Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General

Because Sarah travelled with Anne, and John with the Duke of York, they were often separated, and some of their letters survive. In a note which seems to predate the birth of their daughter Anne on 27 February 1684 by perhaps six months, sent by an ‘express’ courier rather than a regular post, John wrote:

I had writ to you by the post, but that I was persuaded this would be with you sooner. You see I am very just in writing, and I hope that I shall find by the daily receiving of yours that you are so. I hope in God you are out of all danger of any miscarrying, for I swear to you I love you better than all the rest of the world put together, wherefore you ought to be so just as to make me a kind return, which will make me much happier than aught else in this world can do. If I can get a passage a Sunday I will come, but if I cannot I shall be with you a Monday morning by nine of the clock; for the Duke will leave this place by six. Pray [give] my most humble respects to your fair daughter, and believe me what I am with all my heart and soul,

Yours … 55

The Churchills’ settled world was rocked by the king’s unexpected death. In the winter of 1684–85 Charles had been troubled with the gout and could not take his usual exercise, but spent a good deal of time in his laboratory, trying to find a process for the fixing of mercury. He ate less than he once had and ‘drank only for his thirst’, but still took a turn to the Duchess of Portsmouth’s apartments after his supper. On the morning of 2 February 1685 he rose after a restless night, and sat down to the barber, ‘it being shaving day’ – even monarchs were shaved only two or three times a week. He had scarcely sat down when he had ‘an apoplectic fit’ and fell into Lord Ailesbury’s arms. Dr Edmund King, on hand to deal with a sore heel, bled him at once. Charles endured the ministrations of his doctors, which almost certainly accelerated his death, for five days.

On 5 February, when it was clear that his brother was dying, James asked him if he wished to be reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church, and Charles eagerly assented. Finding an English-speaking priest was not easy, for all Queen Catherine’s priests were Portuguese. Quite fortuitously, Father John Huddlestone, who had helped Charles escape after the battle of Worcester in 1651, was in the palace and was brought into Charles’s bedchamber by a secret door which, in its time, had doubtless fulfilled less noble purposes.56

Charles died well. He apologised to the crowd of assembled courtiers and functionaries for being such an unconscionably long time about it, begged the queen’s forgiveness, commended the Duchess of Portsmouth to James’s care and urged his listeners: ‘Let not poor Nelly starve.’ Early on the morning of 6 February he asked for his curtains to be drawn so that he might see one more dawn, and he died at noon. ‘He was ever kind to me,’ lamented John Evelyn, ‘and very gracious upon all occasions, and therefore I cannot, without ingratitude, but deplore his loss, which for many respects as well as duty I do with all my soul.’57

The Churchills stood high in the favour of the new king, James II. John was confirmed in his appointments and sent off to Paris, ostensibly to formally notify Louis XIV of the succession but actually to ask for money. In fact Paul Barillon, the French ambassador, had already presented James with 500,000 livres (perhaps £10 million), so John’s instructions were changed while he was on his way, and he was simply to thank Louis for this handsome gift. Gilbert Burnet maintains that while he was in France John Churchill met the Protestant soldier and diplomat Henri de Massue, marquis de Ruvigny, whom he already knew from Charles’s negotiations with the French in 1678, and warned him that ‘If the King was ever prevailed upon to alter our religion he would serve him no longer, but would withdraw from him.’58

We must be as cautious about Burnet’s assertions, made from the Whig standpoint, as we should be about Lord Ailesbury’s, imbued as they are with Jacobite sympathies. However, it is evident that religion was already an issue dividing the Cockpit circle from James’s court. Sarah maintains that James had tried to shift Anne from her firm Anglicanism ‘by putting into her hands some books and papers’, and in 1679 Dick Talbot, now her brother-in-law, ‘took pains with me, but without any effect, to persuade me to bring over the Princess to their Catholic purpose’.59 A secret French report of 1687 was to suggest that Anne was heavily influenced by Sarah, ‘whom she loves tenderly’, and this helped keep her away from court so that her father could not speak to her about religion.60

