Marlborough (30 page)

Lanier thought, Mackay skill, and Colchester bravery; but there is something inexpressible in the Earl of Marlborough. All their virtues seem to be united in his single person. I have lost my wonted skill in physiognomy if any subject of your Majesty can ever attain such a height of military glory as that to which this combination of sublime perfections must raise him.

‘Cousin,’ responded William, ‘you have done your part in answering my question, and I believe the Earl of Marlborough will do his to verify your prediction.’
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At this time, as William must have known, it would have been dangerous to make predictions about Marlborough. William told Gilbert Burnet, a trusted adviser who had landed with him in 1688, that ‘he had very good reason to believe that he [Marlborough] had made his peace with King James and was in correspondence with France’.
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Marlborough was one of the prime movers in the army’s opposition to foreign generals, and without the Marlboroughs’ support it would have been hard for Anne to maintain her divergent political line. William was fast concluding that Marlborough was a loose cannon who would be safest rolled overboard. Marlborough pressed him to ensure that British troops were commanded only by British officers. On the night of 9 January 1692 Marlborough told Godolphin and Russell that if the king refused he intended to move two resolutions in the Lords. One would deny all foreign officers the right to hold English commissions, and the other would demand the removal of Dutch troops from England.

On the morning of 20 January Marlborough, in his role as a gentleman of the bedchamber, attended the king’s rising as usual. Two hours later Nottingham told him, on behalf of the king, that he was dismissed from all his appointments and forbidden the court. Tollemache
replaced him on the generals’ list, Lord Colchester took over the Royal Dragoons, and George Hamilton, later Earl of Orkney, became colonel of the Royal Fusiliers. The reversal cost Marlborough up to £11,000 a year, and though it did not leave him destitute, it was a shattering blow: the spectre of his father’s fate must have grinned impishly through the coal-fuelled smog of Whitehall.

It may be that William had decided, some time previously, to dispose of Marlborough, and that 20 January simply happened to be the chosen day. Marlborough was, after all, not simply prominent in his complaints about the over-use of foreign officers, but isolated, with Russell and Godolphin as his only really close friends. William told Nottingham that he had disgraced Marlborough for fomenting dissension in the army, but added, ‘He has rendered such valuable services that I have no wish to press him too hard.’
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He assured the Elector of Brandenburg’s representative that it was a matter of honour which, had the two of them been private gentlemen, could only have been settled by a duel. The historian Stephen Saunders Webb maintains that Marlborough’s opposition to foreign generals was the cause of his disgrace: ‘He pursued his xenophobic, patriotic programme to immediate disgrace and to ultimate success.’
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Alternatively, William might have received some specific intelligence, not long after rising that morning, that provoked him into taking sudden action. A well-placed but anonymous commentator later wrote that

the Earl’s disgrace was not slow, but sudden. He accompanied Lord George Hamilton, afterwards Earl of Orkney, and husband to Mrs Villiers, to King William in the morning, and was well received as usual; yet, within two hours after, the Earl of Nottingham came with a message from the king, saying that he had no further occasion for his services.

He acknowledged that Marlborough ‘spoke very freely of the King’s partiality to the Dutch, of the several mismanagements in the war, and of some indignities that had been put upon the English abroad’. However, he maintained that William was not capricious, and ‘very rarely dismissed his old servants’. The most probable cause of Marlborough’s fall, he argued, was the leakage of information about a projected attack on Dunkirk, known only to Marlborough, Portland and Rochford.
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In the published version of his
History
Burnet, by then influenced by his friendship with the Marlboroughs, wrote that ‘it seems certain that
some letter was intercepted, which gave suspicion’. In his own annotations to Burnet, William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, argues that the ‘true cause of his disgrace’ was betrayal from within the Cockpit circle. Marlborough told Sarah of a projected operation against France, and Sarah passed on the news to Lady Fitzharding. Dartmouth maintains that she informed Lord Chelmsford, who in turn told the king.
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An anonymous well-wisher warned Anne:

I beg of you for your own sake that you will have a care of what you say before Lady Fitzharding, remember she’s Lord Portland’s and Betty Villiers’ sister. You may depend upon it that these two are not ignorant of what is said and done in your lodgings. Then I leave you to judge whether they make not their court at your expense … by exposing you and preserving the king as they call it … The King and Queen have been told that there has not passed a day since Lord Marlborough’s being out that you have not shed tears … If it ended in his turning out he might leave it with patience, but if resolutions hold he will be taken up as soon as the Parliament is up, and if you do not part with his Lady of yourself, you will be obliged to it …
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The accuracy of these predictions reinforces the veracity of the source. In April Anne herself warned Sarah about Lady Fitzharding.

