Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes

for toasting damnation to the new Tory ministry) for Mohun, and Colonel John Hamilton for the duke, had not let time hang heavy on their hands, and were at it too: Hamilton was pinked in the lower leg. Hamilton later claimed that he was holding his wounded principal when Mohun ran up and stabbed the prostrate man, and although the evidence was uncorroborated, Macartney wisely fled abroad. He reappeared after the accession of George I, stood his trial at the King’s Bench, and was acquitted.

      Officers, with their keen sense of honour and arms conveniently to hand, were always ready to lug out, though the British army never reached the quarrelsome pinnacle of its French opponents. De la Colonie fought his first duel when still a cadet, but his opponent, a lieutenant and assistant adjutant of the Régiment de Navarre, summoned help by yelling ‘À moi, Navarre,’ and thus unsportingly turning private squabble into public riot. Peter Drake, then serving in a French regiment, was with ‘thirteen friends and bottle companions’ when a dispute arose between two of them. They decided on a mass duel, and as they were walking to a suitable ground Lieutenant de la Salle, observing that the numbers were uneven, cheerfully joined the smaller group. For a moment there was a chance of reconciliation, but de la Salle observed that the wine was drawn and they must drink it.

      The fight began, every man tilting at his opponent, and the two principals engaged; and in a short time killed each other. There was another lost on the part for which I fought, and some wounded on both sides; and I had the good fortune to wound and disarm Monsieur de la Salle.³⁷

      British officers, though, were no slouches. In 1692, when Lord Berkeley’s regiment of dragoons was quartered in Louvain a convivial evening at Captain Edward Mortimer’s lodgings was interrupted by the drunken arrival of Captain Thomas Lloyd, who had recently left the regiment in disgrace. As the officers walked out across the marketplace, Lloyd blamed Major Giles Spencer for his misfortunes: both men drew, and Lloyd was wounded in the thigh, dying soon afterwards. Spencer was court-martialled, and acquitted on the grounds of self-defence. Two years later, despite the fact that the Allied army was marching flat-out to stop the French from crossing the Scheldt near Oudenarde, Sandy Dundas found time to kill Cornet Conway of Lord Polwarth’s Regiment.

      In 1699 the foppish young Conway Seymour met Captain George Kirke of the Royal Horse Guards in Hyde Park, and high words were exchanged. Seymour was stabbed in the neck, and seemed likely to recover when he embarked on a debauch which made him vomit, reopening the wound and causing an infection which killed him. Kirke was convicted of manslaughter and ‘burned in the hand’, branded with a hot iron, a punishment made rather less damaging if one could afford to pay to have the iron dipped in cold water first. He was temporarily suspended from his commission, but went on to be promoted.³⁸ In 1711 the Duke of Argyll, a member of the anti-Marlborough faction, heard from ‘a penny post letter sent him from an unknown hand’ that Colonel Court of the foot guards had refused to drink his health, saying, ‘Damn him he would not drink the health of a man that changed sides.’ When the matter was put to the good colonel he confessed that he had been in drink at the time and had no idea at all what he might have said, but would not deny His Grace satisfaction: ‘They fought in Hyde Park, and the Duke disarmed him, and there’s an end of the business.’

      In 1708 it was said by Ensign Hugh Shaw that the Master of Sinclair, captain-lieutenant in Colonel Preston’s Regiment, ‘had bowed himself towards the ground for a considerable time altogether’ in the hard-fought little battle of Wynendaele. Captain Alexander Shaw, the ensign’s older brother, took his sibling’s side, but Sinclair killed them both, allegedly by hitting Alexander over the head with a concealed stick before wounding him mortally, and then going on to pistol young Hugh ‘before he had time to put himself in a posture of defence’.³⁹ The case caused serious difficulties, for Sir John Shaw, brother of the two dead men, petitioned the queen, demanding the death penalty, while John Sinclair, eldest son of a Scots peer, was not without clout of his own. The solution was typical of the age. Sinclair was convicted by court-martial on one count of murder, but miraculously escaped from custody. On 26 May 1709 Marlborough wrote to Lord Raby, then ambassador to Berlin.

      This will be delivered to Y[our].E[xcellency]. by the Master of St Clair … who having had the misfortune to kill two brothers of Sir John Shaw the last campaign in Flanders, for one of which being tried and condemned by a court martial, he has found means to get away, and must now seek employment elsewhere. If Y.E. will please to take him under your protection and recommend him to your court, I shall take it as a particular favour … ⁴⁰

Influence and Interest

      Influence, that glutinous, omnipresent lubricant that the age called ‘interest’, was never far away, and we cannot hope to understand the period without analysing it. It had a number of components. There was a strong strain of two-way obligation laced with self-interest, with tenants supporting their landlords, officers their colonels, and the heads of families striving to provide for distant relatives. Most contemporaries thought that the process was wholly proper, and the tomb of Elizabeth Bate, widow of the Reverend Richard Bate, who died in 1751 at the age of seventy-four, proudly announced that:

      She was honourably descended

      And by means of her Alliance to

      The illustrious family of Stanhope

      She had the merit to obtain

      For her husband and children

      Twelve several employments

      In Church and State.⁴¹

      Yet even contemporaries, well aware of how the system operated, sometimes thought that it went too far. In 1722 a news-sheet lambasted Robert Walpole, the first man to be widely regarded as prime minister.

      First Lord of the Treasury, Mr Walpole. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Walpole. Clerk of the Pells, Mr Walpole’s son. Customs of London, second son of Mr Walpole … Secretary of the Treasury, Mr Walpole’s brother. Secretary to Ireland, Mr Walpole’s brother. Secretary to the Postmaster-General, Mr Walpole’s brother in law.⁴²

      Many posts, lucrative in themselves, brought with them the right to appoint to other posts, and there was a palpable pull-through as interest groups prospered, and its distressing reverse as the fall of powerful patrons sent misfortune knocking on down the line. In 1718 Sir Christopher Wren lost his post as surveyor general as part of a wider redistribution of spoils. Sir John Vanbrugh would not accept the office ‘out of tenderness to Sir Christopher Wren’, so it went instead to an incompetent nonentity, William Benson.⁴³

      Sarah Marlborough often repeated that her cousin Abigail Hill, who was to supplant her in the queen’s affections, had been raised from nothing by her deployment of interest. Abigail was the daughter of a City merchant ‘by a sister of my father’, and as soon as Sarah heard that she was in want she sent her ten guineas. When the Duke of Gloucester died Sarah got her £200 a year out of the queen’s privy purse, and secured a place in the customs for her son. She recommended Abigail’s brother Jack – ‘a tall boy, whom I clothed … and put to school at St Albans’ – to the Duke of Marlborough.

      And although my Lord always said that Jack Hill was good for nothing yet to oblige me he made him his aide de camp, and afterwards gave him a regiment. But it was his sister’s interest that raised him to be a general, and to command in that memorable [Sarahese for deeply unsuccessful] expedition to Quebec: I had no share in doing him these honours.⁴⁴

      As Sarah’s interest waned, Abigail’s waxed. In 1710 Lord Raby told his brother Peter that ‘Lord Powlett has complemented