Authors: Richard Holmes
In May 1703 the enormously rich Ralph, Earl of Montagu, who enjoyed what Edward Gregg penetratingly calls ‘a singular reputation for profitable dishonour’, had suggested that his heir Viscount Monthermer should marry Lady Mary Churchill. Marlborough had objected on the grounds (rather less reasonable then, when child marriages were not uncommon, than they would be now) that both parties were only fourteen, but in 1705 he agreed to the union, and the marriage took place in the Marlboroughs’ apartments in St James’s Palace on 20 March. The queen not only gave a dowry of £10,000, but on the day of the marriage she created Montagu a duke, and declared that the post of master of the great wardrobe, which he had purchased for life, would revert to his son on Montagu’s death. It was indeed the full zenith of royal favour.
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The general election that spring was something of a personal triumph for the queen, now committed to maintaining balance between the two parties, for neither gained an absolute majority. She had, however, already made clear her support for Marlborough and Godolphin: on the eve of the election Marlborough personally called on Buckingham to demand the privy seal, like a commander receiving the keys of a captured fortress, and it was duly given to Newcastle. There were significant gains for the Whigs, although they were not able to dispose of all the ‘Tackers’, and eventually the balance of power was held by the moderate Tories, ‘sneakers’ to their Tacking friends.
What seemed to offer so much hope for the future, essentially a coalition government under the eye of a queen firmly disposed to rise above faction, was not destined to last, and the ingredients of lethal dissension grew steadily. That spring Godolphin had to threaten to resign to get Lord Sunderland, the Marlboroughs’ Whig son-in-law, appointed extraordinary envoy to Vienna, and he repeated the same ploy to get prominent Whig divines made bishops. Tellingly, it took him a week to inform Harley, his closest ministerial colleague, of Sunderland’s appointment. These signs of future breakdown would have been invisible to all but the most prescient contemporaries, and we must not give this post-Blenheim election more significance than it warrants. But, like Marlborough’s principality and the victory parade through London, it did mark a turning point.
A close observer of the court might have gone further, discerning one of those proverbial clouds, no bigger than a man’s hand, which herald a coming tempest. Abigail Hill, appointed bedchamber woman to the queen through Sarah’s abundant influence, had begun her slow, self-effacing rise. Over the next three years, as Sarah ranted against the Tories and found new opportunities to exercise her waspish temper, those powerful bonds which had linked her to Anne were gradually dissolved. The quiet, unobtrusive Abigail could never offer her employer a relationship of anything approaching the same intensity, but Anne had grown tired of being hectored. It was not until Abigail married Samuel Masham, a gentleman of the queen’s household, in 1707, that Sarah realised that she had been outflanked, and it was by then too late for her to react effectively. After Harley’s dismissal from office in 1708 Abigail Masham used her growing influence to drip-feed the queen with Harley’s own views, giving the opposition covert access to the monarch. Thus, in the kernel of Marlborough’s continuing triumph wriggled the worm of his eventual defeat.
The campaign of 1705 began under strategic circumstances transformed not only by Blenheim but by Marlborough’s brilliant exploitation of his victory. The Elector and Marsin took their survivors back via Ulm to join Villeroi on the Rhine. Marlborough and Eugène, for their part, marched through Württemberg in four large columns to reunite on 5 September at Philipsburg, where they crossed the Rhine, camping on the field of Speyerbach, where Tallard had beaten Prince Louis the year before. It was an inauspicious spot. Marlborough recalled Louis of Baden from Ingolstadt, and the margrave, so Richard Kane tells us, ‘could never forgive them for robbing him of a share of the glory in the late victory’.
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The garrison of the Lines of Stollhofen was brought in to join the army, which now numbered around 130,000 men, and Villeroi had no wish to offer battle, lamely falling back to allow the Allies to besiege Landau.
