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BY WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

MARLBOROUGH
From an engraving after a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller

This volume upon the fall of Marlborough completes the story of his life which I began nearly ten years ago. It exposes and explains the lamentable desertion by England of her leadership of the Grand Alliance, or League of Nations, which had triumphantly broken the military power of Louis XIV. It shows how when victory has been won across measureless hazards it can be cast away by the pride of a victorious War Party and the intrigues of a pacifist reaction.

In the spring of 1709 we see England, or Great Britain, as she had recently become, at the summit of power and achievement. Queen Anne, seated securely upon her throne, was the centre of the affairs of the then known world. The smallest incident at her Court was studied with profound respect or attention by all civilized countries. Louis XIV, old, broken, bereaved, brooded disconsolately amid the stricken splendours of Versailles. The tyrant of Europe, who had let loose a quarter of a century of war upon his neighbours, had become a suppliant. The Whig Party in England, possessed of majorities in the Lords and Commons, had forced themselves into power. They no longer sought the liberation of Europe, but the destruction of France. They lost the victorious peace which might have closed the struggle. In France they roused the patriotism with which Frenchmen have always defended their soil, and in England they fell a prey to the designs of their party foes. The terrible battle of Malplaquet, the bloodiest and best contested for a hundred years, marked the climax of their efforts. Thereafter all became shameful and confused. Queen Anne abandoned the purposes of her reign. Abigail led Harley up the backstairs. The Queen devoted her great power to driving out the Whigs. England was dominated by party politics and the jealous emulation of great nobles. Marlborough and Godolphin were undermined. The Whigs were ejected and chased from office, and a Ministry was installed resolved upon peace at any cost. But by these very facts the French were incited to continue their resistance, and after three more years of conflict they found themselves, though exhausted, still erect.

This process depended upon the political drama in London, which in its various acts and scenes illustrates vividly the life of a Parliamentary nation, and reveals at many points the foundations of our Constitution. Marlborough was hunted down. His wife was driven from the Court. He himself, though he served the Tories faithfully in the field, was subjected to the cruellest humiliations and vile, undeserved reproach. The British army was forced to abandon its comrades in the field, and a peace was made contrary to every canon of international good faith. All Europe, friend and foe, was staggered by the perfidy of the Tory Ministers; but while the Queen lived they ruled with unchallengeable authority. Marlborough chose exile rather than the ill-usage he must receive in his native land. The name of England became a byword on the Continent, and at the moment of Queen Anne’s death the Protestant Succession itself was in danger, and our island on the verge of a second Civil War. This supreme disaster was averted, but when Marlborough returned to his native land and to a great position, time and age, which cast their veils over the fierce impulses and scenes of action, had led him to the dusk of his life.

I have tried to show Marlborough in his wonderful strength, without concealing his faults. I am not aware of any charge brought against him that has not been fully exposed and discussed. My impression of his size and power has grown with study. His genius in war, his statecraft, his virtues as a man, may be judged by these pages; nor is it necessary to dwell further upon them here. Happy the State or sovereign who finds such a servant in years of danger!

I have followed the method used in earlier volumes of always endeavouring to make Marlborough speak whenever possible. I have drawn upon the admirable foreign histories of this period—Klopp, Salomon, Von Noorden—and have been guided by them to the vivid reports of Hoffmann, Gallas, and other ambassadors and envoys to the English Court. From these sources a more intimate picture can be obtained of the political life of our country than in any of our domestic records.

The Blenheim archives have been found more fertile than in the preceding volume; in particular the reports of the British spy in Paris seem of high interest.

I must express my acknowledgments to the authorities of the Rijksarchief at The Hague for the courtesy with which they have laid their archives open to me; and also to the Huntington Library in California, to the Hon. Edward Cadogan, Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon Halswell, and others who have contributed original material.

I have been greatly assisted in the necessary researches by Mr F. W. Deakin, of Wadham College, Oxford, and again by Brigadier R. P. Pakenham-Walsh and Commander J. H. Owen, R.N., in technical matters. I accord my thanks to all those who so kindly allowed me to reproduce pictures and portraits in their possession, and to the present Duke of Marlborough for continuing to give me the freedom of the Blenheim archives.

WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL

Documents never before made public are distinguished by an asterisk (*).

All italics are the Author’s, unless the contrary is stated.

In the diagrams, except where otherwise stated, fortresses held by the Allies are shown as black stars and those occupied by the French as white stars.

METHOD OF DATING

Until 1752 dates in England and on the Continent differed owing to our delay in adopting the Reformed Calendar of Gregory XIII. The dates which prevailed in England were known as Old Style, those abroad as New Style. In the seventeenth century the difference was ten days, in the eighteenth century eleven days. For example, January 1, 1601 (O.S.), was January 11, 1601 (N.S.), and January 1, 1701 (O.S.), was January 12, 1701 (N.S.).

The method used has been to give all dates of events that occurred in England in the Old Style, and of events that occurred abroad in New Style. Letters and papers are dated in the New Style unless they were actually written in England. In sea battles and a few other convenient cases the dates are given in both styles.

It was also customary at this time—at any rate, in English official documents—to date the year as beginning on Lady Day, March 25. What we should call January 1, 1700, was then called January 1, 1699, and so on for all days up to March 25, when 1700 began. This has been a fertile source of confusion. In this book all dates between January 1 and March 25 have been made to conform to the modern practice.

The whole of Europe was now weary of the almost unceasing wars which had ravaged its peoples for twenty years. Peace was desired by all the warring states. It was in all men’s minds. The Allies wished to reap the fruits of victory. Louis XIV, resigned to the decision of arms, sought only a favourable or even a tolerable escape. The enormous quarrel had been fought out, and the exorbitant power of France was broken. Not one of the original objects of the war was not already gained. Many further advantages were open. Why then was this peace not achieved in the winter of 1708 or the spring of 1709? Upon Marlborough has been cast the responsibility for this lamentable breakdown in human affairs. How far is this censure just? The issue is decisive for his fame. Before it can be judged his authority and the foundations on which it stood in Holland and in Britain must be measured.

From the day in 1706 on which the Emperor had first offered him the Viceroyalty of the Netherlands a sense of divergent interest had arisen between the Dutch leaders and their Deputy Captain-General. Although Marlborough had at a very early stage refused the offer, the Dutch could not help suspecting first that he owed them a grudge for having been the obstacle, and secondly that he still hoped to obtain the prize. It was known in Holland that both the Hapsburg brothers were intent upon this plan. After Oudenarde Marlborough had been sent a patent for life of the Governorship of the Netherlands. In August 1708 King Charles had written, “I do not doubt but that you will never allow the Netherlands, under the pretext of that pretended Barrier, to suffer any diminution either in their area or as regards my royal authority in them, which authority I wish to place in your hands.”^[1]

In reporting the arrival of the patent to Godolphin Marlborough had written, “This must be known to nobody but the Queen; for should it be known before the peace, it would create inconveniences in Holland.” But, he had added, if when the time came Anne “should not think it for her honour and interest that I accept of this great offer, I will decline it with all the submission imaginable.”^[2]

Nothing, indeed, could be more correct than his conduct. But the Dutch increasingly regarded him as the interested supporter of Hapsburg and Imperial claims rather than of their own. Rumours of the arrival of the patent were rife in The Hague in December. There is a report in the Heinsius Archives of an interview in December 1708 between Marlborough and the Dutch Intendant at Brussels, a certain Pesters, with whom he was particularly friendly and from whom he gained much information. Marlborough spoke with vehemence.

During the summer of 1708 a correspondence sprang up between Heinsius and Torcy, the French Foreign Minister, the tendency of which was a separate understanding between Holland and France which might well bring about a general peace conference. This was irregular, but not necessarily disloyal. The preliminaries of the Treaty of Ryswick, in spite of the passionate resentment of England, had been arranged for the whole coalition by Holland, and the Dutch Republic conceived itself upon this precedent practically entitled by custom to test for itself, without consulting its allies, the readiness of the enemy to make peace. Louis XIV also was obstinately convinced that the path to peace lay through an initial and separate understanding with The Hague. A means of communication had long existed in the person of Herman von Petkum. Petkum, “Petithomme,” as Marlborough once, perhaps accidentally, spelt his name, was officially the agent at The Hague of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, but he was in fact the Pensionary’s servant, reserved for just this kind of work. Although he was paid not only by Heinsius and Vienna, but by Torcy,^[4] his faithful and skilful labours for peace none the less deserve respect. At the end of May 1708, even before the battle of Oudenarde, Torcy had invited Petkum secretly to Paris, and in August, with the knowledge and approval of Heinsius,^[5] he had conversations with Torcy at Fontainebleau. Torcy complained of the obduracy of the Allies. Petkum said this was due to the shifting propositions of France through different channels, and insisted that France must as preliminaries agree to yield Spain and the Indies, and all allied conquests in Brabant, Flanders, and Alsace; must recognize Queen Anne and undertake not to interfere with her or with the order of succession established by Parliament; must restore English trade in France to its former footing, and accord to Holland the tariff of 1664 and a satisfactory Barrier.

Torcy said that France would hazard everything sooner than submit to these excessive demands. On the other hand, he contemplated the partition of the Spanish Empire, was prepared to yield the bulk of it, and also declared that “the maritime Powers should receive security for their trade, and the Low Countries their tariff and their Barrier.”^[6]

Having remained at Fontainebleau for five or six days, Petkum returned to Holland and reported everything to the Pensionary. But Heinsius told Marlborough nothing.^[7]

It was not proper nor did it prove possible to keep all this from the vigilant Captain-General. During August the news of Petkum’s Paris visit leaked out in high circles at The Hague, and it cannot be doubted that it soon reached Marlborough. In fact, at the beginning of 1709 his Secret Service obtained the whole file of the current Torcy-Petkum correspondence. It was in cipher; but one of his agents, Blencowe,^[8] a gentleman from Northampton, succeeded in penetrating the code, and translations of eleven letters are now in the Public Record Office.^[9] In the autumn of 1708, however, Marlborough was dependent mainly on oral accounts. He was conscious that his relations with Heinsius were far from sure. He was not willing that Heinsius should pursue separate negotiations behind his back or that of the British Government, and in his turn he sought contact with France.

Throughout the long campaigns Marlborough had maintained correspondence, written in English and under his secret sign “00,” with his illustrious nephew Berwick. In the main this had been concerned with the courtesies of war, and cherished kinship amid national quarrels. It also served to keep alive that link with the exiled family at Saint-Germain which had persisted for so many years. But Marlborough’s civilities, although they always excited tremors of hope, had long ceased seriously to deceive the Shadow Court. It was not till 1708 that the correspondence touched any serious matter. Communication was easy, for Berwick at Château l’Abbaye was but a day’s ride from Marlborough’s headquarters at Helchin, and there was much traffic between the hostile commanders upon the exchange of prisoners, safeguards, and complaints of various kinds. To and fro went the messengers with their trumpets and flags of truce, bearing letters of routine, and other letters also, in their sabretaches. Marlborough took every possible precaution. He enjoined secrecy. He requested Berwick to return each of his letters with the answer. He seems to have trusted him absolutely, and as it proved rightly. Nevertheless, he ran a very high degree of risk in confiding himself to those upon whom he was inflicting such grievous injuries when, without consulting the Queen or the Cabinet, Sarah or Godolphin, Heinsius or Eugene, he at last, in mid-August 1708, definitely set on foot a peace negotiation.

Marlborough to Berwick

It will be seen that Marlborough’s intervention took the form, not of superseding any negotiations already in progress between France and Holland, but rather of broadening their basis, and bringing himself and Britain into them. Berwick replied cordially to this letter, and sent it to the King. Louis and his advisers Chamillart and Torcy were all set on dealing with the Dutch alone. They did not welcome the intervention at this stage of Marlborough, and still less of Britain. They also inclined to regard Marlborough’s letter as only another of his innumerable traps and stratagems. Chamillart thought that it confessed a precarious military position. The answer which Berwick was at length directed to send reflected these views. “It is not now for his Majesty to make such overtures, but for the Dutch.”^[12] He invited Marlborough to continue to use him as a channel, and thanked him for his efforts to save the lives of Lord Griffin and Middleton’s sons. Marlborough could only reply, “The King is alone the judge of what is best for his honour and his interest. . . . If ever the King wishes to let me know his intentions about peace, I desire that it should be by your agency, for I shall have no reserve with you, being sure of the care you will have for my safety and my honour.”^[13] And a day or two later: “I beg you to believe that I have no other reason for asking you for the return of my letters than the fear of accidents, for I will always trust you willingly with my life and my honour. So pray return me in your first letter that which I wrote you on the 14th.”^[14]

During the next two months Petkum continued his activities: “I have promised Heinsius,” he wrote to Torcy (September 11), “to treat with him alone and let him communicate to Marlborough no more than he thinks fit.” But Marlborough had already heard many things. Petkum wrote (September 25), “Marlborough suspects some secret negotiation, and will do what he can to thwart it.”^[15] By the end of October the Duke feared that the Dutch were about to quit the Alliance.^[16] No answer had been returned to his urgent request for an augmentation of their army for the campaign of 1709, and he saw that the fall of Lille would encourage the Dutch to a quick separate negotiation. Boufflers^[17] beat the chamade on October 25, and on the 29th Marlborough received an unsatisfactory reply from Heinsius about the augmentation. Confronted with a grave menace to the Alliance and to British interests, he made a renewed and far more direct effort to gain control of the peace negotiations, and to bring London and Vienna into them.

On October 30, the night that the capitulation terms of Lille were finally agreed, and the day after receiving Heinsius’s refusal to increase the Dutch army, he wrote again to Berwick. This time he proposed that France, counting on his aid, should ask for an armistice and openly seek a peace.

Marlborough to Berwick

There follows this remarkable passage:

It is indeed amazing that any man should have the hardihood to write such a letter to those who regarded him as their most terrible foe—indeed, their only foe. Marlborough is justified before history in pursuing these unauthorized negotiations. In his supreme position, both military and political, he was entitled, on his own judgment and at his own peril, to act for the best for his country, for the Alliance, and for Europe, all bleeding and ravaged by interminable war. It is often inevitable that the first overtures of peace should be made by secret and informal means. Marlborough, for his part, combined all the qualities both of the military and the civil power; he was the soul of the war, and if he thought it was time to make peace he was right before God and man to do so. But to introduce into this grave and delicate transaction a question of private gain, a personal reward of an enormous sum of money, however related to the standards of those times, was, apart from moral considerations, imprudent in the last degree. Yet this conduct has a palliative feature curiously characteristic of several of Marlborough’s most questionable acts. It served interests national, European, and personal at once and equally. It was the one thing capable of convincing the French King and Cabinet of his sincerity. It affected Berwick in this sense immediately. “Although naturally,” he wrote to Torcy on November 2, “I am not taken in by all he says, nevertheless I am inclined to believe in his good faith on this occasion, all the more because he speaks in it of a certain matter by which you know he sets great store.”^[19]

It certainly shook the advisers of Louis XIV. “If he is sincere,” wrote Chamillart to Torcy (November 2), “use should be made of his goodwill, which would not be bought too dearly at Monsieur d’Alègre’s figure.”^[20] The dreaded conqueror placing himself in their hands in this way, and revealing his personal weakness so nakedly, went far to sweep away their inveterate suspicions. They addressed themselves with renewed concern to his proposal. In the course of their anxious confabulations a memorandum was written, assembling all the arguments for and against the project, which throws a revealing light upon the inmost thoughts of the hard-pressed yet mighty monarchy.

In the end, however, King Louis and his councillors could not bring themselves to take the momentous step which Marlborough required. They still saw plainly the shattering effects upon French prestige and French means of resistance which were involved in suing for an armistice or initiating a peace proposal to Holland on the morrow of the fall of the city of Lille. It spelt defeat, acknowledged for all time in letters of fire. Well might they believe that Marlborough was sincere; for what better conclusion could the war hold for him? His sword would have struck the final blow. They would have surrendered beneath its impact, and he would quit the field of war loaded alike with glory and booty. More grievous distresses were needed to bring them to their knees. So, hearkening principally to Chamillart and his false ideas about the immediate military situation, clinging to the hope that the French armies could winter on the Scheldt and that Lille could be regained in the spring, the King directed Berwick to say in reply:

Berwick was sorry to have to send such an answer. He had arrived by very different paths at the same estimate of the war facts as Marlborough. “Nothing,” wrote Berwick,

That Berwick was right upon the personal and military issues cannot be disputed. Marlborough felt himself violently rebuffed. He does not seem to have minded at all asking the King of France to give him a fortune if he brought all things to a happy conclusion. He had no consciousness of how disdainfully posterity would view this incident. But he was deeply angered that the other side should dispute his opinion upon the military situation. He was sure he could beat their armies wherever they chose to stand. His peace proposals had been sincere. He had made the French what he deemed a fair offer. They had rejected it. Let them, then, since they were so proud, learn the consequences. In a few weeks he had broken their lines along the Scheldt, recaptured Ghent and Bruges, and driven Burgundy and Vendôme helter-skelter into France. “I am much mortified,” he wrote to Berwick,

He would, he added, continue to do his best to reach a just and lasting peace before the next campaign, “and meanwhile the two armies will be free to make the best use of the advantages which they each suppose they possess. Please send me back my letters with your next.” Marlborough’s request for the return of his letters was evidently complied with by Berwick. The French archives contain only unsigned, undated translations from Marlborough’s English in Middleton’s^[26] hand, with comments by Berwick.^[27] This fact has a bearing on a future transaction.

THE OLD PRETENDER
A. S. Belle
National Portrait Gallery

So failed Marlborough’s personal effort for peace. That it was wisely and justly founded at the time few can doubt. It is tarnished for us by the alloy of a sordid pecuniary interest. But this, indeed, in that age added to its chances of success. Some writers have actually maintained that Marlborough only inserted this suggestion in order to convince the French Court of his sincerity; and they point to his refusals, to the astonishment of Torcy, of all bribes when these were eventually offered. But the suspicion remains. It reflects more upon Marlborough as a man than upon Marlborough as a worker. He was a greater worker than man. No personal interest or failing turned him from his work. He toiled and schemed with all his power for a reconciled and tolerant Europe, a chastened France, and a glorious England to inherit the New World. As a part in these purposes he delighted in military success. All these conditions being satisfied, and without prejudice to their achievement, he would take pains and stoop for a commission. Supreme sanity, profound comprehension, valiant, faithful action, and if all went well large and punctual money payments!

The Lords of the Junto had held together through many baffling years. They now formed the core of a party Cabinet which controlled ample majorities in both Houses. We must not underrate their contribution to the course of public affairs. For years in their splendid country houses, in their clubs, in their party groupings and assemblies, they had examined and discussed every aspect of British politics and of the European war. They conceived themselves the heirs to the majestic estate which Marlborough’s sword and their policy had raised for Britain. They proposed to manage it in their own way, and in accordance with the matured and defined principles of their party, and, above all, in accordance with its interest. On no point did the Whigs ever consciously diverge from that.

The arid, pedantic Sunderland was no longer their chief representative in the Cabinet. Somers had become Lord President of the Council. His outstanding ability, his experience, his learning, his eloquence and aptitude in speech and writing, once joined to a great office, ensured him leadership in the political world. Godolphin, divorced from the Tories, evidently weakened with the Queen, was, in spite of his Treasurership, eclipsed at the council board. His political authority, apart from his long fame, amounted to no more than his unbreakable association with Marlborough.

On the other hand, the fact that the Whigs were now effectively in power, and for the first time satisfied with their treatment by the Crown, removed for the moment all Parliamentary difficulties. For the first time in Anne’s reign the organized dominant forces in the Cabinet and in Parliament had a clear-cut, coherent policy upon the war, upon peace negotiations, and in domestic affairs. The Whig leaders regarded Marlborough as their most valuable instrument. They were at last also contented with Godolphin. Few scruples had governed the pressures they had exerted upon the Crown or upon the Captain-General and Treasurer in order to gain office; but it must be admitted that, once installed, they showed themselves resolute, efficient, and helpful in all the processes of government. They managed the Parliamentary machine with deft and sure touch. Queen Anne had hoped that in practice the Whig Party would be split between the Junto and its moderate elements; but the Junto showed themselves too clever for this. They withdrew their own nominee for the Speakership in favour of the candidate of the moderates, and carried him with a solid party vote. The Royal Speech in November breathed inflexible resolution to continue the war with the utmost vigour. The addresses in reply from both Houses praised the Queen’s conduct of affairs in glowing terms. The successes of the campaign were extolled, and the thanks of Parliament were once again voted unanimously to the Duke of Marlborough for his latest successes and for the energy which he was displaying in the national service. Since he was still abroad, a delegation was sent to present these tributes to him. Without waiting for any similar decision by the Dutch, an augmentation of ten thousand men was voted for the army in Flanders.

Finance was the field in which the Whig mastery was greatest. The whole force of the City, of the Bank of England, of the moneyed classes, obeyed the Ministerial requirements with the enthusiasm of confidence and interest. The largest estimates yet presented were cheerfully accepted by the House of Commons. All Europe marvelled that in the seventh year of so great and costly a war, when every other state was almost beggared, if not bankrupt, the wealth of England proved inexhaustible. Indeed, it seemed that the Government held a magic purse. The yield of high taxation was reinforced by internal borrowing upon the largest scale yet known. The Bank, in exchange for a twenty-one years’ extension of their charter, bound themselves to provide four hundred thousand in cash and issue two and a quarter millions of bank-bills. The lists were opened on February 11. Within four hours of nine o’clock the whole amount was subscribed, and eager would-be lenders were turned away in crowds.^[28] Hoffmann dilated to the Emperor upon these prodigies, as they then seemed to the world. “Outside England,” he wrote,

In the ordinary tactics of party also the Whigs easily out-manœuvred the Tory Opposition. They freed Marlborough and Godolphin from the minor annoyances which they had so long endured while unprovided with a disciplined majority. If there were losses and arrears in the yield of the Land Tax they would allow no censure to fall upon the Treasurer. Godolphin’s name was deleted from the hostile motion by 231 votes to 97. If there were reproaches that the measures to defend Scotland at the time of the invasion had been inadequate, these were converted into votes of confidence and thanks to the Queen’s Government for the great and effectual precautions they had taken and for their success. If “warm speeches were made against him, and he was roasted, as they call it,”^[30] the Whigs hastened to his aid. There was another little matter in which the Whigs made themselves obliging to the two non-party or super-Ministers. An act of general pardon was passed for all correspondence with the Court of Saint-Germain, and, indeed, for all past treasonable actions of any kind except treason upon the high seas. This last provision was designed to exclude the Jacobites who had actually sailed in the invading fleet the year before. Thus the slate was cleaned, and a very large number of Tories and Jacobites both in England and Scotland, who lay under anxieties for what they had done or planned to do if the Pretender landed, were generously released by those who might have been expected to be their chief prosecutors. Gratitude from this quarter was neither expected nor received.^[31]

JOHN, LORD SOMERS
From an engraving after a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller

Marlborough had always pursued his devious way serene and imperturbable. He did not concern himself with the Amnesty Bill. But Godolphin, whom Wharton had recently confronted with one of those customary sentimental letters to Mary of Modena which the Treasurer persisted in writing, was certainly well pleased to have an Act of Parliament between him and future reprisals by his enemies. It is perhaps of significance that the Queen gave consent to the Bill on the very day of its passage. To have the Whigs showing themselves so accommodating to her Tory and Jacobite friends and to Mr Harley, lately harried again over the Greg affair, was at any rate some compensation for their presence at her Council.

But the incident most illustrative of these times concerned the Queen herself. A number of young Whig Members moved an address to the Queen urging her to marry again. This striking proposal was not only supported by the House of Commons, but endorsed by the Lords. At this time Queen Anne was in the depths of mourning for her husband. She had already been eighteen times disappointed of an heir by death or miscarriage; she was within a few days of her forty-fifth birthday. It had, in fact, been decided to omit from the accession service the prayer that the Queen might be “an happy mother of children, who, being educated in Thy true faith and fear, may happily succeed her in the Government of these kingdoms.” What wonder then that many regarded such a suggestion to the Queen as ill-timed and indecorous? Indeed, Mordaunt, Peterborough’s younger brother, who sat in the Commons, raised a general laugh when he suggested impudently that the address should be presented only by Members who had not yet reached their thirtieth year. The explanation was, however, simple to those who were behind the scenes. The bitterness which the Whig triumph aroused in the Tory Opposition had led them once again to bait the Queen with the prospect of bringing over the Electress of Hanover or her son to visit or, perhaps, to reside in England. The Whig counter-move was to urge the Queen to marry again, for she could hardly be urged to do this one day and to bring over the existing heir the next. It seems certain that the Queen fully understood the tactics of both the attackers and the defenders. She replied by message sedately the next day: “The subject of the address is of such a nature that I am persuaded you do not expect a particular answer.”^[32] But if the Queen, weighed down by her grief and increasing infirmities, was thus quaintly protected by the Whigs from a Hanoverian intrusion, and might even recognize their Parliamentary dexterity, she nevertheless sought their expulsion from office as her chief desire.

At this time one would suppose Marlborough and Godolphin had all they could ask in Britain for themselves or for their policy. Yet their intimate letters reveal their profound misgivings and discouragement. Godolphin harps again on vexations to which “the life of a slave in the galley is paradise in comparison.”^[33] Marlborough replies that nothing but his loyalty to his colleagues and his duty to the Queen would make him endure the burden and hazards of his command. There is so much bewailing in the Marlborough-Godolphin correspondence, written for no eye but their own, that many writers have questioned the sincerity of these tough, untiring personalities who, in the upshot, held on with extreme tenacity and to the last minute to every scrap of power. It was surely, then, no mere desire to keep up appearances before each other, but rather to fortify their own minds for action by asseverating their own disinterestedness, that made it worth while to set all this on paper? It is certain that neither was deceived by the favourable surface which British politics had assumed. Both knew too much of what was hidden from Parliament and even from the foreign envoys in London. They knew Queen Anne with the knowledge of a lifetime. They knew the Tory Party to its roots. They had enjoyed the best opportunities of measuring ex-Secretary of State Harley. Thus their eyes were necessarily fixed upon Abigail and the visitors she brought to the Queen by the backstairs.

Party government in time of war might show management and efficiency, but it lacked the deep-seated, massive strength of a national combination. This was revealed only too clearly upon the question of conscription. The fighting had lasted so long in 1708 that the regimental officers concerned in recruiting not only for reinforcements, but even for drafts, were very late in coming over. Parliament had voted an extra ten thousand men for the coming campaign, but had not yet faced the difficulties of recruiting them. Several proposals had been put forward in Ministerial circles. One was the Swedish plan that owners of houses and land should be organized in groups, each group being responsible for the maintenance of a recruit. Walpole, the Secretary-at-War, proposed recruiting the English Army after the French pattern, based on the obligations of each individual parish. But the Cabinet did not feel strong enough to adopt either scheme in the face of high Tory and Whig opposition. Even the tightening up of the existing recruiting laws upon the unemployed and idle was not carried through.^[34] In fact, apart from hired foreign contingents, the proportion of British soldiers in the allied ranks was smaller in 1709 than ever before.

Neither could the Whigs bring to the peace negotiations the real force of a national decision. A Whig Government might in 1707 and earlier years have been most helpful to vigorous war. In 1709 their peculiar qualities, prejudices, and formulas were a new obstacle to the peace now within reach. England had little to ask for herself. The recognition of the Protestant Succession, the expulsion of the Pretender from France, and the demolition of the harbour and fortifications of Dunkirk seemed modest requirements for the State and nation which had formed, sustained, revived, and during so many years led to victory the entire coalition. But upon the general objective of the war the London Cabinet was implacable. The whole of the original Spanish Empire—Spain, Italy, and the Indies—must be wrested from Philip V, the Duke of Anjou, and given to Charles III. As early as 1703 Rochester and the high Tories, intent upon colonial acquisition, had raised the cry “No peace without Spain.” The Whigs, while holding a different view about strategy, were for their part more than willing to associate themselves with this sweeping demand. What had become for years a Parliamentary watchword was now to be made good. This was not only an extension of the original purposes of the war; it was a perversion of them. The first aim had been to divide the Spanish inheritance; now it was to pass it in a block to the Austrian candidate, himself the direct heir to the Imperial throne of the Hapsburgs. From the rigid integrity of this policy there was not to be even the slightest concession. Nothing was to be offered to the Duke of Anjou. Nothing was to be offered to Louis XIV. In order to carry into history their English Parliamentary slogan, the British Government, with Parliament behind them, were ready to shoulder all the demands of the Empire upon the Rhine, including Strasburg, all the demands of the Duke of Savoy, and almost all the demands of the Dutch for their Barrier.

There is no doubt that responsibility for the loss of the peace in 1709 lies largely upon England, and that the cause arose unconsciously out of her Parliamentary stresses. In Parliament the Spanish theatre always commanded vivid and abnormal interest. Money for Spain; troops for Spain; ships for Spain; a base for the fleet in Spanish waters; war in the Peninsula; no peace without its entire surrender—these were phrases and ideas popular not merely for a session but year after year, and enlisting a very general measure of active support. Marlborough throughout regarded the whole of this Spanish diversion as a costly concession to wrong-headed but influential opinion. By one device or another he had contrived to reduce it to the least improvident dimensions. He scraped away troops and supplies on various pretexts. He sought his results in Flanders or at Toulon. Nevertheless, as in the famous debate of December 1707,^[35] he found it necessary to his system to humour Parliament in these ideas which were so strangely cherished by them. No doubt he found it convenient to gather support for the general war by adopting and endorsing the watchword “No peace without Spain.”

Indeed, at this juncture in 1709 we find Marlborough mouthing this maxim, to which he had become accustomed, as fervently as its ill-instructed devotees. He was committed to it by the shifts to which he had been put to gain supplies from precarious majorities in former years. It had become a sort of drill, a parade movement, greatly admired by the public, of doubtful value on the battlefield, but helpful in recruiting. So now, at the culmination of the war, Marlborough marched along with the Cabinet and Parliament upon this Spanish demand; and the whole influence of England, then paramount, was used to compel the Dutch and incite the Empire and German states to conform. The Whigs in the brief morning of their power invested this demand with their own sharp precision. Upon it was placed an interpretation which certainly had not been adopted by any English party at an earlier stage. ‘Spain’ was made to include not only the Indies, but Italy. The interests of the City and of the Whig merchants in the Levant trade now found full expression in the Cabinet. “Let me tell you,” said Sunderland in April to Vryberg, the Dutch envoy, “that any Minister who gave up the Sicilies would answer for it with his head.”^[36] There could be no compromise with the Whigs about Sicily and Naples.

