Authors: Richard Holmes
Marlborough at least had the opportunity of seeing Sidney Godolphin to his grave before going into exile. Godolphin died at Holywell, and it took three weeks to get sufficient Whig Knights of the Garter to act as his pallbearers, ‘for they don’t find the Tory knights so ready to come to town a purpose’. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on 7 October with the Dukes of Marlborough, Devonshire, Richmond and Schomberg bearing his pall. Sarah recognised in their old friend a virtue she admired, even if she could not share it: ‘He was a man of wonderful frugality in the public concerns but of no great money above his paternal estate. What he left at his death showed that he had indeed been the nation’s treasurer and not his own.’
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Marlborough drove to Dover on 24 November 1712 with just a few servants, but, held up by contrary winds, could not get a packet boat till the end of the month, and arrived in Ostend on 1 December. He was received there with enthusiasm, and went on to Antwerp, where his welcome was so spectacular, with shipping in the harbour firing salutes, that he made the next stage of his journey, to Maastricht, in Dutch territory, by a circuitous route to avoid stirring up public excitement that might affront the British government. Now accompanied by both Cadogan and the Dutch General Dopff, he was greeted by a guard of honour and yet more demonstrations of public regard when he reached Aachen on 21 January 1713.
That day he told Sarah that he had received no letters from her since 20 December, and was not sure where she now was. He advised her that because of a sudden thaw ‘you will find the ways extremely bad, and as this place is extremely dirty I have resolved to go to Maastricht at the beginning of the week, and there to expect you. I send this letter to Ostend in hopes it may meet you there.’
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By early February he was palpably concerned at not having heard from her. ‘If you have observed by my letters that I thought you would have left England sooner than you have been able to do,’ he wrote,
I hope you will be so kind and just to me, to impute it to the great desire I had of having the satisfaction of your company. For I am extremely sensible of the obligation I have to you, for the resolution you have taken of leaving your friends and country for my sake. I am very sure, if there be anything in my power that may make it easy to you, I should do it with all imaginable pleasure. In this place you will have little conveniences; so that we must get to Frankfurt as soon as we can. I wish we may be better there; but I fear you will not be easy till we get to some place where we may settle for some time; so that we may be in a method and orderly way of living; and if you are then contented, I shall have nothing to trouble me.
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Sarah applied for her passport on 29 January. It was granted without delay, and she set off to join her husband. But while he had travelled light, she took with her a substantial wardrobe, which included forty cloaks and petticoats and several leopard-skin muffs, as well as a chocolate pot and a five-pint kettle. Her little retinue included a Protestant chaplain with the improbable name of Whadcock Priest. What she saw soon convinced her of ‘the sad effects of Popery and arbitrary power’, though she was delighted by her reception by the nuns of Aachen.
If our enemies do prevail to our utter ruin, I think I had best go into a monastery. There are several of them in this town, and tis all the entertainment I have to vist [them]. I supped with about twenty [nuns] the other night but twas a very slight [meal] nothing but brown bread and butter … They were as fond of me as if I had not been a heretic.
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They reached Frankfurt in the middle of May, and Sarah was delighted to see that the troops, under Eugène’s command, paid her lord ‘all the respects as if he had been in his old post’.
To see so may brave men marching by was a fine sight. It gave me melancholy reflections, and made me weep; but at the same time I was so much animated that I wished I had been a man that I might have ventured my life a thousand times in the glorious cause of liberty …
When I had written so far I was called to receive the honour of a visit from the Elector of Mainz. I fancy he came to this place chiefly to see the Duke of Marlborough. His chap [cheek] is, like my own, a little of the fattest, but in my life I never saw a face that expressed so much openness, honesty and good nature … I can’t help repeating part of his compliment to the Duke of Marlborough, that he wished any Prince of the Empire might be severely punished if they forgot his merit. It would fill a book to give you an account of all the honours done the Duke of Marlborough in all the towns … as if he had been king of them.