Monmouth’s Rebellion

Even if there was palpable tension between court and Cockpit in early 1685, it did not prevent James from settling old debts. On 14 May that year John Churchill was created Baron Churchill of Sandridge in Hertfordshire, and so had a seat in the House of Lords, which was to meet later that month for the first time in the new reign. He also became a governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The first session of the new, staunchly Tory-Anglican English Parliament was overshadowed by rebellion, led in Scotland by the Earl of Argyll, who had lived in the Low Countries since his escape from Edinburgh Castle, and in England by the Duke of Monmouth, also in exile, but likely to have been allowed back home had Charles not died. Monmouth, born in Rotterdam in April 1649, was an experienced soldier, handsome and staunchly Protestant. He maintained that Charles had actually been married to his mother, Lucy Walter, but he had never been the Whigs’ candidate to supplant James at the time of the Exclusion Crisis: they preferred his niece Mary. Exiled following his involvement in the Rye House plot of 1683, Monmouth had been at the centre of a web of radical discontent in the Low Countries, and his invasion in 1685 was widely expected. Argyll and Monmouth might have had a better chance had they been able to coordinate their activities, but even so neither insurrection attracted the widespread popular support that might have posed a serious challenge to the government. Argyll may have assembled as many as 2,500 men, and Monmouth perhaps 7,000 at the peak of his success.

When we are considering John Churchill’s motivation in 1685 and 1688 it is important to recognise some simple truths. In 1685 James had not attracted the suspicion which dogged him by 1688. The army was loyal to its leaders, and they were loyal to James. Neither Argyll’s nor Monmouth’s expedition was a well-planned military invasion with reserves of arms to equip supporters, or serious external support. In 1685 neither invasion had a realistic prospect of success, and men like John Churchill, who lived their lives on the basis of rational calculation, would not support Monmouth or Argyll. Furthermore, Churchill had served under Monmouth, and this experience, far from increasing his regard for ‘the Protestant duke’, had demonstrated some of Monmouth’s frightening unsteadiness.

Monmouth arrived in Lyme Bay on 11 June, to be told that the Somerset militia were already in arms and the Duke of Albemarle (George Monck’s son), lord lieutenant of Devon, was calling out his militiamen. An attempt to fire a warning shot from the guns protecting Lyme Regis had failed ridiculously when it transpired that neither powder nor shot was available. Soon Monmouth himself landed on the beach that now bears his name, thanked God for his safe arrival, and ordered his banner – with the words Fear nothing but GOD on a background of Leveller green – to be unfurled. The town’s mayor set off for Honiton, whence he wrote to the king to say that he thought Monmouth was ashore with three hundred men, and went on to report to Albemarle. Two local royalists saw what had happened and rode hard for London, where they sought out their MP.

By a remarkable coincidence Sir Winston Churchill was Member for Lyme, and so it was that James was roused at four on the morning of 13 June by John Churchill, who, as a lord of the bedchamber, had ready access to the royal bedroom, accompanied by his father and the two loyalists. The latter were rewarded with £20 apiece, and even before he had taken any formal advice, James ordered Churchill to ride westwards with four troops of the Oxford Blues and four of his own regiment of dragoons. Percy Kirke, of Tangier fame, was to join him with five companies of the Queen Dowager’s Regiment of Foot as soon as he could.

Whatever his personal failings, Monmouth was a competent soldier. He realised that he needed to raise troops as quickly as he could, and spent the first few days issuing the weapons he had landed with and procuring more locally. There was a clash with some militia horse in Bridport, but the militia proved less aggressive than Monmouth had feared. This gave him the opportunity to form his infantry into five regiments, known (like the regiments of the London Trained Bands) as Red (the Duke of Monmouth’s own), White, Blue, Green and Yellow, with an independent company of Lyme men. The horse formed a single body under Lord Grey, who had been handicapped by having his second in command, Andrew Fletcher, arrested for murder after pistolling Monmouth’s treasurer, Thomas Dare, in a squabble over a requisitioned charger.

Although the insurrection is now locally described as ‘the Pitchfork Rebellion’, many of the rebels were decently armed with matchlock muskets brought across from Holland, or seized from militia armouries and private houses. Scythe blades were requisitioned and mounted on eight-foot poles, and James himself believed that each of the rebel regiments had a company of scythe-men taking the place of grenadiers. The historian Peter Earle points out that the rank and file of Monmouth’s army tended to be ‘tradesmen, such as shopkeepers or artisans’, solid West Country dissenting folk, rather than general or farm labourers. Most were well established in their professions, and it was rare for father and son to enlist together, or for brothers to serve side by side: wise families insured against failure.