It has been remarked as curious that each side in the great war, while remaining in deadly conflict, had in fact largely adopted the original standpoint of the other. The English, who under King William had seen their safety in the partition of the Spanish Empire, now conceived themselves only served by its transference intact to the Hapsburg candidate. The Spanish nation, which at the outset cared little who was their king so long as their inheritance was undivided, were now marshalled around their Bourbon sovereign, and were almost indifferent to what happened outside the Peninsula. The insistence by England upon her Parliamentary formula destroyed the victorious peace now actually in her grasp. The incidents of the negotiations which will presently be recounted followed inevitably from this main resolve. But although England with her wealth and Marlborough’s prowess could, as the event showed, over-persuade the Allies to her point of view, her resulting position was unsound and even absurd. Neither the Dutch nor the German states had the slightest intention of making exertions to conquer Spain after they had made a satisfactory peace with France. Austria, at once famishing and greedy, was impotent for such a purpose. Upon England alone and the troops she paid must have fallen the burden of conquering not only Spain but, as it had now become, the Spanish nation. It is certain that this was a task of which she would soon have been found incapable.

The Dutch demands were more practical, but no less serious. They had fought hard and long for their Dyke against France. It was now certain they would gain it. Exactly which fortresses, how many of them, where the flanks of the line should lie, were to be matters of sharp discussion with the French, with the English, with the Prussians, and still more with the Empire. But in all that concerned military security friend and foe were agreed that the Dutch rampart should be established. During the course of the war the Dutch trading interests had come to regard the conquest of the Barrier of fortress towns as carrying with it control over the commerce of the whole countryside between the fortresses. The Empire, the Allies, King Charles III, several of the most important German states, and also England had rights or interests which this Dutch demand affronted. In those days the wishes of the local population, with their charters and long-established customs, also counted. The Belgian people, Flemings and Walloons alike, were no friends of France. They were prepared in the circumstances to be ruled by Charles III of Spain, by the Elector of Bavaria, or, if that could be brought about, by the Duke of Marlborough. The one solution which was abhorrent to them was the intimate exploitation of their Dutch neighbours. We have seen how, as Marlborough predicted in 1706, eighteen months of Dutch rule over the Belgian cities had produced a universal disaffection, culminating in the treachery of Ghent and Bruges. A hundred and thirty years later the severance of Belgium from Holland arose from the very same antagonisms which surged within the victorious Grand Alliance and beat upon the head of Marlborough. It was not only fortresses the Dutch wanted, but the trade of Belgium. The London Cabinet was, however, in no position to read the States-General a lecture. In the summer of 1707 Stanhope had induced King Charles III to give special trading rights in the Indies—ten ships a year—to England. This was a minor, though none the less vexatious, breach of the pledge binding on all signatories of the Grand Alliance not to seek special favours at the expense of their confederates. The Dutch might claim that this liberated them from their own undertakings.

The Tories were prepared to make a stand for British trading interests in the Low Countries. But the Whig Junto dwelt upon the Dutch guarantee of the Protestant Succession which assured their ascendancy in Great Britain. Marlborough, whose outlook was European and covered at the least the whole compass of the Grand Alliance, saw from the beginning that if the Dutch had their way in the Spanish Netherlands, not only about the Dyke but about trade and government, the Empire would be fatally estranged. Charles III would be virtually stripped of his dominions in the north, Prussia would be indignant, the cohesion of the Alliance would be ruptured, and the English Tories would make the satisfaction of Dutch pretensions at the expense of British trade a mortal grievance against the Minister responsible. The argument which Marlborough used so often, that, once satisfied about their Barrier, the Dutch would desert the war, was disproved by the event. After the Barrier Treaty, which gave them their fill, had been signed by the Whig Ministers, the Dutch, so far from abandoning the war, fought all the harder for this dear prize. Indeed, it was only England who quitted the field.

Why did Marlborough not see that it would always be possible for England in conceding the Dutch demand about the Barrier to stipulate, as was in fact done, for a still more vigorous prosecution of the war by the Republic? His contention, though valid in the controversy of 1709, was stultified by the final outcome. He had, however, broad as well as particular reasons for opposing the Barrier Treaty. It seemed to him the highest unwisdom to give one of the members of the Alliance all that they desired, thus offending and unsettling the others, before the military power of the common enemy was decisively broken and it was certain the war could be ended. Moreover, his personal influence upon events must be seriously prejudiced. He saw, with his customary clarity, that if his were the hand that signed this invidious pact the wrath of all the disappointed members would be vented upon himself. His own countrymen were turning against him. The Dutch found themselves able, and preferred, to deal over his head with the Whigs. Must he then break with the Empire, with the two Hapsburg sovereigns who wished to make him almost a king, and with Eugene, his faithful comrade? Must he, by accepting the Dutch view of the Prussian claim to Guelderland, alienate that jealous Prussian Court, with whom his influence stood so high, for whose splendid troops he was in constant entreaty? Thus smitten, how could he conduct the war, if after all it had to be resumed? Whatever else a Barrier Treaty agreeable to the Dutch might mean, it was certain that Marlborough could not make it without destroying the whole system upon which he had hitherto led the Alliance through so many perils and shortcomings to what in the spring of 1709 seemed to be almost unbridled victory. For all these reasons, public and also more personal, which nevertheless on the whole corresponded to the essential needs of Europe, Marlborough, as we have seen, had hitherto delayed the Barrier Treaty and was bent on persevering in that course.

The divergence between Marlborough and Heinsius was thus inevitably serious. The Pensionary had been vexed by Marlborough’s obstruction of the Barrier negotiations in 1706. He had for months been conducting secret parleys with France on the basis that Marlborough was not to be told about them. Already in December 1708 Heinsius had gone so far as to instruct Vryberg to discuss the Barrier Treaty directly with Somers^[37] and to appeal to the new Whig Ministers apart from Marlborough. In December Vryberg reported that he had done so, and had found the Whig leader very desirous of a settlement with Holland on the basis of a reciprocal guarantee about the Barrier and the Succession. Godolphin wrote to Marlborough that he agreed with Somers. The formal proposals for a Barrier Treaty which he was expected to negotiate reached Marlborough on his way from Ghent to The Hague, and on arrival he was officially told about the French peace offers through Petkum.

At this time he believed that any peace offer from France would only be an attempt to amuse and cheat the Allies. Accordingly when the Pensionary harped upon the Barrier Marlborough diverted the discussions to the Dutch quota of troops for the new campaign. As the mails from England were weatherbound, he was able to profess himself without sufficient instructions. Heinsius had, however, already threatened Godolphin that he would send Buys, the Amsterdam leader and a friend of Harley, to London to conduct the Barrier negotiations there if Marlborough proved obdurate. He appealed to the Whig Junto over Marlborough’s head, and with success. The Cabinet, and especially Godolphin, who feared Buys’ Tory contacts, was anxious to prevent a Dutch mission arriving in London. Sunderland did not hesitate to criticize Marlborough to Vryberg, the Dutch Ambassador. When he was told that Marlborough pretended to have no powers Sunderland said, “I cannot imagine what reasons my Lord Duke can have for doing so.”^[38] Vryberg lost no time in telling Heinsius that Marlborough was disavowed by the Secretary of State, “who does not hesitate even to gainsay his father-in-law’s opinions when he thinks they are not right.”^[39] Thus at the outset of these all-important negotiations Marlborough found himself to a large extent isolated. He was divided both from the Dutch and from his own Government upon large issues of principle and procedure.

His main wish was to convince the Dutch that he cared more for their confidence in the conduct of the war than for the Viceroyalty of the Netherlands. For this he took during the spring and summer a series of steps which were painful to him. The question of the Viceroyalty did not slumber. In February Charles pressed him further.

Charles III to Marlborough

Marlborough conveyed through Stanhope, with whom he had relations of close confidence and friendship, an account of the difficulties which prevented him from accepting the Viceroyalty.

King Charles replied (June 16):

Up to this moment Marlborough had still nourished hopes of ultimately receiving the appointment. But in the middle of 1709 he took a decisive step to exclude himself. At all costs to himself he must regain the confidence of the Dutch. A letter from Charles III to Wratislaw on June 30, 1709, shows how far he went. Not only did he three times specifically refuse this magnificent office, but he urged that it should be conferred upon Eugene. He thought that only by the substitution of another name for his could the misunderstandings between him and the Dutch be finally removed. Reluctantly he had reached the conclusion that only this sacrifice would preserve that Anglo-Dutch unity, the keystone of the whole Alliance, which was now in jeopardy.

Charles III to Wratislaw

It would no doubt have been agreeable to Marlborough, since he was resolved not to accept the Viceroyalty himself, to have it conferred upon his friend and comrade Prince Eugene. With Eugene in control of the Spanish Netherlands, he could be sure that the treatment of the Belgian inhabitants and the general course of the government would be no hindrance to the military operations. But to propose Eugene for the appointment was by no means to secure it for him. The question became a burning one as soon as Eugene reached Vienna. The Prince himself was anxious to accept. He had been baulked by internal jealousies in 1706-7 of his desire to remain Viceroy of the Milanese. Here now was the opportunity of gaining a finer kingdom, where he would be more closely knit with Marlborough for any further campaigns in the Low Countries. His enemies, however, were as persistent as ever against him. They were now reinforced by the apprehensions of his friends, who saw themselves likely to be deprived in the future of his leadership and protection in Vienna. Thus Marlborough’s proposal was never made public by the Emperor or by Charles III, and it was only after a lapse of a hundred and fifty years that the fact became known.

The campaign of 1708 had ended according to Marlborough’s “heart’s desire,” and although it had been protracted beyond all custom into the depth of winter and over the end of the year, his warlike energy was entirely unabated. “This has been,” he wrote to Godolphin (January 31, 1709), “a very laborious campaign, but I am sensible the next will be more troublesome; for most certainly the enemy will venture, and do their utmost to get the better of us; but I trust in the Almighty that he will protect and give success to our just cause.”^[44] Neither his own fatigues and worries nor his deep desire for peace had slackened his preparations for 1709. While peace negotiations regular or secret, now by this channel, now by that, made The Hague a whispering-gallery, Marlborough had already for two months past been concerting with Godolphin, the British Cabinet, and throughout the Grand Alliance the marshalling for 1709 of the largest armies yet seen in Europe. In order that the whole movement of the Alliance towards its goal should be unfaltering, it was planned that he and Eugene should take it in turns to remain in Holland driving forward the gathering of men, munitions, food, and forage, and making sure that no signatory state fell out of the line. Eugene’s presence in Vienna being judged at first indispensable, Marlborough stood on guard in Holland during January and February. As soon as the fall of Ghent liberated the confederate armies for what remained of the winter he repaired to his headquarters at Brussels, and thence, with occasional visits to The Hague, began to pull all the levers of the vast, complicated, creaking machine of which he was still master.^[45]

He seems to have quartered himself when at The Hague upon the Prussian commissary, General Grumkow, who wrote some droll accounts to his master:

Marlborough lavished his flatteries and persuasions upon the King of Prussia, using exactly the kind of arguments which were most likely to appeal to a military monarchy.

These attentions produced remarkable results. Frederick I was more amenable to Marlborough’s solicitations than to any other. But here is another odd illustration of Marlborough’s attitude towards money. Because of the need for reinforcements, he gave up the 2½ per cent. commission on the pay of the contingent to which he was entitled by the Queen’s warrant and which formed the fund under his unchecked control by which his Intelligence and Secret Service were maintained. How this was applied is not recorded, but it turned the scale at Berlin, and King Frederick by an addition of 6210 men raised the Prussian troops to the magnificent figure of twenty-two thousand for the coming campaign.

It was not until the Prussian negotiations were completed, and he had also made his arrangements for the Würtembergers and the Palatines, that he once again addressed himself to the Dutch. He was now in a position to display to them the powerful succours which he had obtained, and the States-General were threatened with the reproach of being the sole defaulter. Thus spurred, they in the end produced an increase of six thousand hired troops, and this, added to the ten thousand expansion sanctioned by the British Parliament, would raise the confederate army to an unprecedented strength during the currency of the peace negotiations. We must admire the dual process to which the Allies were now committed of earnestly seeking peace while at the same time preparing for war on an ever greater scale. Nearly always Governments which seek peace flag in their war efforts; and Governments which make the most vigorous war preparations take little interest in peace. The two opposite moods consort with difficulty in the human mind, yet it is only by the double and, as it might seem, contradictory exertion that a good result can usually be procured.

On February 7 Marlborough gained possession of a letter written by a Minister at the Court of Madrid to the Duke of Orleans stating that “The most Christian King is resolved to turn the brunt of the war against Flanders in order to make a new siege of Lille from the beginning of April, with 150,000 veteran troops.” “This,” he said to Henry Boyle, the Secretary of State, “agrees with the advices we have from all other parts of the great efforts the French design to make the next campaign in this country.”^[49] And to Godolphin: “I am far from thinking the King of France so low as he is thought in England.”^[50]

The grim winter held Spain with the rest of Europe in its grip.^[51] In Barcelona, overcrowded and short of provisions, Charles and Starhemberg, the commander of his army in Catalonia, wearily composed long memorials of complaint to the English Government and plans for an offensive against Madrid in the next campaign. But while these strategic disputations followed their usual course Charles’s last fortress in Valencia was the scene of an heroic feat of arms. Major-General John Richards, with a mixed force of English, Huguenots, Spaniards, and Miquelets, about two thousand strong, still held out in the castle of Alicante. At the end of November a Bourbon army under d’Asfeld of twelve thousand men advanced down the coast to lay siege to the town, having captured Denia on the way. The town itself was quickly taken. Richards withdrew into the castle, which stood upon a rock, two hundred feet above the town. For three months the French, in spite of the fire of the defence, drove a long gallery under the western wall. This threatened annihilation. In the middle of January five men-of-war of Byng’s fleet arrived in Alicante Bay on their way from Lisbon to Barcelona, but, failing to establish communication with Richards, sailed on to Port Mahon. On February 20 the governor was summoned to surrender. Two of his officers were invited to inspect the completed mine. They went into the gallery under the castle, where 117,600 lb.^[52] of gunpowder was packed. They reported to Richards that all was ready to be sprung. After two more appeals to capitulate Richards prepared himself. On the morning of March 3, surrounded by his senior officers and a small guard, he took his stand upon the parade ground immediately above the mine. Just before six o’clock puffs of smoke were seen climbing the face of the castle rock, and the corporal of the guard on the west side shouted that the train was lit. The inhabitants of the adjacent houses poured forth in panic. On the stroke of the hour a shattering explosion convulsed the castle. The parade ground gaped asunder, and the governor, three senior officers, five captains, three lieutenants, and forty-two soldiers vanished in the abyss. Undaunted by their fate and inspired by their example, the survivors held out for another six weeks. In April Stanhope and Byng sailed into the bay, signed a capitulation, and took on board the remaining six hundred men of the garrison.

The last town in Valencia had been lost to Charles.

Elsewhere the military misfortunes of France were numerous and heavy. The disastrous campaign in Flanders has been recounted. The Hungarian revolt, mortally smitten by Rakoczy’s defeat at Trentschin, was dying down. Turkish intervention against Austria was no longer likely. The Empire, freed from these distractions, must be regarded as a less feeble enemy in the future. The capture of Port Mahon confirmed upon a permanent basis the absolute English command of the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, Louis XIV prepared indomitably to meet in 1709 the onslaughts of the Allies, and from every quarter troops were gathered to face Marlborough and Eugene. Further intercepted letters in January confirmed the reports that the French Grand Army would reach a total of a hundred and fifty thousand men by the early summer, that Villars would command it, and that the objective would be Lille. At the same time by Marlborough’s exertions there were gathering over a hundred and fifty thousand men around the Allies’ standards in the Low Countries. The campaign was therefore planned by both sides upon an unexampled scale.

But now there fell upon France a new and frightful misfortune. Since the beginning of December there had been a hard and almost unbroken frost. On January 6, after a brief thaw, it set in again with a bitterness so intense that two days later the rivers of France, even the Rhône, one of the most rapid rivers in Europe, were almost completely covered with ice. All the canals of Venice were frozen, and the mouth of the Tagus at Lisbon. Masses of ice appeared in the Channel and the North Sea. Communications between England and Holland were suspended; Harwich and the Dutch ports were ice-bound. Olives and vines split asunder. Cattle and sheep perished in great numbers. The game died in the forests, the rabbits in their burrows. From January 25 to February 6 there was an interval of snow followed by a few days’ thaw, and then another month, until March 6, of extraordinary cold. Thereafter gradually the weather became less severe. Thus this almost glacial period had lasted into the fourth month. On February 4 it was known at Versailles that the seed corn was dead in the ground. The English fleet, now active in the Mediterranean and in the Baltic throughout the winter, intercepted supplies of grain from Africa, the Levant, and Scandinavia.^[53] After more than sixty years of his reign, more than thirty years of which had been consumed in European war, the Great King saw his people face to face with actual famine.

Their sufferings were extreme. In Paris the death-rate doubled. Even before Christmas the market-women had marched to Versailles to proclaim their misery. In the countryside the peasantry subsisted on herbs or roots or flocked in despair into the famishing towns. Brigandage was widespread. Bands of starving men, women, and children roamed about in desperation. Châteaux and convents were attacked; the market-place of Amiens was pillaged; credit failed. From every province and from every class rose the cry for bread and peace. Meanwhile the northern horizon darkened continually with the menace of impending invasion.

The peace discussions wended onward. A secret meeting between Dutch and French agents had been arranged in February under the authority of Heinsius and Torcy. In March the burrowings of Petkum were replaced by public negotiations which originated in another quarter. Philip V had, apparently on his own impulse, in the early days of the New Year sent an agent from Spain with full powers to make peace offers on his behalf. The Dutch had replied through van der Dussen, the Pensionary of Gouda, that a minimum offer of Spain, the Indies, Milan, and Belgium, and a favourable treaty of commerce were the essential basis of conversations. Louis XIV saw in this reply the possibility of compensating and consoling his grandson with Naples and Sicily, and grasped the opportunity. In January he had been vigorously preparing for a new campaign pending negotiations. But during February, appalled by the full realization of the calamity which had befallen France, he resolved upon peace at all costs. In March^[54] he sent Rouillé, one of his ambassadors, the President of the Parlement of Paris, to meet the two Dutch plenipotentiaries, Buys and van der Dussen, at Moerdyk, an obscure village within the Dutch frontier.

It was several weeks before the Allies understood this change of mind and the extent of the disaster which had enforced it. Marlborough sailed on a flying visit to England on February 25/March 8. He was still under the impression that another campaign must certainly be fought, and that it would open early in Flanders with unexampled fury. * “I think the only good step that we can make towards a peace is to get early into the field. I have given my orders for all officers to be at their commands by the end of this month, and I beg the Queen would show a dislike of any that should stay after that time.”^[55]

Before he reached London on March 3/14 the Whig leaders Somers and Halifax had carried an address in the Lords defining the minimum terms of an English peace. “. . . That the French King may be obliged to own your Majesty’s title and the Protestant Succession as it is established by the laws of Great Britain; and that the Allies be engaged to become guarantees of the same. And that your Majesty would take effectual methods that the Pretender shall be removed out of the French Dominions. . . .” To this Boyle, in the Commons on the 13th, added the demolition of Dunkirk. The purpose of this address was to proclaim the main outlines of the Government policy, and to rouse and reveal its support in Parliament and the country. It was in essence a vote of confidence in Whig foreign policy, emphasizing the popular side and putting foremost the guarantee of the Protestant Succession. There was no mention of Spain. Somers and Halifax knew that the public were indifferent to this Parliamentary counter. It was better to dwell on the guarantee of the Protestant Succession, which every one understood, and in which the Whigs and the majority of the nation were one. The loud demand by the Commons for the razing of Dunkirk was a warning signal to the Dutch negotiators. “The Pensionary,” wrote Petkum, “is scarcely pleased by the latest address of the English Parliament, or the Queen’s reply. He let me know in confidence that he suspects that the Duke of Marlborough is the author of both.”^[56]

Marlborough on his arrival in England was conscious of a somewhat restrained welcome, especially from his colleagues. He was expected in many circles to be the bearer of definite peace proposals. He had none. He had not sought to have any. His position was sensibly undermined. William III’s old friend Portland, who was an extremely well-informed Dutch agent in England, and Vryberg had been equally successful in convincing the Whigs of the Duke’s obstruction and the Dutch of his loss of influence. When the news of Rouillé’s apparition and the details of the first Moerdyk conversations reached London, the startled Whig leaders looked askance at Marlborough. How could this detrimental situation have arisen without his knowledge? Marlborough no doubt had realized that some one was coming from Versailles. He had not expected that a peace mission would be made public before Heinsius had even mentioned it to him. He was thus proved to the Cabinet not to be in the confidence of the Dutch. He had a just grievance against Heinsius, and their relations were never quite the same as before. The Cabinet showed itself much disturbed by the Dutch proceedings. * “It has,” wrote Marlborough to Heinsius (March 8/19), “given here a very great allarum. . . . I do believe by this proceeding of Rouillé, that the chief design of the French is to occasion a jealousy amongst the Allies.”^[57] Cadogan, who was in charge at headquarters during Marlborough’s absence, was ordered at once to The Hague to assure the Pensionary that the British Government were willing to take up the Barrier negotiations.

Rouillé’s coming caused equal alarm in Vienna. It was, of course, believed that Marlborough was behind it. His disclaimers to Wratislaw,^[58] although true, did not convince. “It seems almost incredible,” replied Wratislaw, “that you should not have been informed.”^[59] Marlborough’s position was further prejudiced. Hitherto his influence with the Dutch had helped him with the British and the Empire, and his influence with these had helped him with the Dutch; now the British and Dutch began to talk together directly, and the Empire still held Marlborough responsible. Portland wrote from London to Heinsius, “There are jealousies here as elsewhere, and he knows that many are watching him.”^[60] In the Cabinet Somers and his tightly knit group were vexed at the friction between the Pensionary and themselves. They were inclined to lay this upon Marlborough. Nevertheless, they disliked the Rouillé discussions as much as he did. Portland informed the Pensionary on March 25, “The jealousies on account of these pourparlers in Holland increase in England and will soon be growing to unkind distrust.”^[61]

Meanwhile Marlborough’s Secret Service had intercepted Rouillé’s correspondence describing the conversations at Moerdyk. The Dutch seemed prepared to go very far to meet France upon the crucial issue of Naples and Sicily. The French proposal was not only that Naples and Sicily should be guaranteed to Philip V, but that the guarantee should be enforced if necessary by a Franco-Dutch (and possibly English) expedition. It is noteworthy that this is the first appearance in the negotiations of the idea of enforcing peace terms upon recalcitrants by war, and that it came from France. Clearly the French envoy was suggesting to the Dutch hostilities in the last resort against the Empire. It also appeared from Marlborough’s intercepts and decipherings that the Dutch were not prepared to go so far as that.

The new instructions, based upon the Parliamentary address of March 6, with which Marlborough reached The Hague on April 9/20 emphasized among other matters “that no negotiations for peace should be concluded with France until preliminaries were adjusted between England and the States.” This sealed the fate of the Rouillé mission. Eugene had arrived from Vienna the day before. “My lord and I are agreed,” wrote Eugene, “that we should press for the dismissal of Rouillé out of the country.”^[62] Marlborough,^[63] supported by Eugene, interpreted his instructions as authorizing him not to open the Barrier negotiations until the Franco-Dutch talks were cleared out of the way. If the Dutch wanted to discuss the Barrier let them first get rid of Rouillé. Heinsius realized that the only point on which the Duke was in agreement with the English Government was deep distrust of the Dutch relations with Rouillé. If these were severed, Marlborough, save for his personal contacts with Eugene, would again be isolated. Heinsius saw himself at his weakest in preserving the Rouillé mission. He saw Marlborough at his weakest if the Barrier Treaty came to the fore. He therefore resigned himself to the dismissal of Rouillé. The last formal interview took place between the Dutch and the French envoys at Bodegraven, another obscure village by the banks of a small, remote canal where the French envoy had been deposited by Heinsius. Rouillé was informed that there could be no guarantee of the use of allied force to procure the cession of Naples and Sicily to France. The very idea was impossible, and ought never to have been suggested. The French envoy then asked for an armistice. Such a request exposed the weakened will-power of France, but the Dutch delegates had no authority to grant it. This was the end of Rouillé’s mission. He brushed from his shoes the dust of the Dutch pothouses to which he had been relegated, and set off for the challenged splendours of Versailles.

Heinsius was now resolved that Marlborough should face the definite Dutch demands which he had so long staved off, but upon which he had been instructed by his own Government to negotiate. On April 19, when Eugene was away at Amsterdam, a deputation of the States waited on Marlborough and with all ceremony unfolded their claim. They opened their mouths very wide. “You will see,” reported Marlborough afterwards, “it encloses what might be thought a great kingdom.” In the course of the discussion it was plainly hinted that if Marlborough objected too much or dallied too long the rumour would be circulated that personal aims—for instance, the Viceroyalty—were his motives. The Duke listened urbanely. When at length he spoke he criticized only the two points which his instructions from the Whigs authorized him to resist. He protested against the inclusion of the coast towns, particularly Ostend, in a military Barrier against France. He drew attention to the weight of the contribution demanded from the Belgians to maintain the Dutch garrisons. He could not resist at the end asking what was to be left to King Charles III of his possessions in the north. Having thus met the attack on ground which even the Whigs must occupy, he dismissed the subject with the soothing remark, “The matter is not yet ripe for discussion.” Thus he had broken the Rouillé mission by invoking the priority of the Barrier, and now put the Barrier once again for the moment upon the shelf.^[64]

During March and April the allied Governments became convinced that Louis XIV was finally defeated. The reports which poured in upon them seemed to show that France was incapable of fighting another campaign. To the lamentable tales of the frost havoc, of the widespread famine, of the desperate condition of the French troops, without bread and forage, had been added the bankruptcy of the great French banker Bernard of Lyons, whose efforts to found a French State Bank with an official paper currency had been remarkable. Whereas the Allies had previously overrated the remaining resources of their antagonist, they now set them as far beneath the truth. Marlborough was not immune from this process. Apart from his manœuvring against Heinsius, he was now sure that the French would grant the whole allied demands. All the more had it been right to drive away Rouillé! Why prolong these partial local chatterings when Louis XIV was forced to beg before all the world for armistice and peace? To drive away Rouillé was not to drive away peace. A far fuller offer was impending.

But how long would it be before France made a new proposal of peace, not secretly to Holland, but publicly to the Grand Alliance? Evidently the Duke thought it was a matter of days. But days were now very important. Heinsius was demanding the Barrier. The Whig Cabinet was set upon the Barrier and Guarantee Treaty as a preliminary to peace. But if the French opened a general peace negotiation all preliminaries between the Anglo-Dutch allies would be superseded. The discussion would be with the three great allied Powers. Marlborough’s instructions were to negotiate the Barrier, and he knew that within a few days of Rouillé’s departure Heinsius would force him to a decision. That decision must cause great dissensions among the Allies. “I tremble,” he wrote to Godolphin on April 19, “when I think that a very little impatience may ruin a sure game.”^[65]

Heinsius at length felt himself certain of his preliminary Barrier treaty. Marlborough was convinced that much larger events were at hand. The question was whether Heinsius would corner him upon the Barrier before France publicly appealed for a general peace. In order to gain time he returned to London.^[66] No one could stop him. While Heinsius and the Deputies were arranging their plans, their Captain-General was at sea on one of the “yahcts,” sailing for home. How could he have negotiated the Barrier Treaty? He did not agree with it. He thought the Dutch demands monstrous in themselves, ruinous to the Alliance. Besides—here he turned the argument which had damaged him against those who used it—the Dutch would never believe he was impartial after the offers of the Viceroyalty had been made to him. The Whigs must appoint a colleague to deal with the Barrier question, some one who felt as they did and commanded their entire confidence; some one who was not hampered as he was by all that had happened in the past and by all that might happen in the future. So Marlborough sailed from the Brill to Margate, leaving Heinsius to extract what consolations he could from the frosty, sepulchral glitter of Eugene.

When Louis XIV read in Rouillé’s report the “hard replies” which were the sole fruit of peace efforts he had never dreamed he would be forced to make, he broke into tears before his Ministers, and with a gesture of despair said he would give up all—yes, even Lille and the Sicilies. To this point, then, had he been reduced by Marlborough’s seven campaigns and the terrible frost. After the Council had been dismissed, Torcy loyally offered himself to carry the humiliating acceptance to Holland.^[67] Upon the mood of the moment this offer was accepted.

The sending of the French Foreign Minister into Holland to sue for peace was a signal acknowledgment of defeat by France. Marshal Villars, when he heard of it, was convinced that peace was already agreed; for otherwise how could so devastating an admission have been made? It was a proof of sincerity and of stress which none could mistake. Henceforth no longer would there be merely attempts to make sectional treaties with the Dutch, but a grand negotiation for a general peace on the part of a Power which could, it was apparent, no longer continue the war. “Had not Torcy come himself,” wrote Petkum, “the Allies would never have asked for such preliminaries.”^[68] On May 4 Eugene reported to the Emperor that an unknown man with the passport of an ordinary courier had passed through Brussels, where the Prince lay, and that rumour said he was Torcy.^[69] Most writers suppose that Heinsius had no previous notice. It is certain, however, that when on that May night the Pensionary heard Torcy’s knock at the door he was already expecting him.^[70] Thirty years before Heinsius, acting in Paris too zealously in the interests of the Dutch Republic, had been menaced by Louvois with the Bastille. The Great King had in his long reign patronized as well as maltreated the Dutch. This small Republic of the Dykes now found mighty France suppliant upon its threshold.

Heinsius received Torcy with courtesy, but informed him that he could only confer with him by the authority of the States-General; and thereafter the States-General declared “that the States did bind themselves to nothing until they knew the sentiments of the Queen of Great Britain by the return of the Duke of Marlborough.” The second stage of the parleys thus began, but on a footing entirely different. An excessive admission of weakness had been made, disastrous to France, but destined in the long swing of events to be fatal to the Allies.

Torcy’s plan was first to gain the Dutch by extreme concessions upon their Barrier, then to induce them to bring pressure upon Marlborough, and at the same time to win Marlborough’s goodwill by a colossal bribe. He believed that “at the present conjuncture Marlborough holds the key and that there are means of making him choose peace.”^[71] Marlborough had just left the second time for England, and the French Minister anxiously awaited his return. In the meanwhile he received the detailed assent of the King to his proposed procedure. He was to tell Marlborough how astonished the King was that he should be making efforts to break off the negotiations after his previous overtures for peace. The King would be glad to see Marlborough receive the reward which had been promised him. A precise tariff was set up. If Philip V received Naples and Sicily, or even in extreme necessity Naples alone, two million French livres; if the fortifications and harbour of Dunkirk were spared, or Strasburg was left to France, two millions: a total, if all these objectives were obtained, of four millions. Such was the view which the French took of their conqueror. They can hardly be blamed for doing so after his letter to Berwick. However, as we shall see, Marlborough was not to be bought for money. He would accept it as a reward, but not as an inducement. There is no doubt a real distinction between the two cases; but it is not one of which the French could be aware, nor upon which posterity will bestow any large measure of respect.

