Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General

The British brigade sent to France in 1672 was commanded by the Duke of Monmouth, commissioned as a French lieutenant general, but, much as he enjoyed diverting scrambles like the siege of Maastricht, he exercised no overall command, for the regiments of his brigade were spread out across the Flanders and Rhine fronts. His colonels were, in consequence, very powerful men, and Robert Scott of the Royal English Regiment held his own courts-martial, appointed officers as he pleased, and happily swindled officers and men of their pay. Amalgamations and reductions were frequent, and in early 1674 Bevil Skelton’s Regiment was merged with the Earl of Peterborough’s Regiment to emerge as the 1st Battalion of the Royal English Regiment.74 On 19 March 1674 a newsletter from Paris announced:

Lord Peterborough’s Regiment, now in France, is to be broken up and some companies of it joined to the companies that went out of the Guards last summer, and to be incorporated into one regiment, and to remain there for the present under the command of Captain Churchill, son of Sir Winston.75

His colonelcy, of course, was French, and his English rank did not begin to catch up for almost another year, when he became lieutenant colonel of the Duke of York’s Regiment.

Much of the British brigade was destined to serve on France’s eastern borders against the German coalition forces of the Emperor Leopold I and the Elector of Brandenburg, whose entry into what had begun as a Dutch war reflected the way in which it was tilting out of Louis’ control. The French army on this front was commanded by Marshal Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne. Turenne was arguably the greatest captain of his age, and might have done even better during this war had it not been for his long-standing quarrel with the marquis de Louvois, Louis’ formidable war minister.

When Field Marshal Lord Wolseley wrote his biography of Marlborough more than a century ago, he concluded that Turenne had been ‘tutor in war’ to the young Jack Churchill.76 We know that Turenne called him ‘the handsome Englishman’. There is also a story, widely repeated though without a reliable primary source to back it up, that, when a French colonel was forced back from a position, Turenne bet that Churchill, with fewer men under his command, would retake it: he won his money.77

On 16 June 1674 Turenne fought the emperor’s army at Sinsheim, roughly midway between Philippsburg on the Rhine and Heilbronn on the Neckar. Both sides were roughly equal in numbers, and the Imperialists were strongly posted behind the River Breusch, on a slab of high ground. Turenne managed to turn both enemy flanks by making good use of unpromising terrain, getting his men onto the plateau by ‘a narrow defile on one side and a steep climb on the other’.78 Even French sources suggest that it was the disciplined fire of the British infantry that checked the counterattacks of Imperialist cuirassiers.79 The careful historian C.T. Atkinson noted that Churchill’s regiment was not present at the battle, but it is clear that both Churchill and his fellow colonel, George Hamilton of the Irish Regiment, accompanied Lord George Douglas, who had been sent off to reconnoitre with 1,500 musketeers and six light guns.

Serving as a volunteer, with no formal command responsibility, Churchill would have had the opportunity to see just how Turenne went about his business, and the French army, at around 25,000 men, was small enough for a well-mounted observer to follow its movements closely. The essence of Turenne’s success at Sinsheim was his swift reading of the ground to see what chance it gave him to get at the enemy, and the routes he selected had not been identified by the Imperialists as likely avenues of approach. The French commemorative medal for the battle bore the words Vis et Celeritas (vigour and speed), which might so easily have been Churchill’s own watchwords.80

By the time that Turenne had moved south to fight the battle of Ensheim, on 4 October 1674, in weather which worsened from drizzle to a downpour, Churchill’s regiment was indeed present with the main French army. The fight hinged on possession of a little wood on the Imperialist left, eventually carried by the French, though with great bloodshed. Churchill’s men fought their way through it, overran a battery, and cleared the Imperialist infantry from ‘a very good ditch’ which they then occupied, obeying the orders of ‘M. de Vaubrun, one of our lieutenant generals’ to hold that ground and advance no further. ‘I durst not brag too much of our victory,’ wrote our young colonel, ‘but it is certain that they left the field as soon as we. We have three of their cannon, several of their colours and some prisoners.’ Louis de Duras (later Earl of Feversham) commanded a troop of Life Guards at that battle, and was eventually to assume command of the British brigade. He declared that ‘No one in the world could have done better than Mr Churchill could have done and M de Turenne is indeed very well pleased with all our nation,’ and Turenne’s official dispatch paid handsome tribute to Churchill and his men.81 In his report to Monmouth, Churchill recorded the loss of eleven of his twenty-two officers, but added that Monmouth’s own regiment of horse had fared far worse, losing its lieutenant colonel and almost all its officers killed or wounded, as well as half the troopers and several standards. He was anything but an uncritical admirer of Turenne’s, though, and admitted that ‘half our foot was posted so that they did not fight at all’.82