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She could not but contrast the civility with which they were received on the Continent with the way they had been cold-shouldered in England.
’Tother day we were walking upon the road, and a gentleman and a lady went past us in their chariot who we had never seen before, and after passing with us the usual civilities, in half a quarter of an hour or less they bethought themselves and turned back, came out of their coach to us, and desired that we would go into their garden, which was very near that place, and which they think, I believe, is a very fine thing, desiring us to accept of a key. This is only a little taste of the civility of people abroad, and I could not help thinking that we might have walked in England as far as our feet would have carried us before anybody that we had never seen before would have lighted out of their coach to have entertained us.
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Marlborough visited his principality of Mindelheim, where he was received with royal honours. He already suspected that its location meant that it would go to Bavaria when peace was concluded, and this is indeed what happened. The emperor promised to ‘give his highness an equivalent principality out of his own hereditary dominions’, and eventually created a new principality from the county of Mellenburg, in Upper Austria. Archdeacon Coxe doubted if this had actually happened, grumbling that ‘The most eminent services are but too often ill requited, when they cease to be necessary or useful,’ but the best evidence suggests that the exchange was indeed made.
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Marlborough was in very close contact with the Electoral court at Hanover, and worked hard, with Cadogan and Robethon, to ensure that the Elector would succeed bloodlessly to the throne on Anne’s death, although the Elector made it clear that he had no intention of sending an expedition to Britain before he had formally succeeded to the throne. They concluded that most of the British troops on the Continent at the time of her death ‘would readily obey a man so agreeable to them as the Duke of Marlborough’, and both the Duke and Cadogan received provisional commissions from the Elector authorising them to take command of these troops when the queen died. Marlborough moved from Frankfurt to Antwerp, to be as close as possible to England when the moment came. In Britain, meanwhile, the ministry purged the army not simply of outright Whigs, but of men like Argyll and Stair, many of whom joined armed associations ready to support the Protestant succession when Anne died.
At precisely the same time that he was working so eagerly for a Hanoverian succession, Marlborough was corresponding with the Jacobites. Indeed, the German historian Onno Klopp argued, in
Der Fall des Hauses Stuart
, that ‘Marlborough succeeded in an astonishing way in not losing the confidence of Saint-Germain, while at the same time preserving that of Hanover.’ Winston S. Churchill maintains that his contact with the Jacobite court gave him ‘a window of indispensable intelligence’, and that this is the only motive for his behaviour that ‘fits all the facts of twenty years’.
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It is hard to share this confidence. We have already seen that Marlborough had shifted £50,000 to the Continent in case of a Stuart restoration, and we shall soon note that he remained on good terms with the Jacobites when he was close to death and had no official responsibilities or personal ambitions. The truth is probably that, as Sarah observed on 17 October 1713, it was impossible to be sure of anything, and dangerous to burn any bridges. ‘This is a world that is subject to frequent revolutions,’ she wrote, ‘and though one wishes to leave one’s posterity secure, there is so few that makes a suitable return even upon that account.’
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Moreover, the spirit of the age saw little wrong in Marlborough’s continuing friendship with James II’s illegitimate son the Duke of Berwick, who was his nephew long before he became a Marshal of France. As Berwick pointed out, when asking Marlborough leave for an equerry to visit the Allied army ‘to buy some English horses’, there were contacts ‘so indifferent to the public cause’ as not to excite reasonable criticism. Berwick concluded: ‘pray [give] my compliments to Mr Godfrey,’ the
English officer now married to his mother.
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When they were in exile Sarah feared that her husband’s old fire had left him. She thought he had grown ‘intolerably lazy’, and one early biographer recorded a comment made at the time: ‘The only things the Duke has forgotten are his deeds. The only things he remembers are the misfortunes of others.’