But Marlborough was in England. His second visit to London taught him further how his power had declined. The Whigs had full control of the Cabinet and both Houses, while the Queen was cool with him and hot against Sarah. The Whigs, and Godolphin with them, were convinced that France was at her last gasp, and would submit to whatever terms were imposed. Marlborough, upon whom the reports of the ruin wrought in France by the frost had made their impression, did not contest the general view. He understood only too well that henceforward in all negotiations he was no longer to be executor of his own policy, but only spokesman of the Cabinet. His keen instinct and knowledge of men must have apprised him of the little goodwill which his new colleagues bore him; but whether he had any inkling of the ingratitude of his son-in-law may be doubted. He did not make a quarrel with the Whigs because he had been overruled or because he found himself in a strait-jacket. He set himself, as usual, to bring about the best results possible with the means at his disposal. But he was determined not to become responsible for the kind of Barrier Treaty which the Dutch demanded. Already on April 24 he had written to Godolphin asking for a colleague plenipotentiary representing the view of the Whigs and accountable to them.^[72]

This request was not entirely welcome. Somers, Sunderland, and others would have been content to have Marlborough obey their will, and yet bear full responsibility. They would thus have been all-powerful and quite safe. But when Marlborough made a move, whether in war or politics, he had usually reasons behind it which could not be disregarded. During all these months he had been busily preparing for a new campaign. The greater part of his time was spent in extorting or enticing contingents from the Allies, in organizing the depots, in assembling the armies, and above all in gathering food and forage. In spite of the rigorous weather, it was expected that the great armies would on both sides have to take the field before the end of May. A request, therefore, by the Captain-General for relief in one branch of the peace negotiations could not be resisted.

The Whigs deferred to the logic of facts. Their first choice fell upon Halifax, who was still fuming out of office, and for whom they wished to provide. Halifax had been much concerned in the earlier peace overtures, and had made public his resentment at not having been associated with Marlborough in 1706. He refused his friends’ offer with a taunt directed at Marlborough. “If the Duke had anticipated that the treaty to be concluded with the Republic would be to the satisfaction of the English people, he would not share it with anyone else; but the fact that he is asking for a colleague shows that he wishes to push off some of the odium upon this colleague.”^[73] Several writers have associated themselves with this sneer. It is hard to see how it can be justified. Marlborough would no doubt have gladly accepted the whole control and borne the whole responsibility. If he was to be merely the instrument of the Whigs, surely they should have one of their own band to share the consequences of their decisions. Moreover, his personal influence over the many states of the Grand Alliance was indispensable to the power of resuming the war effectively if the negotiations failed. Nothing could be more fatal to that influence than that he should have to drive through this hard bargain of the Dutch upon the Barrier Treaty, of which he strongly disapproved, and which was bound to be intensely unpopular with every other member of the Alliance.

The Cabinet next considered Sunderland, and all were speedily agreed that he would never do. So the choice fell upon the young Lord Townshend. He was an amiable and well-informed politician, a recent convert to the Whig Party, and a friend and protégé of Somers. He was a student of foreign affairs, and had much personal charm. “Everybody who knew Townshend loved him.”^[74] This last must always be considered a dubious qualification. But Townshend was prepared to serve as Marlborough’s colleague, and the Junto were able to conceal themselves united in the background. Hoffmann said of him, “He is pliant and manageable.”^[75] Marlborough announced Townshend’s appointment at once,^[76] treated him with the greatest ceremony, and made him bear the responsibility for those parts of the Cabinet policy to which he himself had from the beginning been inveterately opposed.

CHARLES, SECOND VISCOUNT TOWNSHEND
School of Kneller
National Portrait Gallery

The second matter to be settled was the official British attitude towards the Barrier. Marlborough had brought over with him for the Cabinet the latest Dutch project. Parliament had been prorogued before his arrival. Even the Whig Ministers felt bound to support his main objections to it, and their counter-project was framed on this basis. Ostend, which governed the sea trade of Belgium, and Dendermonde, which controlled the sluices affecting Brabant, were definitely refused. The Dutch right to place an army in the Spanish Netherlands was limited to the unique occasion in which France was the attacking Power and war had been declared. The revenues for the upkeep of the Dutch garrisons must be related only to those fortified towns which had not belonged to the Spanish monarchy before the death in November 1700 of Charles II of Spain. The clause forbidding Charles III before the general peace to take possession of Belgium was deleted. Upper Guelderland was reserved for the decision of the Queen. On the other hand, the Dutch guarantee for the Protestant Succession, the sending of the Pretender out of the French dominions, and the demolition of Dunkirk were demanded in explicit terms.

Meanwhile in Holland the negotiations had made great progress. According to his discretion, inch by inch Torcy yielded to the Dutch demands about their Barrier. Heinsius was able to announce to Eugene that the Dutch were content with the terms so far as they concerned themselves alone; they had only to consider their allies. On this they had newly given explicit assurances. Torcy was forced to recognize that there was no chance of a separate settlement with the Republic. “I believe I could deal with you more easily,” remarked Heinsius to him (May 15), “perhaps even more independently of the Dutch nation, if Marlborough and Eugene were with me.” The mood of the Pensionary had changed considerably since the early months of the year. As the desperate plight of France became every day more understood, both he and his countrymen stiffened towards the French and warmed towards the Allies.

Buys now raised the question of what guarantee the French could offer that the Spaniards would accept the terms. Torcy answered that Philip would be given three months to submit on pain of the complete withdrawal of French support. Heinsius also continued to demand, though without great enthusiasm, the entire Spanish monarchy for Charles III. Even this was no longer to be resisted by the French. But now every one hastened to put in his claim. From the Emperor, from the Diet at Ratisbon, from Victor Amadeus of Savoy, and from Portugal there arrived new demands upon the humbled monarchy. All had suffered from Louis XIV in his days of power. All hastened to reclaim with interest in this moment of his apparent prostration what they had lost. “Every sovereign prince,” wrote Torcy to the King, “assumes that he has a right to formulate his claims against France, and would even think himself dishonoured if he had extorted nothing to the injury of the French crown.”^[77]

When we look back on the long years of terror and spoliation to which these princes had been subjected from the might of the Great King, it would be surprising if they had acted otherwise. Moreover, the allied armies were now gathering in the field. Contingents, in former years so tardy, were this time hurried to the front by rulers who saw the prey in their grasp, and were anxious to be in at the death and establish their rights to a handsome share. Marlborough’s exertions for five months to have large forces at his disposal during the negotiations had succeeded beyond his hopes. “All the facts,” wrote Eugene (May 17) to the Emperor, “go to show that France is quite unable to prolong the war, and we can, therefore, if we wish obtain everything we ask for. We have only to hold together and preserve a good understanding among ourselves.”^[78] Even those Dutchmen who at the beginning of the year were willing to make a separate peace were now convinced that France was at their feet. Van der Dussen, the leader of the Dutch peace party, himself wrote, “The policy of this province [Holland], the largest of all, depends upon more than five hundred persons, most of whom regard France as brought to bay [aux abois], and who are so embittered by the memories of the past that they are resolved without compunction to make an end once and for all of their puissant foe.”^[79] In this mood van der Dussen had advised Torcy not to hesitate or wait for the arrival of Marlborough, which would only create fresh complications. Let him now, while time remained, concede all that was demanded. But Torcy still had hopes of Marlborough, and one remarkable reason for those hopes.

On the 18th the two Englishmen arrived.

Marlborough to Godolphin

The situation had simplified itself and vastly improved. The French were ready to submit; the Dutch had no thought of a separate treaty; Heinsius was content to shelve the idea of preliminaries with England. Marlborough saw all going as he had wished, and evidently thought the peace as good as made. Torcy, who was staying with Petkum, asked at once through his host to see him. Marlborough met the French envoy that very night. Torcy has given his own account of the discussion. Marlborough was all smiles and blandishments. He protested profound respect for Louis XIV, and presently mentioned Berwick. Torcy replied that he was familiar with the correspondence and that the attitude of the King had not changed. He would have enlarged upon the details, but Marlborough at once dismissed the subject.^[81] So far from suggesting any mitigation, he asked, in accordance with his instructions, for the restoration of Newfoundland. This was a fresh demand, and Torcy was shocked by it. To ease the situation they talked about Saint-Germain. Torcy had spoken of the Pretender as “the King of England.” Marlborough referred to him always as “the Prince of Wales.” He expressed an earnest desire to do some service to the Prince as the son of a king for whom he would gladly have sacrificed his blood and life. Speaking of Townshend, he said, “He is here to keep watch over me [en surveillant] in person. He is a very good fellow, whom I chose myself, but he is a Whig party man. Before him I must speak as an obstinate Englishman. But I wish with all my heart it were in my power to serve the Prince of Wales, and that your good offices may give me an opportunity.” Marlborough went on to emphasize his desire for peace, and how he longed to end his days quietly. Torcy, who knew how fast the armies were gathering, was not comforted. He saw that there could be no hope of saving any part of the Spanish monarchy through Marlborough. He had that morning received permission from the King to drop Naples and Sicily if need be. He now announced this to Marlborough. The Duke, gratified, assured him that this was the only way to make peace. The interview ended. Torcy went to the Pensionary and informed him of the fresh sacrifice he had been prepared to make for the sake of peace.

The culminating phase in the negotiations was now reached. Together Marlborough and Townshend drafted their report for the Cabinet. Torcy had admitted willingness to concede not only Spain but Italy. He had, however, in telling Heinsius used a phrase which had attracted immediate attention.

Here was the first glimpse of the rock on which all was in the end to split. It was not immediately approached.

On May 20 the three leaders of the Alliance met Torcy and Rouillé in formal conference. The Dutch and English demands were discussed first. These were easily conceded by the French plenipotentiaries. But then Prince Eugene began to say that France had given way to England and Heinsius in order to gain them to her interest. He took his stand for Germany on the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia, which had ended the Thirty Years War in 1648. He must now on behalf of the Emperor ask for Strasburg and Alsace. At this Torcy appeared to lose patience. “We were practically at one with Torcy,” wrote Eugene to the Emperor, “but when mention was made of the lands of the Holy Roman Empire he began to stutter, and answered he must leave, and demanded to depart and asked for his passports, so that without any further resolution the conference broke up.”^[83] Neither Eugene nor Marlborough thought that Torcy was in earnest. The Frenchman saw himself faced by united enemies. Later on in private van der Dussen warned him that the war spirit was rising in Holland, and there was no more hope from the pacifists. Torcy returned to the conference when it met again next day. He had powers to abandon Strasburg, but not Alsace. He fought for both, and no agreement was reached. There was a similar dispute over the claims of Savoy. In the end Torcy offered to dismantle Strasburg; but Eugene still continued to demand Alsace, and the Dutch and English supported the claims of Savoy. The deadlock continued.

Alone with Marlborough, Torcy made a final effort to seduce him. We have only the French Minister’s account. Marlborough, who had himself proposed the interview, urged submission. He used all his most obsequious arts. If the peace was made he would earnestly desire the favour and protection of the King. He spoke again with sympathy about the Pretender. He referred to his desire for peace, to his uprightness, to his conscience, to his honour, and frequently to God. Torcy, thinking his moment had come, renewed his offer of a vast bribe. He received at once the same rebuff. “When,” says Torcy, “I spoke about his private interests, he reddened and appeared to wish to turn the conversation.”^[84] “It was in vain,” says the latest of German writers on these negotiations, “that Torcy offered the Englishman uncommonly high sums of money for the slightest concessions. He got no further than hints.”^[85] It was hopeless. We are left wondering why Marlborough should have wanted to repeat this unpleasant scene. Did he wish to expose Torcy to a second rejection of his offer? Did he wish to convince Louis XIV how vain it was? Did he, perhaps, take a personal relish in being offered these immense sums of money and seeing himself reject them? No one can tell, but the fact remains that this hardy, avaricious man, who could at this juncture without the slightest injury to the interests of England have helped the French towards the peace he himself desired, and gained an immense sum thereby, proved incorruptible. There is nothing to boast of in this.

On the night of May 21, after the negotiators had separated, a letter from the King to Torcy was intercepted with news from the Spanish peninsula. Galway, advancing from Portugal, had fought an unfortunate action on the Caya. The Portuguese cavalry had fled precipitately, and it was only with loss and difficulty that the English infantry had made good their retreat across the frontier. It was deemed striking that the victorious army was for the first time composed entirely of Spanish national troops without any French contingent. This was no great encouragement to the French envoys, for the victory of a Spanish army could not relieve the desperate position of France. The importance of the news was its effect upon the Allies. For the last two days their discussions had been going on in the rather unreal atmosphere of Germanic territorial claims. Now with Spain there came to the forefront the question of security and guarantees.^[86]

When the conference met on May 22 the two questions, Alsace and the claims of Savoy, were still in dispute. Torcy and Rouillé therefore—perhaps a little stiffened by the Spanish news—begged to take their leave. Heinsius replied that they had all gone too far to part without a treaty. On this appeal the French envoys remained, but only provided they could send a courier to Versailles for instructions on these two points, and could present to the conference a memorandum on those which had already been settled. As soon as this memorandum had been presented on the 23rd the new divergence came to the fore. The Allies complained of the inadequate security which was offered for the surrender of Spain. They asked that they should not have to carry on the war in Spain while France was enjoying peace. They demanded guarantees. It had been realized at Versailles for some weeks that security for the fulfilment of the peace treaty would be required.^[87]

King Philip was established in Spain. His kingship was championed by the Spanish people. His armies were victorious. He had declared to his grandfather, “I will only give up my crown with my life.” He had created his one-year-old son Prince of Asturias, and the Cortes had acclaimed the infant as heir to the monarchy. Here were grave realities. Louis XIV was not necessarily able to answer for the King of Spain. He may have been aware of the strong feeling of the Dauphin against any desertion of his son, who had fought successfully at odds amid perils. All the more did the old King hope that some compensation would be secured for Philip V which, added to his own pressures, might procure compliance with the unrestrained demands of the Allies under the leadership, as must be owned, of the English Government. “There are occasions,” he wrote (April 29) to his Ambassador at Madrid, “when courage must yield to prudence; and since the people, at the moment so zealous, may well not always think the same, nor may my grandson, it would be better to reconcile oneself to reigning somewhere rather than lose at a stroke all one’s dominions.”^[88] Such expressions show a sincere will to peace.

But now Torcy violently opposed the idea of any guarantee. The Pensionary on behalf of his colleagues asked as proof of good faith for three French and three Spanish fortresses actually still occupied by French troops over and above all that had been conceded. Eugene, the land animal, wanted permission to march the allied armies into Spain through France. During the conference Marlborough sat silent. But on the night of the 23rd he expressed his doubts upon the possibility of forcing Louis XIV to act against his grandson.^[89] “Marlborough even suggested schemes to turn the article so as not to commit his Majesty to war against Spain.”^[90]

“The French Ministers absolutely refused,” wrote Townshend,

For two days the discussion turned around this crux, and as it became the ultimate cause of the disastrous breakdown it is necessary to realize its importance. Many writers think it monstrous that, when these immense issues were so nearly settled, all should have been wrecked on such a point. It is certain that the Allies would have been wrong and unwise to break upon it, and without doubt they did not mean to do so. None the less it was a matter of far more importance than many of the terms over which both sides haggled so long. To England, with her strident demand for the surrender of the whole Spanish Empire, it was specially important. She would be left alone in all probability to conquer Spain. Marlborough had for some time been aware of the danger. A month before he had written to the Duke of Moles on the urgent need of gaining Spanish support.

The allied chiefs were, however, at this time convinced that King Philip would obey the orders of his grandfather if these were given to him in earnest. Torcy was evidently of the same opinion. All that was necessary, therefore, was for the King to give gages that he would issue these orders in good faith. It never occurred to anyone on either side at this moment that Louis XIV was really to be compelled to use armed force to expel his grandson from Spain. The allied leaders were surprised and shocked at a later stage that this colour could be put on their requests. The alternative for them was a new war, perhaps a very grievous war, a war of conquest and subjugation in Spain. It might impose enormous expense in blood and treasure on the Allies, already exhausted, while defeated France, whose ruler could by a word have prevented it, would rebuild her prosperity in peace.

Marlborough had his plans ready for a Spanish war. It would have been on the largest scale. The great armies would be transported to the Peninsula. One army under Marlborough would advance from Portugal, and the other under Eugene from Catalonia. They would meet in Madrid. Marlborough himself considered that a single campaign would suffice. It may well be that he greatly underrated the resisting power of a nation, and thought of it in terms merely of professional armies. He might have fallen into the same trap as was a hundred years later to ruin Napoleon. There was always the possibility which Bolingbroke, basing himself on Stanhope’s opinion, was many years later to describe: “That armies of twenty or thirty thousand men might walk about that country till Doomsday . . . without effect; that wherever they came the people would submit to Charles III out of terror, and as soon as they were gone proclaim Philip V again out of affection. That to conquer Spain required a great army, and to keep it a greater.”^[93] But at least the Allies saw the conquest of Spain as an operation of the first magnitude, and if they could avoid this by merely extorting from Louis the effective exercise of his royal and family authority no one can fail to see why they pressed the point and pressed it hard. It would have been far better to concede the Sicilies as consolation for the Duke of Anjou. Here is the obstinacy for which the Allies are blameable. It is not, however, certain that even so Philip would have accepted the concession.

As no agreement could be reached on the outstanding points and no solution was forthcoming of the guarantee problem, Torcy invited the Allies in their turn to put their whole proposals in the form of a memorandum. Heinsius undertook to draw it up. The days following were occupied with the final drafting of the preliminaries. The Dutch statesmen worked throughout the nights of May 24 and 25 to frame the project. During that time the memorable Articles IV and XXXVII were drawn up.

No documents have come down to us showing how this wording was reached. It must be remembered that the Dutch did not feel themselves so much concerned as the British or Imperial Governments either in the recovery of Spain or in the means of enforcing it. They themselves did not mean to conquer Spain for anyone. Thus perhaps these two Articles did not receive the profound study at Dutch hands which would have been accorded to purely Dutch interests. Heinsius certainly rested upon his original assumption that, as Louis XIV would bring decisive influence to bear upon Philip V, they would never have to be put into force. The clauses were merely to be a threat of action, and the Allies were prepared to accept alternative guarantees from Torcy. In this sort of atmosphere Marlborough and Townshend sponsored the whole plan of the Forty-four Articles without demur. The Austrians raised only minor objections. It was proposed to arrange an armistice of two months from June 1 in which the final peace would be signed.

On the morning of May 27 Heinsius laid what were called the “preliminaries” before the Frenchmen. Invited to comment upon it, they made various reserves, but it is remarkable that they made no specific objection to Articles IV and XXXVII, which, read together, obliged France, under penalty of losing the cautionary towns, to procure the submission of Philip V. The document must, of course, be sent to Versailles for the King’s final decision. Would the French envoys sign it first themselves? Torcy refused point-blank. Rouillé was inclined to sign. “You knew,” he remarked to Torcy, “the state of affairs when you came to Holland. Your journey was proof of its gravity. If you leave without concluding peace, however onerous it may be, make no mistake about the disappointment of the whole of France.”^[96]

Marlborough to Godolphin

And on the 29th:

The French were requested to give an answer by June 4. Thus the “memorandum” acquired the character of an ultimatum. This had not been the original intention. Into this position the Allies had been manœuvred by Torcy’s skill. The document he had obtained presented the issues to his master in such a way as to enable him to refuse, should he choose to do so, on the broadest grounds.

“Your Majesty,” wrote Torcy on May 28 in sending the preliminaries to Versailles, “is thus entirely free to reject absolutely these conditions, as I trust the state of your affairs will permit; or to accept them if unhappily you conceive it your duty to end the war at any price.”^[99] If the King decided to break, his Minister advised that the odium should be thrown upon Alsace and the claims of Savoy, rather than upon the methods of ensuring the surrender of Spain. It is thus clear that Torcy had in no way taught the allied negotiators to recognize that Article XXXVII possessed a fatal character. On the contrary, it is evident that he took it for granted that Philip V would obey his grandfather without the slightest hesitation. Indeed, he had even remarked in the conference that the King of Spain would very likely be at Versailles before him.^[100] With heavy heart the unhappy Frenchman followed the woeful ultimatum he had sent forward to his master. On the journey he passed through Villars’s headquarters at Douai. He showed the terms to Villars. The Marshal, mortified, indignant, indomitable, conjured him to tell the King that he could count upon the army.

London and The Hague, as well they might, made haste to ratify the preliminaries. Vryberg reported that he had never seen Godolphin so cheerful. There was not even a Cabinet meeting. Every one was confident that peace was made. Marlborough began to arrange for the transport home of the British troops after the paying off of the foreign contingents in Flanders. “Everything goes so well here,” he wrote to Sarah, “that there is no doubt of its ending in a good peace. . . . You must have in readiness the sideboard of plate, and you must let the Lord Treasurer know that since the Queen came to the crown I have not had either a canopy or chair of state, which now of necessity I must have, so the wardrobe should have immediate orders.” And he adds—a characteristic touch—“I beg you will take care to have it made so as that it may serve for part of a bed, when I have done with it here, which I hope will be by the end of the summer.”^[101] Nevertheless, he found the suspense irksome, and from time to time he had misgivings about this Article XXXVII which neither Torcy nor any of Torcy’s allied opponents thought would be a serious difficulty. It is recorded that he said privately in these trying days, “I fear Article XXXVII may spoil everything.”^[102] Certainly, to be prepared for either event, he put the armies at twenty hours’ notice to march.

Torcy reached Versailles on the evening of June 1, and made his report to the King in the apartments of Madame de Maintenon. All next morning the Council sat. The highest dignitaries of France swelled the throng of courtiers in the anterooms, and although they were nourished only upon rumour, the sharpest division prevailed. Peace was the cry of the realm. But did they know what peace meant? Meanwhile behind the closed doors Louis, his son, and his councillors faced the awful alternatives. No authoritative account transpired. Torcy’s memoirs, Dangeau’s diaries, Saint-Simon’s ample pages, give no clues. It was only in 1855, says Klopp, that the publication of the memoirs of Rakoczy’s agent, the Hungarian Vetes, who might well have been in a position to know, threw a light upon this grim debate. Vetes’ report is dated lundi au soir, the Council having been held on the Sunday. He attributes the decision entirely to the action of the Dauphin. This Prince, usually so tranquil, appeared to be transported with wrath at the idea of his son, the crowned King of Spain, at that time idol of the Spanish people, being abandoned, even dragged from his throne, by Louis XIV. He bitterly reproached the Council with the shameful deed they were about to commit, and apostrophized his father the King himself in terms so little marked by respect that the listeners were petrified. Furiously he reminded the Ministers who had spoken for peace that one day he would be their master, and that if the King by their advice abandoned his son they should render a long account to him. He rose from the table and left the room. The doors closed behind him, and there was a lengthy interval; but presently Torcy emerged, and, pursuing the indignant Dauphin, told him and the whole Court that the resolve had been taken to stand by the King of Spain. Rouillé was sent post-haste to tell the Allies that their ultimatum was rejected.

Klopp, for all his research, is wrong in stating that Vetes alone left a record of the dispute in the Council. Frequent mention has been made of Marlborough’s Secret Service. One cannot tell where this begins and ends. The Blenheim Papers contain above four hundred reports from Paris dealing with the events of 1708 to 1710. Twice or three times a week a letter was written from the French capital. These reports, never yet published, are remarkable both for their accuracy and their prescience. They are all in French and, of course, unsigned. The writer must have been a man of position and intelligence, and his contacts were wide and various. Evidently he was accustomed to meet high personages at luncheon or dinner. One of his agents is mentioned who “lunches regularly with the clerks of the Foreign and War Ministries” fresh from the Council of the King. It is also probable from certain domestic details in the reports that some valet or female servant in close attendance upon Louis XIV or Madame de Maintenon gave to the British spy all he observed. They are remarkable because they show how soon and how truly Marlborough was advised. They give pictures of the private life and routine of Louis XIV sometimes more intimate than anything that Saint-Simon and Dangeau have recorded, and these pictures were swiftly, punctually, and regularly transmitted to his principal foe.^[103]

Marlborough’s spy at this juncture was as well informed as Vetes; and Marlborough within a few days had knowledge of the Dauphin’s intervention which Klopp supposed to have been buried for a hundred and fifty years.

Advices from Paris

“Is there, then, no counter-proposal?” asked Marlborough, when he learned the staggering news. He was deeply shocked. For some days he nursed a project for some compromise upon Article XXXVII.^[106] In much despondency he set out for the front.

He wrote to Godolphin (June 7):

This is one of the most revealing insights which we have into Marlborough’s statecraft. The idea of substituting for the despotic rule of France a Parliamentary régime had long commended itself to him. It is a strange speculation how the course of history would have been changed if he had been able to enforce his policy upon France. The French Revolution might have accomplished itself gradually and beneficently in the course of the eighteenth century, and the whole world have moved on to broader foundations without paying the awful price in war and horror. There might have been no Napoleon! To pursue such thoughts beyond their earliest suggestions is vain; but Marlborough’s words show how far in this respect he stood ahead of his times—and our own.

Petkum made a last futile effort with Heinsius for the exclusion of Article XXXVII. The Pensionary said it was too late. Marlborough and Eugene wished, however, to charge Rouillé, who had lingered in Holland, with the offer. On June 9 they made an attempt to interview him on his way through Brussels. “M. Rouillé,” wrote Marlborough to Townshend, “came to Brussels on Tuesday evening. Both the Prince and myself designed to have seen him, and ordered that no post horses should be given to anybody without our direction, but through a mistake we were disappointed.” He added in his own hand a postscript: “The Prince of Savoy is of opinion that we should have explained the XXXVIIth article, and have made it easy, thinking the French were sufficiently in our power when they had put us in possession of the towns. . . .”^[108] But all was over.

The question which is capital for Marlborough is whether he strove for peace or war. The immense tangle of the negotiations and the multitudes of letters written by the principal actors baffle history by their bulk and by their contradictions. A full account from day to day of all that passed would carry little meaning. Sometimes we see Marlborough rupturing what looks like a pacific move. Often he is arguing a minor point. Sometimes he presents himself in sharp opposition to Dutch, Prussian, or Imperial desires. Sometimes he is their champion. At each of the numberless phases of the negotiations the attitudes of the various principals shift. At one moment it is the Dutch who are sincere, at another the French; and always when there is agreement between any two, friend or foe, it is because the interests of others have been put in the shade.

But there can be no doubt where Marlborough stood. To Heinsius, to Godolphin, to Torcy, he wrote a series of urgent and at times impassioned appeals, the only aim of which was peace with France, leaving Spain, if necessary, to be dealt with separately and later. These appeals and warnings began from the moment when the XXXVIIth article, or, in other words, the question of guarantees, became crucial. He was the first to state in open conference, in the presence of the enemy representatives, that Article XXXVII ought not to be pressed. Torcy bears witness to this. When, to Marlborough’s consternation, the negotiations were ruptured and the French envoys took their departure he tried to intercept them, and his first thought, in harmony with Eugene, was to condemn the obstinacy on this point which had led to disaster. His letters to Heinsius, and above all their secret postscripts “For Yourself Only,” most of which have hitherto reposed in the Dutch archives, are the pith of the whole debate and the revelation of his inward mind.

At the moment of the rupture, later as the year advanced, and up to the eve of the great battle, his exhortation to Heinsius not to let Article XXXVII become a fatal obstacle was vehement. After the demand of the Allies had shifted from cautionary towns in France, which Louis XIV could undoubtedly deliver, to a demand for cautionary towns in Spain, which he certainly could not, Marlborough solemnly warned Heinsius that the consequence of obstinacy was the continuance of the war.

“I find the Prince is of opinion,” he wrote to Heinsius (June 11), “that it will be impossible for the French to comply with the Article for the giving up of the Monarque of Spain by the last of July.”^[109] And on June 19:

In reply to Sarah, who had reported that the talk in England was that he had obstructed peace, he wrote (July 1):

Again to Heinsius (July 4):

And (July 10):

The Pensionary revealed his own and reflected the prevailing Dutch view when he wrote to Marlborough (August 17), “There is vehement opposition here to continuing the war in Spain, after peace has been made with France.”^[114] Marlborough’s rejoinder cuts to the root:

He revealed his convictions on this point at any rate to Townshend with perfect candour.

And again, as the crisis of the campaign approached:

Although at the beginning of the conferences Marlborough recognized his own weakness unduly, although he affected an extreme deference to the London Cabinet and the Whig power, although his letters dutifully breathe the form and spirit of his instructions, although no doubt he made wrong estimates of the forces at work, and used many arguments which were not his own, nevertheless it can be proved that at every stage he threw the whole of his weight upon the high personages with whom he was in the most intimate relation in favour of a settlement.

The far shrewder criticism has been launched that he failed to assert his authority and his genius. This view was actually recorded at the time by his critic, Colonel Cranstoun (July 28):

We are told by later writers that he had become so used to conciliating divergent interests, to finding a middle course, to avoiding awkward points, to submitting to the mistakes of others and devising new expedients to achieve his own plans, that now, at this culminating moment in his career, he gave in fact no clear, real guidance, and resigned himself with sombre complacency to the drift and sequence of events. Marlborough, say these critics, had become an institution rather than a man, a function rather than an actor. To keep the Grand Alliance united, and himself at the head of it, till final victory was secured had so long been his duty that he thought it his sole duty. In a certain degree he had become the creature of his task. He had gained so often by being patient that he had lost the quality of revolt. He had conducted so many ill-assorted, antagonistic forces through endless toils and hazards to safety and success that the Common Cause had become more to him than the rightful cause. If his countrymen and colleagues, if the States-General, if the Empire, chose to frustrate the French desire for peace, and conjured him to lead the strongest armies yet known to the invasion of France and the march to Paris, he would willingly, too willingly, be their servant and commander.

The great decline in Marlborough’s personal power must not be ignored by those who censure him. He had since 1700 woven together a Grand Alliance and carried it forward by management, tact, and great victorious battles to mastery. At every stage he had had to hold in check divergent and competing aims. The fear of being defeated and destroyed had joined the Allies together. Now his own victories had destroyed that fear. Thus at the moment when his work should have given him the greatest authority, and when that authority might have been most beneficently exercised, he found himself alone, with no party and no country at his back. In England he was the servant of a Queen with whom his favour was gone, and the agent of a Government to whom he was in one aspect the survivor of a period during which they had been excluded from office. In Holland Heinsius and the leaders of the Dutch Republic were convinced that he was no longer their advocate. The Empire and the Hapsburg brothers still hoped to bind him to their cause and to sever him from the Dutch by proffering him almost a kingdom. But otherwise they thought, with General Schulenburg, “My lord Duc est l’homme le plus fin et le plus rusé du monde.”