There were exceptions. Abraham Holmes, a former officer of the New Model Army, commanded the Green Regiment. He was to lose his son, a captain in his own regiment, in a skirmish at Norton St Philip, and was badly wounded at Sedgemoor, where he cut off his own mangled arm. He scorned to plead for his life, telling his judges: ‘I am an aged man, and what remains to me of life is not worth a falsehood or a baseness. I have always been a republican, and I am one still.’ When the horses which were to have dragged him to the place of execution would not budge (Holmes thought that an angel was blocking their way) he walked to his death with a firm step. He apologised to the spectators, whose mood quickly changed from derision to admiration, for his slowness in mounting the scaffold. ‘You see,’ said the old warrior, ‘I have but one arm.’

Cobbling together an army, however promising some of its raw material, is never an easy task. One of Monmouth’s colonels, Nathaniel Wade, tells us just how hard things were even when his opponents were simply those good-natured countryfolk of the Dorset militia. On 14 June he took about five hundred infantry, notionally supported by Lord Grey with forty horse, to attack Bridport.

We advanced to the attack of the bridge, to the defence of which, the [militia] officers had with much ado prevailed with their soldiers to stand. Our foot fired one volley upon them, which they answered with another, and killed us two men of the foot; at which my Lord Grey and the horse ran till they came to Lyme, where they reported me to be slain, and all the foot to be cut off. This flight of Lord Grey so discouraged the vanguard of the foot, that they threw down their arms and began to run; but I bringing up another body to their succour, they were persuaded to take up their arms again … [The enemy] contented themselves to repossess the town, and shout at us out of musket-shot; and we answered them alike, and by this bravo having a little established the staggering courage of our soldiers we retreated in pretty good order with 12 or 14 prisoners and about 30 horses.61

The first clash of a campaign often sets the tone of what follows, and here we see in microcosm the story of Monmouth’s defeat. His cavalry was poor, which tells us more about the difficulty of getting untrained horses to fight in rank and file than it does about the courage of the rebel troopers or the quality of some of their officers. His infantry was better, but only massed formation and brave leadership would nerve it to its task. Monmouth must have recognised that his men could not face regular troops in open field in broad daylight. Like a powerful but clumsy fighter facing a more skilled opponent, his only chance was to move fast and get in close: inaction would ruin him.

On 15 June Monmouth pounced on Axminster, dispersing the Devon and Somerset militia who were trying to rendezvous there before moving on to attack Lyme. He then marched north to Chard and Ilminster, his ranks swelled by local volunteers and disenchanted militiamen, reaching Taunton, where he was proclaimed king in the marketplace, on the eighteenth. Optimistically signing himself ‘James R’, he asked both Albemarle and Churchill to join him. Monmouth and Albemarle were old drinking companions, but Albemarle’s dignified reply informed Monmouth that ‘I never was, nor ever will be, a rebel to my lawful King, who is James the second.’62 John Churchill did not enter into a correspondence which, one way or another, might have been misconstrued, but sent Monmouth’s letter on to London.

Churchill had reached Bridport with his weary cavalry and dragoons on the seventeenth. His first report, written that day, warned James very frankly that:

we are likely to lose this country [i.e. the West Country] to the rebels, for we have those two [Devon and Somerset militia] regiments run away a second time … there is not any relying on these regiments that are left unless we had some of your Majesty’s standing forces to lead them on and encourage them; for at this unfortunate news I never saw people so much daunted in my life.63

He also drafted a letter to the Duke of Somerset, lord lieutenant of that county, urging him to send 4,000 men to Chard and Crewkerne, and saying that he would do his best to support them if Monmouth took advantage of the collapse of the militia by marching straight for London. The government was already doing its best to guard against a sudden thrust at the capital, concentrating the militia of Surrey, Oxfordshire and Berkshire at Reading to cover the Great West Road, and ordering the Duke of Beaufort to assemble the militia of Gloucestershire, Hereford and Monmouthshire to protect Bristol, which was believed to be Monmouth’s preferred target.

