Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes

with a strong common sense that in itself amounted to genius, and possessed in the most trying moments a serenity and calm that was almost miraculous … With such a temperament there was a bond of humanity between him and his men that was lacking in Wellington. Great as Wellington was, the Iron Duke’s army could never have nicknamed him the Old Corporal.⁶

      Elsewhere, citing an approving comment in the papers of an officer in Marlborough’s army, Fortescue mused: ‘What modern decoration (save the Victoria Cross) could compare to a word of hearty praise from Corporal John himself?’⁷

      However, it was hard even for Fortescue to ignore the fact that Marlborough had detractors during his lifetime, though he maintained that the duke’s ‘fall was brought about by a faction, and his fame has remained ever since prey to the tender mercies of a faction’.⁸ Some of Marlborough’s warmest admirers acknowledge that there was indeed another side to the man. Although Charles Spencer, like Winston S. Churchill, has some of Marlborough’s blood in his veins, he is a wise enough historian to admit that:

      It is difficult to understand Marlborough the man. He was enigmatic, focussed, and brilliant. He was also avaricious and – as we know from his correspondence with the Jacobites – capable of double-dealing. However, his men adored him, and they knew his incomparable military worth: they were proud to point out that he never lost a battle, or failed to take a city that he besieged.⁹

      Marlborough’s abandonment of James II (who had befriended him and raised him to the peerage) in 1688 was a move so significant that one historian has called it ‘Lord Churchill’s coup’. It led G.K. Chesterton to accuse him of the vilest of betrayals: ‘Churchill, as if to add something ideal to his imitation of Iscariot, went to James with wanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth in arms as if to defend the country from invasion, and then calmly handed over the country to the invader.’¹⁰ Marlborough lived on the margins of treason. He never regarded the verdict of 1688 as final, and remained in touch with the Jacobite court for the rest of his life, a process assisted by the fact that one of James’s illegitimate sons, James FitzJames, Duke of Berwick, was both Marlborough’s nephew and a marshal of France.

      Although the circumstances of his upbringing go far towards explaining his notorious cupidity, Marlborough was given to a rapacity remarkable even in a rapacious age, amassing offices which made him one of the richest men in the land. While we must accept stories about his tight-fistedness with caution, for they were circulated by his detractors to damage his reputation, the tale that, after an evening’s gaming in Bath, he borrowed the money for a sedan chair but then walked home regardless may indeed be well-founded. Yet he spent enormous sums on building Blenheim Palace, which still glares out in chilly splendour as his lasting memorial. Though most of the practical work of supervising its construction was left to his wife, who demonstrated that high temper rarely makes a successful contribution to labour relations on a building site, the concept was his, and his pressing on with its construction at a time of crisis in the nation’s history showed that selective blindness which sometimes afflicts the great.

      Many of Marlborough’s advocates argue that, great though his achievements were, he would have been even more successful had he not been ‘hampered by the intransigence of the Dutch field-deputies, incompetent civilians attached to the Duke’s staff whose agreement in any project had to be obtained before it could proceed’.¹¹ There is a strongly nationalistic element in much that is written about Marlborough, and in this instance it is worth recalling that an Allied military defeat in Flanders risked having far more effect upon the Dutch than upon the English, conveniently insulated from the armies of Louis XIV by Shakespeare’s ‘moat defensive’. When Marlborough clashed with the Dutch, as he did from time to time, he was not always right and they were not always wrong, and there were times when he avoided the complicating longueurs of coalition politics by outright deception.

      One of the pleasures of the research for this book is that it took me back to G.M. Trevelyan’s incomparable trilogy on the reign of Queen Anne. If earnest modern scholars have unearthed evidence which changes some of Trevelyan’s findings, few have his ability to bring an age to life. He concluded his assessment of Marlborough’s personality by speculating that:

      Perhaps the secret of Marlborough’s character is that there is no secret. Abnormal only in his genius, he may have been guided by motives very much like those that sway commoner folk. He loved his wife, with her witty talk and her masterful temper, which he was man enough to hold in check without quarrelling. He loved his country; he was attached to her religion and free institutions. He loved money, in which he was not singular. He loved, as every true man must, to use his peculiar talents to their full; and as in his case they required a vast field for their full exercise, he was therefore ambitious. Last, but not least, he loved his fellow men, if scrupulous humaneness and consideration for others are signs of loving one’s fellows. He was the prince of courtesy.¹²

      In all this, though, Trevelyan recognised that he was taking issue with his distinguished uncle, whose surname he bore as his own middle name. Thomas Babington Macaulay was a poet (who, if he had never written another word, would surely be remembered for his account of Horatius holding that bridge), politician and the dominant British historian in the mid-Victorian era. Macaulay, argued Trevelyan, ‘adopted his unfavourable reading of Marlborough’s motives and character straight from Swift and the Tory pamphleteers of the latter part of Anne’s reign’. Yet he was

      less often misled by traditional Whig views than by his own overconfident, lucid mentality, which always saw things in black and white, but never in grey … He instinctively desired to make Marlborough’s genius stand out bright against the background of his villainy.¹³

      The villainy, maintained Macaulay, was certainly dark enough. Marlborough was wholly immoral. He ‘owed his rise to his sister’s shame’, and was then ‘kept by the most profane, impious and shameless of harlots’, Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine. He was woefully ignorant, and ‘could not spell the most common words in his own language’. His avarice knew no bounds, and ‘though he drew a large allowance under pretence of keeping a public table, he never asked an officer to dinner’. And he was, quite simply, a traitor, rendering ‘wicked and shameful service to the Jacobite cause’ by leaking information of a 1694 expedition against Brest so that its troops were slaughtered and its commander, a personal rival, was slain.¹⁴

      This is not the moment to deal with Macaulay’s charges in detail, although it is clear that the documents he used to formulate some of them do, in themselves, demonstrate their own falsehood, thereby making Churchill’s accusation of ‘liar’ more appropriate than Trevelyan’s defence of his forebear as an honest historian misled by his emotions and his sources. ‘Lord Macaulay is not to be trusted either to narrate facts accurately, to state facts truly, or to answer the judgement of history with impartiality,’ wrote a barrister who applied his forensic skills to Macaulay’s methods, and it is impossible for a modern historian to disagree.¹⁵

      Even though Macaulay erred in his attacks on Marlborough, it is already evident that there is much more to the man than stout hagiography can possibly acknowledge. We might avoid at least part of the problem by concentrating on the military aspects of his career, and by passing rapidly over his early life to see him emerge, full-fledged, as captain general of the English army in the Low Countries. Indeed, David Chandler, one the most gifted historians to write about Marlborough in recent times, sidestepped the issue in his Marlborough as a Military Commander by considering the duke in his role as a general, although there are few men less suited to the description ‘simple soldier’.¹⁶ To consider