On 5 January 1675 Turenne won the battle that decided the campaign. He pulled back from the Rhine near Haguenau, and allowed many of his officers (including Louis de Duras) to take leave in Paris, giving the impression that he had ended the campaign, for armies usually slunk into winter quarters in October and emerged from their hibernation in April. But in fact he swung in a long fish-hook march round the Vosges, through Epinal and the Belfort gap, to find his opponents relaxed in their winter quarters near Colmar – and what better place to relax, with so much of the golden bitter-sweet Gewürztraminer conveniently to hand? Although the Imperialists managed to rally and face him at Turckheim, he kept them pinned to their position by frontal pressure before sending an outflanking force through the rough country on their left. Turenne took the village of Turckheim after a stiff tussle in which British musketry proved decisive, and went on to drive his opponents from Alsace. In July that year Turenne was killed by a cannonball, a loss that France could ill afford.

The campaign certainly showed Churchill the crueller side of war. In the summer of 1674 Turenne’s men ravaged the Palatinate as they marched through it. This was done partly to obtain supplies and partly to prevent the Imperialists from obtaining them, but also, as Turenne told the Elector Palatine, who complained about the sufferings of his people, because the local populace attacked stragglers and isolated groups, murdering soldiers with the most appalling cruelty.83 Turenne’s harsh treatment of the Palatinate was not on the same scale as the deliberate destruction of the whole area seven years later, on the specific orders of Louis XIV, but even so the damage was frightful. Archdeacon Coxe quotes a letter written to Churchill from Metz in 1711 in which the widow Saint-Just thanks him because ‘The troops who came and burnt everything around my land at Mezeray in the plain spared my estate, saying that they were so ordered by high authority.’84

If there had been any doubts about where John Churchill stood in royal favour, his campaigning under Turenne resolved them. His English lieutenant colonelcy had materialised in early 1675, and three years later he was appointed colonel of one of the regiments of foot to be raised, not this time to support the French, but to help defend the Dutch: the realignment of English foreign policy was now complete. There is, though, no evidence that Churchill’s new regiment was ever actually formed. His colonelcy (carefully dated a day after that of George Legge, who was to be Pepys’s master on the Tangier mission) was simply a device to ensure that John Churchill had ‘precedence and pay equivalent to the very important work he was now called upon to discharge’. He had reached a key break in his career, and was striding out to bridge the narrow gap between soldiering and diplomacy: the young cavalier had come of age.

* In the seventeenth century the regiment’s ancestor, Hepburn’s Regiment, in French service, was in dispute with the Regiment de Picardie over the dates of their respective foundations. In the process, the Scots claimed to have been on duty when Christ was crucified.

2

From Court to Coup

Love and Colonel Churchill

John Churchill was in love. Sarah Jennings, the object of his affections, had been born on 5 June 1660, the week after Charles II returned from exile.1 Her father, Richard Jennings, came from a family of Somerset gentry which had moved up to Hertfordshire and lived at Holywell House near St Albans. Richard’s father had been high sheriff of the county and MP for St Albans. He himself sat for the same constituency, and had supported John Pym, one of the leaders of the opposition to Charles I in the early days of the Long Parliament, but had later, as a member of the Convention Parliament, backed the return of Charles II.

