Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes

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      In the short term, though, the Restoration changed the fortunes of the Churchill family at a stroke. A gleeful Winston immediately published Divi Britannici: Being a remark upon the lives of all the kings of this isle, a joyfully uncritical celebration of monarchy. He was elected MP for Weymouth in 1661, sitting for that constituency in the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ which lasted till 1679, and going on to represent Lyme from 1685 until his death in 1688. Winston enjoyed the patronage of Sir Henry Bennet (Lord Arlington from 1663), also an Oxford man and a Civil War royalist. He had taken a sword-cut across the face (an occupational hazard for a cavalryman, and precisely the reason why sensible folk, roundhead or cavalier, wore a lobster-tail pot with a sliding noseguard) in a skirmish near Andover in 1644, and habitually wore a black plaster which concealed the wound but, in so doing, advertised its recipient’s loyalty. Arlington accompanied the royal family in exile, where he became secretary to James, Duke of York, and after the Restoration he went on to be a major political figure, not least because of his ability to select (and, so some averred, sample in advance) ladies who might meet his master’s generous tastes.

      We do not know what brought Arlington and Churchill together, but we can make an educated guess. They had overlapped at Oxford, though they were in different colleges, and they both fought in the south-west, so it is just possible to think of a friendship forged in an Oxford ale-house and continued through the hack-and-gallop affair at Andover; and Arlington was anxious to build up his own client base in the West Country. Thanks to Arlington’s patronage, in 1661 Winston Churchill became a commissioner of the Court of Claims and Explanations (Ireland), a body charged with reviewing the redistribution of land in Ireland during the Civil War and the Protectorate. In 1664 he became junior clerk comptroller to the Board of Green Cloth, a committee taking its name from the baize-covered table at which its members sat, which audited the expenses of the royal household and exercised administrative jurisdiction within royal palaces. On 12 June 1681, for example, with a proper regard for interior economy, the board ordered that: ‘The Maids of Honour should have cherry tarts instead of gooseberry tarts, it being observed that cherries are three pence a pound.’ In 1664 Winston was knighted, and he had already been authorised to add an augmentation to his cherished coat of arms, ‘for his service to the late king as captain of horse, and for his present loyalty as a member of this House of Commons’. His arms bore the motto Fiel pero desdichado, ‘Faithful but Unfortunate’.

      Winston might more accurately have described himself as faithful but busy. In 1662 he departed for Ireland, where young John attended the Dublin Free Grammar School. He returned to England in 1664, and it seems safe to surmise that John came with him, to become one of the 153 scholars at St Paul’s School. It is certain that Sir Winston bought a house in the capital, for Sarah Marlborough later recalled John showing her the family home in the City of London. The early records of St Paul’s School were destroyed in 1666, during the Great Fire, but a copy of Vegetius’ De Re Militari, with an annotation certifying that it was from that book that ‘John Churchill, scholar of this school, afterwards the celebrated Duke of Marlborough, first learnt the elements of the art of war’, survived.

      Winston S. Churchill wondered how ‘our hero was able to extract various modern sunbeams from this ancient cucumber’.¹⁶ However, Professor Philip Sabin has recently suggested that military history might indeed be the most important legacy of the ancient world. While Vegetius’ first two books are perhaps of little value to succeeding ages, his third, in which he sums up Roman strategy, tactics and logistics, has been hailed as ‘the foundation of military learning for every European commander from William the Silent to Frederick the Great’. He emphasised the importance of seeking information to dispel the fog of war, while at the same time concealing one’s own strength and plans. Vegetius dealt with the principles of war fought for limited objectives, by no means an inapt comparison with the wars of the early eighteenth century. ‘Consult with many on proper measures to be taken, but communicate the plans you intend to put in execution to few, and those only of most assured fidelity,’ he suggested. ‘Or better,’ he added, ‘trust no one but yourself.’¹⁷ There could scarcely be a better description of John Churchill’s approach to generalship.

      In 1665, with John still at school, his sister Arabella was appointed a maid of honour to the Duchess of York, wife of the king’s brother James. Given the close relationship between York and Arlington, and the latter’s role as royal pander, what followed soon afterwards should come as no surprise. Winston called on the fashionable portraitist Sir Peter Lely, and at some time in the very early 1660s Lely painted his eldest son Winston and his daughter Arabella in neo-classical dress. At this time Arabella was perhaps fourteen years old, and her remorselessly flat-chested portrait gives little hint that she was soon to prove irresistibly attractive to the Duke of York.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