The circumstances of May and June 1709 were very different from those of October 1708. If Louis XIV had at that time accepted Marlborough’s offer in the spirit in which it was made, when the armistice and peace conference would have broken out, as it were, from the surrender of Lille, Marlborough would probably then have been able to gather the conduct of the affair into his own hands. The Whigs had not yet forced their way completely into the Cabinet. The Dutch were comforted by the surrender of Lille, but were still oppressed by the French positions on the Scheldt and their grip on Ghent and Bruges. The great frost had not begun. No one can say with certainty that Marlborough would have had the power to carry a good peace, and end the waste and carnage from which Europe had suffered so long. The negotiations might, however, have lain in his skilful, tolerant, comprehending, if interested, hands. Whatever the military conditions may be, peace can never be established between great civilized countries upon the brutal execution of the rights of one side over the other. Marlborough’s desire was peace; his interest was peace; perhaps he had then the power to procure peace.

This later phase shows Marlborough’s efforts to guide events without any real control of the new forces at work. He was admittedly the indispensable agent. But for that very reason he could not use the last weapon at the disposal of a public servant who is resolved to carry his point of view. He could not compel by threatening resignation. This, if accomplished, would only wreck any chances of peace. His fall would be sufficient to encourage France to a point where all hopes of an agreement would have vanished. He must continue Generalissimo and plenipotentiary of the Allies, while at the same time consciously and unconsciously he was divested of the necessary power. Whereas up to this point Marlborough has been leading forward the whole Alliance for the most part along paths which he had chosen, we now see a cluster of magnificos bearing him shoulder-high on their own courses, but in great difficulty in deciding, and still more in agreeing, what those courses shall be. We see also efforts and manœuvres by Marlborough to free himself from these ceremonious maulings and to regain independent authority.

In the process everything was lost. Marlborough did not regain his control, and the Allies did not secure their terms. Europe was long denied the peace so sorely needed. Confusion and disaster were destined to cloud the end of this triumphant war. Peace was achieved only after further years of waste and torment, and then at the price to Britain of an act of desertion and dishonour. And Marlborough, who had performed a prodigy of loyalty, skill, valour, and effort, was condemned to be the scapegoat of universal disappointment. He had won the war. Some one, somehow, had lost the peace—his peace—and lost it for ever. Between them all they had let the splendid opportunity slip through their fingers. There were too many powers and potentates engaged, and no commanding leadership was tolerated. No one can be convicted of malice. All wanted peace. At the end two great Captains were still striving for it. They all failed. They all suffered for their failure.

The disappointment of the Allies found vent in a vain and furious clamour that they had once again been tricked and fooled by Louis XIV. The drums beat in the allied camps, and the greatest armies those war-worn times had seen rolled forward to the carnage of Malplaquet.

When Torcy had declared at the peace congress that Louis XIV could not wage war upon his grandson to dethrone him Marlborough had replied at once that he agreed with that. But now the die was cast to fight it out, and for the first time in his reign of more than sixty years the Great King appealed directly to French public opinion. In a circular letter addressed to the governors of his provinces, but intended for the widest audience possible in those days, he fastened the blame of the broken negotiations upon this cruel and unnatural demand. It had not been made, but there was enough appearance of it in the excessive claims of the Allies and in the protracted discussions upon them. Many famous verbal manœuvres have been less justly founded.

From this time the character of the war was profoundly affected. Justice quite suddenly gathered up her trappings and quitted one camp for the other. What had begun as disjointed, tardy resistance of peoples, Parliaments, and Protestantism to intolerant and aggressive military power had transformed itself for some time gradually, and now flagrantly, into invasion and subjugation by a victorious coalition. From this moment France, and to a lesser degree Spain, presented national fronts against foreign inroad and overlordship. Many generations had gone since Joan of Arc had struck this gong, and three were to pass before its harsh, reverberating clang was heard again. In those days, when all the large populations were controlled and their life expressed only by a few thousand notables and educated persons, there was, of course, no conscious movement of the masses. Nevertheless the governing classes throughout France, and also in Spain, derived a strange invigoration from the national spirit. The French people reverenced and almost loved their monarch; and a strong unity reaching far beneath the official hierarchies now made itself felt. A new flood of strength, welling from depths which the early eighteenth century had not plumbed, revived and replenished an enfeebled nobility, exhausted professional armies, and a ruined treasury. The Spanish were already fighting a national war on behalf of Philip V. Now the French nation moved against foreign oppressions with some rude foretaste, even at that time formidable, of the passions of 1792.

The King’s circular letter invoked a haggard but none the less genuine surge of indignation through all the circles upon which the French Government was accustomed to rely. “I cannot express to you the wrath of this nation,” wrote Vetes, “against the Allies at the news of their stiff demands, and the general joy at the King’s resolve to sustain his grandson, the King of Spain.”^[119] In Court circles there was a wave of emotion. Marshal Boufflers sent his plate to the Mint. The royal Princes and the aristocracy followed his example. Louis XIV melted down his gold dinner service and made efforts to pawn or sell the Crown Jewels. His example was followed by the Duke of Grammont and all the Ministers. No one in Paris dared to dine off silver. In the provinces the Church, the bankers, and the merchants responded to this mood. * “It is an emetic,” wrote Marlborough’s Paris spy,

In France, even a foe turned ally. Famine, which had brought the realm so low, now led the strongest peasantry to the Army. “They follow the bread wagons,” remarked the King unworthily. They followed also the promptings of the French heart, of which he had so long been unconscious.

At the Court much of the exaltation was on the surface and short-lived. The King and his morganatic wife set no great store by it. “When it became known that the King refused the shameful terms of peace,” wrote Madame de Maintenon to the Duke of Noailles (June 9), “every one cheered and called for war; but this impulse did not last, and people soon fell back into that prostration which you saw and despised.” There was also a fierce temper around, of which the shrewd woman was sharply aware. “How many times,” she wrote,

In July there were serious riots at Dijon and Rouen. At Rouen the mob cried, “Vive Marlborough.”^[122] In the capital bitter tongues repeated a new Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father which art at Versailles, unhallowed is thy name. Thy kingdom is no longer great. Thy will is no more done on land or sea. Give us this day our daily bread, which we are short of on all occasions. Forgive our enemies who have beaten us, but not your generals who have allowed them to do so. Do not fall into all the temptations of the Maintenon, but deliver us from Chamillart.”^[123] This appeal was answered. Chamillart’s obstinacy, it was declared, had lost the chance of peace. His improvidence had neglected the preparations to resume the war. In June he was replaced by Voisin. For the eighth campaign the French armies assembled. Money drawn from every recess trickled into the military chest. Rations, though not enough, were gathered into the magazines, and in the old hero Boufflers, and even more in the ardent, indomitable Villars, the army of France found leaders worthy of the greatest nation in its greatest need.

The unfolded map of history now shows us that Louis XIV was right in rejecting the peace terms and renewing the war. He wavered long; but the outcome vindicated his final plunge, and in the after-light his grandeur amid appalling stresses shines forth. Here is another triumph for perseverance against the enemy. His decision was condemned at the time by some of the clearest minds in France. Fénelon has left his reasoned censures upon record. Moreover, the final result of the war was not determined by the fortitude of the sovereign, nor by the magnificent efforts of the French armies. It was settled by the obscure intrigues upon the backstairs and around the couch of Queen Anne and by the consequent reversal of British policy which produced and followed the fall of Marlborough. None of this was guessed or even dreamed of by Louis XIV at the time. It was unknown and unknowable. Who could foresee that in little more than a year the dominating Whigs would be hurled from power or that England, so long the implacable soul of the confederacy, would become the active agent of its destruction? All the more must the moral be drawn—“Fight on.”

Claude-Louis Hector de Villars, Marshal of France, has already played some part in this account. When Marlborough in 1705 had wished to enter France by the Moselle, Villars had confronted him; and the fact that, owing to the tardy arrival of the German contingents, the Duke had been forced to abandon the project constituted a French success. Villars’s three campaigns on the Rhine had prospered and at moments shone. His surprise of the Lines of Stollhofen in 1707 and his subsequent inroad into Germany had gained him glory and booty. He had regained in full the confidence of the King. The discrediting of Vendôme had thrown the brunt of the defence of France on Villars. Placed at the head of the main army to face the gravest attack, his buoyant assurance had sustained the spirits of Versailles, and was no doubt a factor in the decision to persevere in the war.

Villars was a being into every atom of whose texture vanity and valour entered in equal proportions. Both were serviceable to his country in those dark days. He boasted, he postured, he gesticulated, but at the same time he organized, inspired, and acted. His self-admiration was matched by his patriotism. He was a great-hearted braggart. When disasters befell the armies on other fronts he was heard to exclaim, “I can’t be everywhere.” His indomitable ardour in facing adversity and the foe was of the highest service to his country. To few of her great soldiers does France owe more. But the conditions at the front in March were shocking. “I was unable before starting to formulate a plan of campaign because I did not know whether I should find an army there. . . . In fact I found the troops in a deplorable condition, without clothes, without arms, and without bread.”^[124] The soldiers starved in their camps. The officers were demoralized. Even more than when Vendôme had taken the command after Ramillies, every one was “ready to doff his hat when one mentions the name of Marlborough.” By every device of discipline and every trick of propaganda he had set himself in the face of these aching deficiencies to revive the spirit of the army.

But at this stage the facts left Villars no choice of action. He could aim at nothing more than keeping the army together behind entrenchments. He affected throughout the campaign the desire to fight a great offensive battle. But his means were never equal to this, and the King’s permission was only given intermittently. He spread the tale that before leaving Paris he had required as a condition of accepting the command that nine million livres in cash should be placed in the army chests. The famished soldiers looked upon him as a man fighting for their daily bread and trusted him as their sole champion. Here at least was stubborn material. The men driven into the ranks by famine were the best the French peasantry could breed. They had a feeling that they were fighting not only for their King but for their country. Since it was so hard to keep body and soul together, why not die fighting? Thus there were desperate troops and an indomitable chief. As he moved about among them in his ceaseless inspection of garrisons and camps he often heard the words, “The Marshal is right. There are times when one has to suffer.”^[125] “Villars,” says Saint-Simon, writing in the safety of Versailles, “set to work to boast like a madman and to advocate insane proposals in his usual style. He breathed nothing but battles. He gave out that nothing but a battle could save the state, and that he would fight one in the plains of Lens at the outset of the campaign.”^[126] But this is a shabby account of exertions which saved France.

Marlborough’s spy took a far truer view. * “The King has written,” he reported (June 10),

Of Chamillart’s successor, Voisin, the spy wrote (June 14), “He is a creature of the Lady’s, and described as a turned-coat.”^[128]

The allied army was already assembled about Ghent, and Marlborough and Eugene set out thither along the causeway road on June 12 under an escort of two hundred horse. As reports had been received that French raiding parties were in the woods near Alost with intent to seize the High Commanders, considerable detachments of allied troops were drawn out in this direction. The army at Ghent was the most powerful yet known, and more numerous than Europe had seen for many centuries. The order of battle comprised 194 battalions and 320 squadrons. Of these 152 battalions and 245 squadrons^[129] were already marshalled, amounting to between 110,000 and 120,000 men for active operations, apart from a much larger number in garrisons and on the communications.

The cruel winter was followed by a cold, wet spring. The fields were sodden. Even by June the grass could scarcely support the cavalry horses. The magazines which Marlborough had sought to establish at Ghent and Lille were only half filled. “The account we have concerning forage is so terrible,” he wrote to Godolphin (June 9), “that I fear that much more than the Marshal de Villars’s gasconading.”^[130] Even if there had been no peace conference the campaign could not have begun sooner. Moreover, it was plain from the state of the French countryside that famine-stricken regions alone awaited the invader. Not only did the campaign open late, but it was already obvious that it would have to end early. There was no chance of repeating in 1709 the winter struggle of 1708. A mighty, well-equipped army, the best-fed community in Europe, stood at the orders of the renowned Chiefs. But the time at their disposal was short, and the fortress barrier of France after all these years of siege and battle, though worn thin, was still unbroken. If forecasts were to be made upon the military facts only, the prospect to those who had lost so good an opportunity of peace was certainly bleak. But we find at this time an overwhelming conviction among all the allied leaders, soldiers and statesmen, that the economic and internal misery of France would compel a peace. Merely leaning the weight of the great army upon the enemy would, it was believed, confront them with stresses they could in no wise sustain. The blockade was rigorously enforced.^[131]

Marlborough to Heinsius

And to Godolphin:

Marlborough to Heinsius

And again (June 19):

A glance at the map reveals the strategic situation. The French front line stretched from Dunkirk to the Meuse. It had been bent back by the capture of Lille. Marlborough, with the Lys and the Scheldt up to Tournai in his control, could advance through his captured strongholds of Courtrai and Menin in several directions. The gap between Ypres and Tournai was blocked by the French army. If that army would give battle, as Villars loudly boasted, in the plains of Lens, all would be brought to a speedy issue. But nobody believed that Villars would be so foolish. All available information about his army showed it weaker in numbers than the Allies and subsisting only with extreme privation. It was already known that, far from seeking battle in the open field, he had constructed strong defensive lines running from the minor fortress of Saint-Venant through La Bassée to the great stronghold of Douai. Here, almost in the trenches in which two centuries later the descendants of the French and British troops together faced the remorseless bombardment of the descendants of the Prussian and German contingents, Villars had drawn his line. At first it was a single trench, with a parapet fifteen feet thick and a ditch deep and broad. But a second line fifty paces in front of this was in process of construction, and every use was made of all the water which the control of the headstreams of the rivers could give after a season of exceptional rains.

When Marlborough and Eugene reached Ghent several councils of war were held. The headquarters of the confederates had now become an assembly of the leading warriors of Europe after nearly thirty years of war. So many states had sent their contingents to Marlborough’s army that his own British redcoats actually in the field army were barely a seventh of the international force which now awaited his orders. The commanders of all these forces, and representatives from all the countries from which they came, made a gathering of notables and potentates at once imposing and top-heavy. Nevertheless, so nicely were the distinctions drawn and so unquestionable was the authority which flowed from Marlborough, acting with Eugene, that it was not only possible to discuss the war measures in a considerable body without leakage, but for sudden and surprise action to be taken. The councils of war surveyed the situation, and many alternatives were examined or aired, but afterwards orders were issued by Marlborough which embodied what he with Eugene decided. Only in this way can the repeated deceptions of the enemy be explained.^[135]

THE SITUATION EARLY IN 1709

Apparently both Marlborough and Eugene at first spoke freely of their disapproval of the way in which the negotiations had been conducted; and to such an extent that offence and some alarm were caused at The Hague. Goslinga’s secret letters to the States-General are revealing:

And the next day, evidently after some remonstrance on his part:

And from Lille on June 23:

He adds:

It is to be hoped that in the face of this and similar evidence the many historians and writers who have condemned Marlborough and his comrade for prolonging war for their own ambition or profit will no longer be credited.

Public opinion in England expected that a great battle and a victorious advance to Paris would follow the impudent rejection of the Allies’ peace terms. This was not unreasonable, considering the mood of Ministers. Godolphin was worried. * “Though,” he wrote to Marlborough (June 1/12),

Tory criticism was loud and captious.

Peter Wentworth to Lord Raby

At the front the matter was less easy, although the strategic issues were simple. Could the confederate army pierce the lines of La Bassée? Could it defeat the French, no longer in the open field, but behind entrenchments amounting almost to fortresses? If so the march would lie forward into the heart of France. But if these lines and the troops which held them were judged too strong for frontal assault, then they must be turned on one flank or the other. The approaches to both these flanks were protected by fortresses—on the north Ypres, on the south Tournai. The reduction of either of these places would probably occupy a large part of the all too brief campaigning season which was open. It was therefore first of all necessary to decide whether a frontal attack should be made or not. Great reconnaissance was made of the whole of Villars’s front during the latter part of June. Cadogan and Dopf not only pressed at this point and at that with powerful escorts, but also it is said that the former, descending from his high position as Marlborough’s Chief of Staff and Quartermaster-General, traversed at the peril of his life, disguised as a labourer, a large section of Villars’s front. The spy in Paris reported:

On June 24, in the light of all information procurable, the question of frontal attack was put to the council. There was no doubt about the conclusion. Villars supposes that Marlborough and Eugene were overruled by the Dutch Deputies. But there is no truth in this. Marlborough’s letters show that he accepted Cadogan’s view that a frontal attack would not be justifiable. It was unanimously resolved that the French lines were too strong to be attacked. The only question in dispute was whether Ypres, on the one flank, or Tournai, on the other, should be besieged. Considering how France had begged for peace and the terms which could have been obtained, it was a poor and damaging outcome that the main effort of the Allies could compass no more than a siege. Indeed, Villars by his lines, by his forays, by his gasconades, had already gained an unfought victory when he compelled his indignant enemies to content themselves with such local and stony fare.

Which, then, should it be? The allied commanders debated in deep conclave. Marlborough still hoped to pursue his design of the previous autumn. He wished to advance along the coast by Boulogne upon Abbeville and then up the Somme to Amiens and towards Paris. As a preliminary to this it would be necessary to besiege Ypres. We know now from Villars’s memoirs that this was the movement which he dreaded most. It would be difficult for him to feed his own army in opposing it; and he saw as clearly as Marlborough that here alone could the Allies make use of their command of the sea in supplying their forces or in establishing a new base. There seems little doubt that Marlborough’s view was right. But Eugene opposed it. He advocated the attack on Tournai, and he found great support. On political grounds the whole inclination of the German states and the Dutch was to draw the British away from the sea and carry the war as far inland as possible. Goslinga, who was present at the council, says:

All these reasons were no doubt just; but in war, as in peace, there is rarely any lack of good arguments for doing all sorts of things. “The Duke,” continues Goslinga,

Thus we see Marlborough deferring as easily to the opinions of Eugene and the Deputies in the field as he had to those of the Whigs in council. In the one case, as in the other, he was evidently conscious of diminished authority. Besides this, it had become a habit with him to try to get everybody together and yield to majority opinion in the hope that at some moment or other a situation would be created out of which his ingenuity might draw some great event. He was ageing and worn with incessant exertions, and perhaps unduly conscious of the decline of his power in England. He could not well, when the British contingent was so modest, force the commanders of the confederate army into courses which were unwelcome to them. It was rash even to persuade them against their will. He believed at this time that the state of France was so desperate and the war so nearly over that unity among the Allies was more important than true strategy. He underrated the remaining strength of France. He perhaps still more underrated his own strength, ebbing though it now was. He thought the Grand Alliance would gain an inevitable victory if only it kept together; and this was no doubt true if it had kept together long enough. Lastly, he was in favour of a siege of Tournai if the other alternative was excluded. The rapidity and precision of the operation which follows makes it certain that there was no friction in the allied High Command.

The decision to besiege Tournai was taken on June 24. The operation was executed with masterly precision, and, according to Pelet,^[141] “with such extreme secrecy that no one was able to divine the true objective.” Marlborough, in pursuance of his Ypres plan or alternatively as a feint, had brought all the siege-train down to Menin. Its position there was known to Villars, and seemed to him proof that it was his left that was about to be attacked. Dompré, one of the Ally commanders, who was marching with twelve battalions and as many squadrons from Alost, was ordered the same afternoon to rejoin the army at Tournai. Another reconnaissance in force of Villars’s lines before La Bassée was made as a blind on the 25th, and on the 26th a full council of war assembled ostensibly to take proper measures to assault them. At tattoo the allied camps were struck, the baggage loaded, and the whole army stood to arms ready to march. Once it was dark the heavy baggage started back to Lille, and the mass of Marlborough’s and Eugene’s forces moved in the opposite direction south-west towards La Bassée. By these manœuvres Marshal Villars was convinced either that he would have to face a frontal attack upon his lines at daybreak, or more probably that a feint at La Bassée was to cover the turning of his left. Accordingly, “fearing much more for his left than for his right, and above all for the neighbourhood of Saint-Venant, which was the most important and the most exposed, he sought the means of protecting it without moving his army from the La Bassée position.”^[142] He reduced the garrison of Tournai, reinforced those of Saint-Venant and Aire, and proceeded himself to Béthune with five hundred men, who lighted fires along three leagues of the front as if he had moved his main army towards his left. Finally he sent a detachment towards La Gorgue with orders to spread the tale that they were the vanguard of the French army.

THE FEINT BEFORE TOURNAI

“This ruse,” writes Pelet, “had all the success which was hoped for. Eugene stopped short. . . . The Duke of Marlborough’s march towards Douai produced no effect.” It is surprising that so able an historian, writing long after and with much knowledge, should remain under the deceptions of the French headquarters at the moment. In fact, at eleven p.m. on June 26, after marching southward towards La Bassée for about two hours, Eugene turned north-west and later east towards Tournai. At the same time the long strings of barges carrying the siege-train and its ammunition began to float down the Lys back to Ghent, in order to be towed up the Scheldt. Marlborough’s right and centre, moving at first south through Seclin, turned simultaneously in the same direction, while his left, which had not yet quitted camp, marched due east directly upon Tournai. Agreeably with these changes, the Prince of Orange with 30 squadrons and 10 battalions moved against Mortagne and Saint-Amand, on the Scarpe before it joins the Scheldt above Tournai.

The confederate troops, whose wagons carried six days’ rations, did not know where they were going, and at first expected to be called upon for a general assault on the lines in the morning. But the turns in the darkness completely mystified them as well as the enemy, and when day broke they were astonished to see the towers of Tournai Cathedral rising at no great distance before them. Dompré, from the north, arrived simultaneously on the eastern side of the Scheldt, where he was soon joined by Lumley with 30 squadrons, including the British cavalry, and 10 battalions. Marlborough’s army deployed during the day, facing south with its right on the Lille-Douai road. Mortagne and Saint-Amand were captured without opposition by Orange; and Eugene, coming in later, filled the gap between Marlborough’s left and the Scheldt. By nightfall on the 27th Tournai was invested in force on all sides. The surprise was complete, and the fortress was caught with barely five thousand men, or half the proper number to man its defences. It was well supplied with munitions and had some bread, but the hostile apparition was so sudden that Surville, the commander who had distinguished himself at Lille, had no time even to drive in the cattle from the surrounding fields. The attempts by Villars on the 29th to throw in seven or eight hundred horse from Mons and Condé, and on the 30th by Luxembourg, who had orders to repeat his brilliant exploit at Lille with a thousand dragoons each carrying a foot soldier behind his saddle, were effectually frustrated.

John to Sarah

Marlborough to Godolphin

Although the pretence of French historians that the Allies had been forced to alter their plans by Villars’s nocturnal measures cannot be maintained, the Marshal had nevertheless no serious ground for self-reproval or disappointment. It was beyond human wit to guess which way the cat would jump. It had jumped in the least dangerous direction. The siege of Tournai, begun as late as midsummer, meant, even with the favour of surprise, the indecisive consumption of the greater part of the campaigning season. Villars was relieved that the danger of operations against his left in conjunction with the naval power of the Allies might now be definitely set aside. He therefore expressed himself well content with what had happened. “It was a great relief,” he says in his memoirs. He set himself at the time to interpret the events of the preceding days in the manner most satisfactory to his reputation. Marlborough and Eugene had sought, he suggested, to lure him from his lines into a battle in the open field. He had baulked them. Fearing their movement by his left, he had purposely left Tournai weakly garrisoned as a bait. “The fortress should hold out,” he declared publicly, “at least four or five months.” His private estimate carried its defence to the beginning of October. These views commended themselves to Louis XIV. “I count for much,” he wrote on July 2, “that by your wise dispositions and the precautions which you have taken all the vast projects [of the enemy] are reduced to the single enterprise [of the siege of Tournai], and you could not at the beginning of this campaign render me more important service.”^[145]

Marlborough’s letters to Godolphin speak repeatedly of the hardships of the troops and of the misery of the countryside. (June 24) “All the wheat is killed everywhere that we have seen or heard of.”^[146] (July 4) “It grieves my heart to see the sad condition all the poor country people are in for want of bread; they have not the same countenances they had in other years.”^[147] To Sarah (July 11): “It is not to be imagined the ill weather we have, insomuch that the poor soldiers in the trenches are up to their knees in dirt, which gives me the spleen to a degree that makes me very uneasy, and consequently makes me languish for retirement.”^[148] (July 18) “If we have not peace, I shall be sooner with you this year than any of this war, for in all likelihood we shall not find forage to enable us to make a long campaign, and that is what I fear the French know as well as we.”^[149] And (July 30): “The misery of all the poor people we see is such that one must be a brute not to pity them.”^[150]

The strains were increasingly hard in all directions. Godolphin wrote to Marlborough (July 4):

Meanwhile the vessels carrying the battering-cannon had passed through Ghent and were being towed up the Scheldt. The French had blocked the fairway by sinking barges filled with stone, and it was necessary to cut a new channel. The first thirty barges passed the obstruction on the 8th, and by the 10th the whole of the siege artillery had arrived. The work of constructing the batteries and mounting the cannon absorbed the energies of the besiegers. Marlborough, with sixty battalions, undertook the siege. Eugene commanded the covering army. Thus the rôles at Lille were reversed. Three separate attacks were launched against the town: Lottum the Prussian against the citadel from the Valenciennes road; Schulenburg the Saxon against the Sainte-Fontaine gate from the left bank of the Scheldt; Fagel the Dutchman against the Manville gate. Keen rivalry existed between these commanders, and wagers were laid as to which would win the prize. The difficulties of the siege were vastly increased not only by the unseasonable rains, but by the enemy’s control of the sluices of the Upper Scheldt, which enabled them to flood the siege works suddenly in various places. The Town Ditch opposite Fagel, which was in fact a branch of the Scheldt, was filled with a deep stream running so fast that it washed away the débris as fast as the bombardment cast it down. To this was now added an intensity of mining and countermining novel and horrible in that age. “This is a siege,” wrote Schulenburg, “quite different from any hitherto made; the most embarrassing thing is that few officers even among the engineers have any exact knowledge of this kind of underground works, and even less of the way of attacking them.”^[152] “The great quantity of waters,” Marlborough wrote to Godolphin (July 25), “which this garrison are masters of gives us great trouble now that we should pass the Fosse, so that our being masters of the town is retarded for some days.”^[153]

On the 19th Marlborough had determined not to press Fagel’s attack, but to concentrate upon the other two. The garrison, although active and frequently successful with their mines, were clearly saving themselves for the defence of the citadel, and on the 28th, when preparations for a general storm were far advanced, Surville hung out a white flag and beat the chamade on the fronts of all three attacks. The terms of capitulation resembled those of Lille. Eight hundred French wounded and invalids were allowed to proceed to Douai. The town was yielded, and Surville after dining ceremonially with Prince Eugene withdrew into the citadel with about four thousand men. Taking the town cost the Allies over 3200 men—800 in Lottum’s, 1800 in Schulenburg’s, and 600 in Fagel’s attack.

Colonel Cranstoun was, as usual, critical of Marlborough. “All those amongst us here,” he wrote to a friend (August 5),

The hardest part was yet to come. The citadel, a five-bastion fortress of earthworks and masonry, was reputed “one of the best fortify’d Places by Art that is in the World.”^[155] The garrison was sufficient for the defence of their reduced lines. Powerful as were the visible defences, the underground works were soon found by the assailants to be even more formidable. A bitter subterranean warfare began. “We have to fight with moles,” the British complained. Mining parties met each other below the surface and fought with picks and shovels, and, as the process developed, with sword and musket. The men in the batteries and trenches heard the ceaseless tapping of the miners beneath their feet. Explosions where soldiers were buried thirty or forty at a time, and one in which no fewer than four hundred men perished, made the siege terrible in the memories of veteran troops. All our diarist friends confirm this. “The siege,” wrote Blackader (August 18),

The pious major had other griefs.

Private (afterwards Corporal) Matthew Bishop, whose moving life-story is too little known,^[157] writes:

This private soldier’s diary finds exact confirmation in Schulenburg’s report to King Augustus: “They exploded several mines, which caused but little damage. In one case there was not enough powder in the mine; for those who were up above [merely] jumped a foot into the air. If it had been effective it would have killed more than eighty men.”^[158] “We were prodigious hard at Work,” Bishop continues, “in sapping the Enemy, who sapped under us, and sprung several Mines, which stifled great Numbers of our Men. Then those that were above would work with all their Might, in order to give them below Air. By that Means we did save some alive.” One day he saw when out of the trenches “a prodigious Blaze, and it ascended up into the Air like unto a Cloud. We could distinguish they had sprung one of their grand mines. . . . But at our return I found there was almost a whole Regiment of the Scotch Hollanders^[159] blown up. There was likewise a kind of report spread through all our Army, that it was their intention to blow us all up; but to prevent them we were continually in Motion.”^[160]

Surville was prepared to make a resolute defence of the citadel, and his underground works gave him great advantages. He had, however, been guilty of the fatal neglect of not laying in sufficient provisions. His resistance was limited to little more than a month by his food. He therefore proposed to Marlborough that the citadel, unless relieved before September 5, should then be surrendered, and that in the meanwhile the siege operations should be suspended. He asked leave to send an officer through the lines to obtain the King’s approval. Marlborough was agreeable to this, “since it will save the lives of a great many men, and we cannot hope to take it much sooner.”^[161]

Villars, when he heard of the shortage of food, vented his wrath upon Surville in cruel terms. He alleged that the proposal for a local armistice had come from the Allies. He advised the King to reject it. Louis XIV accepted his view. It seemed to him unwise not to compel the Allies to spend their munitions upon the siege. Surville was, therefore, sternly forbidden to go forward with his proposal, unless the allied commanders would consent to a general armistice throughout the whole of the Flanders theatre. This, of course, was in turn rejected.

Marlborough to Godolphin

Marlborough’s reaction to the defeat of Charles XII at Pultawa gives us a glimpse of his own inward feelings. “Constant success for ten years; two hours’ mismanagement!” How easily in the dangerous game of war might these words find a new application! There is no doubt he liked the tremendous Swede, and, in spite of the advantage which his removal from European affairs spelt to the Allies, Marlborough was sorry for him, and fortified in his own prudence.

