Authors: Richard Holmes
The fighting in Spain, where British troops were commanded first by Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, and then by that rheumy old Huguenot warrior Henri de Ruvigny, Viscount Galway, lay outside the compass of Marlborough’s sphere of tactical command. Yet it was never far from his thoughts, for he was concerned that the British army could never be simultaneously strong enough in the Low Countries and the Iberian Peninsula, and that the country’s desire to have ‘No Peace without Spain’ would compel the diversion of resources from the war’s main theatre to an important but necessarily subsidiary one. In October 1703 he informed Godolphin:
Mr Secretary [Hedges] sends me word that Lord Nottingham would send me her Majesty’s commands concerning the 2,000 men for
Portugal. Not having heard from him, I take it for granted he wrote to me by that packet that is lost. However, I have directed the regiments of Leigh and Lord Baltimore to be ready for to be embarked, which has given so much alarm here, that I had a deputation this day from the States, to represent to me the dangerous consequence of what might happen, by drawing away without their consent any of those troops which were agreed at the beginning of the war …
23
This might almost be Sir John French, writing to Lord Kitchener in the spring of 1915 to say how much the French resented the diversion of British troops to the Dardanelles.
Both of the Marlboroughs had deep reservations about Peterborough. Sarah thought that his ‘vileness of soul’ had led him into ‘a sort of
knight errantry
’ with Lord Rivers, himself ‘of no better reputation than a common cheat or pickpocket’.
24
Peterborough, initially a Whig, was to win several victories in Spain. The capture of Barcelona owed much to his efforts: when the attackers shrank from the assault on the fort of Montjuich, ‘Lord Peterborough … fell into the horriblest passion that ever man was seen in, and with a great deal of bravery and resolution, led us back to the part we had quitted.’
25
However, Peterborough got on badly with other Allied commanders, and suggested a variety of schemes so puzzling that there was reason to believe that he did not in fact wish to see the Archduke Charles installed as king of Spain. Summoned home to explain himself in 1707, he was championed by the Tories, and soon became a member of the opposition to Godolphin and Marlborough. Richard Savage, 4th Earl Rivers, was a general who at first enjoyed Marlborough’s patronage, but he too slid across to the opposition, and succeeded Marlborough when he was dismissed as master general of the ordnance. Both were disappointed military commanders who became political opponents, and both, when the dice rolled again, lost their offices under George I and died in exile.
In April 1707 Galway was beaten by Berwick at Almanza and several British regiments were destroyed, and in late 1710 the capitulation of a British force at Brihuega effectively doomed Allied hopes in Spain. Marlborough, as captain general, was part of the opposition’s target when the Tory leader Henry St John attacked the government for failing to ensure that the Almanza regiments were up to strength: of almost 30,000 troops on the payroll for Spain fewer than 9,000 had actually been present at the battle. Marlborough was then involved in trying to find extra recruits for ‘re-forming broken battalions’, for influential
colonels were not prepared to see their regiments disappear, at precisely the same time that Flanders made its own inexorable demands for manpower and, as a theatre commander in his own right, Marlborough had a campaign to fight.
This workload was unending and potentially crushing, and if its tenor changed between the campaign season and the winter months, its weight scarcely ever receded. Marlborough coped as well as he did not simply because of personal energy and an acute brain, but because the delegation of routine work was fundamental to his style of command. His principal staff officer, ‘quartermaster general’ in the terminology of the age, was William Cadogan. Cadogan’s family was Welsh, but his grandfather had gone to Ireland with Charles I’s lord deputy, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. He later became a major in the parliamentarian army and served as governor of Trim Castle, whose massy square Norman keep still guards the River Boyne many miles upstream of the battlefield. His son Henry married Bridget, daughter of the regicide Sir Hardress Waller, and they had two sons and two daughters. Henry Cadogan was determined that William, born in 1672, should follow him into the law, and he duly went to Trinity College Dublin, where he met the convivial Lord Raby, subsequently Earl of Strafford.
