Authors: Richard Holmes
Lastly, ‘No Peace without Spain’ was evidently what had wrecked the talks, and that was a key plank of Whig policy. This was an administration
in deep trouble, now faced, in the shape of Robert Harley, with a politician with the skill to bring it down, and a monarch with slights to avenge.
The tale is quickly told. Harley succeeded in converting the Dukes of Shrewsbury, Somerset and Argyll to his cause. All were Whiggish by sympathy but were distinct from those ‘Lords of the Junto’ so detested by Anne, and were invaluable allies for Harley. Marlborough’s own position had been very seriously damaged, as we have already seen, by his failure to make the queen part with Abigail Masham in early 1710, and was later dented again by a row with the queen over promotions, in which he tried, ultimately without success, to avoid promoting Abigail’s brother Jack and her husband Sam. The narrow majority which convicted Sacheverell, and the very moderate penalty imposed on him, weakened the government’s authority. And then, on Thursday, 6 April 1710, there was a final, fulminating interview between Sarah and the queen. There is no impartial account, for Lord Dartmouth, who tells us the story, was a political opponent of the Marlboroughs, and the tale comes secondhand via Mrs Danvers, who was in waiting at the time. She told Dartmouth that:
The Duchess reproached her [the queen] for above an hour with her family’s services in so loud and shrill a voice, that the footman at the bottom of the back stairs could hear it … The Queen, seeing her so outrageous, got up, to have gone out of the room: the Duchess clapped her back against the door, and told her that she must hear her out, for that was the least favour she could do her, for having set and kept the crown upon her head. As soon as she had done raging, she flounced out of the room and said, she did not care if she never saw her more; to which the Queen replied, very calmly, that she thought the seldomer the better.
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In mid-April, without consulting the Duumvirs, the queen made Shrewsbury her lord chamberlain, not in itself a fatal blow but a dangerous sign of the way the wind was now blowing. She toyed with the idea of dismissing Sunderland, the Marlboroughs’ Whig son-in-law, as secretary of state, and her determination to do so was strengthened rather than diminished by Sarah’s clumsy threat to make public some of the royal correspondence. Godolphin warned Anne that Marlborough would resign if she did indeed sack Sunderland, and the queen sweetly replied that she had no intention of replacing Marlborough, and that if he
did ‘desert my service’ at what she called ‘this critical juncture’ then the blame would be Godolphin’s alone. On the same day, 14 June, Godolphin joined seven leading members of the government in urging Marlborough not to resign because of Sunderland’s dismissal. The duke, then besieging Douai, told Sarah:
I am only thinking how I may soonest get out of all business. All my friends write me that I must not retire, and I myself think it would do great mischief if I should quit before the end of this campaign. But after the contemptible usage I meet with, how is it possible to act as I ought to do? … I hope tomorrow we may sign the capitulation of this town, which would give me pleasure, were I not so extremely mortified with what you are doing in England.
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On the following day he informed Godolphin that Douai had indeed surrendered, but that ‘My spirits and zest are quite gone.’ He feared that ‘the expectation of disorders in England’ could only hearten the French, and was afraid that he would simply ‘drudge on for four or five months longer, and venture his life for those who do not deserve it from him’.
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By now Harley and his associates were applying increasing pressure to the queen to make her part with Godolphin, and he, tired and isolated, responded with a sourness that did not help his cause. An attempt by the Whigs to hold their ground backfired. The Dutch, Imperial and Hanoverian envoys were persuaded to ask the queen neither to change her ministry nor dissolve her Whig-dominated Parliament until the war was over. Harley was easily able to persuade Anne that this was foreign interference in her affairs, and both Godolphin and Marlborough were associated, probably rightly, with the appeal. On 8 August the queen sent a letter dismissing Godolphin with a pension of four thousand a year. She thought that it would be easier for them both if he broke his staff of office rather than, as was the custom, returning it to her personally. Anne probably felt genuine pain at parting with Godolphin, but what was meant to be a courteous dismissal turned into brusqueness.