John to Sarah

The siege went forward in a severe and bloody style. Nothing like the mining and counter-mining had ever been known. On August 5 a hundred and fifty besiegers who had gained a footing upon the defences were blown into the air. Through the nights of the 16th and 17th there was fierce fighting in the mining galleries, ending in the expulsion of the French. On the 20th the blowing up of a wall smothered thirty or forty Ally officers and men. On the 23rd the besiegers discovered a large mine when it was about to destroy a whole Hanoverian battalion. But while they were rejoicing in this good fortune another mine below it was sprung, causing very heavy losses. On the 26th a townsman of Tournai offered to reveal one of the principal mines of the citadel on condition that he should be made head gaoler of all the prisons in Tournai. His offer was accepted, and the mine gallery was occupied by three hundred men. The French, however, again sprung a mine below this gallery, and the whole three hundred were destroyed, and a hundred more besides.

“The manner of Fighting in this Siege,” says the author of The Tatler,

In the face of grievous losses and ordeals the Allies persevered remorselessly in their attacks. On August 31 Surville, almost destitute of food and exposed to imminent storm, when no quarter would be shown, hung out the white flag of capitulation. Marlborough demanded that the garrison should be prisoners of war, and on Surville refusing another two days’ bombardment ensued. On September 3 it was agreed that the garrison should march out with the honours of war and be permitted to return to France on condition of not serving again until duly exchanged. On September 5 the Allies were masters of Tournai.

The advices from Paris were never more full of information, true and false, than during this period. The extracts which follow show the variety of contacts which the spy must have made at Versailles.

Thus did this deadly personage feed Marlborough with knowledge.

The fall of Tournai was followed by an explosion of war-fury strangely out of keeping with the policy and temper in which the campaign had hitherto been conducted. Up to this moment the French had been virtually forbidden by Louis XIV to fight a battle. Villars was told that their interest enjoined a strategy of delay. On the other side, Marlborough, Eugene, and the Dutch Deputies, convinced that France must collapse under the weight of the war through economic and financial pressure, had also been wedded to caution. Repeatedly they had examined Villars’s lines, and always it had been decided that to incur the risks and costs of forcing them was not warranted in the favourable position of the allied cause. Thus the campaign seemed relegated to the sphere of manœuvre, with no more serious objective than making a further inroad upon the French fortress line.

Now suddenly, upon the capitulation of Tournai, an access of mental rage seems to have taken possession of both sides simultaneously. They discarded their cold calculations. They flung caution to the winds. The King gave Villars full freedom. The Marshal used it to court an encounter battle. Marlborough and Eugene two days later assaulted him frontally in a position already strong by nature, and now fortified by serious entrenchments and defences. The contagion of this mood swept through both armies like a fever. A terrible ardour inspired all ranks. They thirsted to be at each other’s throats, and slay their foes. The soldiers of every nation, national and mercenary alike, fell upon each other with a ferocity hitherto unknown to the age, and in the largest and bloodiest battle of the eighteenth century quarter was scarcely asked or given.

But the source of this new temper is to be found in the allied Governments even more than in their troops or their generals. A hitherto unpublished letter of Marlborough’s shows that his own instinct was against a supreme trial of strength, but that both the Empire and the Dutch were pressing him to it. In this letter is revealed for the first time the origin of Malplaquet.

Marlborough to Heinsius

As the fall of Tournai citadel approached the next step was considered by the Allies. It was realized that the situation would not be greatly changed by its capture. On the one hand, the course of the Scheldt would be open up to Saint-Amand; on the other, Villars’s army was better organized, his supply was less stringent, and his defences more complete. The season was far advanced, and no important invasion of France could be made that year. There remained, as it seemed, only the possibility of prolonging the pressure upon the French to renew the negotiations, or, if that failed, to secure a good start for the army in 1710. An advance in the centre between the Lys and the Scarpe would be confronted by the French prepared positions. Eyes therefore turned again to the flanks. In the west Ypres, Aire, and Saint-Venant offered themselves as costly prizes. Ypres was strong and well prepared, and Marlborough and Eugene judged the country round it bad for manœuvre late in the season. Our own experience at Passchendaele in 1917 in no way contradicts their impressions. On the other flank lay the fortresses of the Sensée—Condé, Valenciennes, the entrenched camp at Denain, or perhaps Bouchain.

FORTRESSES AFTER THE FALL OF TOURNAI

A wider turning movement would be facilitated by the capture of Mons. But this fortress of the first order controlled no river communication. High ground stood between it and the valley of the Sambre. There is no account of the discussions which took place, though Goslinga, as usual, condemns what was actually done. Politics may well have been the deciding factor. During the peace negotiations nothing should be done to sow dissension among the Allies. Mons may have been chosen because it completed the occupation of the Barrier required by the Dutch. There was always the chance that Villars would fight a battle for the sake of Mons; but neither Marlborough nor Eugene counted upon his doing so. Actually the Marshal does not appear to have considered the likelihood of an attack on Mons. He was with reason more concerned about Valenciennes and Bouchain, and also about his lines stretching west to Aire. If Villars foresaw the allied plan, and occupied the line of the Haine and the strong position behind the Trouille stream, the siege of Mons might be prevented. Thus quick movement and surprise were necessary to Marlborough.

The first step was to seize the fort of Saint-Ghislain, on the Haine. Orkney, with the Dutch general Pallandt, twenty squadrons, and the grenadiers of the army, was entrusted with this task. There is conflicting testimony whether he started before or immediately after Surville offered to surrender.^[167] The French accounts record his arrival in front of Saint-Ghislain at one A.M. on September 3. He was followed on that day by Hesse-Cassel with sixty squadrons and four thousand foot. They were to help Orkney take Saint-Ghislain, and if successful to cross the Haine and invest Mons from the south-west. If Saint-Ghislain could not be taken, both forces were to pass round the north of Mons and capture the line of the Trouille to the eastward. After dark on the same day Cadogan with forty squadrons followed Hesse-Cassel. At midnight, leaving 26 battalions and 20 squadrons to clear up at Tournai, the main army marched to Brissœil. The operation was hazardous, and Goslinga was full of misgivings. * “This is only to tell you,” he wrote to Heinsius on the 4th, “that the army marched this night [i.e. the 3rd]. They aspire to invest Mons, but, according to my humble view, it is impossible to succeed. We are going to follow to-morrow and join the army on the march. If all goes as wished, Mons will be invested to-morrow; but, as I had the honour to tell you, I doubt myself whether even our leaders are convinced that the thing is possible. . . .”^[168]

THE MARCH FROM TOURNAI TO MONS

Saint-Ghislain had been reinforced from Condé, and resisted Orkney. He therefore turned northward. On September 5 the main army marched to Sirault, where Orkney rejoined them. On the 6th, at two a.m., Hesse-Cassel crossed the Haine at Obourg, driving a small French force before him. At seven a.m. he formed his line south of Mons, and at noon crossed the French lines on the Trouille. Three French regiments of dragoons withdrew back into Mons. Luxembourg, with thirty squadrons, arriving too late for an action, retired to join Villars at Quiévrain. By nightfall Hesse-Cassel held the heights south of Mons on the line Frameries-Jemappes. That same night (the 6th) Marlborough reached Obourg, and marched south at dawn to support Hesse-Cassel. By these swift operations, which won Hesse-Cassel much praise, Mons was effectually cut off and invested.

The Paris spy sent the following decisive intelligence:

The fact that this probably did not reach headquarters in time in no way detracts from the surpassing quality of the information.

Villars, awaiting at Quiévrain the arrival of part of his infantry under D’Artagnan, spent the 7th in a reconnaissance in force towards Hesse-Cassel’s position. Boufflers had, indeed, arrived, bearing with him in his person the proof of the King’s willingness for battle. During the evening Villars advanced with his army, and lay ten miles from the Allies on the front Montrœul-Athis. The fact that Boufflers had joined the French army reached Marlborough within a few hours. He therefore continued his southward march, and halted for the night on Hesse-Cassel’s left on the line Ciply-Quévy. The armies were now eight miles apart in gently undulating country. Between them lay a broad belt of forest, through which there were but two passages (trouées). The first, called the Trouée de Boussu, was between the Haine and the Forest of Warquignies. The second was the Trouée d’Aulnois, in which stood the village of Malplaquet. With the modern rifle and tactics of infiltration, these woodland tracts would be an assistance to the attack. Nothing would be worse for assailants than the open ground of a gap. But in the eighteenth century, with its firearms deadly only at close quarters and with its rigid formations, woods were considered sure barriers of defence. Flanks resting on woodlands were generally considered secure. If Villars wished to attack elsewhere than through one or the other of the gaps, he must make a long march round, and eventually attempt the river lines of the Haine and the Trouille.

EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 7, 1709

On the morning of the 8th a Council of War was held at the allied headquarters at Quévy, in which it was decided that to cover the siege of Mons Eugene should block the exit of the Gap of Boussu, and Marlborough that of the Gap of Aulnois. As Villars on that day faced the former gap Marlborough must keep close to Eugene. Accordingly during the afternoon Eugene occupied the heights of Quaregnon, while Marlborough camped between Genly and Quévy. A French general captured by the patrols stated openly that Villars had the King’s leave to fight.

Marlborough seems to have had at this moment no fixed plan of action. His letters show no expectation of battle.^[170] He and Eugene were waiting upon events. If they had been content merely to make the siege of Mons they could during the 8th and 9th have constructed a line of circumvallation either in the woods and across the gaps or behind them. But this was not their object. They wanted to bring about a battle in the open, and to hold themselves loose so as to be able to encourage and accommodate Villars, if such was his purpose. No attempt was therefore made to take up a defensive position. Such a step would have prevented a battle. They cherished the hope that Villars would advance through one or other of the gaps, and that then they could fall upon him. They did not want to do anything which would deter him from this. Still, we can hardly think they believed he would do so. The heroic Marshal, while breathing fire and slaughter and inspiring his troops with the spirit of the offensive, never had any such intention. He was only doing what he had done several times before, and was to do afterwards on notable occasions—namely, advancing to close proximity in the hopes of finding a weak body of the enemy in his clutches, or some other exceptional advantage. Marlborough and Eugene during the 8th were evidently tempting him; and for the sake of doing so they allowed him to occupy the forward edges of the woods by the Gap of Boussu—that is to say, they would let him without dispute make of this gap a gateway which he could open when he chose, and through it debouch and deploy for battle. But this was too good to be true.

Villars, who had to halt for supplies, and fed his troops with the greatest difficulty, contented himself again with a cavalry demonstration. His patrols and squadrons came in contact at many points with the cavalry of the Allies, and the numerous sharp minor collisions which took place showed the tension of the great masses now brought so close together. He had seen the Gap of Boussu left open to him on the 8th. During the night which followed he sent Luxembourg with a strong force of cavalry to seize the forward edges of both the gaps, thus securing to himself the power to debouch at either. It cannot be supposed that Marlborough and Eugene, watching the scene on horseback from hour to hour during the preceding day, permitted him to do this by negligence. Evidently they meant deliberately to leave both doors open for him to come through either into a battle arena. At dawn on the 9th Villars learned that both the gaps were in his possession. He marched forthwith to his right in four columns ready for immediate deployment, and occupied the Aulnois gap with his whole army.

EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 8

Early on the morning of the 9th both Eugene and Marlborough were writing letters.

Eugene to the Emperor

Marlborough’s letter was to Sarah.^[172] She had upbraided him for not writing to the Queen to complain of the treatment she was receiving. Apparently she had reproached him with lack of zeal for her interests.

At this moment the news that Villars was moving came in and Eugene arrived. Marlborough’s horse was brought, and, with an escort of thirty squadrons and four hundred grenadiers under the Prince of Auvergne, the two commanders rode out to the Mill of Sart to reconnoitre. They reached this point about eight o’clock. As the fringe of their cavalry patrols approached the village of Malplaquet, in the Aulnois gap, they came in contact with Luxembourg’s outposts. Auvergne with a heavier force brushed through the hostile screen and found himself confronted by strong bodies. To the westward he or his officers discerned the French army marching towards the Aulnois gap and the plateau of Malplaquet. As far as they could tell, the enemy seemed to be about to advance through the forest clearing into the open country towards Mons. Thereupon Marlborough ordered the concentration of the Allies. Only his left, composed mainly of the Dutch under Dopf, could immediately come into line. The right could not come up for several hours, and Eugene’s army lay six miles farther to the north. The concentration, according to Orkney, was delayed by “prodigious dusty rain,” through which the troops marched incessantly. At 2 p.m. the French batteries, which had now gathered in strength about Malplaquet, began to cannonade Marlborough’s left, who, as they were without artillery, could not reply.

This situation has been represented by several writers as critical for the Allies.^[174] It is suggested that if Villars had advanced through the gap and deployed his forces he could have beaten the confederate army in detail; but this is nonsense. Marlborough’s left, unencumbered by artillery, could have fallen back as fast as the French could advance, and as they receded would have accelerated the concentration of the allied army. Villars himself could not have forced them to battle till they were willing. Nothing could have prevented them from reoccupying, for instance, their former position from Genly to Quévy with their whole united strength. It is certain that this was exactly the kind of situation which Marlborough and Eugene desired. They could then, at dawn on the 10th, have fought that general battle in the open which had never been offered to them since Ramillies. The whole of the allied movements on the 8th and 9th show beyond all question that Marlborough and Eugene had only one object and hope—namely, to entice Villars to go through one or other of the gaps into the plain of Mons, and then fall upon him.

But Villars was far too good a soldier to be caught in that way. He never for a moment contemplated attacking the Allies, or even the risk of an encounter battle, in the open. Under such conditions his ragged, ill-found army, however brave and trained, was no match for the perfectly equipped veteran forces of the Allies. He saw, as well as we see to-day, that the great Captains opposed to him had left these gaps open because it suited them that he should go through them. It is, indeed, surprising that Marlborough and Eugene should have even appeared to take Villars’s offensive seriously. Allowance must be made for the atmosphere of excitement which rises to explosion-point when great masses of armed, eager men are manœuvring in close contact with one another, and when the fall of the thunderbolts is expected and even longed for by all. Accordingly Villars sat down in his gap. His troops were marching up all day. His artillery continued to fire on Marlborough’s left, which stood in position against his front. During the afternoon the English and Dutch batteries came up, unlimbered, and began to reply in increasing numbers. Thus night fell.

Pelet makes the odd statement that Villars was mistaken about the width of the gap, and thus was “forced” to occupy the woods on either side with infantry. It is surprising that he should have made such an error, or that he should have regarded the occupation of the woods on either flank of the Malplaquet position as anything but a vital duty and an important advantage. During the night he began to fortify his position across the gap. He dug the deepest ditches and built the highest parapets that time allowed. The woods on either side he defended by successive lines of smaller trenches, and with abattis.^[175]

Early on the morning of the 10th it was seen that Villars had already begun entrenching himself, and all prospect of his attacking faded. The allied Commanders had now to decide first whether they would themselves assault his position, and whether they should do so at once or wait until the next day. On the one hand, the French defences were growing hourly; on the other, General Withers with nineteen battalions and ten squadrons was marching from Tournai, and could not join the army until very late that night. According to some accounts, Marlborough was for attacking at once, and Eugene for awaiting Withers.^[176] The matter rested between the two comrades, and neither of them has left any statement of his individual views. They worked together, and never claimed credit at each other’s expense. Whatever passed between them is therefore unknown. In the outcome, “the Princes” resolved to wait until their whole army was assembled, and to hold a council of war that night to decide the question of battle. Such a council was necessary in view of the constitution of the army and the stipulations of the Dutch. The Dutch Deputies had remained behind at Tournai, and Goslinga alone reached the army.

All through the 10th the cannonade continued in the centre of the army, and several hundred casualties were inflicted on either side. Marlborough and Eugene spent the day examining the French position. Breastworks were constructed for the attacking batteries. Towards evening the guns fell silent, and an incident occurred upon which many accounts dwell. The French general Albergotti, riding round his outposts in the Wood of Taisnières, sent an officer to tell the allied pickets that he would like to talk to one of their generals. The officer was fired upon and withdrew. But a little while later there arrived from the Allies a trumpeter with a flag of truce in due form to say that, if Albergotti desired it, the Prince of Hesse, the Electoral Prince of Brandenburg, and General Cadogan would be delighted to converse with him. The parley which followed spread far along this part of the line. Rumour ran that peace had come, and several thousand men from the two armies, who the next day were to show each other little or no quarter, came eagerly together in a strange paradox of human emotions, embracing and exchanging gifts and salutations with lively curiosity and goodwill.^[177] While this fraternization was in progress it was noticed or suspected by the French that several Ally officers were making notes and sketches of the ground, its defences and defenders, and Cadogan was seen to be looking about him in all directions. As soon as Marshal Villars heard of the parley he at once sent orders to break it off, and asserted that Cadogan had only allowed it in order to have the chance of reconnoitring the French left and its incomplete entrenchments. However this may be, the prime responsibility clearly rests with Albergotti.

In the meanwhile the measures which Marlborough took had all been directed to a battle on the 11th. Instructions were sent to Withers to press his march. In order to have an uninterrupted line of retreat upon Tournai in the event of a repulse, Marlborough determined to take Saint-Ghislain by storm. About two thousand men, collected under General Dedem from the battalions blockading Mons, marched accordingly upon this post. Its garrison had been reduced by Villars to two hundred men, and about nine in the evening it was carried “sword in hand,”^[178] the garrison being accorded quarter. Withers actually passed through Saint-Ghislain after its capture, and camped four miles beyond the Haine.

At the Council of War Marlborough and Eugene urged a general attack the next day. Goslinga, who represented the Republic, vigorously supported them. Such a combination of authority was not questioned by the other generals present, and the momentous resolve was taken unanimously. There was no obligation upon them to fight. They had only to sit still and let Villars watch them choke Mons into surrender. There had been half a dozen situations in the war when a great battle could have been fought on no harder terms—nay, on terms less hard—and several others were to occur afterwards. Both sides wanted to fight. Villars made the greatest contribution in his power by coming forward into the gap. Marlborough and Eugene, pressed by their Governments, were in the mood to accept his challenge. How many times of which we know nothing had they perhaps found it impossible to procure an agreement upon decisive action? Now they had the pugnacious Goslinga with them, and alone. Never might such an opportunity return. Now was the time to end the war at a single stroke. Even if conditions were not entirely favourable they believed they were strong enough to beat and ruin the last remaining army of France.

At some moment during this tense day Marlborough resumed his interrupted letter to his wife. “Having writ thus far, I have received intelligence that the French were on their march to attack us; we immediately got ourselves ready. . . . I do not yet know if I shall have an opportunity of sending this letter to-night; if not I shall add to it what may pass to-morrow.” He ended with a gesture which may seem extravagant to us, but which might well have served as his farewell to Sarah, and would have been precious to her. “In the meantime I can’t hinder saying to you, that tho’ the fate of Europe if these armies engage may depend upon the good or bad success, yet your uneasiness gives me much greater trouble.”^[179]

Eugene’s diary records:

By the first light of dawn all the troops were already under arms and in their stations. But with the sun a dense fog rose from the fields and marshy places, shrouding the loaded woods and the two hundred thousand men who awaited the signal to fall upon one another. In the allied army of many nations the ministers and priests of almost every communion known to Christendom—Church of England, Presbyterian, Dutch Calvinist, Huguenot, Lutheran, Roman Catholic—performed their solemn offices at the heads of the regiments. So perfect was the harmony which the ascendancy of Marlborough and Eugene exercised upon all minds that these soldiers of different races, creeds, and Governments—English, Scots, Irish, Danes, Prussians, Hanoverians, Hessians, Saxons, Palatines, and Dutch—acted together as if they were the army of a single nation. Opposed to them was the greatest Power of that age, at length brought low, but finding in desperation new, unmeasured sources of strength from its valiant people. The French stood at the gateway of France—almost along the line where the frontier runs to-day—prepared to dare all to shield their land from invasion. With the French army were a few brigades of Irish exiles, and of troops driven out of the Electorates of Bavaria and Cologne, but all were united in the Catholic faith and in long military comradeship. While they ate their meagre bread, they mocked the plenty of the allied camps and the rum and brandy rations customary there on battle days. The standards of the Maison du Roi bore Louis XIV’s challenging motto, “Nec pluribus impar.” Never was it more bravely sustained than at Malplaquet.

MARLBOROUGH’S PLAN OF ATTACK

During September 10 the French line had been minutely studied by “the Princes” and the allied Command. Marlborough’s conception was in principle the battle of Blenheim adapted to a new field. The enemy’s wings were to be assaulted until Villars was induced by this pressure to weaken his centre. The centre was then to be pierced by the reserve of the infantry (in this case mainly the British), and its earthworks occupied. Out of a hundred guns no fewer than thirty-seven were assigned to move and work with the attacking infantry. The enormous cavalry army, nearly thirty thousand strong, was then to pass through the gaps in the defences, and fight a sabre battle with the French cavalry in the plain beyond. If the French cavalry were routed, all their troops drawn into the two flanks would be cut off, as had happened to the French right at Blenheim. We can see the methods and experience of that day alive in the minds of Marlborough and Eugene. The line of redans which Villars had built across the gap were to Marlborough the reproduction of the obstacle of the Nebel. He proposed when the moment came to seize and hold these positions with infantry, and, covered by their fire and by artillery, to form his whole cavalry on the far side for the final stroke. At Blenheim he was suffered to do this without opposition at the passage. Now he might have to fight hard for his debouchment. Apart from this, the gambit of the battle was almost the same. But Marlborough, and still more Eugene, had behind him a vast experience of war. If they had a plan it was to be no rule. The measureless chances of action would certainly create better or worse situations with which they felt competent to deal. Whatever they may have said or written, both looked out upon the day with zest and thrill, and, casting care aside, rejoiced in the intensity of risk, will, art, and action which lay before them. Moreover, here must be the end of the long war, and rest and glory after toil. All should be staked. Nothing should be neglected, and nothing should be withheld.

The curtain of fog by all accounts was regarded as highly convenient for the drawing up of the allied troops. For the main attack of the right wing the lines of battle were three deep: for the secondary but still heavy attack by the left wing, two deep: and in the centre, where it was hoped to give the decisive stroke, only a single line. To this centre, covering a third of the front, Marlborough assigned only nineteen battalions out of a hundred and twenty-eight. But these battalions, which he kept under the strictest personal control, were thirteen English, two foreign, and four Prussian, and constituted his only infantry reserve. He himself would stand near the redcoats and use them for the culminating stroke. Behind this slender infantry line were massed over two hundred squadrons of cavalry and the main artillery of the confederate army.^[181]

As the sun gained power the mist dispersed. Broad daylight lapped the field, bright with symmetrical masses of uniformed men and the sparkle of standards and blades. On both sides the famous leaders presented themselves to their soldiers. In the well-known figures of Marlborough and Eugene the confederates saw the assurance of certain victory. In Villars and in Boufflers the French army recognized the two foremost heroes of France. The artillery began to fire about half-past seven, and gradually grew far louder than on the previous days, until at nine o’clock Marlborough ordered the Grand Battery to fire the signal salvo, and the battle began.

The Wood of Taisnières points north-eastward a projecting tongue. This salient, the scene of the fraternization of the day before, held by the five brigades of Albergotti, was Marlborough’s first objective. Upon the edge of this his forty-gun battery concentrated its fire. Schulenburg, with forty battalions, three lines deep, marched against its northern face; and Lottum, with twenty-two battalions,^[182] after moving as if to attack the French centre, was to change direction to his right, and assault it from the eastward. When Lottum turned to his right Orkney with his fifteen battalions would cover Lottum’s left shoulder, which might otherwise have been exposed. At the same time, beyond Schulenburg’s right, the detachment of nineteen hundred men from Mons entered an unoccupied part of the wood, and upon the extreme right Withers, with nineteen battalions and ten squadrons, began to march through the forest in the direction of the La Folie farm, with the object of turning the left of the whole French army. Thus eighty-five allied battalions were simultaneously launched upon or into Taisnières Wood, of which more than sixty attacked the comparatively small tongue-shaped salient. The allied forces outnumbered the French in the Wood of Taisnières by four to one, and Marlborough might well have expected a speedy result.

Marlborough and Eugene in their battles understood one another so well that each exercised a supervision over the entire field. But although there was no formal division of spheres, Eugene assumed the direction of this great operation upon the right, while Marlborough, with his headquarters staff, conducted the general battle from a slight eminence about half-way between the Grand Battery and the village of Blaregnies. From this dangerous but convenient spot, a little behind Orkney’s corps, he was able personally to ensure the safety of Lottum’s exposed flank, thus preserving his contact with Eugene, and at the same time to survey, or receive information from, the rest of the front.

THE ATTACK ON THE WOOD OF TAISNIERES

Schulenburg’s Germans marched firmly to the assault. This oblong mass of over twenty thousand men had eight hundred paces to cross before they came to grips. The five brigades of Albergotti met them according to the tactics of their commanders and the nature of the ground. Here the French charged forward; there they stood behind their entrenchments and reserved their fire till pistol range. But, however it befell, the clash was savage and the slaughter heavy. Two of the three major-generals and all the colonels of Schulenburg’s first line were killed or wounded as they led their men inexorably forward till they were stopped by lead or steel. The opposing battalions grappled with each other. The fringe of the wood blazed with fire and smoke. The survivors of Schulenburg’s first line recoiled, rent and ragged. But the second, following at two hundred paces under Eugene’s personal direction, bore them forward in a double wave. “The Imperial grenadiers, circling the treacherous boggy ground, streamed into the wood upon the outermost flank.”^[183]

La Colonie, the “Old Campaigner,” to whom we have often recurred, was posted with his Bavarian brigade behind the redans, and watched the advance of Lottum’s twenty-two battalions.

The French under Albergotti resisted with the utmost tenacity, and the defences proved their value. Sheltered behind the breastworks, they fired steadily into the great numbers of assailants, who struggled through the abattis and tried to re-form a fire front at close quarters. To the surprise of the allied generals, the first onsets of both Schulenburg and Lottum were brought to a standstill either on the fringe of the wood or in the open ground before it. Their second and third lines bore them forward again. Generals and colonels sacrificed their lives with the highest devotion. Eugene, riding into the severity of the fire, reorganized and forced on the attack by weight of numbers, regardless of losses. On the other side Albergotti’s reserves were thrown into the struggle.

THE DUTCH ATTACK

The attack by the allied left was timed to start half an hour later than that of the right. It had originally been intended to reinforce the Dutch in this quarter by Withers’ nineteen battalions from Tournai. The fatigue of these troops after their long, rapid march from the fortress, the late hour on the 10th at which they approached the main army, and the advantage of turning the French left flank by a wide movement had induced a change of plan. Withers was to act upon the right, and the Dutch attack was to become secondary in importance. For this reason it was ordered to halt just outside the range of grapeshot for half an hour after Schulenburg and Lottum had begun. All the officers in the Dutch army looked with pride and loyalty to the gallant figure of their young Prince. Those elements in Holland which wished to keep the house of Orange in the shade were represented by the aged General Tilly. About half-past nine, therefore, the Prince of Orange, without waiting for the consent of General Tilly and accompanied by the fiery Deputy Goslinga, led forward thirty battalions of the Republic with several batteries, the Scots brigade^[185] being up on the left. As the left of the attack skirted or penetrated the Wood of Lanières a withering fire burst upon them. Here, in line with the Highlanders, fought the redoubtable Dutch Blue Guards, the flower of their army. The Prince of Orange had most of his staff shot around him. General Oxenstiern fell dead at his side. The Prince’s own horse collapsed, and he advanced on foot. The entrenchments before him, three lines deep, were held by some of the finest troops in French service—men of Picardy, of Navarre, of Piedmont, and the French Royal Marines. These considerably outnumbered their assailants. In fact, on this wing the French had sixty battalions against thirty Dutch.

As the Dutch attack advanced in magnificent order it passed on its right hand the salient of the French line on the spur south-west of the Wood of Tiry. Beyond this wood there is a long, shallow trough of ground, about two hundred yards wide, which strikes obliquely across the path the Dutch took. Concealed at the head of this trough was a nest of French batteries mounting twenty cannon. From these there now burst a horrible flanking fire of cannon-balls and grape-shot which tore through the Dutch and Scottish ranks, killing or wounding thousands of men as they moved in faultless discipline towards their goal. The ground was soon heaped with blue uniforms and Highlanders, over whom the rear of the attack moved forward steadfastly, paying their toll. Nevertheless the young Prince, his surviving generals, and Deputy Goslinga arrived, with the mass of the Dutch and the Scots, before the French entrenchments, endured their volleys at close quarters, tore away the abattis, stormed the parapets, and captured the works. But they were now too few. The reserves of Navarre and Picardy charged forward in counter-attack, not only upon the front of the Dutchmen, but out of the Wood of Lanières on their left flank; while always around them the scourge of the French batteries smote upon their right and upon the troops advancing in their support.

TAPESTRY OF THE BATTLE OF MALPLAQUET
By permission of the Duke of Marlborough. Photograph by permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum

A retreat in good order began. The generals set the highest example. Spaar was killed; Hamilton wounded. Tullibardine fell amid his clansmen; General Week was killed. The Swiss general Mey was hard hit. The whole allied left wing fell back slowly, receiving terrible punishment, over the ground which they had traversed, now thickly strewn with the corpses or writhing bodies of their comrades. They might have fared even worse, for the French pursued them with vigour, but for the fact that the Prince of Hesse-Cassel, with the twenty-one squadrons of cavalry assigned to this flank, was perceived by the enemy, drawn up and seeking the moment to charge. Thus covered, the Dutch halted their deliberate retreat, and faced about. They had lost in half an hour at least five thousand men. Among the Scots there was an equal carnage. But the Prince of Orange would not be denied. His second horse shot under him, he seized the standard of the wounded Mey, ordered a second attack, and led it forward in person on foot. Once again the faithful battalions ran the gauntlet of the batteries firing along the trough. Once again they reached the French entrenchments. Foremost of all their heroic prince planted his standard upon the parapet. Once again the counter-attack swept them backward, this time in grave disorder. Once again Hesse-Cassel with his cavalry checked the pursuers.

On the right of the Dutch attack Baron Fagel with Pallandt’s seven battalions stormed the defences of Bléron Farm; but they in their turn were driven out by the French counter-attack. Rantzau commanded the four Hanoverian battalions on the right of the Dutch. Although he did not belong to the left wing and was in Marlborough’s reserve, he had sent two of his battalions to assist them. They had suffered severely in the slaughter. “Monsieur de Goslinga,” he wrote when his conduct was afterwards questioned,

Thus upon the left there was a complete and bloody repulse. This is the moment when the French consider that Boufflers, who was on the spot, should have ordered a general advance of their right wing, which he commanded. It was certainly not from want of spirit that he did not do so. He did not feel entitled to make so great a change in the plans of the Commander-in-Chief without consultation, and for this there was no time. The opportunity passed without being tested.