William Cadogan escaped north when the Jacobites arrived in 1689, and was commissioned as a cornet in the Enniskillen Dragoons. He fought on the Boyne and took part in Marlborough’s attacks on Cork and Kinsale. In 1694 he bought a captaincy in Thomas Erle’s Regiment of Foot, and was present when William of Orange recaptured Namur the following year. Cadogan went back to the Enniskillen Dragoons as major in 1698, but in 1701 we find him entrusted with the transport of Danish troops to the Low Countries, dealing with issues which went well beyond the responsibilities of the average major. ‘I had by the Danish post that came in this morning letters from the Duke of Württemberg and Mr Gregg,’ he told secretary Blathwayt,
which to my very great satisfaction brought an account that the final order was given for the march of the troops and that it would be dispatched by the same post, of which I immediately sent notice to the Danish Commissary General, and to let him know how we were now ready to receive the troops. I have ordered the ships to fall down the
river with the first tide to Gluckstadt, and having before settled everything in relation to the march of the horse, there can be no further delay in this matter.
26
There is no direct evidence that Cadogan knew Marlborough well because they had served together at Cork and Kinsale. After all, Marlborough was a lieutenant general and Cadogan a cornet, although his huge size did mean that he was a hard man to miss. Winston S. Churchill’s assertion that ‘they were already old friends’ is pure speculation. However, Cadogan had certainly earned Blathwayt’s approval by the way he dealt with the Dutch in early 1702, and the circumstances argue strongly for some previous relationship with Marlborough, because that summer he was appointed colonel of foot and quartermaster general on ten shillings a day. Marlborough gained him an extraordinary payment of £175.4
s
early in 1703, and soon afterwards he was appointed colonel of the Earl of Arran’s Regiment of Horse.
Cadogan’s career now moved in parallel with Marlborough’s. He was promoted steadily, and, like his chief, made a handsome profit from a variety of perquisites and investments. In 1709 he was able to spend over £6,000 buying the Caversham estate near Reading, and his share of what his most recent biographer calls the ‘net fraudulent profit’ on insider dealing in 1708 alone was over £33,000.
27
In 1706 he slid easily into the House of Commons, in the Whig interest, as Member for Woodstock, a borough firmly in Marlborough’s pocket.
If we deplore Cadogan’s avarice we cannot but admire his courage. After the fall of Marlborough he must have known that his own future was decidedly cloudy, but he wrote to Robert Harley, now Earl of Oxford and one of the main agents of Marlborough’s downfall, asking permission to join him on his travels on the Continent. ‘The Duke of Marlborough’s ill-health,’ he wrote, ‘the inconvenience a winter’s journey exposes him to, and his being without any one friend to accompany him, make the requesting leave to wait on him an indispensable duty on me, who for so many years have been honoured with his confidence and favour and [owe] all I have in the world to his favour.’
28
He was allowed leave, and was, as he must have expected, dismissed from all his appointments immediately afterwards.
When Marlborough’s fortunes turned again, Cadogan shared them. In February 1718, in uneasy combination with the Duke of Argyll, he was commanding the government forces putting down the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland, and heard that he was to receive a peerage.
He wrote to Marlborough at once, to ‘beg leave to return my most humble thanks for your great goodness in being pleased to approve of the services I have endeavoured to render here, and Your Grace’s representing them so very favourably to His Majesty’.
He hoped to have his barony styled ‘of Cadogan, near Wrexham on the borders of Wales’. He reminded Marlborough that he had no son, and had settled his fortune on his brother, and so it would be very generous if the title could slide sideways after his own death. ‘I humbly beg pardon for mentioning it,’ he wrote, as if they were still back in the old days, as commander-in-chief and quartermaster general, ‘and entreat Your Grace to consider it no more than if I had not.’