Although Richard Jennings was in theory a wealthy man, with perhaps £4,000 a year from property in Hertfordshire, Somerset and Kent, his estates were encumbered with debt and he had many younger siblings who had to be provided for. Sarah was the youngest of five children, with two brothers and two sisters, and it may have been the strains of a large family and hopeless debts that drove her parents to split. She moved to London with her mother Frances, who sought (unavailingly) to rescue her dowry from the shipwreck of Richard’s finances. In 1673 Sarah followed her sister Frances into the household of the Duchess of York. Frances had served James’s first wife Anne Hyde until her death in 1671, and soon became a maid of honour to Mary of Modena. The comte de Gramont called her ‘la belle Jenyns’, who was as lovely as ‘Aurora or the promise of spring’. It speaks volumes for her determination that she resisted the Duke of York’s roving eye and busy hands, but remained on sufficiently good terms to get her sister a place in the household.

In 1668 Richard Jennings died, and Sarah’s mother, who inherited little but his creditors, moved into an apartment in St James’s Palace with her daughters. The scurrilous Mrs Manley, author of The New Atlantis, a Tory scandal-sheet, was later to accuse her of witchcraft. She was like ‘the famous Mother Shipton, who by the power and influence of her magic art had placed her daughter in the Court’.2 There are too many contemporary complaints about Mrs Jennings for us to attribute them simply to political malice. She was certainly evil-tempered, may actually have been unhinged, and some suggested that she dabbled in the black arts and the procurement of that commodity most sought after by the court, pretty girls. In any case, the maids of honour were hardly above suspicion. Samuel Pepys grumbled that they bestowed their favours as they pleased without anyone taking any notice, and Frances and a friend once amused themselves by dressing up as orange sellers (a common cover for prostitution) and standing outside a playhouse to accost two gentlemen of their acquaintance. They were given away by their expensive shoes.

Sarah met John towards the end of 1675, and they began to dance together at balls and parties. Sarah had a blazing row with her mother at about this time, and eventually Mrs Jennings was ‘commanded to leave the court and her daughter in it, notwithstanding the mother’s petition, that she might have her girl with her, the girl saying she is a mad woman’. Theirs was a relationship which prospered only at a distance, and attempts at reunion regularly resulted in hot words. Some time after her marriage, after yet another furious argument in which she urged her mother to get into the coach and not freeze to death outside it, Sarah affirmed that ‘I will ever be your most dutiful daughter, whatever you are to me.’3

Just as John Churchill’s character was shaped by growing up in straitened circumstances, so Sarah’s was influenced by her own experience of poverty, genteel though it was, and by her inability to tolerate her mother’s company, however much both of them genuinely hoped that their next meeting would bury bad feelings for ever. We often pay out in adult life the coins we receive as children, and in Sarah’s tumultuous relationship with her mother we have a foretaste of her dealings with her own daughters. Sarah was certainly beautiful, not with the classical good looks of her sister Frances, but with that thin edge of imperfection that men often find even more attractive. She had long fair hair that she always made the most of, full, firm lips, a naturally pink complexion, and a nose that turned up, ever so slightly, at its tip.

Even at the age of sixteen she had unstoppable determination and a flaming temper. There is a great deal about Sarah Marlborough that is hard to admire, but the three centuries that separate us cannot dull the impact of this outspoken, uncontrollable and self-willed beauty. One can see why, once John Churchill had met her, he never thought seriously about marrying anybody else, and we can never practically separate John Churchill, soldier and politician, from John Churchill, husband and lover, nor usefully speculate on what he might or might not have become without Sarah. One incident throws their relationship into sharp perspective. When Marlborough was captain general of Queen Anne’s armies and one of the most important men in the kingdom, he entered Sarah’s dressing room to tell her that Sidney Godolphin, the lord treasurer, was going to dine with them. She was brushing a hank of her yellow hair over one shoulder and, furious at having her evening spoiled, seized a pair of scissors and cut it off, then flounced out in a fury. He picked up the severed tress, tied it up with ribbon, and kept it in his strongbox until he died. She found it there, and it broke her heart.