None of this would beat Monmouth, but it would give the royal army time to concentrate. The Earl of Dumbarton’s Regiment set off with a train of artillery from the Tower of London, and Colonel Charles Trelawney’s Regiment, commanded by its lieutenant colonel, Charles Churchill, accompanied a smaller train from Portsmouth. James recalled the English and Scots regiments in Dutch service: William of Orange was not only happy to release them but, possibly fearing that his own prospects in England would be compromised if Monmouth succeeded, volunteered to command them himself, an offer James felt able to decline.

Churchill, with his advance guard, hung on to the rebels like a terrier locked on to a burglar’s ankle. He reached Chard on 19 June, and sent out a strong patrol of the Blues under Lieutenant Philip Munnocks. Near Ashill, three miles from Ilminster, it met ‘about the like number of sturdy rebels, well armed, between whom there happened a very brisk encounter’. Churchill’s men had the best of the first clash, but the rebel patrol was supported by a stronger force and the Blues fell back, leaving their officer ‘upon the place, shot in the head and killed on the first charge’.64 Churchill told the Duke of Somerset that he intended to follow Monmouth ‘so close as I can upon his marches’, and suggested that the duke should get Albemarle to join him because the latter’s militiamen would not be able to keep pace with Churchill’s horse.

This advance guard of cavalry was ‘to be commanded by our trusty and wellbeloved John Lord Churchill in all things according to the rules and discipline of war’, and Churchill had been appointed brigadier general for the purpose.65 However, he was not entitled to give orders to the lords lieutenant, magnates like the Dukes of Somerset and Albemarle who were responsible for the county militias and commissioned their officers. He may have had a professional soldier’s grasp of tactics, but as the most junior baron in the House of Lords he was simply not in their league. On or about the eighteenth James decided to appoint Louis de Duras, Earl of Feversham, his lieutenant general for the campaign. Feversham was ‘to command in chief wherever he is, the militia as well as the King’s forces’.66

There is no foundation for suggestions that this reflected a sudden loss of confidence in Churchill on James’s part. Churchill had only been appointed to head the advance guard, and command of the whole royal army evidently required a more senior officer. Not only has Winston S. Churchill’s assertion that Churchill ‘resented his supersession, and he knew it could only come from mistrust’ little contemporary foundation, but to maintain that ‘this snub … eventually turned Churchill from loyalty to the Stuart kings’ stretches the evidence to breaking point.67 It was only later in the campaign, when he thought that Feversham was inclined to favour Colonel Theophilus Oglethorpe and to ignore his own contribution to the early stages of the campaign, that Churchill’s irritation can be detected.

On 21 June Percy Kirke joined a wholly unsnubbed Churchill at Chard with five companies of his regiment, having marched 140 miles in eight days. This now gave Churchill a small combined-arms brigade, and he told the Duke of Somerset that ‘I have enough forces not to apprehend [fear] the Duke of Monmouth, but on the contrary should be glad to meet with him and my men are in so good heart.’68 Although Churchill was not to know it at the time, Feversham was making good speed into the West Country, travelling with the remaining troops of the Life Guards and Royals, as well as the Horse Grenadiers, who looked ‘very fierce and fantastical’ with their moustaches and grenadier caps, even if their complicated drill made experienced officers grumble that no good would come from combining grenade-throwing with galloping about on horseback.

Feversham marched from London to Maidenhead on 20 June, reached Newbury the next day and joined the Dukes of Beaufort and Somerset at Bristol on the twenty-third. He had slipped Colonel Oglethorpe, with a party of Life Guards and Horse Grenadiers, off to his left flank by way of Andover and Warminster in case Monmouth tried to break eastwards between Churchill and his own force. There can be no faulting Feversham’s performance in the early stages of the campaign. He reached Bristol in time to thwart Monmouth, and screened his open flank as he marched. We cannot say for certain how close the militia were to total collapse, but a fragmentary undated letter from the Duke of Somerset to either Albemarle or Churchill shows the state he was in:

I do desire your Lordship to come away towards me with what forces you have, for I have only one regiment and one troop of horse which I am afraid will hardly stand because the others have showed them the way to run, the enemy is now at Bridgwater, which is ten miles of where I am, and that if your Lordship does not march to Somerton … 69