The letter which effectively ended Godolphin’s distinguished political career was delivered to him by one of the Duke of Somerset’s grooms. John Smith, chancellor of the exchequer, called on him shortly afterwards, and saw Godolphin break his staff and fling the pieces into the fireplace, telling him ‘to witness that he had obeyed the Queen’s commands’.
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His pension was never paid, although the fact that he inherited the bulk of the family fortune when his elder brother died
soon afterwards meant that he was able to survive without it. Arthur Maynwaring, writing before Godolphin had inherited, warned Sarah that Godolphin ‘will not be able to keep his family, unless 39 [Marlborough] assists him, which I really think he should do’.
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Godolphin continued to attend Parliament and to associate with what had become the Whig opposition, but his health failed fast, and he died at the Marlboroughs’ house in 1712. Sarah wrote on the flyleaf of her Bible: ‘The 15th of September at two in the morning the Earl of Godolphin died at the Duke of Marlborough’s house at St Albans, who was the best man that ever lived.’
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On 8 August Godolphin wrote to tell Marlborough that ‘The Queen has this morning been pleased to dismiss me from her service.’
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On the same date Anne herself told Marlborough what had happened, so ‘that you may receive this news first from me & I do assure you I shall take care that the army shall want for nothing’.
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On the ninth, when his initial pain had begun to subside, Godolphin assured Marlborough that although his ‘circumstances are at present a little discouraging’ he would do his best to ensure that Marlborough was ‘effectually supported to the end of this campaign, in the post where he now is’, and emphasised that it was essential to keep the Alliance together.
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At a meeting of the Privy Council on 20 September the queen ordered a proclamation dissolving Parliament to be read out – the clerk did it so eloquently that it was clear he had been practising. Most of the Whig ministers resigned the following day. The queen bade farewell to the Whig leader Somers and the lord keeper, Lord Cowper, with evident regret, in Cowper’s case probably because Harley had no one in mind to replace him. Some of the new ministers, notably Harcourt, who became lord chancellor, and St John, lord keeper, sympathised with Marlborough. St John, who kept in touch with the captain general through his confidential man of affairs, James Craggs the elder, did much to prevent a war office committee established by Harley from wresting political control of the army from Marlborough’s hands.
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Craggs, born in 1657, had entered the Duchess of Marlborough’s service and, through her interest, became MP for the Cornish borough of Grampound in 1702, retaining the seat till 1714. He served as clerk of the deliveries of the Ordnance from 1702 to 1711 and again in 1714–15. He died, possibly by his own hand, enormously wealthy but in disgrace over his involvement in the South Sea Bubble, in 1721. All the property he had acquired since December 1719 was subsequently confiscated by Act of Parliament. His correspondence with Marlborough seems not to
have survived, but he flits through extant documents like a rather substantial wraith. By 1710 he was coded as ‘185’ in letters between Marlborough and Godolphin, and the latter told Marlborough: ‘I have spoken to him as fully as I can upon the posture of our affairs here, and I think nobody understands them as fully as he does.’
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In August that year Marlborough asked Villars for a passport for ‘Mr Craggs the elder, an English gentleman returning from Italy, who wishes to pass through here on his way back to England’.
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A year later, rightly foreseeing worsening problems over getting the Treasury to pay for Blenheim Palace, Marlborough wanted Craggs to work on the accounts, as it was clear that Harley, now Earl of Oxford, was anxious to avoid any official recognition that the queen was obliged to pay for the place.
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Although Cragg’s shuttle diplomacy ensured that the captain general was in close contact with sympathetic members of the new government, the fall of Godolphin and the rise of Harley and his associates left him increasingly isolated. The election of 1710, which resulted in a Tory majority of 151 in the Commons, further strengthened his enemies. Marlborough had initially hoped that the Tory majority would not be so overwhelming, and told Heinsius of his distaste at seeing ‘a great many honest people turned out to make room for the Earl of Rochester and the Duke of Buckingham and such like men. God knows where this can end …’
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Although Sarah and the queen had met for the last time in April 1710 they still corresponded – or, more accurately, Sarah wrote to the queen through the agreed medium of Sir David Hamilton, a Whig doctor – but now her further insinuations of a lesbian relationship between Anne and Abigail Masham determined the queen to be rid of her at last. Anne did her best to prevent Sarah from travelling to the coast to meet Marlborough when he returned home on 11 December, and hoped that he would be ‘calm and submissive’ and would not be inflamed by his wife.
