Marlborough (60 page)

The government capitalised on the failure of the expedition by calling a general election in which the Whigs won a handsome majority. The Whig grandees pressed their advantage by trying to get the queen to take their ally Lord Somers into the cabinet, and Godolphin told her that she should give way. She wrote to Marlborough, by then back on the Continent, to say that she would never consent to the inclusion of Somers, and asking for his support. Marlborough, in view of the February crisis, was now seriously concerned about his own survival, and told the queen that the Dutch were well aware of what had been happening, and would be likely to negotiate with the French if they felt that a threat to its leadership made Britain no longer a reliable ally. He then took up Sarah’s familiar line of warning the queen that the Tories were simply closet Jacobites. Her refusal to appoint Somers would, Marlborough warned, be ‘a demonstration … to everybody, that the Lord Treasurer and I have no credit with your Majesty, but that you are guided by the insinuation of Mr Harley’.
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The queen replied by assuring Marlborough that she agreed with him that peace could only be made on ‘safe and honourable terms’, but would not give way on Somers.

Marlborough knew that the crisis had weakened his authority, and he was aware that Anne and Sarah were now hardly on speaking terms. His true feelings towards Harley and Godolphin at this time are very hard to gauge, but it is likely that the real issue for him was whether, if Godolphin fell, his duty would oblige him to serve the queen under any ministry. We know that he had a view of Harley, but he does not deign to tell us what it was. ‘I have avoided saying anything to you of Mr Harley,’ he told Heinsius, ‘when I have the honour of being with you, you shall know my thoughts of him and everything else.’
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Their correspondence suggests that Marlborough and Godolphin were as close as ever, though it was no thanks to other Churchills. On 19 April Godolphin warned Marlborough that the queen’s intransigence ‘puts us into all the distraction and uneasiness imaginable. I really believe her humour proceeds more from husband than from herself, and in him it is very much kept up by your brother George, who seemed to me as wrong as is possible.’
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George Churchill, one of the first sea officers to offer his services to William of Orange, had commanded battleships at the battles of Beachy Head and Barfleur. He left the service in 1693 but returned after his brother had made his peace with the king, and had a seat on the Board of Admiralty. When Prince George became lord high admiral on Anne’s accession George was appointed to his council, and immediately engineered his promotion to admiral of the Blue, flying his flag aboard
Triumph
at Portsmouth for a few days just to make the point. Although Prince George remained in titular charge of the navy, Churchill was responsible for its day-to-day activities, and came in for increasing public and parliamentary criticism as French privateers like Forbin or Dugay-Trouin did much damage to British trade. He was a resolute Tory and steadfastly blocked the promotion of senior officers who were known to be Whigs, playing his part in the politicisation of the navy’s upper echelons and lending weight to Shovell’s assertion that ‘There is no storm as bad as one from the House of Commons.’
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By this time Marlborough, who had once encouraged his brother to sail along briskly in his slipstream, now had no time for George, but he could not associate himself with the Whigs’ repeated criticism of him, both because of family loyalty (despite his politics George remained one of the MPs for the family borough of St Albans until his death) and because Prince George, whose support was so important to the Duumvirs, disliked having his namesake criticised. The prince ultimately solved the problem of the awkward admiral by dying in October 1708.
George left the Admiralty at once and retired to his house in Windsor Great Park, where he spent the remaining eighteen months of his life adding to his splendid collection of birds. He died without legitimate issue, and his enormous fortune, the fruit of long and assiduous perquisite-pecking (John was certainly no family exception in this regard), went to his natural son.

Not only did political squabbles in London make it unusually difficult for Marlborough to devote himself to strategy for the coming campaign, but he was concerned with a myriad of issues trickling out of the Ordnance Office and flooding from his responsibilities as captain general. He had some responsibility for French prisoners of war in British hands, and he also took the plight of British prisoners in French hands very seriously indeed. The former caused frequent correspondence with Godolphin, because Marlborough was scrupulous in ensuring that nothing he did would cause his colleague political difficulties. Thus, when a lady wrote to him about the comte de Lionne, a colonel taken at Blenheim, Marlborough at once passed the letter on to Godolphin.

