Authors: Richard Holmes
Some of Marlborough’s gloom stemmed from the fact that Sarah had now had her final meeting with the queen. Anne increasingly flouted Sarah’s traditional prerogatives over household appointments, and there was a major row in August 1709 over the appointment to the bedchamber of one Belle Danvers, who, Sarah maintained waspishly, ‘did not look like a human creature’. The queen’s dispute with Sarah became inextricably entwined with Marlborough’s continuing attempt to obtain the captain generalcy for life. Having made predictably poor progress in her efforts to secure proper respect from Sarah, the queen pointedly told Marlborough:
You seem to be dissatisfied with my behaviour to the Duchess of Marlborough. I do not love complaining, but it is impossible to help saying on this occasion, I believe nobody was ever so used by a friend as I have been ever since my coming to the crown. I desire nothing but that she would leave off teasing & tormenting me & behave herself with the decency she ought both to her friend and her Queen & this I hope you will make her do, & is what I am sure no reasonable body can wonder I should desire of you, whatever her behaviour is to me, mine to her shall be always as becomes me.
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Another royal trespass on her prerogative provoked Sarah into sending Anne a long and tendentious ‘Narrative’ of her relationship with the queen, complaining again of Abigail Masham’s influence. She followed it shortly with a fresh tirade which reflected some material from one of Maynwaring’s tasteless insinuations about ‘passions between women’. To show how shamefully her enemies were treating her, she included large chunks of the even more tasteless
Secret Memoirs and Manners … from the
New Atlantis
, the work of Mrs Mary de la Rivière Manley, a catspaw of Harley’s, which defamed both of the Marlboroughs in a barely concealed and often quasi-pornographic way. Upon whom can Mrs Manley have modelled ‘Stauvatius the Thracian’?
A man who at present, and for some time past, has seen himself as the greatest subject upon earth, who never undertook any adventure that he did not perform to his satisfaction; whether it were to subdue a mistress, to win a battle, to take a town, or to secure himself such and such heaps of money, employment, grant or contribution … could one repeat the individual distresses of so many brave officers and soldiers, upon whose shoulders he has mounted to victory, through whose blood he has so often waded to conquest, one would detest, despise and loathe that abominable, sordid, despicable vice, which makes him more the hated of his own army, than their bravery has made him the dread of his enemies.
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Mrs Manley was prosecuted for seditious libel, but the case against her was not pressed, and as soon as the Tories were in power she was one of the most notable anti-Marlborough pamphleteers, accusing him of prolonging the war for his own profit.
In the autumn of 1709, before he returned to England after the fall of Mons, Marlborough made it clear to Sarah that he sided with her against Anne, who was ‘set so entirely wrong’. He thanked her for the draft of the letter he was to send the queen, assuring her that ‘I shall be careful in making the alterations as they are marked.’ This was the basis of his letter of 10 October in which he again demanded the captain generalcy for life and begged the queen ‘to be sensible of the long and faithful services of Lady Marlborough’. But he went on to warn Sarah that he had had quite enough of politics, and that
all the honours and riches in the world could not tempt me to take any other part in Ministry than what belongs to my employments, which in time of peace is very little. As I hope you will approve of this resolution and that no consideration will make me depart from it. I would not have my friends deceived by taking other measures for me.
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When he returned home in November the Whigs, who were perforce his supporters, though not his friends, seemed at the very zenith of their power. They had at last forced the queen to accept Orford at the
Admiralty, and her speech at the formal opening of Parliament on 15 November described Malplaquet as ‘a most remarkable victory, and with such other great and important successes, both before and after it, that France is thereby become much more exposed and open to the impression of our arms, and consequently more in need of a peace, than it was at the beginning of this campaign’.
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However, Arthur Maynwaring told Sarah that the queen’s voice was fainter, and her manner ‘more careless and less moving’ than it had been on previous occasions.