It was very hard for him to remain calm, for he had already been publicly humiliated. In September Harley had engineered the dismissal of Marlborough’s private secretary Adam de Cardonnel, the newly appointed secretary at war, and his replacement by George Granville, later Lord Lansdowne, a personal enemy of Marlborough’s. In November generals Meredith, Macartney and Honeywood were dismissed from the army for drinking damnation to the new ministry. All three were Marlborough’s men, and he had only recently pressed to have Honeywood (the least culpable of the three, and the only one to have a notable military career after reinstatement in 1714) made a brigadier general.
Not only was Marlborough commanding the Allied army on a busy and successful campaign while all this was going on, but he remained determined to keep the British army under tight administrative control as long as he remained captain general. He promoted officers by seniority where this was appropriate, but always tried to give an advantage to those on active service. On 11 September he informed a Mr Pulteney that, despite ‘having just reason to be satisfied with his services’, he could not make his brother a captain, for there were several officers in the Guards who were senior to him. In a similarly conciliatory vein, he told another correspondent that while ‘I am very sorry the death of Captain Hearne should occasion you any loss than that of a brother’, his captaincy had already been given to an officer ‘to whom I could not refuse it without doing a piece of injustice’.
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Some correspondents railed against what they saw as such injustices. A lady describing herself as ‘an officer’s wife that was killed under your command’ bewailed ‘the loss of twenty thousand pounds a year to his family’. She felt that ‘the quality and estates of my near relations’ entitled her to ‘the same favours others receive from your Grace or my Lady Duchess’, but her late husband’s regimental agent was unable to produce the money. ‘May God send your Grace a happy conscience,’ she concluded.
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The process inevitably had political overtones. Regimental colonelcies were potentially lucrative appointments, coveted by the government’s friends, real or imagined. When Lord Essex’s death left the colonelcy of his dragoon regiment vacant, Marlborough hoped to fill it with Lord Hertford, son of the Duke of Somerset, who the ministry was eager to please. Jack Hill, the queen’s candidate for the post, was actually far better qualified from a purely military point of view. Because generals did not receive pay for the rank they held, but only for the post they filled, command appointments were also useful ways of rewarding the government’s supporters and punishing its opponents. Marlborough was certainly not immune to personal or political favouritism. There were some officers, like his brother Charles or the capable Philip Honeywood, whose interests he looked after, and others, like Jack Hill and Sam Masham, who were elevated despite his attempt to rig the lists for a periodic promotion so that the elevation of brigadiers stopped just short of Hill and that of new colonels just short of Masham. Marlborough professed friendship for Lord Raby, a major general and colonel of a dragoon regiment, whose old schoolfriend Cadogan assured him: ‘I hope that I shall soon wish your Lordship the joy of being lieutenant general.’
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Marlborough, however, had no intention of
making somebody he regarded as a Harley supporter a lieutenant general, and was anxious that Raby should not join him and Lord Townshend as a plenipotentiary in the 1710 peace talks. Once Harley gained control of the government he did his best, not wholly successfully, to deprive the captain general of his patronage by setting up a board under Ormonde, later Marlborough’s successor, which began its work by dismissing all the captain general’s brigadiers.
Brevet promotion, which gave its holder rank in the army but not in his regiment (and thus conferred status but not necessarily employment consistent with that rank) was a cheap and widely used way in which, in an age where decorations were not available, commanders-in-chief could reward the successful or the favoured. It inevitably produced confusion, which Marlborough did his best to mitigate. ‘Besides Colonel Hollins having a commission of brigadier,’ wrote Marlborough, ‘does nowise exempt him from his duty as major, there are older captains in the first regiment to whom it would be a prejudice when they come to roll together.’
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However, attempts to sort out the rank structure created almost as many problems as they solved, and officers who were passed over often responded by blaming political interference.