At ten o’clock, while the Dutch were in their agony, Schulenburg and Lottum renewed their onslaughts upon the Taisnières salient. This time Schulenburg broke into the north face of the wood, and his whole command vanished into it. Lottum’s corps also fell on, but were again brought to a standstill “torn and exhausted.”^[187] Their position in the open, almost at right angles to the French centre, harassed by artillery fire from both their front and left flank, became critical. Orkney, who, though not himself actually engaged, was close at hand, sent two more British battalions^[188] to support and extend Lottum’s left. While these troops were making their way through the marshy ground, Chemerault, the French general commanding the left of the line of redans, saw a chance. He formed a counter-attack of twelve battalions, and was about to launch it upon Lottum’s exposed left flank. But meanwhile Marlborough had himself ridden forward with the Prince of Auvergne’s thirty squadrons of Dutch cavalry, whom he placed in readiness to charge the French counter-attack. Marshal Villars, who on the other side had also reached this crucial point, seeing the redcoats extending to their right, and this large cavalry force, which Chemerault had not noticed, ready to charge, stopped the counter-stroke and ordered the twelve battalions back—but not to their redans. “I saw,” he declares, “that our infantry was losing ground in the wood, and I posted these twelve battalions to receive them when they came out of it.”^[189] The denudation of the French centre had begun.

With conspicuous zeal Argyll’s brigade and Orkney’s two battalions plunged into the Wood of Taisnières at the root of its tongue.^[190] “The English brigade,” says the Feldzüge account, “was in support and gathered Brandenburg’s troops to a renewed storming.”^[191] Thus they drew forward with them in their movement the whole of Lottum’s corps, which, like that of Schulenburg, now disappeared among the trees and undergrowth. The conditions inside the salient were indescribable. Within a triangle, no side of which exceeded six hundred yards, there were at least seven thousand men lying killed and wounded, more than thirty thousand allied infantry in almost solid masses, and four or five thousand French survivors. More than half the superior officers had fallen. The wounded of both sides, officers and men, were bayoneted and plundered. The screams of the injured, the roar of the mob of combatants, the crash of musketry, resounded from this smoking inferno, in which half the allied foot had become engulfed.

Argyll’s brigade sustained heavy losses—in fact, Sir Richard Temple’s regiment lost more men that day than any other single British battalion. They performed prodigies; but their high spirits took a savage form. “They hewed in pieces,” wrote a German observer, “all they found before them, . . . even the dead when their fury found no more living to devour.”^[192]

Such was the situation which Marlborough from his post a furlong behind the Grand Battery surveyed upon his right. Here amid the cannon-balls he sat his horse, waiting for the moment to strike at the French centre. He must for some time have felt serious concern at the numbers of his troops which were being absorbed in the Taisnières Wood, and by the carnage and chaos which reigned there. Towards half-past ten he began to feel uneasy also about his left. He knew that the first attack of the Dutch had been repulsed. He had not intended this attack to be pressed to the same extremity as that of his right. It was, however, an essential part of his plan that the fighting even on the left flank should be serious and heavy. Only by these brutal pressures would the two French Marshals be forced to denude their centre. He had not, however, prepared himself at all for the catastrophe which now broke upon him.

He had already begun to ride towards the left wing when Goslinga, indignant, excited, stained with battle, met him a little short of the Wood of Tiry, before which Rantzau and his battalions were posted. The brave, vehement Deputy told his tale. To anyone who had been through that double repulse it must have seemed that the Dutch corps was virtually destroyed. Goslinga added that the Prince of Orange was organizing a third attack. He demanded immediate reinforcements for the Dutch. Apparently he complained of the change of plan which had deprived them of Withers’ corps. It is very likely that he also reported that when he had urged Rantzau to advance with his two remaining Hanoverian battalions Rantzau had not complied. The Captain-General bore the tidings with his usual composure. He calmed the passionate Deputy, and brought him along with him. About this time Eugene, warned of what had happened on the left, overtook Marlborough. Together they reached the point where Rantzau was in action. “Presently,” writes Rantzau, “this Prince and the Duke of Marlborough passed on their way to the left wing. Monsieur de Finck, Lieutenant-General, received from them the order [for me] not to quit the post where we now were, unless my lord Duke should make us march himself.”^[193]

Marlborough, Eugene, and Goslinga then rode on through the streams of Dutch wounded staggering from the battle, or returning bleeding to resume their places in the ranks, to the point where the survivors of the Dutch command gathered around the indomitable Prince. They found consternation both at the appalling losses and at the young Prince’s resolve to renew the attack. Together they forbade the further effort, and ordered the left to stand still under the protection of Hesse-Cassel’s squadrons.^[194]

Then the two Chiefs returned to the centre and the right. Perhaps they galloped, for the crisis of the battle approached. Eugene hastened back to the Wood of Taisnières. Marlborough resumed his former position behind the Grand Battery. It was now half-past eleven of the clock on a fine summer’s morning.

Eugene found that progress had been made in Taisnières Wood. Weight of numbers had prevailed over both the obstacles and the French resistance. The French had been driven out of their second position behind the tongue, and the allied line was rolling forward yard by yard, extending as the wood broadened. General Withers with his separate corps, including three British battalions and the Royal Irish, who were some way behind, had entered the wood on the extreme right and encountered little resistance. Eugene had sent him ten additional squadrons, which with his own ten were making their way by a wide circle round the woods and also moving towards La Folie. This movement as it progressed tended to turn the whole hostile position.

A combination of forces was thus developing against the left of the French army which if not broken would be fatal. Marshal Villars watched this with deepening anxiety. He felt the left of his centre was about to be exposed. He responded to this dire pressure exactly as Marlborough had planned and expected. First he sent to Boufflers for reinforcements, but that Marshal, in grapple with the Dutch, could send him none. Villars then resorted to the desperate expedient of taking the remaining troops out of the redans of his centre and throwing them against the Wood of Taisnières to stem the allied advance. He, or others acting on his authority, drew first the Irish brigade, the Champagne brigade, and later La Colonie’s Bavarians, and sent them to reinforce Albergotti’s remnants. Some of these troops, as will presently be seen, ranged widely in the wood, but their main attack fell upon Lottum. Both Lottum and Schulenburg were heavily checked. The dense but much disordered allied line wavered and recoiled. Eugene was at hand. He rode forward into the front line rallying the German Imperialist troops. It was now that a bullet grazed him behind the ear. He was not disabled. He refused to withdraw. “If we are to die here,” he exclaimed, “it is not worth dressing. If we win there will be time to-night.” Step by step, with hideous losses, all the allied nations fighting in the wood resumed their advance, and shortly before noon arrived in a ragged but heavy line at the edge of the plain.

THE ALLIED RIGHT IN THE WOODS

“The wood being forced,” says Schulenburg, “I found myself on the other side towards the enemy’s lines, where I managed to bring up by a kind of miracle seven big cannon which I had with me, by which I did not fail to do great harm to the line of French cavalry.”^[195] This battery began to fire with highly disconcerting effect from the southern flank of the line. At the same time the twenty squadrons of cavalry in Withers’ force were making their way round the western edge of the Taisnières Wood towards the French extreme left flank behind it. The remainder of Albergotti’s corps, driven out of the wood, formed on a prepared line and on their reserves three or four hundred paces from its farther edge. For a space of perhaps an hour all the forces on this wing were occupied in rearranging their disordered lines and preparing for a further clash.

THE ALLIES REACH THE EDGE OF THE WOODS

La Colonie shows us very plainly the working of the remorseless pressures upon the French centre.

By noon Schulenburg’s troops were reassembled and drawn up beyond the wood “where one saw the open country.”^[197] Their front stretched from the village Chaussée du Bois to La Folie, and the enemy’s line stood before them at a distance of two to three hundred yards. Lieutenant-General Wackerbarth, who commanded Schulenburg’s first line, is responsible for an erroneous statement which has confused some Continental accounts: “The nineteen battalions from Tournai who ought to have been on my right came out of the wood eventually on my left, so that I became the right of the whole army.”^[198] In the depths of the wood, by one of the strange coincidences of history, the Royal Irish met and defeated the French Royal Irish Regiment—famous in the war as the “Wild Geese.”^[199]

Marlborough was still uncertain of the position in the centre. He doubtless knew that the Wood of Taisnières was cleared of the enemy. But more than four-fifths of his infantry were either repulsed with the Dutch or so deeply committed on the right as to be beyond manœuvring control. He now resolved to ride swiftly through Taisnières Wood to where Schulenburg’s battery was heard to be firing, in order to see the condition of his right wing, and above all from this new angle the state of the enemy’s centre. As he picked his way through the terrible wood, encumbered with slain, filled with the groans and piteous cries of the wounded, he met Eugene. Schulenburg describes how the two Commanders both joined him on the inner edge of the wood at about a quarter to twelve.

A great situation disclosed itself. Beyond the wood to the southward, perhaps three hundred yards away, a strong French line of battle of apparently forty or fifty battalions had been formed to deliver the supreme counter-attack on the remaining forces of Lottum, Schulenburg, and Withers. The forces now facing each other in array at a few hundred paces in this part of the battlefield amounted to perhaps twenty-five thousand men on each side. But the vital fact lay in the centre.

“I can indeed,” says Schulenburg in his account,

So once again the moment had come when, the whole of the enemy’s infantry being fully engaged and their centre naked, Marlborough still had under his hand a decisive reserve of fresh troops of the highest quality. Much is contradictory and most things uncertain in this vast, dark battle; but we know definitely that Marlborough was with Schulenburg at the edge of the wood somewhat before noon, and that a few minutes after twelve he was back at his former post behind the Grand Battery giving a series of orders which snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. He ordered Orkney to advance with the British corps and several Prussian battalions upon the line of redans. He rearranged the artillery in the centre so as to bring cross-fire to bear upon these works. He ordered Auvergne with his thirty squadrons to follow immediately behind Orkney. He summoned Hesse-Cassel from the left to keep pace with Auvergne. He ordered the whole mass of the cavalry to be ready to advance. He must now have felt, as in the afternoon at Blenheim, that in spite of all mischances and disasters victory was in his hands.

ORKNEY’S ATTACK

The British and Prussian infantry had hitherto stood in array under severe cannon fire, close to the battle-front. On Marlborough’s order Orkney led them forward in a single line of battalions upon the redans of the French centre, from which they had noticed for some time neither smoke nor fire had come. Now their Hussar patrols cantered forward, and here and there got round or into some of the works and signalled that they were empty or weakly held.

“It was about one o’clock,” says Orkney, “that my thirteen battalions^[201] got up to the retrenchments, which we got very easily; for as we advanced they quitted them and inclined to their right. . . . We found nothing to oppose us, however. Not that I pretend to attribute any glory to myself (for it was the nature of our situation), yet I verily believe that these thirteen battalions gained us the day, and that without firing a shot almost.” But this advantage had not come by chance to the gallant Orkney. It was the gift of Marlborough’s genius dominating at last the confusion of the battle.^[202]

Among the British battalions which now delivered the decisive stroke were the Cameronians, and we discern the sombre, stately figure of Major Blackader, inspiring his men and communing with his God, his eye fixed upon the Amalekites in another “Ebenezer” of his life.

“It was,” he writes,

But if the major had never passed a more pleasant day, it fared otherwise with his colonel. Cranstoun, whose able letters and criticisms have been several times quoted here, was at the head of his stern regiment. A round shot, about the size of a cricket-ball, such as are still picked up on this old battlefield, struck him in the left breast, coming out at his back. He fell from his horse before Blackader’s eyes without a word. The command devolved upon Blackader. “A thousand shall fall at thy side,” he murmured, “and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not once come near to thee.”^[204] Thus uplifted, in the temper of the Ironsides, he led forward his men.

The French Guards, resplendent in their new uniforms, who were posted some distance behind the redans, did not attempt any counter-attack, incurring thereby bitter ridicule and reproach from the French army. Only upon the British left was there any resistance; and all the entrenchments in the enemy’s centre were captured with small loss. The Dutch infantry on the left, torn by their fearful losses but with undaunted spirit, were led for the third time to the attack on the corpse-strewn triple entrenchments by their Prince and their surviving generals. All accounts speak of the ardour of these troops, who had to be restrained rather than incited. “As at the beginning of the battle, so now, the Dutch bought with their blood every step of the broad earth, and in the end the French right wing had to abandon the field to such death-defying courage.”^[205] Hesse-Cassel with his twenty-one squadrons was already passing the gaps upon the left of the line of redans, and unless arrested would speedily take the hitherto victorious French right wing and their defences in flank and rear.

By a quarter-past one the British battalions held the front face of all the redans. The intervals between them became so many gateways through which the allied cavalry could debouch and endeavour to form line on the plain beyond. The cross-fire of their supporting batteries afforded them some measure of protection during this critical operation. The Prince of Auvergne, with his thirty Dutch squadrons, had followed close behind the British infantry, and began to pour through the gaps and deploy for the charge. Close behind came General Wood with the whole of the British cavalry. Rolling forward behind them again marched the heavy columns of the Prussian and Hanoverian horse under General Bülow, and the whole body of the Imperialist cavalry under the Duke of Würtemberg and Count Vehlen; in all, pressing forward at this point, more than thirty thousand horsemen, the equivalent of seven or eight modern cavalry divisions. This combination of horse, foot, and guns recalls the central attack at Blenheim. The perfect execution of these complicated manœuvres in the roar and crash of the great battle, the discipline and mutual loyalty of all these troops of different nations, justly won the admiration of their enemy, and deserve the proud glance of history.

THE CAVALRY ATTACK

Marlborough with his staff had ridden forward to a point near one of the redans where he could regulate this new and decisive phase. The struggle of the infantry was mainly over, and a cavalry battle, far larger even than Ramillies, the greatest, in fact, of which there is any example, was about to begin.

While all this was in progress in the centre the much diminished and somewhat disorganized forces of Lottum, Schulenburg, and Withers, in line beyond or along the southern edge of Taisnières Wood, faced the counter-stroke which Marshal Villars had prepared at so heavy a cost to his army. The Marshal had collected upwards of fifty battalions, composed of the remains of Albergotti’s five brigades, all the troops he had withdrawn from his centre, and the French reserves which had hitherto been posted in this quarter of the field. The two lines along a mile of front faced each other, often at no more than two hundred yards’ distance. Beyond La Folie, and in full view of the greater part of the French left wing, a cavalry episode cheered the arms of France. General Miklau, with the squadrons of Withers, had at length made his way round the forest belt, and his leading squadrons were already deployed to attack the left flank of the hostile infantry. Upon him fell eight squadrons of French carabineers. They caught Miklau in flank in the act of deploying. At least six squadrons of the allied horse were cut to pieces, and the rest driven from the field, the bulk taking shelter in the woods. No mercy was shown by the victors, and the wounded were slaughtered on the spot.

The BATTLE of MALPLAQUET

As the whole French line braced themselves to attack there arrived from the centre the veteran artillerist Saint-Hilaire. The tale he told to Villars was terrible. The redans were empty. Masses of the English were already breaking into them. He had only by minutes saved his guns from capture. The Marshal, resolute as ever, saw no remedy but to lead forward twelve battalions which were at the moment in his hands as part of his general counter-stroke. Opposite to him at the edge of the wood was Eugene, who, with all the troops he could control, prepared to meet the French in full career. The whole front came into close, intense fire action, quivering and writhing under the effect of the volleys, while the dead and wounded sank upon the ground.^[206] Marshal Villars and his staff, riding forward, caught a blast of fire. His horse fell dead, and a bullet smashed his left leg below the knee. At the same moment Albergotti fell from the saddle with a broken thigh, and General Chemerault was killed. Aides-de-camp and a surgeon ran to the prostrate Marshal. He refused to quit the field. A chair was found in a cottage hard by. Seated in this, he endeavoured to conduct the battle, but the agony of his wound was overpowering. He swooned, and remained so long unconscious that they carried him away. He did not recover consciousness until he was in the hospital at Quesnoy. In his own words, “That is all I know about the end of the battle.”

There is no doubt that the fall of the illustrious Commander-in-Chief and the simultaneous loss of Albergotti and Chemerault disorganized the French command at the supreme moment of their counter-attack. It is natural that French writers, then and afterwards, should claim that but for this they would have won the battle. But the troops who stood before them were tough and bitter, certainly as numerous, infuriated by their losses, flushed by success, and with Eugene at their head. They would not easily have been driven back into the wood, certainly not through it.

After an interval of paralysis Puységur, the staff officer whose reputation after Oudenarde still stood high, assumed direction of the French left wing. He organized and ordered a methodical retirement. Some regiments marched to within twenty yards of the Allies to fire their final volley before retreating, but within a quarter of an hour of Villars’s wound the fifty battalions with their supporting cavalry had retired in good order out of all contact. The Allies, still clogged by the confusion of their passage of the wood, were in no condition to pursue. Eugene himself ordered them to remain halted, and to consolidate, and hastened to join Marlborough in the new focus of the battle.

From early morning onward the French cavalry on the plain behind the centre had suffered severely from the allied cannonade. The slopes of the ground were such that many cannon-balls which ricochetted from the crest of the redans flew onward, cutting cruel gaps in the closely formed squadrons. The allied cavalry did not suffer in this way, for the ground on which they had waited was not exposed to this glancing fire. Nevertheless, the French horse was almost as numerous as the Allies’. The French also had the advantage of being able to attack in superior strength an enemy while forming. It was indeed with relief and pent-up wrath that the brilliant squadrons, which had so long borne their punishment from the cannon, found at last a foe to strike. Marshal Boufflers, learning that the supreme command had devolved on him, placed himself at the head of the Maison du Roi, and as soon as Auvergne had formed twenty squadrons beyond the redans, charged him with these splendid troops.

A, French cavalry; B, French infantry and guns; C, allied infantry; D, allied guns; E, allied cavalry.
From “Marlborough’s Battlefields Illustrated: Malplaquet,” by Major A. H. Burne, D.S.O., R.A., in “The Journal of the Royal Artillery,” vol. lx, p. 48.

Orkney, whose battalions now manned the whole line of redans, watched the scene at close quarters. “Before we got thirty squadrons out they came down and attacked; and there was such pelting at one another that I really never saw the like.” Auvergne’s Dutch squadrons were driven back upon the redans, and through the intervals between them. But here the pursuers were stopped by the steady fire of the British infantry and guns. As they recoiled the allied cavalry poured forward again through every gap. General Wood came up with the British cavalry. The fighting was now almost entirely with the sword. Orkney’s laconic, veteran style reveals how deeply he was stirred: “We broke through them, particularly four squadrons of English. Jemmy Campbell, at the head of the Grey Dragoons, behaved like an angell, broke through both lines. So did Panton, with little Lord Lumley at the head of one of Lumley’s and one of Wood’s.”^[207] The struggle ebbed and flowed. The Maison du Roi, with Boufflers fighting sword in hand at their head, again drove back the Dutch, British, and Prussian horse, and repeatedly prevented them from deploying in sufficient numbers. But the triumphant cavaliers were brought each time to a standstill by the disciplined platoon firing of the British infantry. “I really believe,” says Orkney, “had not ye foot been there, they would have drove our horse out of the field.”^[208]

Six separate times did the French charges prevent the main body of the allied cavalry from forming on the plain. Marlborough had led up in person the British and Prussian squadrons. Now Eugene arrived with the whole Imperialist cavalry. Hesse-Cassel had established himself on the left of the line. Boufflers, at last convinced of the impossibility of charging home and producing decisive results against the well-posted and well-trained infantry on the redans, withdrew the mass of the French cavalry to the heath of Malplaquet, a few hundred yards farther to the southward. Here the cavalry conflict renewed itself in continuous charges for over an hour.

THE FRENCH RETREAT

But meanwhile the main battle had been decided. The French left was already in full retreat upon Quiévrain. On the other flank Hesse-Cassel’s squadrons now threatened the rear of the French right wing. The Prince of Orange in his final attack led his heroic fellow-countrymen over the three lines of trenches. The aged, noble Boufflers, unshaken by his prodigious exertions, did not forget his duty as Commander-in-Chief. Both his wings were in retreat. His centre was pierced, his cavalry outnumbered, pressed backwards, but still in order. He devoted himself with his cavalry to the task of covering the general retirement which was now in progress. By three o’clock the French were marching in three directions upon Quiévrain, Bavai, and Maubeuge.

JOHN TO SARAH AFTER MALPLAQUET
Blenheim MSS.

So severe and sternly contested had been the battle that the Allies could not pursue. The infantry of both wings were fought to a standstill. The intact British battalions in the centre were the sole link between the two disorganized wings. The cavalry pursued as far as the Hognon stream, but the French had organized strong rearguards of infantry, and their cavalry, though worsted, was still formidable. Marlborough and Eugene were both convinced that they could ask no further sacrifices of their troops. The battle was won, and the victors camped upon the bloody field. Marlborough sat down in his tent near the Mill of Sart and finished the letter he had been writing to Sarah at intervals since the morning of the 9th. The facsimile opposite shows how little his careful handwriting had been affected by the ordeal through which he had just passed. The intense strain of the two days’ manœuvre and battle, the long hours at close quarters under the cannonade, the tumult and collision of the cavalry masses, the thirty or forty thousand killed and wounded men who cumbered the ground, the awful stake which had been played, left his sober poise undisturbed, his spirit calm. He reread what he had written the day before, took up his pen, and added:

Europe was appalled at the slaughter of Malplaquet. The battle of Landen, to which its features have sometimes been compared, had not been nearly so bloody. The losses of the Allies were returned at twenty-four thousand officers and men; those of the French were not fewer than twelve thousand, and probably nearer fifteen thousand. Not until Borodino in 1812 was the carnage of this day surpassed. Our modern mass minds, brutalized by the tenfold figures of the Great War, spread over wider fronts and often weeks of fighting, measure only with some difficulty the shock which the intricate polite society of the old world sustained.^[210] Upon no one was the impression of the slaughter more deeply marked than upon Marlborough. It disturbed his mind; it affected his health; it changed his sense of values. As he rode through the ghastly woods of Taisnières, or up the trough across which the Dutch had attacked, the heaps of stripped corpses affected him profoundly.

“The day,” wrote Goslinga on September 13, “was very bloody, and disputed for more than six hours with more obstinacy and uncertainty of result than I know how to describe. The Princes and generals who saw yesterday the left of the battlefield were horror-struck to see our men stretched before the entrenchment and within it in their ranks as they had fought.”^[211]

A foreign writer says:

All his long years of war—almost from childhood—had not been able to impart to Marlborough that detachment from human suffering which has often frozen the hearts of great captains. Considering all the rough work he had had to do, he was astonishingly sensitive. He had none of the fanatical ruthlessness of Cromwell at Wexford and Drogheda. He could not, like Napoleon on the field of Eylau, remark unconcernedly upon the physique of the dead, “Ce sont de la petite espèce.” “It is melancholy,” he wrote, “to see so many brave men killed, with whom I have lived these last eight years, when we thought ourselves sure of a peace.”^[213] He was unmanned by the plight of the wounded, of whom at least fifteen thousand of all nations and both armies were left upon his hands. “I have hardly had time to sleep, being tormented by the several nations for care to be taken of their wounded.”^[214] His resources and the science of those days were hopelessly inadequate. For days the woods were crawling with shattered beings. From all sides it is testified that he did his utmost to succour them. He invited Boufflers to send wagons without formality or delay to take back all French wounded, officers or men, upon the simple promise not to serve again. He sent back the wounded Irish himself. He took all the money in his military chest and spent it on relief. His behaviour at this time was greatly respected in all countries. It was known how hard and well he had fought in the battle,^[215] and also that his compassion for the wounded was sincere.

Marlborough, like his army, was morally and physically exhausted by the battle. He had fought it with all the skill and vehemence he had shown at Blenheim. His plans had proved successful. He had won at every point. The enemy had been beaten out of all their defences and driven from the field as a result of the heart-shaking struggle. But they had not been routed: they had not been destroyed. They had got off as an army, and, indeed, as a proud army. They retreated, but they cheered. They were beaten, but they boasted.

Villars has been blamed by many French writers for fighting a defensive battle; but what he did was in fact to make the best use of his forces. In particular Feuquières, the most pretentious, censorious, and misleading of military critics, has outlined fancy schemes either for a French attack beyond the woods or for a broader line of defence behind them. Modern thought may, on the contrary, regard Villars’s decision as both simple and sensible, as all great things in war should be. Unable to face the Allies in the open, he contrived to bring about the main trial of strength under conditions which were most costly to them. Resting his wings upon the woods and covering his centre with intermittent entrenchments, he presented a front which no army but that commanded by Marlborough and Eugene, with superior numbers and eight years of unbroken success behind them, would have dared to attack. He exacted from the Allies a murderous toll of life by his entrenchments and abattis; but all the time he fought a manœuvre battle around and among these created or well-selected obstacles. By a prodigy of valour, tactical skill, and bloodshed they drove him from the field. The victory was theirs; but not one of the allied generals, if he could have gone back upon the past, would have fought the battle, and none of them ever fought such a battle again.

England was inured to victory, and France to defeat. The Allies were discontented at not having gained all. The French were elated at having escaped with so much. Boufflers wrote triumphant letters to Louis XIV. A cruel ordeal beset Villars. His shattered leg and knee-joint involved him in protracted suffering, and for many days his life hung by a thread. He tells us in his memoirs with simplicity and dignity something of what he endured in the two months after he regained consciousness at Quesnoy: how he prepared himself to die, and thereafter at least to lose his leg. He tells us how one morning the surgeon, pretending he was only about to dress his wounds, suddenly ordered his assistants to seize the Marshal and hold him down upon the table, lest his movements under pain should hamper them, and how then they bared the whole bone and ascertained the exact path of the bullet. At last he turned the corner. In the meanwhile he was brought to Paris by slow stages. As his litter was carried through the war-stricken French towns he was greeted with tributes of reverence and honour, which he enjoyed and had deserved. He too wrote letters exulting in the battle-day.

The Dutch bore their losses with fortitude. The “High and Mighty Lords” wrote their acknowledgments and thanks to Marlborough in the most flattering terms. Their leaders did not play false to their own responsibility in pressing their Deputy-Captain-General for action. It is strange, when the strength of the Peace Party in Holland in earlier and easier years is remembered, that it seemed to lose its influence now. Whereas for some years it had been Marlborough’s preoccupation to keep the Dutch from making peace, we see them during the last four years of the war the most steadfast and unrelenting of all the Allies.

Still, the slaughter cast a dark shadow over the Republic. “Ye joy here,” wrote Horatio Walpole from The Hague (September 17),

When Goslinga, visiting his friend Slingelandt, ventured to scold him for cutting down so many fine trees upon his property, Slingelandt answered pointedly that he too might have thought before he consented so lightly to allow the battle of Malplaquet, knowing as he did “the two Princes and the way they looked upon these sort of things.”

Goslinga himself was robustly impenitent. He wrote sharply to Heinsius when the latter seemed disappointed with the campaign:

No one disputed that a great victory had been gained, and that nothing that the courage of soldiers and the skill and devotion of Chiefs could give had been withheld. But equally no one doubted that it had cost more than it was worth, and that it cast a lurid reproach upon the failure to make peace in the spring, when all was so near. For a month the impression of triumph was strong in London. There were loud rejoicings, and every one believed that peace was at hand. But the Tories soon recovered from their setback. They sought to represent the battle as a positive disaster. Although the British casualties were under two thousand, they made far more outcry about it than the Dutch, with four times that number. We can get an idea of their curdled venom from a letter which one of them, Sir Thomas Mansell, wrote to Harley (September 26): “When I first heard that we lay upon the field of battle, I concluded our victory could not be great, when we contented ourselves with that single honour; and could a great man have found in his heart to have parted with intelligence money, they would either have fought two days before or two days after they did.”^[218] In these circumstances the Queen had little difficulty in concealing her enthusiasm for the victory. * “I do agree with You,” Marlborough wrote to Sarah (October 3), “that mrs Morley might have taken notice to You of the Victory and have shown some concern for my being safe. If I do not mistake, it was much the same behavior last Year after the Battle of Audenard . . .; I desire You will return my compliments to mr Maynering and lett him know that the Pr. of Savoye and his humble sarvant cals the late battle by the name of Taisniere.”^[219] However, this last was not a matter upon which either the “Prince of Savoye” or “his humble sarvant” was found to have the final word.

When Argyll came home at the end of the campaign he attacked Marlborough in bitter terms in the House of Lords for having mismanaged operations and squandered life. But the Whigs used their party and Parliamentary power to the full. They declared Malplaquet his signal and culminating triumph. They voted him the thanks of both Houses of Parliament. They celebrated the battle with all the resources and ability of their party and all the machinery of State. The Tories, outmatched by this exuberance, could but look down their noses and mutter insults and calumnies. The Tatler made a witty parody upon the French boastings in Boufflers’s and Villars’s letters.

Colonel Cranstoun’s death made a vacancy to which Major Blackader had claims. The faithful officer waited upon the Duke, comporting himself with pious dignity. He knew that “promotion comes not from the east nor from the west”; nevertheless his diary and his letters to his wife show a natural anxiety. The claimants were busy and pressing, and he feared lest influence and favour should outstrip him. If so he was resigned. “Let others, whose talent it is, get places and posts by assurance and forwardness. I shall have mine by modesty or want them, for I cannot force nature. . . . This winter probably will make you either a Lieutenant-Colonel’s Lady or a Farmer’s Wife.”^[221] But valour was rewarded; all was well. Merit prevailed. Providence, acting through Marlborough’s hands, guarded his interests. In October he was promoted to the command of the Cameronians, in which famous regiment his name should live.

The battle upheld the credit. * “I have agreed with the Bank,” wrote Godolphin to Marlborough (September 16), “to circulate four hundred thousand pounds more in Exchequer bills pursuant to the latitude given by the Act of Parliament to contract with them to any sum not exceeding one million two hundred thousand pounds. This is one good effect of your battle.”^[222] And (September 20):

After Malplaquet the French retired behind the line of the Rhonelle, which formed a part of Villars’s defensive lines. The Allies were free to open the siege of Mons. Boufflers began to extend his defences from Valenciennes to the Sambre with a view to protecting Maubeuge. Marlborough wished to forestall him in the interests of a future campaign. He therefore, as he tells us, would have preferred to leave Mons and besiege Maubeuge. However, he convinced himself that this was impossible until Mons was taken. French writers assert that the Dutch were inclined to abandon the siege of Mons. Marlborough and Eugene insisted upon its prosecution. The battle had been offered by Villars in order to save Mons, and Mons must fall, if only to prove that Villars was beaten. Besides this, it was of real importance to maintain the pressure upon France to the end of the campaign in the interests of the peace negotiations. Accordingly it was decided to persevere. The siege-train had been ordered before the battle to descend the Scheldt from Tournai to Brussels and thence journey by road to Mons. It could not, however, arrive till September 25. Meanwhile the siege-works were completed and all preparations made for the attack.