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Dr Henry Sacheverell had preached his inflammatory sermon, ‘The Perils of False Brethren in both Church and State’, on 5 November, and the events of the next four months went on against the backcloth of his trial. During this period Harley capitalised on the fierce passions raised by the trial, used Abigail Masham to give him secret access to the queen, and worked hard at the creation of an opposition party founded, as Edward Gregg tells us, on two principles: ‘The queen should be liberated from the tyranny of the Marlborough family and England should be given a respite from the war.’ Both planks of his policy attracted widespread and increasing support for many reasons.
First, it was and remains the nature of British politics for tall poppies to excite the malice of small boys with big sticks, and there were no fairer flowers than John and Sarah. Marlborough’s thirst for wealth was remarkable even by the standards of the age, and those who felt inclined to forgive a successful commander were less inclined to tolerate the frequency with which Cadogan’s plump fingers also slid into the till. Some of their perquisites, although wholly unjustifiable to us, were tolerated then. Other sources of income were far more suspect, and Cadogan’s conduct aroused particular indignation. Van den Bergh, who served alongside him on the Anglo-Dutch condominium, called him ‘the greatest thief in the whole army’, and Giulio Alberoni, Vendôme’s secretary during the period in question, maintained that Cadogan had ‘carried off more than 200,000 pistoles from Flanders, quite apart from other unknown thefts’.
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However, what qualified as theft to a French marshal’s secretary could easily seem legitimate to the recipients of its proceeds. In December 1706 Marlborough told Stepney that the
règlement
for the governance of Netherlands
was made with a great deal of deliberation and, as the Deputies assured me, contained nothing contrary to the known laws of the country. However, our chief aim ought to be to satisfy the people,
and to make them easy under the present administration, so that the collecting at present a little money more or less ought not … to come into competition in a matter of this moment, especially considering that when we take the field we shall be able to leave but small garrisons in the great towns, and must depend in some measure on the faithfulness of the inhabitants. I believe the states will readily agree with me in this point, and authorise their Deputies to concur with you in leaving the Council of Sate to do what might be most advisable for quieting the minds of the people, and putting them to good humour.
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The selective quotation of the middle part of this letter has been used to imply that Marlborough had a personal interest in extracting money from the Netherlands, but the whole document makes it clear that the issue was one of legitimate taxation, and that Marlborough was primarily concerned with alleviating its burden so as to encourage citizens to remain loyal. Indeed, had more attention been paid to his concerns, then Ghent and Bruges might have remained loyal.
Huge sums of money passed through Marlborough’s hands for the pay of British and British-funded foreign troops as well as for provision contracts. In June 1710, for instance, Cadogan told Marlborough: ‘The present wants of the contractors are supplied with an advance of five hundred and fifty thousand guilders.’
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The money often arrived long before it was required, and Cadogan generally invested it wisely and remitted the interest to Marlborough. The combination of legitimate perquisites, interest on government money and what his enemies alleged were simply bribes or extortions, produced very large sums. In the spring of 1709 van den Bergh told Heinsius that Marlborough had had ‘six hundred thousand rixdollars or 15 tons of gold transferred to England by Antwerp bankers; so that the safeguards, the marches, the orders for winter quarters, and more things of that kind no doubt bring in nice profits’.
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Cadogan was an inveterate gambler: in 1707 James Brydges wrote to congratulate him ‘on two pieces of good news the town is full of: one that you have won six thousand pistoles at play, the other that you are to reside at the Hague or Brussels in the room of Mr Stepney’. Usually his deals worked well, and the fact that Brydges was paymaster general to the army overseas put them both in a good position to slice off percentages here and there. In the spring of 1707 the two men agreed a complex scheme of shuffling government money between currencies with different agents. ‘I am persuaded this method is so settled,’ wrote
Cadogan, ‘that we shall turn £15,000 or £16,000 a month at 100 per cent clear of all charges.’