The enclosed is a letter from a young woman of quality that is in love with the Comte de Lionne. He is at Lichfield. I am assured that it is a very virtuous love, and that when they can get their parents’ consent they are to be married. As I do from my heart wish that nobody were unhappy, I own to you that this letter has made me wish him in France, so that he might have leave for four months, without prejudice to her Majesty’s service, I should be glad of it. But if you think it should not be done, you will then be pleased not to speak to the Queen about it.

Charles-Hughes de Lionne was eventually exchanged with a British officer, and married Marie Sophie Jaeger, daughter of an innkeeper in the delightful town of Wissembourg on the Alsace frontier, in 1709. The marriage was not a success, and seven months later he was striving to have it annulled, a process which took till 1719.
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Officers allowed back to France on parole sometimes developed serious ‘illnesses’ in order to extend their stay. In July 1707 Marlborough had warned Godolphin that French officers on leave in France

have all written as if they were dying, but I have refused them, so that I hope the Queen will not give it to [Brigadier the marquis de] Blanzac, nor any of the others, for they have been long enough, and the others ought to have their turns.
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Scouller suggests that prisoners of war ‘were, in general, unwelcome. Almost the sole justification for capturing them was to have something to exchange for one’s own men in the hands of the enemy.’
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Marlborough hated having his soldiers captured, and when the Queen’s Regiment and Elst’s Dutch battalion were forced to surrender after a valiant resistance at Tongres in May 1703 he kept the garrison of Huy, captured later that year, in close confinement until it could be exchanged for the two battalions. Commissioners for Prisoners accompanied armies in the field to oversee the practicalities of escorts, rationing and exchange. Where possible cartels were agreed, specifying the relative exchange values of various ranks: an abortive naval cartel of 1702 specified that a naval captain was worth twenty men. There were always difficulties with such calculations: how did an ensign serving with the fleet rank amongst naval officers, and was a corporal of horse of equivalent rank to a
maréchal de logis
?

Captured senior officers might profit from the attention of their own commander and the courtesy of the enemy’s. Cadogan himself had managed to get captured while out looking for forage during the siege of Tournai in 1706. Marlborough at once wrote to Sarah to say that:

poor Cadogan is taken prisoner or killed, which gives me a great deal of uneasiness, for he loved me, and I could rely on him. I am now sending a trumpet to the Governor of Tournai to know if he be alive; for the horse that beat him came from that garrison. I have ordered the trumpet to return this night, for I shall not be quiet till I know his fate.

I have opened my letter to tell you that Cadogan is a prisoner at Tournai and not wounded.
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Cadogan quickly told Raby, who had been riding with him as a volunteer when their patrol was caught, what had happened.

I was thrust by the crowd. I endeavoured to step into a ditch on the right of the way we passed, with great difficulty I got out of it, and with greater good fortune avoided falling into the Hussars’ hands who first came up with me … It made us fall to the share of the French Carabiniers, who followed their Hussars and Dragoons, from whom I met with quarter and civility, save their taking my watch and money … My Lord Duke has been so kind as to propose exchanging the Marquis de Croissy for me, so I hope my prison will not be of very long continuance.
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Initially Marlborough thought that he would have to wait till winter to arrange an exchange, ‘which will be very troublesome, having nobody very proper for the execution of his place’, but in fact Vendôme sent Cadogan back on parole a few days later, asking for Lieutenant General Baron Pallavicini, a Savoyard captured at Ramillies, in return.
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Marlborough planned to send Croissy, brother of the French foreign minister, as well, but found that Eugène had already taken steps to exchange him.