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In early 1714 his favourite daughter Elizabeth, Countess of Bridgewater, died of smallpox. He received the dreadful news in his house at Antwerp, where he was leaning on a marble mantelpiece: it was said that his head slammed against the marble so hard that he fell to the floor unconscious.
Queen Anne had been very ill over the winter of 1713–14, but had recovered sufficiently to open Parliament in person on 15 February. However, it was ‘universally recognised that her days were numbered’, and on 5 January Oxford’s cousin Thomas Harley was sent to Hanover to assure the Electoral court that Anne was determined to adhere to the Act of Settlement that enshrined the Hanoverian succession.
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Just as Marlborough kept a foot in both camps, so Oxford also negotiated with the Jacobites, though there can be no doubt that his overtures to St Germain were perfectly sincere. He used an intermediary to ask James, the Old Pretender, to change or at least conceal his religion, and Bolingbroke assured the French envoy in London that unless he did so there was no chance of his succeeding, for ‘people would rather have a Turk than a catholic’. Happily for the Protestant succession, James declined to temporise.
On about 9 June Marlborough told Viscount Molyneux of yet another twist: there would be no Queen Sophie. He had arrived at Herrenhausen, the country retreat of the Electoral court,
And there the first thing I heard was that the good old electress was dying in one of the public walks. I ran up there, and found her just expiring in the arms of the poor electoral princess, and amidst the tears of a great many of her servants, who endeavoured in vain to help her … No princess ever died more regretted, and I infinitely pity those servants that have known her a long time, when I, that have had the honour to know her but a month, can scarce refrain from tears in relating this.
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Marlborough thought that the electress’s death had been brought on by receiving letters from Oxford saying that, despite her hope that her grandson would be summoned to Parliament by virtue of his British
dukedom, so as to be on hand when Anne died, no member of her family would be allowed to enter the kingdom while the queen still lived. Anne at once ordered that ‘The Princess Sophia’ should be replaced by ‘the Elector of Hanover’ in the appropriate part of
The Book of Common Prayer.
The Elector, now heir apparent to the throne of Great Britain, repeated his request for a senior member of his family to reside in England, and replaced his envoy there with Baron von Bothmar, not only his close confidant but an enemy of Oxford’s.
On 9 July Marlborough, writing from Antwerp, told Robethon that ‘the arrival of Mons Bothmar may be of great use’. He added that he would not leave for England till the end of the month, and was confident that the British troops at Dunkirk ‘are all well inclined apart from the two battalions of Orkney’s [Regiment]’.
Although Winston S. Churchill argues that Marlborough’s determination to return home was a bold personal decision, we now know that he had written to the queen through the medium of his daughter and her godchild Lady Sunderland. Although the contents of the letter are unknown, it is possible that the queen may have summoned him home, using Cadogan as her point of contact. In any event, Bolingbroke had been in touch with James Craggs, Marlborough’s man of affairs, and it seems to have been agreed that Marlborough would be reinstated in his former offices, with Ormonde becoming viceroy of Ireland by way of compensation. Adverse winds delayed Marlborough’s arrival in London, where he had been expected on 21 July, and this probably thwarted Anne’s hope that Marlborough and Bolingbroke between them would assume the reins of government, ensuring a smooth succession on her death.
On 7 July Anne dismissed Oxford, leaving Bolingbroke, directionless at the moment of supreme crisis, in effective charge of the ministry. On the thirtieth, barely conscious, she passed the lord treasurer’s white staff to the Duke of Shrewsbury, one of the middle party who had brought Oxford to power in 1710, and she died at 7.45 on the morning of Sunday, 1 August. She was forty-nine years old. The Elector of Hanover was proclaimed King George I at St James’s Palace at four o’clock that afternoon, and the Marlboroughs reached Dover on the following morning. The
Flying Post
reported from Rochester that:
The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough passed through this city; they were received with great expressions of joy from the people, especially those at Chatham, who strewed their way with flowers, as they adorned
their houses with green boughs, and welcomed them with repeated shouts and acclamations.
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