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Cadogan’s friendship with Lord Raby meant that he enjoyed some of the benefits of what we might now call insider trading. In July 1707 he confessed to Raby: ‘We are in mighty pain about the King of Sweden. If that storm should break on the Hereditary Countries [of the Hapsburg crown] the affairs of the Allies would be in worse condition than ever. I that am a thousand deep in the Silesia loan, have some reason to enquire about it, for upon any hint from your Lordship I could dispose of it in time.’ Raby reassured him, correctly predicting ‘an accommodation between the Emperor and the King of Sweden’.
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However, Cadogan was not always fortunate, and shortly before Marlborough’s death Sarah pursued him in court for having placed £50,000, given him for investment in Holland, in Austria instead, where the rates seemed better: a sudden fall in Austrian rates left the Marlboroughs out of pocket. With a determination untroubled by Cadogan’s long personal loyalty to the duke, Sarah hounded him to what she regarded as a satisfactory conclusion even after her husband had died. She was so concerned that Marlborough, close to death, would wreck her suit by changing his will in Cadogan’s favour, that ‘I ordered his gentlemen that they should be sure to let me know when Lord Cadogan came to see him … I was so fearful of his altering his will that I locked up all the pens and ink.’
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If Cadogan’s evident rapacity helped prejudice people against Marlborough, the duke’s own ‘close accounting’ helped convey the impression that he was not only very rich but a skinflint into the bargain. In June 1709, with many other things on his mind, he drew Sarah’s attention to the fact that Lord Feversham, who had just died, had fallen into arrears with a mortgage he owed Marlborough, and that she might thus purchase his property at advantageous terms.
I think Lord Feversham owed three years last Christmas, but if you send for the steward he will show you the last acquittance. As for his estate, when I was about it two years ago, everyone thought him unreasonable in his demand, but if you can have it a penny worth you will do well by it. I remember one objection was that he had ploughed up the meadow ground so that some years hence it would not yield the same rent.
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What was in fact financial astuteness was easily misrepresented by Marlborough’s enemies, who claimed that he chivvied the dying and
impoverished Feversham for payment, telling him that he could not invest his money on such good terms elsewhere. The fact that the mortgage was so long overdue is actually proof of the latitude he allowed his old commander. Moreover, as Philip Rambaut’s recent work demonstrates, Feversham died ‘a man of considerable means’, having an estimated income of £8,000 a year.
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It was not hard for folk to compare the Marlboroughs’ all too evident wealth with the financial state of the country. Over the duration of the war public expenditure had risen from £3 million to £13 million a year, and the national debt eventually rose from £10 million to £50 million during Anne’s reign. The hard winter of 1708–09, which had caused such suffering in France, also caused great hardship in Britain, and in January 1710 the price of grain in London was higher than ever before. There was an influx of some 10,000 Protestant refugees from the Palatinate, some of them hard-working but others (and where have we heard this before?) ‘inactive and mutinous’. ‘Charity begins at home,’ was the cry among the labouring poor, ‘and these foreigners are a plague to us.’
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Country gentlemen of a Tory persuasion met to quaff their bumpers, thump the table and damn the government and its land tax. City merchants complained of the damage done to trade by French privateers – the contemporary claim that 3,600 merchantmen were lost during the war is, thinks N.A.M. Rodger, ‘not much exaggerated’.
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G.M. Trevelyan was quite right to observe that Malplaquet might have once been regarded as a victory, but that under the shadow of the failed peace talks only a decisive battle and a march on Paris would have sufficed. Terrible though the slaughter had been, the British contingent of 14,000 had lost fewer than six hundred killed and under 1,300 wounded. Tories and Jacobite sympathisers, though, were not slow to magnify these figures. The Oxford diarist Thomas Hearne had been unmoved by Blenheim, Ramillies and Oudenarde, but now described
the most direful battle to England that has yet happened, and there is not, in the opinion of honest men, the least reason for bragging. Private letters frequently come which give the most impartial accounts, and we are well assured from the greatest to the meanest officer hardly one escaped but was either slain or very much wounded.
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