In the winter of 1707–08 the French had sought ‘a general exchange of prisoners’, which Cadogan told Raby was simply ‘a total release of all we have of theirs … officers and soldiers, by which they would have back four officers for one, and forty-three general officers for five, and your Excellency will easily believe we shall not treat on those terms’. He soon added that ‘nothing like a hint of peace’ had emerged from the conference to discuss prisoner exchanges, but the French ‘threatened extended war and destruction rather than give up any part of the Spanish monarchy’.
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In an effort to hasten the process Louis ‘has given notice to all our officers who are on their parole in England or Holland that they are to return at the expiration of their
congé
to France without hopes of any further prolongations, this extraordinary severity will oblige us to send the like order to all their officers who have the Queen’s or the States’ leave to be in France’.
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The Allied officers and men captured at Almanza were soon counterbalanced by the French taken at Oudenarde, and a general exchange agreement was at last concluded in April 1709. Much of this work was undertaken by Cadogan, who in 1707 had become ‘Envoy Extraordinary to the Southern Netherlands’ after the death of George Stepney, who had been posted from Vienna to The Hague after falling out with the Imperialists by repeatedly pressing them to come to terms with the Hungarian rebels. This did not simply give him a good deal of purely diplomatic work, but made him one of the two British representatives (Marlborough was the other) on the Anglo-Dutch condominium governing the Spanish Netherlands. He remained Marlborough’s quartermaster general, but the workload bearing down on both men was simply colossal. Marlborough was corresponding with Chamillart about the Almanza prisoners, with the usual galaxy of European royalty about troops for the coming campaign, and with the York justices of the peace, up in arms because of some new high-handed act of Lord Peterborough, who, Marlborough assured their worships, had been left in no doubt of the queen’s displeasure.

Marlborough stage-managed, from London, the embarkation on the Continent of a suitable force to pursue the Jacobite expedition to Scotland. His letter to Cadogan of 17 January 1708 is a masterpiece of brevity and clear thought. Cadogan, now a major general, was to go to Flanders immediately and, if there was indeed truth in the rumours that a French expedition was being prepared at Dunkirk, to ensure that sufficient British troops were on hand to be embarked ‘with all possible speed, either at Ostend or in Zealand’. He was to discuss the allocation of troops with Lieutenant General Lumley, in command there in Marlborough’s absence, and to be aware that Overkirk had been copied in on the correspondence and knew what was afoot, although secrecy was essential. Just in case Cadogan had time to spare, he was to note that a copy of the last treaty with the Prussians would arrive by the same post, pay them 56,000 crowns, and sign the treaty governing the terms of service for the Hessian troops, ‘leaving out any charge that might accrue by those troops being in Italy’.
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It was staff work of the slickest and most comprehensive sort.

In late 1707 Marlborough had suggested that the next campaign would focus on the Spanish Netherlands, and early in 1708 he developed the idea for a campaign there. The French now had little to gain in Germany or Italy, and so would probably concentrate in the north, giving them a numerical superiority which would turn the tide in their favour. Indeed, this is precisely what Louis XIV told Marshal Vendôme in May:

I cannot see the different orders of battle of my army without asking you the disposition that you intend to make for its first moves; it seems to me so superior to that with which my enemies can oppose you that you must get the Duke of Burgundy to profit from the first movements it will make.

Louis wanted a substantial success, and besieging Huy was simply not good enough. However, he warned Vendôme that he had to watch out for rapid Allied moves designed to tilt the balance of forces in another theatre of war:

If the English and Dutch strengthen the army of Prince Eugène with a detachment of troops which ought to reinforce their army in
Flanders, in that case, it will be absolutely necessary for the Duke of Berwick to detach a similar proportion and to send a sufficient number of troops to the Elector of Bavaria so that he has nothing to fear from enemy superiority.
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Louis had long given instructions like this to his army commanders, which often made them reluctant to act on their own initiative and slowed down their reaction time as contentious issues were referred back to Versailles for resolution, but in this instance the relationship between Vendôme and Burgundy complicated things still further. Burgundy, the king’s grandson, was in command of the army, but Louis sent most of his instructions to Vendôme, who was expected to persuade Burgundy to do the right thing.