Marlborough (67 page)

I was yesterday from ten in the morning till six at night seeing the garrison of Ghent, and all that belonged to them, march by me. It is
astonishing to see so great numbers of good men look on, and suffer a place of this consequence to be taken at this season with so little a loss. As soon as they knew I had possession of the gates of the town they took the resolution of abandoning Bruges [and retiring right along the coast as far as Dunkirk]. The campaign is now ended to my heart’s own desire, and as the hand of God is so visible in this whole matter, I hope her Majesty will think it due to him to return public thanks, and at the same time to implore his blessing on the next campaign.
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While Marlborough was racing for Oudenarde and battering at Lille, the Duumvirs were inexorably losing their grasp on government. A biographer who sought to present his readers with Marlborough’s political and military identities in parallel would be forced to intersperse correspondence on strategic policy, tactical detail, administrative minutiae, cabinet reshuffles, borough-mongering and monarch-management. The fact that no reference has been made here to Marlborough’s political tribulations does not, however, mean that they were not both real and present. A psychologist considering his behaviour after he received news of the loss of Ghent and Bruges might opine that those events were simply the trigger for the breakdown that followed, and that Marlborough had simply been doing too much for too long to tolerate the sudden and unexpected appearance of a new crisis. This, indeed, is why his well-wishers, like Natzmer and Grumbkow, found it hard to link the crisis itself to what seemed to them an extreme response.

Relations between Sarah and the queen went from bad to worse, and, with more unwise insinuations of lesbianism from the prurient pen of Arthur Maynwaring, from worse to impossible. The final breakdown came on 19 August 1708, the day of thanksgiving for the victory of Oudenarde. Prince George, beset by chronic asthma, was in slow decline, and the queen had been at Windsor nursing him. It was a hot day, and when she changed her clothes at St James’s Palace, Anne took exception to the heavy jewels that Sarah, as groom of the stole, had laid out for her. Sarah interpreted her refusal to wear the jewels as evidence of Abigail Masham’s influence, and the two women had a blazing row in the royal coach on their way to St Paul’s Cathedral. It apparently ended with Sarah telling the queen to ‘be quiet’ as they reached their destination, so that they would not be overheard by the onlookers. Sarah later tried to make
amends, ending what came close to a letter of apology with the assertion that ‘I shall never forget that I am your subject, nor ever cease to be a faithful one’; but the damage was done.
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Anne recognised that at the same time that her relationship with Sarah – groom of the stole, first lady of the bedchamber, and keeper of the privy purse – had collapsed, she needed to retain Marlborough’s services. Yet he had made it clear to her that the continuing pressures of command were imposing a burden that he found all but intolerable. If she dismissed Sarah, then Marlborough might simply retire. Things were not helped by the fact that Sarah was now hard at work on the construction of Marlborough House, on Pall Mall just to the east of St James’s Palace. She wanted it (in contrast to the infinitely grander Blenheim) to be ‘strong, plain and convenient’, and Christopher Wren and his son responded with a two-storeyed house in brick with rusticated stone quoins. In order to pay for it, Sarah, with the queen’s knowledge, borrowed money from the privy purse, probably a total of £20,800, for which, as Anne’s biographer politely observes, ‘No repayments are shown in the extant records.’
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Although the political nation paused to watch the progress of the siege of Lille, recorded in detail in the
London Gazette
, the grim reaper did not check his stride. In early October Prince George was so ill that the queen could not attend the christening of Abigail Masham’s daughter, and on 25 October Godolphin warned Sarah that: ‘The Prince seems to be in no good way at all (in my opinion) as to his health, and I think the Queen herself now seems much more apprehensive of his condition, than I have formerly remembered upon the same occasion.’ It is a reflection on the state of Sarah’s relationship with the queen that she heard this from Godolphin, who had earlier told her that the leading Whig Tom Wharton ‘seemed very much to wish that Mrs Freeman would come to town. All my answer was, that I wished it at least as much.’
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On the twenty-sixth Godolphin complained to Marlborough that he was not writing often enough (‘how disagreeable it is to see 3 Holland mails come in successively without one letter from you’), and concluded that Prince George

