Ormonde succeeded him as commander-in-chief and colonel of 1st Foot Guards, and Lord Rivers became master general of the ordnance. The same
Gazette
announced the promotion of the twelve new Tory peers.

Marlborough took his downfall with remarkable equanimity, writing to assure his well-wishers that he sought only ‘a quiet retirement … [which is] what I have long wished for, I shall be easy in my relation to my own destiny, and shall always add my good wishes for the continued success and prosperity of the public’.
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Amongst the dozens of replies to foreign monarchs, soldiers and diplomats who had sent their commiserations was a note to Sir Thomas Wheate, who lived at Glympton, near Woodstock. ‘I am very much obliged to you for being mindful of my want of beagles,’ Marlborough wrote, ‘though I am yet at a loss where to keep them; however I should be glad to know where they are, and if the huntsman will undertake to keep them till I have a proper place, and upon what terms, to which I shall pray your answer at your leisure.’
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It seemed that he might, at long last, be able to live in retirement as a country gentleman, albeit in a rather big house.

Marlborough had little to do with the Treaty of Utrecht, though he can have taken little comfort in the events leading up to it. Bolingbroke’s plans received a serious jolt when in 1713 the Duke of Burgundy and his eldest son both died, leaving only one infant prince, the future Louis XV, between Philip of Spain and the French throne. Bolingbroke and Oxford decided that Philip could either keep Spain but renounce France, or leave Spain to the Duke of Savoy and take the latter’s territories and Sicily instead. Neither the Imperialists nor the Dutch would accept this, and resolved to fight on. To prevent the Allies from gaining a victory which might have upset their plans, the ministry imposed ‘restraining orders’ on Marlborough’s successor. Ormonde was secretly forbidden to engage the French, leading to letters like this, from Ormonde to Villars:

It is true, Sir, that for the siege of Quesnoy, which it was not in my power to prevent, I was obliged to contribute some troops in the pay of the Estates-General, but not a single man in the Queen’s pay; it seems to me that, as we had not even opened our trenches, that the siege could in no way break the measures agreed by our sovereigns.
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‘Whether the Duke of Ormonde was really concerned at receiving these orders, I shall not take it upon me to say,’ wrote Robert Parker; ‘but however that was, most certain it is, that he was extremely punctual in observing them.’
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Corporal Bishop thought that with Marlborough’s departure, ‘the neck of the war was broke, and that I should be disappointed of the pleasure of seeing Paris next year’.
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Richard Kane was even more critical. Ormonde, he thought, was ‘a good natured, but a weak and ambitious man, fit to be made tool of by a crafty set of knaves’.
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Without British help, the Allies took Quesnoy but lost it again almost immediately, and Eugène, who had taken over as Allied commander-in-chief, was beaten by Villars at Denain. Villars finished up with Marchines, Bouchain and Douai in his hands, having undone much of the work of Marlborough’s last two campaigns.

The treaty was not signed till 1713, and it took the Empire another year to agree to it. The terms were approved by Parliament, passing the Lords by eighty-one to thirty-six votes. Twenty-four peers, Marlborough and Godolphin among them, recorded their formal protest, but the majority ordered this to be struck from the records of the House. When the protest was printed for circulation, the ministry prosecuted its printers and publishers.

By this time Marlborough’s own position had deteriorated. Parliament concluded, by a substantial majority, that ‘the taking of several sums of money annually by the Duke of Marlborough from the contractor for foraging the bread and wagons in the Low Countries was unwarrantable and illegal’, and that the 2½ per cent deducted from the pay of foreign troops ‘is public money, and ought to be accounted for’.
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The House of Commons took vengeance on Cardonnel, one of the MPs for Southampton, and duly expelled him for having accepted bribes from Medina. The government press enjoyed open season on Marlborough, that man who had ‘once perhaps been fortunate’. Captain Parker was shocked to see that the
Examiner
, one of the ministry’s news-sheets, described the former captain general as ‘naturally a very great coward … all the victories and successes that attended him, were owing to mere chance, and to those about him’. ‘Had I not read those words,’ Parker wrote, ‘I should never have believed that any man could have the face to publish so notorious a falsehood.’
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Falsehood or not, it was clear to Marlborough and his supporters that he was in real trouble. The ministry’s lawyers had it in mind to make him repay the cash he had acquired from Medina and his percentage of the pay of foreign troops, and the crown was likely to demand the return of part of the money expended on Blenheim Palace, still far from completion. The repeated attacks on his reputation made it dangerous for him to remain in England, and with Anne’s health visibly failing, the prospect of a Hanoverian succession might provoke factional violence or, as many Whigs feared (with good reason, as we shall see), a Jacobite invasion. He had other reasons for wishing to go to the Continent. It seemed probable that peace negotiations would result in his principality of Mindelheim being given to Bavaria, and he hoped to prevent this. Marlborough also hoped that he might persuade the Elector of Hanover and other Allied sovereigns to send an expedition to Britain to forestall the expected Jacobite attack. In short, he had much to risk and little to gain by staying at Holywell. ‘In England,’ writes Winston S. Churchill, ‘he was a prey. In Europe he was a prince.’
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The queen, who retained great personal attachment to Marlborough, told Dr Hamilton that ‘it was prudent of him’ to depart, and signed his passport on 30 October. Bolingbroke maintained that there had been ‘a good deal of contest’ within the cabinet about allowing him to go,
though the passport bears his countersignature. There have been suggestions that Oxford was so anxious to get Marlborough out of the country that he threatened to make public details of his dealings with the French over the money promised him for helping bring about peace. There is no doubt that Marlborough met Oxford that autumn, but the best we can say of the ‘blackmail’ assertion is that, even if it were true, Oxford was ‘forcing at an open door with a battering ram’, for Marlborough had many other reasons to depart.
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However, one of Oxford’s letters to Maynwaring, Marlborough’s intermediary in his application for a passport, tells him that ‘You will … assure your friend that there have been endeavours from both sides to obstruct granting the pass desired, yet I shall have the honour to put it into his hands.’
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This would be odd language had the idea of exile been Oxford’s in the first place. Marlborough passed much of his money to his sons-in-law, and transferred £50,000 to Cadogan, then serving as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary at The Hague, in case, as Sarah put it, ‘the Stuart line were restored’: Cadogan’s error in investing this money in Austria rather than Holland, losing interest in the process, was to attract Sarah’s wrath.