I can’t end this without begging dear Mrs Freeman to have a care of Mrs Hill [Sarah’s MS insertion: ‘That was a nickname for Lady Fitzharding’] for I doubt she is a jade and though one can’t be sure she has done anything against you, there is much reason to believe she has not been so sincere as she ought, and I am sure she hates your faithful Mrs Morley, & remember none of her family were ever good for anything.
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Princess Anne, pregnant yet again, was shocked, not simply by the news of Marlborough’s dismissal but by its yet unspoken corollary: Sarah, as the wife of a disgraced man, would be expected not to appear at court again. Only two weeks after the dismissal Anne put convention to the test by taking Sarah with her to a formal reception at Kensington Palace, and sure enough, Mary at once wrote to tell her forcefully that ‘never anybody was suffered to live at court in Lord Marlborough’s circumstances. I need not repeat the cause he has given the King to do what he has done, nor his unwillingness at all times to come to extremities, though
people do deserve it.’ Under the circumstances it was ‘the strangest thing ever that was done’ for Anne to have brought Sarah to the palace: ‘it was very unkind in a sister, would have been very uncivil in an equal; and I need not say I have more to claim’. She concluded: ‘’Tis upon that account I tell you plainly, Lady Marlborough must not continue with you, in the circumstances her lord is …’
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Anne, furious at the suggestion that she could not choose her own servants, and by being reminded of the duty she owed her sister, slapped off a note to Sarah saying that she would keep her ‘in spite of their teeth’. She followed it with a measured letter telling Mary that ‘This proceeding can be for no other intent than to give me a very sensible mortification,’ and flatly refusing to part with Sarah. The maladroit Lord Rochester, upon whom Mary would rely increasingly heavily after William had departed to the Continent for the campaign of 1692, was summoned to the Cockpit to deliver this missive. Having seen what was in it he felt unable to do so, but advised the queen to expel Anne and her little court from the Cockpit. The lord chamberlain passed on this order, which was manifestly illegal because Anne held the Cockpit’s freehold, given her by Charles II.

However, Anne felt that she had no alternative but to comply, and duly moved into Syon House, on the Thames west of London, generously loaned to her by the Duke of Somerset. Her guards were withdrawn, and the Dutch sentries at Whitehall were told that they need no longer ‘stand to their arms’ for Anne and her husband. Sarah maintained that she was warned by Lady Fitzharding that her continued support for Anne would provoke worse trouble: ‘If I would not put an end to measures so disagreeable to the King and Queen, it would certainly be the ruin of my lord, and consequently of all our family.’ Indeed, she argued that it was her own closeness to Anne, not any action of her husband’s, that had precipitated his fall. ‘The disgrace of my Lord Marlborough,’ she writes, ‘was designed as a step for removing me from her.’
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Sarah offered to resign her post with Anne to defuse the crisis, but Anne replied that her mind was made up: ‘I am more yours than can be expressed, & had rather live in a cottage with you than reign empress of the world without you.’
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She followed this with a violent attack on ‘that monster … that Dutch abortive’, and looked forward to the ‘sunshine day’ of her own succession when she could right the many wrongs that William had done to her country and her friends.
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In early April Mary called on Anne, now in the last stages of her pregnancy, and as Anne put it ‘talked a great deal of senseless stuff’. Anne gave birth to her seventh
child, a boy who lived just long enough to be christened George, on 17 April. Having been told that her sister had endured a difficult labour, Mary came to see her again. It was the last time the sisters ever met, and the only account of their conversation comes from Sarah, who heard it from Anne. There was apparently no sympathy for a dangerous labour or a dead child, only a renewed demand for the dismissal of Sarah, reinforced by the same peremptory order given to Prince George as he escorted Mary to her coach.