has such a general weakness and decay of nature upon him, that very few people that see him have any hopes of his recovery. The Queen herself … begins to think ’tis hardly possible for him to hold out long. I pray God her own health may not suffer by her perpetual watching and attendance upon him.
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George died early on the afternoon of 28 October. The queen, ‘who continued kissing him until the very moment the breath went out of his body’, had to be helped away by Sarah. Godolphin warned Marlborough that the queen’s grief created ‘a new additional affliction which our circumstances did not need’, and said that unless he could return to England without delay ‘it will be next to impossible to prevent ruin’.
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For Marlborough the blow was as much personal as political. He had known Prince George since 1683, and the two men had always got on very well. Moreover, the Danes had provided one of the most reliable of the Allied contingents, and George had helped ensure that it stayed in the field. In May 1706, for instance, he told Marlborough:

I am very glad the Danish troops have been assisting to you, and hope that they will always do their duty however others behave themselves, nothing shall be wanting on my part to persuade their master to follow the interest of England in everything.
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The duke confessed that the news of the prince’s death ‘made such an impression on me that I have not been well for several days, insomuch that I was obliged to march last night in a litter, but have been all this day on horseback. I pray God to enable HM to support this great affliction.’
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Sarah, however, was little help to her mistress in the hour of her need. She declined the queen’s order to fetch Abigail Masham, and as they were leaving St James’s arm in arm, noted disparagingly that Anne ‘found she had the strength to bend down towards Mrs Masham like a sail’. The fact that the new widow ‘ate a very good dinner’ surprised her, and she ‘could not help smiling’ when the queen, addressing her as ‘dear Mrs Freeman’ for the last time, wrote to say that she had ordered ‘a great many Yeomen of the Guard to carry the Prince’s dear body that it may not be let fall, the Great Stairs being very steep and slippery’.
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There is no doubt that Sarah’s ‘unsympathetic analysis of the Queen’s grief is contradicted by every contemporary authority’.
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The queen was at first too prostrated by grief to oppose further Whig advances, but as the year went on she had recovered sufficient strength to fight a valiant rearguard action against the replacement of the moderate Earl of Pembroke, who had taken over as head of the Admiralty Commission not long after Prince George’s death, by the Whig grandee the Earl of Orford. The parliamentary session of 1708–09, whose first half was missed by Marlborough, did little but define Britain’s minimum terms for peace: Louis XIV should recognise Anne’s royal title and the
Protestant succession, order Philip V back from Spain, expel the Old Pretender and demolish the harbour and defences of Dunkirk. The French king was in such financial difficulties that he had had the silver furniture at Versailles melted down, and there was widespread belief that he would be forced to accept a humiliating peace.

French and Allied delegates met at The Hague in April 1709. The Allies had agreed a list of forty terms which, in summary, would indeed have embodied a wholesale defeat for Louis. Marlborough, one of the British delegates, was sure that the French would accept, although he noted with irritation that Torcy, the French foreign minister, had been heartened by news of yet another Allied defeat in Portugal, which, he told Sarah, ‘makes our negotiation move slowly’.
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Overall, though, he assured her that:

there is not doubt of it ending in a good peace, but for some little time it must not be spoke of. You must have in readiness the sideboard of plate, and you must let Lord Treasurer know that since the Queen came to the crown I have not had neither a canopy and chair of state, which now of necessity I must have, so the Wardrobe should immediately have orders; and I beg you will take care to have it made so it may serve as part of a bed when I have done with it here, which I hope will be the end of this summer, so that I may enjoy your dear company in quiet, which is the greatest satisfaction I am capable of having. I have so great a head that you will excuse my saying no more by this post.
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Marlborough’s hopes of cutting a fine figure at the formal signing of the peace treaty were to be dashed. Torcy, ‘not having powers sufficient to agree all we insist upon’, sent the preliminary articles to Louis for his consideration.