The siege was entrusted to Prince Louis, anxious for some visible triumph, with Marlborough and Eugène forward on the line of the little River Lauter to cover the operation. The fall of Ulm on 11 September released heavy guns and other siege equipment, strengthening Prince Louis, but Landau still held out till 8 November. It is evident that Marlborough was not happy with the conduct of the operation. On 20 October he warned Godolphin that the business was ‘very little advanced’, and Louis had just lost five hundred men in a failed attempt to wrest a handhold on the covered way. As late as 7 November Adam de Cardonnel told Ellis that ‘Everybody of all sides are dissatisfied with the management and cry out against Prince Louis, if the weather was not favourable, tho’ extreme cold, I know not what would become of us.’
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With the siege still labouring on, Marlborough himself planned to send a detachment under Colonel Blood to take Trier, and then proposed to go on to besiege Trarbach. Both these attacks succeeded, although the march was through what Marlborough called ‘the terriblest country for an army with cannon’. Trier was evacuated as Marlborough approached, and Trarbach fell in mid-December. The campaign ended with the Moselle cleared and the Allies in winter quarters there, ‘which I think will give France as much uneasiness as anything that has been done this summer’.
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Before returning to England, Marlborough visited Berlin. The King of Prussia was concerned at ‘commotions in the north’, where those
martial titans Charles XII of Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia were in the throes of the Great Northern War, which lurched on, with interruptions, from 1700 till 1720, and ended with the destruction of Sweden as a major power. Marlborough was still able to persuade the king to send a force of 8,000 infantry to join the Allies in north Italy, in return for 200,000 écus from England and 100,000 from Holland, with the Empire providing the bread.
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Marlborough was well aware how much the events of that wonderful year owed to the soldiers under his command. After the Schellenberg he ordered the wounded ‘to be dressed with all possible care, and sent forthwith to the hospital’, and as Eric Gruber von Arni puts it, ‘personally supervised many of the talks associated with the work of organising casualty care that would normally have been delegated to a quartermaster or other subordinate officer’.
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He paid careful attention to the repatriation of wounded soldiers who had fought at the Schellenberg and Blenheim and to dependants of those who had fallen, for at this stage in the army’s history many women and children followed their menfolk on campaign. The lyrics of that touching folk song ‘High Germany’ make the point well.
O Polly, love, O Polly, the rout has now begun,
And we must be a-marching to the beating of the drum.
Go dress yourself all in your best and come along with me,
I’ll take you to the wars, my love, in High Germany.
O Harry love, O Harry, come list what I do say,
My feet they are so tender, I cannot march away.
Besides my dearest Harry, I am with child by thee,
Not fit to go to wars, my love, in High Germany.
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Immediately after the storming of the Schellenberg widows were ordered to report to the hospital at Heidenheim, where they were to help as nurses before being given passes and passage money for their journey home. After the campaign the hospital was closed, though not before some 1,710 sick and wounded had passed through it on their way to Flanders, where arrangements were made to hospitalise some men at Ghent and to repatriate others. On 20 March 1705 the commissioners of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea were ordered to give priority to
such of the invalids as being wounded in the last campaign in Germany are in the worst condition and want more than ordinary care
to be taken of them. For the remainder of those invalids who, having likewise served in Germany, are entitled to the benefit of the hospital, His Grace does think fit that you appoint a person upon the most reasonable terms to take care of quartering them. And of the due payment of their quarters until vacancies shall happen. If any are found willing to return home and quit their pretensions to the hospital … for their encouragement £3 a man is to be paid to them.
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A bounty fund of £4,000 was to furnish this money, and also to provide payment for sick and injured NCOs and men on a scale determined by rank and unit, with a corporal of horse receiving one shilling and sixpence per day and a private in the infantry just five pence. Further money was put into the bounty fund so that widows could be paid, and Marlborough personally contributed £600. He also initiated the first ever scheme to give pensions to officers’ widows, with part of the capital coming from money paid in by officers on first commissioning or subsequent promotion. Modern research demonstrates conclusively that the historian R.E. Scouller’s assertion that Marlborough’s medical care was ‘remarkable for mismanagement, brutality, inhumanity, and, possibly corruption’ is at variance with the facts.