29
At that time the tiny hamlet of Cadogan was not deemed suitable to sustain a peerage, but when, after a flurry of distinguished diplomatic work, Cadogan was raised to an earldom, he was duly made ‘Earl of Cadogan in Denbighshire; Viscount of Caversham in Oxfordshire; and Baron Oakley, in Buckinghamshire’.
30
Cadogan was big, hard-headed – often with a glass in his hand but rarely in drink – and an inveterate gambler, both at the tables and, less creditably, by advising his London-based business partner to bet on the progress of campaigns. ‘They now give 20 Guineas for £100 if either Mons, Charleroi, Lille, Tournai or Namur be not taken by the last of October,’ wrote his cautious associate, ‘but I won’t venture without your advice.’
31
In the autumn of 1707, when Cadogan replaced George Stepney as envoy to the States-General, the same friend wrote to ‘congratulate you on two pieces of good news that the town is full of, one that you have won six thousand pistoles at play, and the other that you are to reside at the Hague in the room of Mr Stepney’.
32
Cadogan spoke fluent French, and in 1702 he married Margaretta Munter, a beautiful Dutch heiress, and quickly added both Dutch and German to his languages.
Careful study of both the Cadogan papers and the Marlborough – Cadogan correspondence in the British Library shows the real scale of Cadogan’s contribution. First, during the winter months he was in charge of what we would now, less than elegantly, term ‘force packaging’ and was then called drawing up the order of battle. The Allied forces for the coming campaigning season were divided into brigades, usually on a national basis. Larger formations like divisions did not then exist, but it was customary to divide an army up into formations of the right and left wing, and sometimes to subdivide these further into first and second lines, appointing general officers to command them. Frustratingly for historians, these definitions held good for the whole of a campaign, so it
was perfectly possible for the army’s right wing to find itself, after a good deal of marching and countermarching, on the left flank of the battle.
The process of drawing up the order of battle needed careful thought, to gratify national preferences and minimise clashes of personalities. Although generals might not always find it easy to ensure that another nation’s contingents complied with their orders, the generals of an allied army ranked on a common roll of seniority by the date of their current commission, and it was important to ensure that nations supplying large contingents did not suddenly find themselves commanded by a very senior officer from another, much less significant, force. In August 1703 Marlborough warned Godolphin:
If I leave the army some time before they go to garrison, it would be for the honour of the English that the right wing should be commanded by an Englishman; and that can’t be, there being several lieutenant generals among the foreigners that are elder [i.e. senior] than our lieutenant generals, so that I would beg the favour of the Queen that I might have a commission sent to me for my brother, he being the oldest [English] lieutenant general, to be General of the Foot. I desire that nobody might know of the commission, for if I did not leave the army before they went into garrison, I would not make use of the commission.
33
When Marlborough went back to England the following month General Charles Churchill duly took command of the right wing of the army, the troops in English pay.
In the winter months Cadogan compiled orders of battle, sent them to England for Marlborough’s approval, and then awaited orders for ‘assembling the army at the time your Grace is pleased to direct it’. Assembling too early would start the logistic meter ticking too soon, with foraging parties bringing in hay and bread contractors busy. Assembling it too late, though, might mean that the French would be able to steal a march. In April 1709 Cadogan informed Marlborough: ‘Fine weather has forwarded everything, and a great deal of the corn which was thought lost begins to spring out again, so that suffering the assembly of the army for eight or ten days is as long as any will require.’
34
On 10 April 1710 he acknowledged receipt of Marlborough’s letter of the eighth, and said that he was prepared
to give
all
orders that may be necessary in your Grace’s name. ’Tis with great satisfaction that I acquaint your Grace our magazines and
everything of that kind are in the readiness that could be desired, and due care is taken for the providing wood, straw and [?] in the places the troops encamp at in their passage, what relates to the bread and bread wagons is also requested, so that I hope your Grace on joining the army will find all matters in the forwardness and order you expected.
35
He did not merely act as the passive instrument of Marlborough’s endeavour, but developed operational plans along the lines laid down in outline by his chief. In February 1711 he announced: