Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes

themselves rarely fully informed. And most, in the way of things, had likes and dislikes which might reflect nothing more than the imponderables of human emotion. However, Goslinga was in the Allied army but not of it, and in regular contact with Marlborough but never dependent on his goodwill for advancement. He saw Marlborough in his depths as well as at his heights: riding out with him to his outposts in the small hours when it seemed certain that the French had trapped him, or sharing the duke’s riding-cloak when both lay down to snatch some sleep after a long and successful pursuit.

      Goslinga gives us a pen-picture which at last begins to catch some of the light and shade of Marlborough.

      Here is his portrait, as far as I am able to paint it. I do not speak of his fortune, nor of the manner in which he began to make it: his conduct towards his great benefactor and his first benefactress are things well known, and add nothing to the matter in hand. He was born a gentleman: his stature was above average and was one of the finest one might see: he had a perfectly beautiful face, with two fine and sparkling eyes of an admirable colour, a pink and white complexion which a woman might envy, and fine teeth … He had much spirit … very clear and solid judgment, swift and deep penetration, knowing his people well and able to distinguish real merit from false; speaking well and agreeably even in French, which he actually spoke with poor grammar but with a harmonious tone of voice.

      On the other hand, Goslinga found him

      capable of profound, even the most dangerous deception, which he covers by manners and expressions which seem to express the utmost frankness: he has a boundless ambition, and the most sordid avarice, which influences all his conduct: if he has courage, which he doubtless has, whatever his enemies say, he has certainly not got the firmness of character which makes the real hero … He did not know much about military discipline, and gave free rein to the soldier, who committed frightful disorders. He also knew little of the detail of the profession, less than was proper for a commander-in-chief. Here are the weaknesses which, however, do not detract from the rare talents of this really great man.²³

      Some of Goslinga’s words find answering echoes elsewhere. The two great English diarists of the age, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, both had a view of Marlborough. Pepys, ‘sole counsellor’ to the newly ennobled George Legge, Lord Dartmouth, on his 1683 fact-finding trip to the English garrison of Tangier, chatted with his master about John Churchill, as he then was. Dartmouth:

      tells me of the Duke of York’s kindness to him and how Churchill was made what he is by my Lord Rochester, only to lessen him; and that all he knows Churchill rewards himself by, is his lying with their wives, which he says is not certain as to my ladies Rochester and Sunderland.²⁴

      This was the sort of salacious gossip that Pepys loved, and in part Dartmouth’s words no doubt reflect the suspicion of one fast-rising man for another. Yet there were persistent rumours that Churchill turned his remarkable physical attractiveness to his advantage, and he is certainly not the first British commander to profit from being big and bonny; nor, no doubt, will he be the last.

      In 1702, well before Marlborough had won his greatest victories, John Evelyn complained of the ‘excess of honour conferred by the Queen on the Earl of Marlborough, by making him a Knight of the Garter, and a Duke, for the success of but one campaign’, but added: ‘He is a very handsome person, well-spoken and affable, and supports his want of acquired knowledge by keeping good company.’²⁵ In February 1705, just a year before his death, Evelyn visited Lord Godolphin.

I went to wait on my Lord Treasurer, where was the victorious Duke of Marlborough, who came to me and took me by the hand with extraordinary familiarity and civility, as formerly he was used to do, without any alteration of his good nature. He had a most rich George in a Sardonyx set with diamonds of very great value, for the rest, very plain.^* I had not seen him for some years, and believed he might have forgotten me.²⁶

      This is a telling anecdote. Marlborough’s social accomplishments were legendary, and his ability to remember old acquaintances did much to help him. The Earl of Ailesbury remembered that when he was a Jacobite exile and Marlborough was the queen’s captain general and Allied commander-in-chief, the duke gave him dinner at his own ‘little table’ at headquarters, and held his hand for part of the meal, although (and here is another penetrating insight) he ensured that their clasped hands were hidden under a napkin.

Portraits in a Gallery

      We can get much closer to our quarry in words than we ever can in pictures. Portraits often deceive, and it is perhaps in the early eighteenth century that the deception is most complete. There are the great men of the age, with well-scrubbed pink-and-white faces, staring complacently at their world from beneath full-bottomed wigs, lips pursed in the half-smile of those who know that life has treated them well. The peruke’s soft curls and the snowy lace of a jabot tumble onto a coat whose stuff and hue betokens the wearer’s status: a cleric’s black broadcloth, a merchant’s prosperous blue or plum, or a soldier’s martial red. Peers often wear the ermine of their House, with a coronet denoting their rank (six silver balls on a plain silver gilt circlet for a baron, and on to the chased coronet with its eight strawberry leaves for a duke) dangling from the noble fingers or tossed onto a table just within the picture’s frame. In their portraits generals appear in the armour they would never have worn on the battlefield, sometimes with a plumed helmet, as useless then as a general’s ivory-hilted dress sword is today, standing in for a peer’s coronet.

      Women are plump-faced, opulent of bust and shoulders, and usually portrayed with their heads tilted ever so slightly to the right to allow the artist to throw some shadow beneath a soft jawline. Children are rarely allowed much in the way of childhood. Once boys had been breeched, at the age of four or five, they appeared as miniature adults. Johann Baptiste Clostermann’s huge family portrait of the Marlboroughs, painted in about 1694, shows the parents and their five children against theatrical drapes. John, later Marquess of Blandford, their eldest son, is stepping up onto the dais, looking back at the artist and gesturing proudly towards his elegant family. He was nine years old at the time.

      A year later Nicholas de Largillière painted James II’s only legitimate son, James Francis Edward Stuart (‘the Old Pretender’) and his sister Louisa Maria Theresa. Although the young prince was only seven and his sister just three, both are dressed for court: James is wearing long coat, lace jabot and silk stockings, and Louisa has a dress with a train and the tall fontange headdress. William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was the only one of Queen Anne’s many children to live beyond infancy, and was regarded by many as the heir most likely to prevent the restoration of his uncle James II. In 1699 Sir Godfrey Kneller painted him as a warrior prince, with a soldier’s cuirass: the boy was ten years old and had just a year to live.

      There is enough symbolism to keep costume historians busily engaged for years. Gentlemen advertise their status by wearing swords, the slim, straight-bladed small sword in town and the stubbier hunting sword in the country. Races at Newmarket, then the only major national meeting, were an exception, for folk of all classes met on equal terms, turning out ‘suitable to the humour and design of the place for horse sports’, with nobody wearing swords. Spurs were important even if there was no evidence of a horse, for they showed that although the sitter might not be riding at the time, he could vault into the saddle at a moment’s notice. Not for nothing did the Latin inscriptions on gentry’s tombstones style a knight as equitus and a gentleman as armiger. In Charles II’s time red shoe-heels – a fashion borrowed, like so much else, from France – suggested noble rank, and the fashion spread so that officers of the Restoration army were as identifiable by their bright heels as their great-grandsons were to be by their epaulettes. The greatest officers of state, like the lord treasurer and secretary of state, carried thin white