The king was at his lowest ebb, well aware of the damage done by the war, a particularly harsh winter, and failed harvests. The frost killed vines in Provence, wine froze in its glasses at Versailles, and Mrs Christian Davies recalled that, not long after the capture of Ghent, ‘two of our sentinels were found frozen to death’. As Torcy tells us: ‘Sensibly affected by the distress of his people’, Louis ‘thought that he could not purchase peace for them too dearly’. Yet the Allies, notably by their insistence on ‘No Peace without Spain’, had pitched that price too high. Conditions 4 and 37 of the articles bound Louis to hand over Spain within two months or face a renewal of the war. He could not in honour order Philip to vacate his throne, and would not consent to using French armies to expel him
from it. After intense soul-searching, in early June he rejected the Allied terms, and summoned his people to make a final effort to win peace with honour. It was a phenomenal achievement: one of his biographers is right to maintain that ‘The Revolutionaries of 1792–93 did not do much better.’ ‘I have conducted this war with hauteur and pride worthy of this kingdom,’ he told his people.

With the valour of my nobility and the zeal of my subjects, I have succeeded in the enterprises I have undertaken for the good of the state … I have considered proposals for peace and no one has done more than I to secure it … I can no longer see any alternative to take, other than to prepare to defend ourselves. To make them see that a united France is greater than all the powers assembled by force and artifice to overwhelm it, at this hour I have put into effect the most extraordinary measures that we have used on similar occasions to procure the money indispensable for the glory and security of the state … I come to ask for your counsels and your aid in this encounter that involves your safety. By the efforts that we shall make together, our foes will understand that we are not to be put upon. The aid that I ask of you will oblige them to make a peace honourable for us, lasting … and satisfactory for the princes of Europe.
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These were high words, not all of them honest, but they helped inspire genuine sympathy for a monarch who had confronted so much personal misfortune – and who was soon to lose both his son and his eldest grandson. There are moments in French history when military defeat has summoned up an unexpected reserve of national strength. The threadbare citizen armies of the new Republic were to trounce the pipe-clayed warriors of old Europe at the century’s close; in 1870–71 the Armies of National Defence fought with a determination that often astonished their opponents; and in 1916 the defence of Verdun tapped a vein of resolve and self-sacrifice whose outpouring bleached France for another generation. In 1709 the process was neither instant nor comprehensive, and Cadogan was to write at the year’s close that:

Great numbers of deserters come in daily, they are half starved and quite naked, and give such an account of the misery the French troops are in as could not be believed were it not confirmed by the reports and letters from all their garrison towns on the frontier.
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Yet a fresh spirit began to animate the French army, associated with its new commander in Flanders, Marlborough’s old comrade in arms, Claude Louis Hector, duc de Villars. Like many great generals before and since, Marshal Villars was not a comfortable fellow. His willingness to seek battle had often vexed a more cautious Versailles; an irascible man, he was hard on his subordinates, though he never asked more of them than he would freely give himself; and, no less to the point, he got on so badly with Max Emmanuel of Bavaria that he could not be used in Flanders as long as the Elector was there. With Vendôme out of favour, Burgundy a broken reed, Boufflers ill and Max Emmanuel tainted by failure at Brussels, Villars was simply too competent for his boldness or his hot temper to exclude him from command in France’s hour of need. ‘All I have left is my confidence in God and in you, my outspoken friend,’ said Louis, and his confidence was not misplaced.
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Nor was this all. On 10 June Louis sacked his billiards partner Chamillart, and replaced him as war minister with the capable and energetic Voisin.

The collapse of peace negotiations saddened Marlborough, who assured Sarah, even as he was on his way to the army to begin a campaign he had hoped never to fight, that:

I can’t but think that some way will be found before the end of this month for our agreeing, everybody having approved of the pleasuring thoughts of peace … I confess I thought it sure, believing it very much in the interest of France to have agreed with us; but since they seem to think otherwise, I hope God has a further blessing in store. I was in hopes to have had the happiness of being with you before the winter; I wish I could still flatter myself with these thoughts. I do wish you all happiness and speed with your building at London, but beg that may not hinder you from pressing forward the building at Blenheim, for we are not so much master of that as of the other.
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