Some of the letters written during their courtship have survived. All are undated, most are from John to Sarah, and she herself assures us that the correspondence started when she was not more than fifteen. She told him to burn her letters, and he seems to have obeyed her, because the eight that survive are only copies. Sarah, in contrast, kept his letters and read them from time to time, and when she had only a year to live, wrote on one: ‘Read over in 1743 desiring to burn them, but I could not do it.’ His letters, in black ink and a slightly sloping hand, show all the symptoms of courtly love. ‘You are, and ever shall be, the dear object of my life,’ he tells her, ‘for by heavens I will never love anybody but yourself.’ In another he assures her:

If your happiness can depend upon the esteem and love I have for you, you ought to be the happiest thing breathing, for I have never loved anybody to the height I do you. I love you so well that your happiness I prefer much above my own; and if you think meeting me is what you ought not to do, or that it will disquiet you, I promise you I will never press you more to do it. As I prefer your happiness above my own, so I hope you will sometimes think how well I love you; and what you can do without doing yourself an injury, I hope you will be so kind as to do it – I mean in letting me see that you wish me better than the rest of mankind; and in return I swear to you that I never will love anything but your dear self, which has made so sure a conquest of me that, had I the will, I will not have the power ever to break my chains. Pray let me hear from you, and know if I shall be so happy as to see you tonight.4

He gave her presents. First she had a choice of two puppies, and then he sent her a waistcoat: ‘I do assure you there is not such another to be had in England.’5 From what we already know of Sarah we will not be surprised to hear that there were rows. ‘To show you how unreasonable you are in accusing me,’ he wrote, in a letter which still bears red seals and threads of green ribbon,

I dare swear you yourself will own that your going from me in the Duchess’s drawing-room did show as much contempt as was possible. I may grieve at it, but I will no more complain when you do it, for I suppose it is what pleases your humour … Could you see my heart you would not be so cruel to say I do not love you, for by all that is good I love you and only you. If I may have the pleasure of seeing you tonight, please let me know, and believe that I am never truly pleased but when I am with you.6

This correspondence dates from 1675–76, after John’s service under Turenne in Alsace and the Palatinate. However, it is hard to be sure of exact dates. Courtin, the French ambassador in London, had kept Louvois apprised of the goings-on at court, and when there was first talk of John Churchill commanding a French regiment, Louvois advised against it, arguing that Churchill’s real concern at that moment was ‘to give more satisfaction to a rich and faded mistress’ rather than to serve his own royal master, undoubtedly a reference to his relationship with Barbara Castlemaine. Some time later, Courtin reported that ‘Mr Churchill prefers to serve the very pretty sister of Lady Hamilton than to be lieutenant colonel of Monmouth’s regiment.’ In 1665 Frances Jennings had married Sir George Hamilton, Marlborough’s fellow colonel, who commanded the Irish Regiment until his death in action in 1676. Winston S. Churchill dates Courtin’s second letter to November 1676. It raises the question as to why Churchill might have been interested in being lieutenant colonel to Monmouth, at best a sideways move in the hierarchy, but it does suggest that he was now so heavily preoccupied with Sarah that he was unwilling to accept a full-time command appointment.7

Several things blocked the path of true love. First, John Churchill’s relationship with Barbara Castlemaine was common knowledge at court, and Courtin reported to Paris that Sarah’s parents had refused their consent to her marriage with John. This cannot be true, for Sarah’s father was long dead, but it may well reflect the opposition of Sarah’s mother. Next, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill were firmly against the union. They hoped that John would marry another of the maids of honour, Catherine Sedley, daughter and heiress to the wealthy Sir Charles Sedley. Her portrait suggests that she was by no means as attractive as Sarah (the attentive Courtin called her ‘very rich and very ugly’), and she certainly had a caustic wit. It may be that rumours linking her name with John’s were the reason for Sarah’s accusation in the last of his letters quoted above. Catherine eventually became yet another of James’s mistresses, though when Queen Mary reminded her of the fact after 1688 she riposted: ‘Remember, ma’am, if I broke one of the commandments with your father, you have broken another against him.’8

Mrs Manley, writing long after the event, with the intention of damaging the Marlboroughs’ reputation and making money, provided two alternative versions of how John ended his relationship with Barbara Castlemaine and married Sarah. The first has him provide a virile ‘body double’ who, his face concealed, tumbled the ever-ready Barbara, enabling a supposedly furious John to catch the lovers in flagrante. The second has Sarah replace Barbara in bed before one of John’s visits. This time the lovers are caught by Sarah’s mother, who insists upon marriage to save her daughter’s honour and promptly produces a priest. Both stories are wholly improbable. Barbara had enjoyed a long sexual relationship with John and borne him a child, so the story of the body double is scarcely convincing. The stage-managing of the second scenario would have been difficult: how did Sarah gain access to Barbara’s bed, and where were priest and mother concealed?