Rochester tried to broker a reconciliation based on Anne’s removal and, when that failed, advised Mary to ban any courtiers from visiting Anne. This was immediately effective, and only two or three Jacobite ladies visited the princess. Sarah observed that the breach between Mary and Anne was welcomed by the Jacobites. When Lady Ailesbury visited Anne, who was still confined to bed, to tell her that a French invasion was imminent and that 5,000 Jacobite soldiers would be ready to escort her to her father, she replied: ‘Well, Madam, tell your Lord that I am ready to do what he can advise me to.’
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As rumours of invasion reached fever-pitch, the nervous government responded by acting on a letter provided by Robert Young, a former confederate of Titus Oates and already a convicted criminal. He drew the Council’s attention to the fact that a treasonable bond of association, signed by Marlborough, Cornbury, Archbishop Sancroft and others, was hidden in a flowerpot at the Bishop of Rochester’s house. A search was made, the document was discovered and all the alleged signatories were sent to the Tower.

The Tower of London, where Marlborough found himself in May 1692, was England’s principal state prison, though it also did duty as royal menagerie (the largest, most splendidly-endowed male lion in Charles II’s time had been called Rowley after his royal master), arsenal, mint and record office. Prisoners of consequence were usually lodged in apartments on either side of Water Lane, the cobbled street just inside the double drum-fronted Byward Tower, or in buildings opening off Tower Green. Their material conditions were often relatively comfortable, and they sometimes had their families with them: Sir Walter Raleigh’s son Carew was born in the Bloody Tower in 1605. The Countess of Ailesbury conceived in the Tower, and her husband blamed the fact that the birth wrecked her health on the governor’s refusal to allow a midwife to attend her. The comparatively gentlemanly conditions of detention meant that there were some escapes, the last of them in 1716 by the Jacobite Earl of Nithsdale, who slipped out in his wife’s clothes.

Marlborough, perhaps understandably, has left no account of his brief stay in the Tower, but the Earl of Ailesbury, mewed up there a few years later after being charged with plotting James’s restoration, reports that he was so courteously treated that he gave venison and wine to the captain, lieutenant and ensign of the company on guard. They felt unable to dine with him, but their colonel, the Earl of Romney (Henry Sidney, formerly a Williamite plotter, and now master general of the ordnance and colonel of the 1st Foot Guards), gave an order that was ‘gracious and gentlemanlike and entirely suitable to him’. ‘Pray go,’ he declared, ‘and if I was not engaged I would go there also.’
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Ailesbury walked for five hours a day across his thirty-three-foot room, daily completing fifteen ‘London miles’ and, because of the numerous nails in the floor, getting through a pair of shoes a fortnight. His stay there was sharpened not only by concern for his own fate (he was released on five recognisances of £10,000 apiece), but by his fears for his fellow prisoner Major General Sir John Fenwick, charged with conspiring to assassinate William, whose quarters were within earshot and who was plainly terrified of what awaited him. He was sentenced to a traitor’s death by an Act of Attainder (the last Englishman to be thus condemned), and was beheaded on Tower Green in January 1697. When the time came, though, ‘he behaved himself decently, nobly and well’.

Marlborough and his fellow accused were committed ‘close prisoners’, and visitors required orders from the Earl of Nottingham to get into the Tower. Anne warned Sarah that she and Prince George were likely to be placed under guard if the wind changed, allowing the French fleet, presumably escorting an invasion army, to leave Brest, and urged her to visit as soon as she could, because a meeting might be impossible later. Sarah was already at her wits’ end, for her younger son Charles was desperately ill. On 22 May, with his father still imprisoned, Charles died, and was buried without his father at the graveside. On 19 May Admiral Tourville, out from Brest with a following wind and forty-four sail of the line, met Admiral Russell’s larger Anglo-Dutch fleet. In a running battle which began rather well for the French off Cape Barfleur, and ended dismally for them in the bay of St Vaast-la-Hougue, Tourville was comprehensively beaten and his flagship
Soleil Royal
destroyed. In fact the victory did not rule out a future French-Jacobite invasion, for the French had made up their losses in two years, but it drew the moment’s sting and enabled Mary and her Council to proceed with some judgement.