Monmouth might conceivably have beaten Feversham to Bristol, but he was raising troops as he advanced, so could not achieve Feversham’s turn of speed. As generations of holiday-makers know to their cost, the dryness of West Country summers cannot be guaranteed, and now the weather conspired against the soldiers on both sides. Nathaniel Wade recorded that on 22 June the rebels marched to Glastonbury on ‘an exceeding rainy day’ and quartered their infantry in the abbey and churches, making ‘very great fires’ to dry them out. On that day a patrol of the Oxford Blues, scouting out from Langport, met a stronger party of rebel horse and ‘beat them into their camp’, and the Portsmouth train of artillery, which had reached Sherborne with its escorting infantry of Trelawney’s Regiment, was ordered forward to Somerton by Churchill. This further increased the strength of his brigade, and on 23 June he told the nervous Duke of Somerset that he hoped to persuade Feversham to join him at Wells and fight Monmouth before he reached Bristol.

Feversham, however, had decided to head straight for Bristol, and reached it with his leading horse on the twenty-third, leaving the bulk of his infantry slogging out behind him along the Great West Road. Then, on the twenty-fourth, still before Bristol was firmly secured, the leading cavalry troop of Monmouth’s advance guard rushed the Avon bridge at Keynsham, only five miles away, and drove off the party of militia horse protecting civilian workmen who were damaging the bridge so as to prevent the rebels from crossing. It took Monmouth’s inexperienced officers the best part of twenty-four hours to get their men across the river and formed up in Sydenham Mead on the far bank. Monmouth decided to attack Bristol that night, and we cannot tell how its defenders, the Duke of Beaufort’s Gloucester militia, would have performed if put to the test. But the filthy weather induced Monmouth’s men to recross the river: a local royalist heard shouts of ‘Horse and away’ as they broke for cover. Those who could took shelter in the houses of Keynsham, and others were in the nearby fields ‘refreshing themselves’. The posting of sentries was not accorded high priority.

Feversham had spent much of the twenty-fourth at Bath, and when he heard that Monmouth had seized Keynsham bridge he sent Oglethorpe, who had commanded his flank-guard on the march west, to investigate. The Horse Grenadiers, at the head of Oglethorpe’s detachment, were as poor at their scouting as Monmouth’s men were at their sentry duty, and had actually reached the centre of Keynsham before the rebels turned out of the houses and opened fire. The royalists eventually had the better of the skirmish, with an anonymous rebel reporting: ‘They did us mischief, killed and wounded about twenty men, whereas we killed none of theirs, only took four prisoners and their horses, and wounded my Lord Newburgh, that it was thought mortal.’70 Oglethorpe, who had immediately charged to rescue the beleaguered Horse Grenadiers, actually lost two men killed and four wounded, and was in no position to force the issue. However, one of the captured troopers told Monmouth that Feversham’s main body was not far behind, and Monmouth resolved to fall back, along the south bank of the Avon, to Bath.

Monmouth reached Bath on the twenty-fifth, but the militia garrison refused to open the gates, and shot his messenger. He then headed south, for Frome, and on the evening of the twenty-sixth the royal army, now lacking only the guns from the Tower of London and their escorting companies of Dumbarton’s Regiment, linked up in the city. Churchill had marched in from the west, pausing briefly near Pensford to hang ‘Jarvis the feltmaker’, a Yeovil radical whose commission as a captain in the rebel army did not save him, though he died ‘obstinately and impenitently’, and we should remember him for that.

The astute historian John Tincey complains that Churchill had not managed to stop Monmouth’s march on Keynsham, and that had Bristol fallen its loss might have been laid at his door. Yet from the start of the campaign it had been Churchill’s plan to hang on to Monmouth’s flanks and rear: his getting ahead of the rebels only made sense if Feversham joined him, which is precisely what he had hoped for on 23 June. When Feversham decided instead to head straight for Bristol it was reasonable for Churchill to assume that the earl would watch his own front. The fact that Feversham had indeed begun to break down Keynsham bridge shows that he understood its importance, even if those hapless lads of the Gloucester militia did not.