THE SIEGE OF MONS

Marlborough exchanged eighteen battalions which had suffered the most at Malplaquet for twenty-four others drawn from the various garrisons. The numerical strength of his army was thus restored. Boufflers managed to slip two battalions into Mons before the investment finally closed. He also reinforced the garrisons of Condé, Maubeuge, Charleroi, Douai, and Landrecies at the expense of Ypres and Aire, and strengthened his weakened formations with men drawn from all his garrisons. Even so his strongest battalions could muster only four hundred men each. Eventually he collected forces under Luxembourg in the neighbourhood of Charleroi to threaten the communications of the Allies with Brussels and to harry their foragers. Eugene, Orange, and Hesse undertook the siege with 31 battalions and 31 squadrons, another 27 battalions being added later. Marlborough with the covering army lay to the south and south-west. The siege-train arrived safely, and on the 25th the trenches were opened. On this day Cadogan, whose duties took him always into the most dangerous places, was wounded.

John to Sarah

Marshal Boufflers wished to make an effort to break the siege, but Louis XIV was more concerned for the safety of Maubeuge. He and his military advisers agreed with Marlborough upon the importance of this place. The King told Boufflers that he might risk another battle if necessary to save it. Boufflers thought Maubeuge was strong enough to last out the campaigning season. Meanwhile the siege of Mons progressed steadily, and the breaching batteries performed their remorseless task. At the end of September Berwick, who had been sent to assist Boufflers, personally reconnoitred Marlborough’s covering position. He reported that it was too strong to be attacked. On October 20 Mons capitulated. The French army concentrated to protect Maubeuge, but Marlborough had already decided, owing to the bad weather, the hardships of the siege, and the lack of forage, to disperse the army into winter quarters. “I am glad to tel You,” careful as ever, he wrote to the Treasurer, “that we have sav’d this Yeare above one-third of the Monys given by Parl: for the additional ten thousand men.”

Perverse fortune dogged the Allies in Spain. The news of Galway’s defeat at the Caya had cast its malign influence upon the negotiations in the critical days of May 1709. At any time during the rest of the campaign a good success in the Peninsula would have brought peace to Europe. The almost unbearable strain upon France in Flanders and the course of the peace negotiations imposed a strict defensive upon the French troops in the Peninsula. As the summer wore on Louis XIV felt himself compelled, alike by war and policy, to recall all his troops to France. Thus every condition seemed favourable to the gaining of the precious and indispensable victory. Yet it was denied.

Although war had been resumed upon the greatest scale, negotiations for peace were unceasing. Torcy and Rouillé had returned to France in June, but Petkum maintained an active correspondence with both sides. The immediate object was to bring about a renewal of the conference. It must be remembered that the breaking-point had not been about the evacuation of Spain: both sides were agreed upon that; but upon the method or guarantees for procuring this evacuation. The new discussions played around various alternatives to the obnoxious Article XXXVII. In principle, the French were prepared to give some cautionary towns in France, but were neither ready nor able to give similar cautionary towns in Spain. The Whigs and the Emperor, bringing the Dutch along with them, continued to insist upon Spanish towns being yielded. A further obstacle was the French demand that there should be an immediate armistice, which the Allies would by no means entertain. Thus both before and after Malplaquet the summer and autumn passed in futile interchanges.

It is not true that, as some writers have assumed, the battle made the French more ready to yield. On the contrary, in Torcy’s correspondence we read, “The last battle has rather raised the courage of the nation than weakened it” (September 27).^[225] The hopes of the French were, however, fortified by the prospect of a new Northern war, consequent upon the defeat and internment of Charles XII, which would lead to the withdrawal from the allied armies of important German contingents. With the close of the campaign and the dispersal into winter quarters the French request for an armistice virtually conceded itself, and the negotiations took a more hopeful turn.

Marlborough’s share in these transactions is plain beyond the slightest question. He did not consider himself in a position to press his own views in any formal manner. Throughout he acted in strict submission to the instructions he received from home, and in repeated letters he enjoined this course on Townshend. Secretly, behind the scenes, he did his utmost to procure such mitigations in the allied demands as would enable the Conference to reassemble. In repeated personal letters to Heinsius and to Townshend he declared that the demand for cautionary towns in Spain was beyond the power of the French King to meet, and that to insist upon it was in fact to will the continuance of the war. He was quite ready to fight a separate campaign in Spain, and foresaw no serious difficulty in driving out Philip V once peace had been made with France.^[226]

It seems probable that Eugene was, as usual, in agreement with Marlborough, and if the two Captains and Heinsius could really have handled the negotiations unhampered by London and Vienna the vital result might have been won. In November these three together procured the sending of Petkum to Paris. This was the first peace initiative to come from the Allies. They could give Petkum but little latitude. Article XXXVII and its companions prescribed a time-limit of two months in which Louis XIV must take positive steps for the evacuation of Spain. Petkum was authorized to withdraw this condition. The concession was small, but the spirit in which it was offered, and the sending of Petkum, were tests of the sincerity of the French will to peace. Had Torcy and his master been in the mood to which the famine had reduced them earlier in the year the path to a general treaty would have been opened. Petkum and his proposals were, however, coolly received in Paris. All that the French Court would yield was an admission that the substance of the preliminaries might form the basis of a renewed Conference. At the same time they began to talk as if not merely the outstanding points of difference, but the whole preliminaries would be opened for rediscussion at such a Conference. Heinsius sustained the impression of a rebuff, which he roughly retorted upon the disappointed Petkum on his return.^[227]

Marlborough felt convinced of the French insincerity. Both at The Hague and in London tempers rose, and declarations were made of the allied resolve to continue the war with the utmost vigour in 1710. On December 14 the Dutch sent a bellicose message to Queen Anne. In face of this attitude the French became more conciliatory. Their hopes of the Northern distraction proving effective had faded,^[228] and in January they made a definite offer to agree to all the preliminaries provided that the difficulties of Article XXXVII were first of all surmounted. The allied chiefs debated this in stormy session at The Hague. The Dutch peace party, headed by Buys and van der Dussen, put extreme pressure upon Heinsius to bring about a conference, and even declared that neither the Province of Utrecht nor the city of Amsterdam would vote the supplies for the new campaign unless this was accomplished.

We have only fleeting glimpses of Marlborough’s part in these debates. It is certain, however, that while helping Heinsius to moderate the vehemence of Buys and the Dutch peace party, he also desired to give them satisfaction in the main. He, in fact, sponsored the proposal that should the conference be reached Buys and van der Dussen, the two chief advocates of peace, should themselves conduct the negotiations. This would give the greatest opportunity for obtaining a settlement if one were to be had, and if not, would satisfy the peace party that all possible had been done to procure it. This course was eventually adopted.

Whatever disputes there might be about the consequences of Malplaquet, one fact was certain: peace was no nearer than in June. A far more potent current than any that set from that battlefield was now flowing. It was becoming evident to the world that Marlborough’s authority was being undermined. The effect of this conviction upon the fortunes of the war was instant and constant. The French began to feel that they could afford to wait. Marlborough’s need was to create for himself an independent position at the head of the Alliance before his authority vanished at home. It was a grim race.

As early as May 1709 he had sent Craggs to London to make a quiet search in the Privy Seal offices. He hoped to find a precedent for a life-appointment as Captain-General. Craggs’ reply of May 20 was markedly discouraging:

And a month later, in answer to the Duke’s more formal application to the Lord Chancellor, the latter wrote (June 23):

Nothing could have appeared less auspicious. Both authorities consulted, one Marlborough’s close personal adherent, the other his most friendly Cabinet colleague, were independently adverse. For some months the matter slumbered. The urgency of the European situation in the autumn led him to thrust it forward again. In October he applied directly to the Queen, and when she refused his request he made a strong protest against the adverse influences which he declared had been used against him. Continental historians have complained that Coxe has not published these letters in his voluminous Marlborough correspondence. But, in fact, no one has been able to trace them. Considering how regularly all correspondence with the Queen was preserved by the Duke or Sarah, it is a fair assumption that these records were destroyed. Certainly the request could not have been made in worse circumstances nor at a worse time. It was just the kind of demand which Marlborough’s enemies would have wished him to prefer, and which Harley could safely advise the Queen to refuse.

JAMES CRAGGS THE YOUNGER
From a copy of a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller
National Portrait Gallery

The Queen to Marlborough

The Queen added:

From the terms of this refusal it is clear that Marlborough’s request to be accorded the Captain-Generalcy for life was coupled with a declaration of his resolve to retire at the end of the war. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this intention, and in any case the Queen could have held him to it. There is not, nor has there ever been, power in a sovereign to make an irrevocable grant. Crown and Parliament together cannot be bound by any law. If, then, a future revocation of the grant were to turn on the question only of fair dealing, Marlborough’s expressed resolve to retire would have afforded the fullest justification to the Queen. Therefore, the request which Marlborough was making, however unseasonable, was by no means improper. It might have given him the authority which he needed to bring the war to a satisfactory end. It would have largely re-established his credit among the Allies and his prestige with the enemy. It could only conduce to national and international advantage. Yet, on the other hand, what doors it opened to malice! It not merely exposed the Duke to a direct and painful rebuff, but it afforded Harley fertile occasions of working on the Queen’s fears and of convincing her that she was losing her rights and prerogatives by needless subservience to an insatiable family.

The fact that the request had been made was judiciously imparted to hostile circles, together with its worst construction. Violent party opponents, proud nobles, disaffected officers, found it easy to believe that Marlborough harboured some prodigious design against the State. Was he not already “an overmighty subject”? Had he not power enough? Would nothing satisfy him under the Crown? The case of General Monk, already mentioned by Craggs, occurred to many minds. It was well known how Charles II had feared his power, and how his brother and eventual successor had urged him to curtail it. But other more sombre precedents might be invoked in warning. Many were alive whose youth had been spent under the rule of Oliver Cromwell and his major-generals. Never again must England sink into such military bondage. The Queen, probably by Harley’s suggestion, consulted various great men outside the Government, and especially those who would be most inflamed upon the issue. The Duke of Argyll, on leave from the Army, was one of these. This fiery soldier, in no way conciliated by Marlborough’s procuring him promotions and the Garter, replied in language whose extravagance was calculated to inspire the Queen not only with lively alarms, but also with combativeness: “Your Majesty need not be in pain, for I would undertake whenever you command to seize the Duke at the head of his troops and bring him away dead or alive.”^[233]

In the Tory coffee-houses the story was spread that Marlborough sought to subvert the Throne. “General-for-life” was but the stepping-stone. He would be King. “King John II” was the latest term of abuse cast upon him.^[234]

While freeing Marlborough from all the graver imputations, it is impossible not to be surprised that he should have exposed himself to such dangers. How could he not have foreseen the fate of his request? His surefooted judgment had gone for once astray. Was this a proof of his inordinate pretensions, or was it a measure of the difficulties by which he was being overcome, and of the forlorn expedients to which he was reduced to carry through his task in the dusk of his power?

The impending Barrier Treaty between England and Holland was bound to aggravate the dissensions of the Alliance. Marlborough’s opposition to it was inveterate. In all his extant letters he gives as his reason the fear that the Dutch, once satisfied, would make a separate peace. He wrote this regularly to Godolphin, to Sunderland and Townshend. But there can be no doubt that his main reason was, as always, the ill-effect which the Dutch Barrier in its extreme form would have not only upon the Imperialists, both at Vienna and in Spain, upon the Emperor and his brother Charles III, but also on the King of Prussia. It was more than ever indispensable to Marlborough, if he was to preserve any further influence with the rest of the Allies, not to be associated with it. He therefore refused his signature and remained at Brussels on October 29, when the document was signed by Townshend alone.

But he went further. The essence of the Barrier Treaty was that it should remain the secret of the Sea Powers. On November 14 Marlborough quitted the army and reached The Hague on a three days’ visit. He took the Prussian Commissioner, General Grumbkow, with whom he was on the best of terms, in his coach. At The Hague he met both Eugene and Sinzendorff. It is almost certain that he disclosed to all three the character of the Barrier Treaty which now awaited ratification by the British Cabinet.^[235] It was, of course, inevitable that during the impending discussions in London, to which so many persons would be parties, the news would eventually reach the allied Courts. But Marlborough evidently wished to be the purveyor himself, in order first to raise Imperial and Prussian opposition to the treaty at the earliest moment, and, secondly, to make Vienna and Berlin feel that he was true to the Alliance and scrupulously careful of their interests. Thus only could he preserve that confidence in himself on the Continent without which neither the armies nor the signatory states could be held together. Such dissociation from colleagues at home and from his fellow-plenipotentiary Townshend on the spot, unpardonable in persons of secondary status, and in any case open to stricture, is to be justified only by Marlborough’s supreme position in the heart of the Alliance and his ceaseless, unswerving zeal and care for its interests.

Meanwhile Harley pursued his designs. Notwithstanding his astute and laborious calculations, success came to him by a path different from that he had prepared. It was no doubt a reasonable expectation after so many years of deepening war that the turn of the peace party would come. This accorded tolerably well with the composition and temper of the Tories. The Jacobites, veiled or avowed, were naturally so inclined. The Rochester Tories were against the kind of war which Marlborough had forced them to wage in Flanders. Party men were able to press Spain as an exciting alternative to Marlborough’s theme, and all the country gentlemen, however patriotic, felt the hard bite of aggravated taxation. The exploitation of war-weariness in all its forms was a policy which seemed capable of uniting the Tory forces, and was also likely to profit by time and chance. Thus Harley ruminated, resolved, and acted.

JOHN CAMPBELL, SECOND DUKE OF ARGYLL
William Aikman
National Portrait Gallery

Not only were the Tories inclined to peace, but several eminent Whigs, who were watching all the Queen’s motions, might be easily gained upon this line. Of these the greatest was Shrewsbury, at this time a sincere advocate of peace. He was in the opinion of all men a prize of the first order. Finally an agitation for peace enabled the whole propaganda against Marlborough to be used to the fullest advantage. The General—thus it ran—was prolonging the war for his own profit. Military men raised by the luck of battle to dizzy heights were naturally prone to preserve the conditions upon which their authority and affluence alike thrived. How many good opportunities of obtaining all the objects of the war by sagacious and even glorious peace had not Marlborough burked! He could have had a good peace after Ramillies; he could have had a better peace before Malplaquet. Even now everything could be obtained by a sincere negotiation. But nothing could be expected except a continuance of the slaughter and taxation, and the ever-mounting indebtedness of the landed gentry to the money-power, while the General ruled all. Here, then, was Harley’s political campaign, and to it he devoted himself with slow-burning zeal and shuffling skill.

However, the peace movement encountered obstacles none the less serious if submerged. First, the Tories, for all their party spite, were powerfully affected by the impression of England leading Europe, of redcoats beating the French, and some, politics apart, could scarce repress a cheer for the Duke of Marlborough. Secondly, the Ministry presented an oblique front to the peace talk. They too, so they declared, were striving for peace. Indeed, indefatigable negotiations, fathomless to outsiders, were unceasing. Discussion must therefore turn, not upon a vague desire to escape from war burdens or hardships, but upon particular points of the Treaty. And who had cried loudest for “No Peace without Spain” but Rochester and his Tories? Many Tories prided themselves upon being what Marlborough called “good Englishmen.” War under Marlborough, however costly, had spelt glory. No would-be Minister dared openly cast away the fruits of eight dazzling years. Evidently this part of the case had to be stated by the Tory leaders with discretion.

Thirdly, there was the Queen. It was engrained in Anne that her security upon the throne depended upon the stunning defeat of France. All her reign she had pursued this course and had prospered. If she felt her own position greater, more solidly founded, if she found all the princes of Europe attentive to her slightest mood, it was because of her wonderful success in war which Marlborough had unfailingly brought to her. True the Queen was tired of the ordeal. She was galled by the submissions to Marlborough, and still worse to the Whigs, which it required. Had she not exclaimed on the day of the Oudenarde dispatch, “Lord, when will all this dreadful bloodshed cease?” None the less she remained deeply conscious that her sovereignty and British national greatness were founded upon undoubted victory in the war, and that this victory in one form or another, as long as Marlborough was her servant, was almost certainly within her grasp.

Therefore Harley, working steadily through the whispering Abigail, found that his peace talk gained only a lukewarm, doubtful, and hesitating response. The Queen made difficulties about backstair audiences. Abigail flitted to and fro with explanations that “my poor Aunt” was “short of ready money [courage],” and that she allowed herself to be overborne by the cruel pressures of her Ministers and General.

Abigail Masham to Robert Harley

Even the slaughter of Malplaquet did not affect the Queen, nor, indeed, her people, as deeply as might have been hoped by the Tories. British troops had been few and their losses comparatively small. It was the Dutch, the Prussians, and the mercenaries whom England set in motion and directed who had shed their blood. The British casualties at Malplaquet had been under eighteen hundred. Marlborough’s fame, his influence upon the Continent, his comradeship with Eugene, had compelled the tremendous event. The war was not all loss or waste to the British realm, and it was no use for Mr Harley to pretend the contrary.

In the winter of 1709 it was by no means clear that the Tory Opposition could ride back to power upon a hasty peace. At the end of October Harley was discouraged, and Abigail could give him no comfort. But if the peace agitation failed, what other course was open? There was always one sure issue which could be raised—“The Church in danger.” On this the strongest elements in the Tory Party and the immense power of the country clergy could be rallied. Harley, however, was the last man to choose such a cry. Had he not at all times striven to modify the rancour of the Church against the Dissenters? Had he not, with St John in his train, joined Marlborough and Godolphin in 1704 on the definite basis that the Occasional Conformity Bill should be shelved or defeated? Was he not himself of Dissenting stock? Those who had opposed him most among the Tories were those very Highfliers with whom the contest between Church and Chapel was a perennial crusade. As Harley viewed the situation in October 1709, nothing could have seemed less propitious than bringing the Church question to the forefront of politics, or using it as the vehicle of success at a General Election. It would certainly unite the super-Ministers, the Whigs, and the moderates. It would divide the Tories. The Catholics would lose interest; the moderates or “whimsicals” would fall away; and Harley would be left alone to share misfortunes with Rochester and the High Church. Yet the caprice of events was to draw him into this very quarrel and to yield results beyond his dreams.

Since June the Whigs had demanded the Admiralty, over which Pembroke had presided after Prince George’s death, for Orford.^[237] This actor in the Revolution, and hero too of the battle of La Hogue, was the sole member of the Junto who had not regained the Council Chamber. The Queen, remembering his attacks upon her late husband’s administration, employed all her means of resistance. Marlborough and Godolphin, deeply concerned by the flaring party complexion of the Government, tried to stave off the appointment. But the Whigs used their power in the Government and in the House of Commons in their usual hard, decisive way. “If the business of the Admiralty,” said Halifax, “be not set right, it will be impossible for Lord Somers to continue in his employment.”^[238] A point was reached when Marlborough and Godolphin had to throw their weight in with them. Marlborough advised the Queen to yield.

At length she gave way. She had a grievance against Sir John Jennings, a competent captain who was also proposed as a member of the Board. He was involved with those who had criticized her husband’s administration. She consoled herself by insisting on his exclusion. Orford was nominated head of the Admiralty on November 8. All five members of the Junto—the five tyrant Lords—sat with Queen Anne at the council board. Now at last this long confederacy declared itself satisfied. There was a momentary lull. Political stabilization seemed to be achieved, the tension eased. The Queen even smiled at Sunderland. Sarah reported the prodigy. Marlborough had no illusions. “I believe,” he replied to his wife (November 1),

The end of 1709 marked the zenith of Britain in Europe, of the Whigs under Queen Anne, and of Marlborough’s career. Thereafter all fell with odd rapidity. The victorious Alliance moved forward with ever-growing disunity and ever more unreasonable pretensions. The Whigs were driven from office; Marlborough was hounded down; and glorious England turned renegade before all men. But the winter sun shone with fitful brightness.

Queen Anne brooded and planned revenge upon the Whigs. Her power, founded upon Marlborough’s victories, was immense. The Courts of Europe studied her whims; the fierce parties in Britain competed for her smile. But there is a cruel sketch of her about this time, oppressed with sorrow and physical suffering, struggling under her burdens, which commands sympathy and mocks pomp. “She appeared to be the most despicable mortal I had ever seen in any station. The poor lady as I saw her twice before, was again under a severe fit of gout, ill-dressed, blotted in her countenance, and surrounded with plaisters, cataplaisma, and dirty-like rags.”^[240] From the autumn of 1709 onward the Queen felt herself capable of driving out the Whigs if she could take her time and have good advice. Thereafter she thought about little else. These Whigs had forced themselves upon her. They had intruded into her Council of State. They had used without scruple the power they had from majorities in both Houses of Parliament to override her sovereign pleasure about the personages she thought fit to employ. Not only were her wrath and prejudice directed against the Whigs, but they fell upon Godolphin, her Lord Treasurer, who had been their tool. Marlborough, although not upon this plane, had lent his weight to the Lord Treasurer and shared his disfavour. As for Sarah, the Queen was utterly worn out by her arguments and admonitions. She desired above all things never again to hear her voice or see her handwriting. Nothing remained of that remarkable partnership except the opportunities of quarrel; and these were nearing their end.

When they met at great functions, or when Sarah’s offices required her attendance, appearances were preserved. Sarah was a State and political personage. Her dismissal might be followed by Marlborough’s resignation and a crisis in Parliament and throughout the Alliance. Even the rumours that she was in disfavour stirred Europe. The Queen did not feel strong enough to face such contingencies in the autumn of 1709. Had Sarah discharged her duties with respectful formality, avoided all intimate or controversial topics, and remained in the country as much as possible, a tolerable relationship between the two women might have been preserved. But Sarah’s judgment was warped by her hatred of Abigail, and she was tormented out of all prudence or proper self-respect by jealousy of her triumphant rival. She obtruded herself upon the Queen; she protested her party views; she asked for petty favours, and attributed the refusals to the influence of Abigail. Abigail Masham had become an obsession to her, and she acted as if it were possible to tear the Queen away from her by force. Thus what might have been a dignified if frigid association became a violent and protracted annoyance to the Queen. At every rebuff or repulse Sarah wrote of her grievances to her husband, and urged him, as he loved her, to take up the cudgels on her behalf. All the advice he gave was sound. He begged her to stay away from Court, not to accost or write to the Queen, to remain as quiet as possible and ask no favours. This was advice which Sarah could not bring herself to follow.

“I would go upon all-four to make it easy between you,” wrote the Captain-General (August 19), “but for credit, I am satisfied that I have none; so that I would willingly not expose myself, but meddle as little as possible.” (August 22) “Be obliging and kind to all your friends, and avoid entering into cabals, and whatever I have in this world, if that can give you any satisfaction, you shall always be mistress of, and have the disposing of that and me.”^[241]

The British envoy to the Court of Hanover, Mr Howe, having died, Sarah, ignoring these sagacious counsels, unfolded to Anne the hard case of his widow, and suggested a pension and apartments in Somerset House. The Queen said stiffly it was a matter for the Lord Treasurer. Sarah then asked for some vacant lodgings in St James’s Palace for herself in order to make a better entrance to her own apartments. The Queen, as Sarah no doubt knew only too well, had promised these to Mrs Masham’s sister. Sarah said they had been reserved for her when they fell vacant. “I do not remember that I was ever spoken to for them,” said Anne. “But, supposing that I am mistaken, surely my request cannot be deemed unreasonable,” said Sarah. “I have a great many servants of my own,” rejoined the Queen, “and some of them I must find room for.” “Your Majesty, then, does not reckon Lord Marlborough or me among your servants?” This was picking a quarrel, but Sarah persisted. “It would be thought still more strange were I to repeat this conversation and inform the world that after all Lord Marlborough’s services your Majesty refuses to give him a miserable hole to make a clear entry to his lodgings. I beg, therefore, to know whether I am at liberty to repeat this to any of my friends.” The Queen, much ruffled, after a long pause said she might repeat it. “I hope your Majesty will reflect upon all that has passed,” said Sarah, leaving the room.^[243]

The impropriety of Sarah’s manner in a subject addressing the Sovereign must be judged in the light of her love and intimacy dating from childhood’s days; but the folly of her persistence needs no comment. It did not end here. Sarah resorted to her pen, which was pointed and tireless. She lectured the Queen on the duties of friendship. She dwelt upon the sin committed by those who took the Sacrament while still at enmity with their fellows. She demanded to know by what crime she had forfeited the royal favour. She furnished a lengthy memorial setting forth her services over more than a quarter of a century. But nothing that she could do served any purpose but to confirm the Queen in the position she had adopted. “It is impossible,” wrote Anne, “for you to recover my former kindness, but I shall behave myself to you as the Duke of Marlborough’s wife, and as my Groom of the Stole.”^[244]

All this account comes to us from Sarah herself. It proves her as wrong-headed in defending her case to posterity as in pleading it with Queen Anne. The breach was now open and scandalous, and all the ambitions of a rival, of a clique, and the interests of a great political party were concerned to keep it so.

The accomplishment of the Queen’s political purpose was by no means easy or free from risk. The Government commanded the ability of the great Whig lords, and behind them lay the force of the Whig organization. This included not only the City, with its mysterious power of manufacturing credit, but also the Dissenters, who might upon occasion become the Ironsides. Besides this both Houses of Parliament—the Commons but one year old—were capable at any time of taking sharp and measureless action against the Court, of refusing supplies to carry on the war, of arresting and impeaching friends of the Queen, or having her gentlewoman, the comforting Abigail, dismissed or sent to the Tower. Above all, Marlborough stood at the head of the armies of the Grand Alliance, apparently invincible, indissolubly wedded to Godolphin, to the Whigs, to the Parliamentary system, as well as to Sarah.

This was a great combination for the Queen to confront. Such was her confidence in herself and in her majesty and prerogative that she set herself without hesitation to overthrow it. But she must have good advice. Her intentions could only be carried through by a parliamentarian of profound astuteness and skill. Mr Harley’s experience of the House of Commons was unequalled. His management when Speaker or Secretary of State had repeatedly been attended by success. Although he did not control the Tory Party, he had it all behind him now. With the Queen’s favour he was, in fact, the head of an alternative Government. He alone would know how to play the Queen’s very difficult game. She must act upon his advice. How could she, a woman, cope otherwise with great questions and great figures? But happily at the Queen’s ear, always at hand, there was Abigail, Harley’s relation and dear friend, whispering slander against the Marlboroughs, waiting hand and foot upon her, always available to carry messages or to arrange interviews. Up and down the backstairs Abigail conducted Harley, or carried his counsels to the Queen.

The successive steps by which the Queen sought and compassed the destruction of her Ministers were calculated and timed with remarkable address. At every stage her action was measured by the growing Tory strength in the country. This process continued remorselessly through the autumn of 1709 to the winter of 1710. This gradual but persistent change from Whig to Tory was only possible because the doctrine of collective Cabinet responsibility was in its infancy. The Lord Treasurer had many of the duties but few of the powers of a modern Prime Minister. His colleagues at the council table felt little loyalty to one another or to him. The Queen had no thought of loyalty to her Ministers, nor to the Parliament which voted her great supplies by their majority. To break and turn them out upon the advice of secret counsellors and by intrigue, veiled under deceitful protestations of confidence and regard, was her unswerving aim. She pursued it with almost total disregard of the consequences to the war, upon which she had spent so much of her subjects’ blood and treasure, or to the princes of the Grand Alliance, to whom her royal faith was pledged. Queen Anne conceived herself as entirely within her rights in cleansing herself from the Whigs whom she detested, and also in punishing the two great super-Ministers who had helped to force the Whigs upon her. In behaving thus the Queen violated every modern conception of the duties of a constitutional monarch, and also most of the canons of personal good faith. Nevertheless, neither she nor her subjects felt the same repugnance to these methods as we do to-day. Royal favour was like the weather. It was as useless to reproach Queen Anne with fickleness and inconstancy as it would be to accuse a twentieth-century electorate of these vices.

So complete a transformation in little more than a year of a Government unquestionably sustained by majorities in both Houses could not have been effected if the threatened Ministers had stood together and acted resolutely in their own defence. It would probably have been possible in the early stages to confront the Queen and her secret advisers with an issue. Marlborough, with his sure instinct, was, as we shall see, most anxious for a decisive trial of strength on well-chosen ground. But at every stage the timidity of Godolphin, and the jealousy and selfishness of the Whigs towards one another, prevented any combined front from being formed. Harley, with extraordinary subtlety, managed to present always baffling and oblique issues, never hesitated to recede here and there for the moment, led the Queen to be prodigal in assurances of goodwill and promises to go no further, and thus edged and wedged the doomed administration inch by inch and week by week down the slope towards the disastrous general election which a dissolution against the advice of Ministers could at any moment precipitate.

Party historians, Whig and Tory, have had their say. Modern opinion unitedly condemns the failure to make peace both before and after Malplaquet. But no one can read without disgust and censure the shameful tale of the Harley-Abigail intrigue. Harley, as we have seen, was now master of the Tory Party. All its various circles from Jacobites to moderate Churchmen and patriotic fox-hunters were agreed that the Whigs should be turned out and the war stopped, whatever might happen to Marlborough or to the Allies. Queen Anne had become a traitor to her own Ministers. Harley and the Opposition, agitating from below, received a grand encouragement from above.

Two main methods were pursued by Harley. The first was a villainous propaganda against Marlborough, or what was more easy, ‘the Marlboroughs.’ Here was this pair and their offspring holding the Queen in bondage, engrossing to themselves all the sunlight of the realm. Here was this General gathering with his covetous hands filthy lucre in fabulous quantities. He was prolonging the war for his own advantage. He had prevented a triumphant peace in order that he might batten on the public fortunes at the head of the army, which, it must be admitted, he sometimes conducted with diabolical skill, but—as Harley did not shrink from hinting—with doubtful courage. Even to this level did he sink. The General had now at Malplaquet contrived a battle, which for its brutal slaughter was without compare, in order that he might line his pockets with the profits of favouritism and corruption, through filling the commissions of those he had led to death. Now this ogre, in base ingratitude to the Queen to whom he owed all, in treason against the kingdom and Parliament, was secretly aiming at the Crown. A new Cromwell dictatorship was his goal. See how the mob cheered him when they had the opportunity. Parliament itself must be on its guard against an ambitious adventurer, who had betrayed in turn every party and every prince he had served. Such, in insidious forms, was the nourishment which Harley fed to Abigail, and which Abigail fed to Anne.

For the rest there were the Whigs, the party foe, a cabal of wealthy nobles, an obsolete expression of the forces which had cut off the head of King Charles the Martyr, now allied with the profiteers and moneylenders of the City and the Bank of England. These were piling up ceaselessly a gigantic debt, of which they were the usurers, which soon would equal in its dead weight and in its interest the whole value of the land and annual food of England. These same Whigs were at heart not only republicans but atheists. It might be going too far to suggest they were the only evil-livers in the land; but still, their standards of morality were drawn at a level which, if accepted for a generation, would destroy the Church of England and debase the British breed.