The truth of this blazing courtship may actually be gleaned from the surviving love letters. Sarah told John that: ‘If it were true that you have that passion for me which you say you have, you would find out some way to make yourself happy – it is in your power.’9 In other words, if he really loved her then he should marry her or end the relationship. This clearly failed to move him (perhaps his parents, at this very moment, were reminding him how Catherine Sedley’s fortune would secure his future), and in another letter Sarah warned him: ‘As for seeing you, I am resolved I never will in private nor in public if I could help it.’10 Things went from bad to worse, and the affronted colonel wrote to Elizabeth Mowdie, Sarah’s waiting woman:

Your mistress’s usage to me is so barbarous that sure she must be the worst woman in the world, or else she would not be thus ill-natured. I have sent a letter which I desire you will give her. It is very reasonable for her to take it, because it will then be in her power never to be troubled with me more, if she pleases. I do love her with all my soul, but will not trouble her, for if I cannot have her love, I shall despise her pity. For the sake of what she has already done, let her read my letter and answer it, and not use me thus like a footman.11

Sarah responded that she had done nothing to deserve the sort of letter he had written her, and told him that it was entirely up to him whether or not he saw her, though she would be ‘extremely pleased’ if he decided against it.

The correspondence thundered on like the most obdurate battle between resolute opponents, with Sarah yielding nothing and John returning to the attack with as much determination. Even when they seemed to have agreed on marriage, John feared that the sudden reappearance of Sarah’s sister Lady Hamilton would wreck his plans; but Sarah assured him that he had nothing to fear if his intentions were honourable, and he should not worry that her sister’s arrival could ‘make any change in me, or that it is in the power of anybody to alter me but yourself’.12 We know that John formally asked the Duchess of York to consent to the marriage, and we can presume that both Sarah’s mother and his own parents agreed.

Sir Winston had his own reasons for giving consent, just as he had for pressing the advantages of the Sedley connection. The old cavalier was broke again, and could survive only if John agreed to give up his inheritance so that Sir Winston could sell off some property to pay his debts. A Sedley marriage would have prevented the need for this, and if we need further evidence of the intensity of John’s love for Sarah it is that he was prepared to give up his family estate for her. Even Macaulay was reluctantly prepared to admit that he must have been ‘enamoured indeed’ to let so much money slip past him. True, their poverty was relative, for he had his army pay and the £500 a year interest on the ‘infamous wages’ he had received from Barbara. Moreover, Mary of Modena had been charmed by the couple, and with her interest firmly engaged they married, probably in her apartments, in the winter of 1677–78. Colonel and Mrs Churchill could not afford to buy a suitable house, so they stayed in his lodgings in Jermyn Street (five doors along from St James’s, not far from where Wilton’s restaurant now dispenses its matchless Dover Sole) when he was in London, and she spent a good deal of time in Dorset with Sir Winston and Lady Churchill. Although her circumstances were not precisely the same as those in which her husband had grown up, it is not hard to see how the episode helped sharpen her desire to make money.

John Churchill, a full colonel in the English army from early 1678, was now a senior liaison officer, his tasks part-military and part-diplomatic, negotiating with the Dutch about arrangements for accommodating the British troops who were now on their way to Flanders to fight against the French as a result of the English government’s political realignment. He was very much in the Duke of York’s mind, and enjoyed a measure of devolved authority. In April that year the Duke of York told William of Orange, concerned about a French attack on Bruges, held by four British battalions, that ‘Churchill will speak to you more at large about it.’ Churchill was well aware that although the majority of Englishmen, and indeed the Duke of York himself, were in favour of vigorous prosecution of the war, the king himself was not.