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Indeed, in his personal recognition that responsibility for the long-term care of his wounded was an inseparable part of the function of command, we see a quality that our own times might envy.
Examples of the battle injuries received by candidates for admission to Chelsea over the course the war make sobering reading. A trooper of Mapper’s Horse had been shot in the right arm at Blenheim and in the back at Ramillies, then cut over the head at Oudenarde: he lacked only a wound at Malplaquet to hold every suit. A soldier in Howard’s Foot had been shot in the right knee at Blenheim, had his left leg fractured by a mortar bomb and his left arm injured by a halberd. French sergeants, like their British counterparts, carried the halberd, a staff weapon with axe-edge and point: Peter Drake called his fellow sergeants ‘the brethren of the halberd’. Halberds could be used to help sergeants dress the ranks, or sometimes, laid across men’s shoulders, to hold a wilting rear rank in place by main force. When men came to hand-strokes, shoving with their bayonets or reversing their muskets to lay on with the butt, neither the halberd nor the spontoon, a similar but slimmer weapon carried by infantry officers, was to be despised.
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A private soldier of Wade’s Regiment managed to get shot in the left thigh at Schellenberg and the right knee at Blenheim, while a sergeant of
Harrison’s had been wounded in the right groin when he became impaled on a palisade (either while trying to scale it, or having been blown onto it by grenade or mortar bomb). He had also had part of his abdominal lining removed by an operation, and was a fortunate man to get as far as the gates of Chelsea Hospital.
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There is no doubt that Marlborough intended to open the campaign of 1705 by advancing up the Moselle while the Imperial army threatened Alsace. He travelled to the Continent to prepare for operations in early April, telling Sarah that a difficult voyage caused him to be ‘so very sick at sea, that my blood is as hot as if I were in a fever, which makes my head ache extremely, so that I beg you will make my excuse to my Lord Treasurer, for I can write to nobody but my dear soul, whom I love above my own life’.
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These repeated headaches, which were so much a feature of Marlborough’s life, deserve further consideration, and all the evidence points to migraine. Full-blown ‘classical’ migraine starts with an aura, sometimes a visual disturbance, and sometimes with a more severe neurological disturbance such as one-sided tingling or even weakness. This is shortly followed by a severe one-sided headache, accompanied by vomiting, and lasting from six to forty-eight hours. Less severe forms of migraine are common, and the headache may have no preceding aura, may not be unilateral and may not be accompanied by vomiting. These forms are often less incapacitating.
Migraines are not daily events, but tend to come every few weeks or months, sometimes occurring in clusters of great frequency followed by longer periods of freedom. They may be precipitated by substances such as chocolate, cheese and red wine, and often occur after a period of stress rather than during the stressful event itself: typically they often arrive at weekends. Marlborough’s symptoms strongly support a diagnosis of migraine. He sometimes distinguishes a ‘disorder’ in his head, possibly evidence of some kind of aura, from the headaches themselves, and regularly reports headaches after stressful events like difficult voyages, conferences or battles. The headaches did not progress or lead to other problems over the years, so we can safely rule out some serious underlying pathology. However, migraine, especially ‘hemiplegic’ migraine, is a risk factor for stroke in later life, and Marlborough was to be disabled by strokes.
It is believed that migraines result from the constriction of the cerebral arteries, causing the neurological symptoms, followed by the dilation of
the arteries, causing the headache. Marlborough once reported that he felt better after being bled. Theoretically blood-letting should relieve the headache by reducing the pressure in the dilated arteries, but there seems little evidence of this in practice. Marlborough’s relief might thus simply have been a placebo effect. These headaches were sometimes totally disabling, although in cases of real emergency, as in the pursuit after Ramillies, Marlborough was able to carry out some of his duties, suggesting a form of migraine that fell short of the most severe. However, these attacks were certainly frequent and damaging, and it is remarkable that he coped as well as he did with the crushing burden of responsibilities and his migraine too.
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