Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes

      In 1659 James had contracted a secret marriage to Anne Hyde, daughter of Charles II’s adviser Edward Hyde, who as Earl of Clarendon was to dominate politics in the period 1660–66. Of the children she bore him only two, Mary (b.1662) and Anne (b.1665), survived infancy. The marriage was formalised in London in 1660, but James’s eyes and hands were for ever wandering, and he embarked on a series of affairs. In 1665 the gossipy Pepys identified a lady who ‘is said to have given the Duke of York a clap upon his first coming over’; the following year the eager duke was said to be ‘desperately in love with Mrs Stewart’, and on Easter Day 1669 Pepys, now frankly alarmed rather than merely gossipy, complained that the royal lecher ‘did eye my wife mightily’.¹⁸ We might style James gourmand rather than gourmet, and his taste in ladies, like his religion, was Catholic. Catherine Sedley, one of his mistresses, confessed that: ‘We are none of us handsome, and if we had wit, he has not enough to discover it.’¹⁹

      Arabella Churchill was described by one contemporary as having a face of no more than ordinary feminine beauty, which made her a good deal more attractive than many of James’s ladies, but a very pretty figure. We are told that the ducal party was riding to a greyhound meet near York when Arabella’s horse bolted. She fell, and the Duke of York found her unconscious and dishevelled: the fact that underwear was not in general use at the time may well have increased the joy of his discovery. Arabella bore James at least four children, Henrietta FitzJames (b.1667), James FitzJames, later Duke of Berwick (b.1670) and, after Anne Hyde’s death in 1671 and James’s marriage to Mary of Modena in 1673, Henry FitzJames, later Duke of Albemarle (b.1673), and Arabella FitzJames (b.1674).

      Lord Macaulay, whiskery jowls quivering, thundered that the complaisant John Churchill stood dishonoured by his sister’s behaviour, though Sarah Marlborough acidly wondered quite what ‘he could do when a boy at school to prevent the infamy of his sister’. Sir Winston could do little, even if he had the inclination to make the attempt, because in 1665 he was sent back to Ireland, leaving his family behind in London. At about this time John went to court as page to the Duke of York, and in 1667 he begged his patron for an ensign’s commission in the foot guards, which was duly granted on 14 September that year. There was no formal uniform for army officers at this time, but the guards, like the rest of the infantry, wore red, and young John would have turned out in a knee-length red coat with broad blue turned-back cuffs and a good deal of gold lace. It would have taken rare perception to have guessed just how much lustre he would bring to coats like that and the men who wore them.

       The Army of Charles II

      The army that John Churchill joined was the product of an uneasy union between George Monck’s regiments, which represented the New Model Army, instrument of parliamentarian victory in the Civil War, and the force of exiled royalists maintained by Charles in the Low Countries. In 1660 Monck, now the well-pensioned Duke of Albemarle in reward for his services, began the disbandment of his troops as their arrears of pay were met, and by Christmas that year only two regiments of this remarkable army remained: his own foot, the ‘Coldstream Regiment’, and his own regiment of horse. A force of around 6,000 foot and six hundred horse was maintained in Dunkirk, consisting partly of ex-parliamentarian soldiers and partly of royalists, including Lord Wentworth’s regiment of foot guards.

      It soon became clear to Charles that he could not afford to maintain Dunkirk, and in 1662 he sold it to France. Some of the troops went to the North African city of Tangier, which had come to the crown as part of the dowry of Charles’s queen, Catherine of Braganza. Others went off to fight in Portugal, and still others were disbanded in Dunkirk or joined the French army as mercenaries: Lord Wentworth’s guards returned to England in 1662, and were amalgamated with Colonel John Russell’s 1st Foot Guards in 1665.

      Charles did not share the widespread mistrust of standing armies, and Gilbert Burnet maintains that lord chancellor Clarendon agreed that such a force was needed to protect the king from riots and risings.

      And there was great talk of a design, as soon as the army were disbanded, to raise a force that should be so chosen and modelled that the King might depend upon it; and that it should be so considerable, that there might be no reason to apprehend tumults any more.²⁰

      However, the Earl of Southampton, the lord treasurer, feared that while the New Model’s men had been ‘sober and religious’ the king’s would perforce be brutal and licentious, and the probable instrument of royal despotism. One of Samuel Pepys’s drinking companions certainly agreed with him:

      They go with their belts and swords, swearing and cursing, and stealing – running into people’s houses, by force oftentimes, to carry away something. And this is the difference between the temper of one and the other.²¹

      Charles’s army was small – 6,000 strong at its peak – and it would have been a wise man who predicted that it would eventually grow into a force of European stature. There were many who argued, throughout his reign and beyond it, that the Trained Bands of the City of London and the county militias, their officers appointed by local potentates and their men selected by ballot from lists provided by parish constables, were sufficient guarantee of domestic security. On 1 January 1661, however, a small armed group of no more than fifty Fifth Monarchy men under ‘Venner the cooper’ seized the north gate of St Paul’s. A plucky watchman cried out that he was for King Charles. They replied that they were for King Jesus, and piously shot him through the head. Venner’s men went on to beat both a detachment of musketeers sent across from the guard on the Royal Exchange, and the lord mayor’s own troop of City militia, before making off to Highgate. Running short of food, they returned to the City on the fourth. It took the king’s Life Guard and ‘all the City Regiments’ to subdue them: ten were taken and twenty killed. Thomas Venner was wounded, but lived long enough for rope and bowelling knife.

      Charles had already raised a regiment of foot guards commanded by John Russell, one of the Duke of Bedford’s grandsons and a steadfast Civil War royalist. The king had brought a Life Guard of horse across with him in 1660, but it had subsequently been reduced in size and the residue sent to Dunkirk. As a consequence of Venner’s rising the officers and men of Albemarle’s Coldstream regiment of foot were disbanded (thus meeting the letter of the agreement that specified that the old army was to disappear) and then immediately re-enlisted. In 1684 a royal ruling made this ‘new’ regiment junior to Russell’s 1st Foot Guards, but the Coldstreamers made clear their disapproval by adopting the motto Nulli Secundus, second to none. Members of the 1st Foot Guards helpfully translated this as ‘second to one’ or ‘better than nothing’.²² The Life Guards were brought back from Dunkirk and augmented into three troops – the King’s, the Duke of York’s and the Lord General’s, with a Scots troop raised soon afterwards. At the same time Aubrey de Vere, Earl of Oxford, raised a regiment of horse, properly the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards but known, from the colour of their uniforms, as the ‘Oxford Blues’. This was based on a parliamentarian regiment, brought up to strength with royalist volunteers.

      This process gave Charles II guards, both horse and foot, and with them came the realistic prospect of preserving order in the capital and escorting the monarch when he travelled in the country. There were also a number of isolated non-regimented garrison companies in key strongholds like Portsmouth, Dover and Hull, all now commanded by officers of suitable royalist credentials. Although the small standing armies of each of Charles’s kingdoms were theoretically separate, ‘In practice,’ as John Childs tells us, ‘all three were interdependent and formed part of the same large whole. Soldiers from Scotland and Ireland were raised to serve on the English establishment whenever forces were needed for foreign service.’²³

      Charles expanded his