Ought not the Queen to count for more? Ought she not to be mistress in her own realm? Could she not free herself with loyal aid from the trammels in which Whig majorities in the Commons and the Lords had entangled her? Then England might also be freed from the recreant, self-seeking, and blood-sucking allies who sheltered behind her sword—victorious no doubt—who pursued aims which had no longer any interest for the British Isles. Let the Queen use her undoubted rights and power, let her throw herself with confidence upon the love of her people; and the hateful toil of war would end, peace could be made upon unchallenged victory, and plenty would cheer manor house and vicarage alike. Such was the propaganda, a mixture of fact and malice, pressed upon Queen Anne from many quarters, urged by Harley in his backstair consultations, and counselled by Abigail at the Queen’s bedside as she smoothed the pillows and removed the slops.

Side by side with all this lay a plan of action profoundly studied and step by step brought into execution. Fortified by the unfailing favour of the Queen, Harley now began to tamper with the Whig weaklings. The Duke of Somerset was a Cabinet Minister. Although a duke and wealthy, he had never reached beyond a secondary sphere in national politics. A searching process of reciprocal canvassing and criticism proceeded within the ranks of the aristocracy. Society and politics coincided through the entire field. In that keen, well-informed atmosphere personal defects were soon descried. Somerset’s intelligence was limited, but he was independent, ambitious, bold, and could upon occasion be both violent and forcible. The insulting manner in which he had driven Harley from the Cabinet in 1708, when Marlborough and Godolphin had stayed away, had played its part in history. His wife was becoming the Queen’s close friend. The seduction of the Duke of Somerset from the Whigs and his separation from Marlborough and Godolphin were objects of high political importance.

Harley knew all about the Duke of Somerset. He measured shrewdly both his smaller qualities and his large potential usefulness. For more than a year Somerset was led to believe that he might become the head of some great Ministry, truly national, combining the best in all parties, for causes with which, until they were defined, none would disagree. No records are available of Harley’s approaches to Somerset. But we know that the Queen—no doubt by Harley’s guidance—began to show him exceptional favour from the end of 1709. She was repeatedly closeted with him. She listened with unwearied patience to all the advice he had to give. He basked resplendent in the royal grace. Godolphin wrote drily to Marlborough that Somerset seemed to be more hours each day with the Queen than away from her. Already because of his airs he was spoken of in the Court as “the Sovereign.” We are witnessing an early eighteenth-century example of the process, familiar to twentieth-century democracy in every land, by which a pretentious, imposing mediocrity can be worked up into a national leader. The Duke of Somerset enjoyed the treatment, and while sitting at Council with Marlborough, Godolphin, and the Whigs, upon the assumption of amity and good faith, he actively, crudely, and obviously played Harley’s game. Lord Chancellor Cowper has passed a severe judgment on him. “On the whole he appeared a false, mean-spirited knave, at the same time he was a pretender to the greatest courage and steadiness.”^[245]

CHARLES SEYMOUR, SIXTH DUKE OF SOMERSET
From an engraving after a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller

Somers may also have been toyed with. “Mr Erasmus Lewis told me,” says Carte (April 10, 1749),

But this is doubtful authority.

The next to be detached was Earl Rivers. Godolphin, with his unique experience of the pettiness and baseness of noble persons, and also of others where office is concerned, was early apprised of the alienation of Rivers. In his apprehension he proposed to Marlborough that Rivers, who was a general of some repute, should replace the much aspersed and grievously mutilated Galway as Commander-in-Chief in Spain. Marlborough was by no means incapable of a political job. The old, trained courtier had seen the like without undue aversion for more than forty years. But he had the prejudice which all good soldiers have against putting inferior men in command of troops. Moreover, he was loyal to Galway. Although he had criticized severely Almanza and some of his other operations, he none the less believed that this Huguenot refugee and hero was one of the finest warriors in that age of ceaseless war. Marlborough did not readily hold with the modern doctrine, popularized by Napoleon, that generals must be judged by results. He therefore upheld Galway, and with many regrets left Lord Rivers on Godolphin’s hands. Henceforward Rivers, while preserving his position as a leading Whig, acted in the interests of the Tories.

A far greater figure was the Duke of Shrewsbury. No one could charge him with ignoble ambition. Some twenty years before he had been King William’s Secretary of State, and known to all as “the King of Hearts.” In unaffected dislike he had cast away office and power. He had repeatedly refused to resume the burden. He had quitted the island. Amid the monuments, pleasures, and cosmopolitan society of Rome he had been for years the prototype of an English grandee. Noble in the technical sense, of vast wealth, bland, affable but remote, detached from his surroundings, disdainful to politics, but with his historic, formidable record, the Duke of Shrewsbury had brooded agreeably upon the Roman scene.

Upon Queen Anne’s first coming to the throne Marlborough’s resolve had been to bring him into the highest place next to Godolphin. But Shrewsbury preferred his idle life in Rome. He had married an Italian lady whose previous morals had not escaped gossip or even scandal, and whose manners were in all quarters judged lively to the point of being deplorable. In December 1705, when Shrewsbury passed through The Hague, Marlborough had made renewed attempts to rally him to the Administration. Nothing, not even the comical little creature he had espoused, could deprive him of his political status. Shrewsbury had now returned to his great estates in England. Again Marlborough endeavoured to enlist him in the Government. Would he not, perhaps, at least be Master of the Horse? There would be no need for him to do business, or suffer any personal inconvenience. But Shrewsbury amid profuse expressions of friendship had preferred a private life. On another occasion in 1709 Marlborough had spoken to him of the undue claims made by the Whigs, and had dwelt on the importance of having moderate men in the Government. It seemed that this conversation was to be the forerunner of others.

Shrewsbury, whose interest in politics was now being revived by his desire to carry his Italian wife into the forefront of haughty English society, had perhaps been conscious of waiting for some time. Marlborough for his part had found the Junto, upon whom his policy had come to depend, by no means eager to admit Shrewsbury to their circle. True he was a famous Whig and one of King William’s most trusted Ministers. But was it, they asked themselves, for his party colour and services that Marlborough sought to include him in the Government? Was it not rather because he had let that colour fade, and was at heart as ready to work for national as for party purposes? The Lords of the Junto might have accepted Shrewsbury as a mild Tory, but in 1709 they had no relish for him as a Whig. They saw in this idea of Marlborough’s only another attempt to build up the strength of the super-Ministers against honest party men. At any rate, Marlborough never resumed his conversation with Shrewsbury, and Shrewsbury was perfectly free to allow his own weight and standing to play their just part in political events.

But Shrewsbury’s value to Marlborough’s system was also his value to Harley. Shrewsbury was the man of all others to break the Whig phalanx. He was the wedge to drive deep into the official array. Before the end of 1709 Harley had reached a tolerably good understanding with this timid, gifted magnifico. Here was a Whig who cared nothing for the Junto. Here was a Whig whose name was revered throughout that party but who took no further interest in its fortunes. Here was one who could be introduced into the Government as a friend who was in fact their foe. “I am sensible how far I am from being able,” wrote Shrewsbury to Harley (November 3), “to act any considerable part in the good you mention, but shall always be ready to concur with you in everything that may be for the interest of the public, being convinced nobody can wish better to it nor judge better of it than yourself. I do not doubt but the generality of the nation long for a peace. . . . Some opportunities have already been lost.”^[247]

The Houses met on November 15. The Queen for the first time since her husband’s death opened Parliament in person in royal and war-time pomp. Her speech from the throne, though read, as some noticed, in faltering tones, was all that a Whig Parliament could wish. French duplicity had used the peace negotiations in an attempt to provoke dissension among the Allies. Their designs had failed. The war had been renewed with greater resolution. A splendid victory had been won, and peace was now only the more needed by the enemy. But the war was still going on, and the final effort was required. The Queen appealed for generous supplies.

The Whigs excelled in Parliamentary stage-management. Under their influence the House of Commons resolved, contrary to all custom, to present the Address to the Sovereign on the very same day. Both Houses then proceeded to extol Marlborough. Never in the whole course of the war had the Commons expressed thanks to their General in such glowing terms. They exalted the victory of Malplaquet. They praised his skill and valour. Fifteen of the most distinguished members of the House were deputed to wait upon him with the thanks—against which no single speech had been made—of the most powerful assembly in the world. The Lords vied with the Commons. When Marlborough returned and came to the Upper House on November 17 Lord Chancellor Cowper outstripped all the eulogies he had earned in eight years of invincible war. Klopp rightly says, “This day may be called the supreme and also the last pinnacle of Marlborough’s career.”^[248] Barely two years were to pass, and two more unfailing campaigns to be fought, before he was to be dismissed from all his offices, his faithful generals superseded or cashiered, and he himself charged with peculation and eventually driven from his native land in obloquy.

Hoffmann, the Emperor’s Minister, saw beneath the structure of this fine parade. “This extreme politeness,” he wrote, “is, to speak exactly, a result of the pleasure which the Whigs have derived from the appointment of one of their friends as Lord High Admiral; and,” he added, with less foresight, “this satisfaction promises everything we can desire.”^[249] More than six million pounds—at which Europe gasped—was voted for the war with the utmost concord and dispatch. “Our Parliamentary business is going wonderfully [à merveille],” wrote Marlborough (November 25) to Count Maffei.^[250] He told Hoffmann that he believed the session would end six weeks before its usual time. Whig ascendancy was a dangerous medicine; but it certainly seemed at first to work.

Two unforeseeable but eventually devastating episodes now occurred in which the Whigs showed weakness and unwisdom. For the first they had only themselves to blame. The part played by Dr Sacheverell in the history of the Church of England is out of all proportion to his moral or mental stature. It exercised an influence which lasted for several generations. After the trial of Sacheverell no British Government, even during all the long reign of the Whigs, dared to make an attack upon the Church of England. The Dissenters, though immune from persecution, were for five generations tolerated only upon the characteristic British device of an Act of Indemnity passed from year to year, like the Army (Annual) Bill. It was not until the nineteenth century was well advanced that the religious disabilities of Nonconformists and Catholics were removed; and then only by Tory hands.

Noorden has drawn us a picture of Sacheverell more lively than is found in our own histories.

On November 5, 1709, Sacheverell preached a sermon in St Paul’s before the Lord Mayor of London on “the perils of false brethren in Church and State.”

“I remember,” wrote a Whig observer, “he sate directly against me during Prayers, and I was surpriz’d at the Fiery Red that overspread his Face, (which I have since seen fair and Effeminate enough) and the Gogling Wildness of his Eyes. And I may truly say, He was (if ever Man) transported with an Hellish Fury.”^[252] There was no remarkable doctrinal departure in the sermon. It represented the views of the main body of the English country parsons. The Doctor had preached it in Oxford four years earlier, in 1705, without its attracting any attention. But now he added certain hostile allusions to Godolphin, who was classed among the “false brethren” as the “wily Volpone.” The Treasurer had long been nicknamed “the Fox,”^[253] and was thus easily identifiable. It was not only Guy Fawkes Day; it was the anniversary of William III’s landing at Torbay. Whig ears were all attention. There was a sounding-board for words which otherwise would have passed unnoticed. The Tory Party was boiling and bubbling under the rule of their party foes, and under the illicit, but all the more thrilling, favour of Queen Anne. The Reverend Doctor was well aware that he was playing high politics. His move, though perhaps spontaneous, was a recognizable feature in the general Tory attack. The Lord Mayor listened without noticeable discomfort. But when the sermon was printed, with a dedication to himself, and when no fewer than forty thousand copies were sold or distributed in a few days, he made haste to dissociate himself from these dangerous manifestations.

Interest spread throughout the country. “We long here,” wrote the Jacobite Hearne (November 19), “to see Dr Sacheverell’s V^th of November Sermon preach’d upon these Words, In perils amongst false Brethren. Upon which Words I remember he formerly preach’d at S^t Marie’s and ’tis said ’tis the very same Sermon, only with some Alterations and Additions. It makes a great Noise, and several give out that he will be prosecuted, but that you know best at London.”^[254]

Sacheverell’s discourse threw the Whig Party into a rage. They were in the full pride of place and power. They viewed the sermon as a challenge, not only to their Government, but to the very principles of “the Glorious Revolution of 1688.” Party men may be forgiven for party passions, but cooler heads and broader views are required at the summit of affairs. An Opposition would naturally welcome just this kind of discussion; but it was not for a Government in full career and at the height of war to indulge them. Obviously the wise course was for Ministers to ignore or belittle the whole affair, and perhaps set one of their minor supporters to deliver a counterblast. There were, however, in the Cabinet Council several elements which did not conform to reason.

Godolphin was deeply sensitive about attacks upon his phantom Tory orthodoxy. He was naturally disquieted by the state of his relations with the Queen. He had the feeling that he was being singled out and marked down as a victim of Tory vengeance. He was therefore in a state of lively indignation. It happened to suit some at least of his Whig colleagues to indulge and even to inflame his wrath. Wharton and others thought that Whig interests would be served by making the Treasurer break his last contacts with the Tories. Marlborough had not returned from the front when the matter was first discussed by the Council. Sunderland was, as usual, a zealot. The Whig Party, Wharton as the leading spirit, clamoured for spirited action. It was decided to pursue Dr Sacheverell. In December articles of impeachment were exhibited against him by the majority of the House of Commons.

The Government’s tactical error was understood by the Tories from the first. “So solemn a prosecution for such a scribble,” wrote Dr Stratford, tutor to Harley’s son (December 21), “will make the Doctor Sacheverell and his performance much more considerable than either of them could have been on any other account.”^[255] As was well said at the time, “the Whigs took it into their minds to roast a parson, and they did roast him, but their zeal tempted them to make the fire so high that they scorched themselves.”^[256]

The second episode, though ranking much smaller in history, nevertheless cut deeply into the sequence of events. The mortifications for which Marlborough’s secret information had prepared him began almost as soon as he came home. In January Lord Essex died, and the Lieutenancy of the Tower, together with the Oxford Regiment,^[257] became vacant. Upon these, as on all other military appointments, it was the unvarying custom for the Captain-General to advise the Queen. Marlborough, having in his mind the interest of the Ministry in conciliating Somerset, planned to give the Tower to the Duke of Northumberland, and the regiment to Somerset’s son, Lord Hertford. Whether apprised of this or not, the Queen’s backstair advisers thought otherwise. Their candidate for the Tower was Lord Rivers. They would find in his appointment a means of displaying their power to reward new adherents. Rivers waited on Marlborough and asked for his recommendation. Marlborough replied affably that the office was not one of sufficient importance for him, and that he hoped to serve him better on a future occasion. Rivers then asked permission to plead his own suit to the Queen. Marlborough, assuming naturally that no appointment would be made without his advice first being sought, and resolved to advise against Rivers, consented. But when almost immediately afterwards he had an audience and submitted Northumberland’s name, the Queen answered forthwith, “Your Grace has come too late, for I have already granted the Lieutenancy to Lord Rivers, who has assured me that you had no objection to him.”^[258] Marlborough saw at once that he had been tricked. He protested, but the Queen declined to recede from her promise to Rivers. That same day the Queen sent him a written message desiring him to appoint to the vacant regiment no other person than Colonel Hill, Mrs Masham’s brother.

It was obvious that an insult of the most carefully studied character was intended by the Queen’s secret advisers. But the issue ran much deeper than this. In an army in which the leading officers were regarded as the champions of two fiercely struggling parties, whose exploits were cheered or disparaged according to their political colour, it was utterly impossible to maintain discipline or safely to conduct operations except upon the basis of all these men knowing that in their military fortunes the Commander-in-Chief was supreme. It was bad enough that the prowess of the Tory or even Jacobite Webb should be vaunted against the services of the Whig Cadogan in the House of Commons. But these unseemly proceedings could not be extended to the British Army in the field without destroying its efficiency. There was already much talk of Mrs Masham’s growing influence, and of Sarah’s loss of favour. “The dispute was not between the Queen and my lord Duke, as some will have it, but whether Mrs Masham and her party should have a disposal of all the vacancies in the army, and, by degrees, of everything else.”^[259] The appointment of Mrs Masham’s brother to a regiment over the heads of many more competent and experienced colonels was nothing less than a signal to the Army that Marlborough no longer possessed the confidence of the Queen, on which his authority over the British forces stood. The evil of such a demonstration would swiftly extend to the Allies, spreading doubt and discouragement as it travelled. Already the enemy were watching with eager eyes for every sign that the power of their antagonist was waning. The proposed appointment of Abigail’s brother to a regiment might well be fatal to the campaign for which the largest armies yet seen were soon to assemble.

Marlborough therefore refused point-blank. He informed his Whig colleagues of his inflexible resolve, and they promised to stand by him. Sunderland, perhaps because he already had a sense of a threat to himself, was especially vigorous. Somers offered either to go with the Captain-General to the Queen or to make a separate intercession. Thus sustained, Marlborough sought a second audience. He pleaded his case with his usual skill and force. He warned the Queen that, apart from the military impropriety of appointing so young an officer on favour over the heads of others with better claims, the event would in the circumstances “set up a standard of disaffection to rally all the malcontent officers in the army.” He appealed to the Queen that after all his services he should not be treated thus. Anne remained obdurate. She did not show the slightest sign of sympathy, still less of yielding. Coldly and harshly she ended the discussion with the words, “You will do well to advise with your friends.” “He could not draw one kind expression from her.”^[260] Marlborough left her presence in extreme distress. The peering courtiers in the antechamber noticed that that serenity which neither the heat of battle nor the endless vexations of business had ever disturbed had for the moment deserted him.

He now took a firm decision that the Queen must either dismiss Abigail or himself. On this he invited the Whigs and Godolphin to rally. There is little doubt that he measured the situation rightly. Unless they all stood together and drove Abigail out, their destruction by the intrigues of which the Queen was at once the head and the tool was certain. What better ground could be chosen for Parliament with its Whig majority in both Houses, for the nation at large, and for Europe, than this contrast between the illustrious Commander at the head of the Grand Alliance and the spiteful ingrate of the bedchamber? Marlborough’s military eye recognized this as an occasion, which might never return, for “venturing all” as on a day of battle. He therefore, without the ceremony of leave-taking, left London and drove down with Sarah to Windsor Lodge on January 14. But the Whigs failed him; and so, from the best of motives, did Godolphin. The Junto, so pertinacious and united in forcing their way into office, were divided and irresolute upon the method of holding their positions. Godolphin laboured for a compromise behind the scenes. Neither he nor Somers attended the meeting of Ministers which Marlborough had arranged. Somers preferred to remonstrate with the Queen himself. Sunderland alone was vehement for action. These divergencies paralysed the Ministers. When the Cabinet met next day Marlborough’s place was empty. We have seen what had happened two years before when he and Godolphin had absented themselves in order to force Harley’s resignation; but now events ran differently. No Minister interrupted the business to draw attention to the General’s absence. They looked at each other and at the Queen, and said no word. The business proceeded mechanically, and the Council separated as if nothing unusual had happened. By this neglect to take united action, as much as by their foolish prosecution of Sacheverell, not only the Whigs but Godolphin settled their own speedy downfall.

Alone at Windsor Lodge with Sarah, Marlborough penned his ultimatum to the Queen. His first resolve and his best was to end the letter with the words, “I hope that your Majesty will either dismiss Mrs Masham or myself.” He sent this draft to Godolphin with injunctions to show it to the Whigs, rally them to it, and present it to the Queen. All the Ministers except Sunderland seem to have lost their nerve. Godolphin was obsessed with the feeling that his sole duty to his friend and to the nation was to patch up the quarrel. He therefore damped and divided the meetings of Ministers, which were held at Devonshire House. He absented himself and persuaded others not to attend. Meanwhile, as he did not himself dare broach the matter, he implored Somers to expostulate with the Queen. Somers has left a full account of what he said, or wished to have said, to the Queen. His eloquence loses nothing in the record. “And may I,” said he, “take the liberty to observe that the Duke of Marlborough is not to be considered merely as a private subject, because all the eyes of Europe are fixed upon him, and business is transacted with him under the notion of one who is honoured with your Majesty’s entire trust and favour; and as men depend on all which he does? The army also unanimously obeys him, because the soldiers look up to him for advancement.”^[261] Anne listened coldly. She made a few perfunctory remarks about her regard for Marlborough and his great services, but for the rest she maintained an adverse reserve.

An agitated correspondence now ensued. Godolphin’s letters betray his distress. “I am in so great a hurry,” he wrote to Marlborough (January 16), “and my thoughts so much distracted with the confusion I see coming upon everything, and everybody equally, that I have neither had time to write nor a mind enough composed to write with any sort of coherence.”^[262] It is only rarely we find Sarah’s letters preserved. In this episode her correspondence with Maynwaring, her secretary, shows her clear-cut view.

Sarah to Maynwaring

She sought to enlist the Whigs wholeheartedly in her husband’s support by holding out the hope that he would range himself definitely with their party.

Meanwhile the news that Marlborough had left town caused a stir in Parliament. Sunderland and some of Marlborough’s partisans began to talk of an address to the Crown praying for the dismissal of Mrs Masham by name. Marlborough never lent himself to this; he was ready to put the issue to Anne personally and, if possible, in the name of his colleagues, but he certainly never contemplated or countenanced the harsh measure of a Parliamentary demand. Even Sarah, usually so downright, drew the line at this. Nevertheless it was the only movement of any effect which was contemplated. If it had been encouraged by the force of a united Cabinet it might have been successful. The reactions in Parliament were impossible to forecast. The point, though vital to a Commander-in-Chief, was a narrow one, and acquired its sharpness from personal stresses only vaguely known to Parliament. However, the mere rumour that such rough action was being discussed filled the Queen with lively alarm, and we may be sure that Harley liked the prospect as little. If the brunt fell upon Abigail, if Abigail were driven from the Queen’s ear, the whole political deployment now prospering so well would be ruptured. Abigail was the vital link. It was not thought wise to expose her to what might at this stage be a shattering blow. From the moment that Queen Anne heard these ugly tales her temper altered. She sent again for Somers. “I do assure you that I feel for his Grace as much kindness as ever; yet I am much surprised at the great offence which is taken at my recommendation, and when Lord Marlborough comes to town, I will endeavour to convince him that my friendship for him is as entire as he can desire.”^[265]

All his colleagues now begged Marlborough to come back to London. This he steadily refused to do. He was disconcerted by the evident lack of support which the Whigs would give him. At the same time he would not, for the reason Sarah mentioned, join himself definitely to their party. He, however, yielded to the adverse currents and ebbing tide so far as to excise from his letter the decisive sentence which said, in effect, “Either dismiss Masham or me.” The letter now went forward to the Queen in a modified form.

Marlborough to the Queen

On January 20, before this reached her, Anne summoned Godolphin and declared, “After deep consideration of Lord Somers’s suggestion I am resolved not to insist on the appointment of Colonel Hill to the regiment. Inform the Duke of Marlborough that I will tell him myself if I see him soon, as I hope I shall.” Godolphin replied, “I wish that your Majesty had communicated this to the Duke of Marlborough at an earlier period, as he would then doubtless have been satisfied; but as I am afraid that at present it will not have such good effect, I must request your Majesty to write to him yourself.” The Queen only said, “I will tell it to him myself when I see him.”^[267]

Marlborough’s letter now arrived. Its severe and challenging tone, joined to his prolonged absence from the Court, made an impression upon the Queen. She and those behind her saw that, merely by remaining in the Ranger’s Lodge for a few days longer, he could create a Parliamentary situation out of which might emerge a direct public attack on Masham. The Queen, therefore, sent again for Godolphin. She showed him the letter. He said, “It is a very good letter.” “Do you think,” said the Queen, “the conclusion of it is good?” “It shows,” said the Treasurer, “that he is very much mortified, and I hope your Majesty intends to answer it.” The Queen said, “Yes, but should I not wait for an answer to the message which I sent by you?” “With humble submission,” replied Godolphin, “I think not.” After a pause the Queen closed the conversation by saying, “I will write to the Duke and send the letter to you to-night.” But she did not write. Marlborough, convinced that this was a fatal turning-point, and also that his foes behind the Queen were no longer sure of their ground, was still obdurate. It was no longer a question of a regiment for Hill. Masham must go.

But now, armed with the Queen’s surrender upon the immediate issue, Godolphin and almost all his colleagues insisted upon Marlborough’s return. Plainly he had gained a victory, and certainly they could argue that his position with the Army was entirely safeguarded. It would be long, they supposed, before such an attempt to undermine his authority as Captain-General would be renewed. Marlborough and Sarah saw clearly that this was no longer the crux. Anne, once again forced to submit to Ministerial control, would be only the more resolved to break it. He might have carried the incidental point, but Harley’s opportunities of mischief were endless so long as Abigail had the Queen in her empoisoned hands.

We must not underrate an ordeal in which women are concerned, when one of the women is a Queen whom every one reveres, when one great party stands ready to exploit the situation, when two-fifths of either party would rally to the cry, “No bullying of the Queen. Is she not even able to nominate a colonel to one of her regiments? Is all jobbery to be reserved for the favourites? Besides, has she not already given way?” We can easily see across the centuries the undercurrents which terrified the Whigs and Godolphin, and led them all to caress and coerce Marlborough into acquiescence. Against his truest instincts and the plain facts he yielded to the intercession of his friends, and thus exposed himself and them to the inveteracy of their foes. Never did the chance return of taking Abigail by the scruff and Harley by the throat.

So all was settled to the general acceptance. Marlborough returned to London, and on Tuesday, the 23rd, was received by the Queen with more smiles and favour than he had known since Ramillies. The Whigs purred to one another in short-sighted relief. Godolphin felt that he had averted a catastrophe. Harley comfortably cast up the balance of gains and losses. Marlborough knew that he and his policy were doomed. He and all he stood for were henceforward only prey to time and occasion.

There now arose a general wish that the Duke should cross the seas for The Hague and to the Army. Some said it was a manœuvre of Harley’s to get him out of the way before the Sacheverell trial began. But there is solid proof that Parliament was deeply concerned both about the peace negotiations and the approaching campaign. The Dutch were known to be calling for him with insistence. Partly in the desire to enhance his authority, partly to free him from the political brawl which was now imminent, his best friends agreed with his worst foes that he should be gone. An address was carried to the Queen by the Whigs praying that Marlborough should be sent forthwith to supervise the peace negotiations. “We cannot fail,” declared the Commons, “to make use of this opportunity to express our sense of the great and unparalleled services of the Duke of Marlborough and to applaud your Majesty’s great wisdom in having honoured the same person with the great characters of general and plenipotentiary, who, in our humble opinion, is most capable of discharging two such important trusts.”^[268]

According to Hoffmann, these terms were used in order to uphold the prestige of Marlborough on the Continent after all the recent bickerings, the rumours of which had been greedily lapped up abroad. The Duke himself must indeed have been glad to quit the darkening scene in London. Instead of having to grind and squeeze his honoured royal mistress amid the deceits, intrigues, and brutalities of party warfare, he could become again Prince, General, Plenipotentiary, with the magnates of Europe waiting upon his action, and brave armies impatient for his presence. When before sailing he was asked who the plenipotentiaries would be, he replied gaily and grimly, “I think there are about a hundred thousand of us.” But his real battleground was in England. It was at Westminster and in Whitehall that the fate of the war now lay. The Queen had replied coldly to the Commons’ address. She had refused the laudatory draft which Godolphin had laid before her. She preferred terms which followed as closely as possible the rejected Tory amendment. “I am so sensible of the necessity of the Duke of Marlborough’s presence in Holland, at this critical juncture, that I have already given the necessary directions for his immediate departure; and I am very glad to find that you concur with me in a just sense of the Duke of Marlborough’s eminent services.”^[269]

The coast was now clear for Harley and Abigail, and the impeachment of Dr Sacheverell was about to begin.

Sacheverell’s trial began in February. A battle royal on party principles was now joined. At the root lay the question, was the Monarchy founded in divine right or upon a Parliamentary title? Both sides had to face complications. Sacheverell had preached the doctrine of non-resistance to royal authority “in the highest strain.”^[270] This led him into a tangle; for he and all the Tories who were not Jacobites or Non-Jurors had solemnly accepted the Revolution, and without it the Queen, from whom the Tories hoped so much, would not possess the Crown. Therefore he had to argue that ‘resistance’ had played no part in the driving out of one King and the setting up of another. James II had gone of his free will, and William III had come with no design of conquest. Had it been otherwise, he asserted, the Revolution would have been black and odious. Thus non-resistance, puffed so high in theory, appeared in practice to produce results with which the most ardent revolutionary might be content. But if this absurd hypothesis failed, as fail it must, then nothing stood between the Revolution and all Dr Sacheverell’s offensive censures. The preacher had used this subterfuge to indict the Revolution without apparently repudiating it.

The Whig managers of the impeachment for their part were bound to challenge the Tory doctrine of non-resistance in the most strenuous fashion. They declared that resistance ratified by Parliament had brought Henry IV, Henry VII, William III, and Queen Anne herself to the Throne. But then they must remember that their leaders were the Queen’s Ministers, and that neither Queen Anne nor any other sovereign could relish open-mouthed championship of the right of subjects to rebel. They were the more anxious to extol the strength of the Queen’s Parliamentary title; and as the case proceeded they were drawn into a series of admissions about the birth of the Prince of Wales which struck at the whole popular foundation of the Whig case. They boldly declared that but for the Act of Parliament, not the Queen, but her brother would reign. In right of blood his claim, they affirmed, was just. Where, then, was the famous warming-pan, still worn on political fête-days in farthing miniature, and where all the laboured significance of the word praetensus? The warming-pan was brazenly discarded as a lie that had served its purpose. Polite society had for some time ceased to believe it; but for the Whigs to proclaim their own work of falsehood to the nation was a grave imprudence. The Tories also were distressed. They had salved their consciences in acting with the Whigs in the Revolution with doubts and aspersions on the legitimacy of the Pretender. These serviceable fictions alone reconciled for both parties the hereditary and Parliamentary rights of Queen Anne. Now they were swept away, and by the very party which had triumphed through exploiting them! The effect in the constituencies was deeply harmful to Whig interests. They could be taunted as self-confessed liars. Moreover, the Succession settlement was weakened by the avowal that the rightful King was for ever to be excluded because of the misdeeds of his father.

Lastly, the effect upon Anne was adverse to the Whigs. Henceforward she accepted the fact that her brother was legitimate. All the more, therefore, did she rest herself upon the Church of England. All the more did she see in protecting that sacred structure alike from Popery and Dissent her sole spiritual claim to wear the Crown. All the more was she tempted to favour her brother’s right to succeed her, and thus make final amends to the shade of her father at the expense of her bugbear, the Elector of Hanover. In the autumn of 1710 she would ask that the expression in an address from the City of London “that her right was Divine” might be omitted “as she could by no means like it.”^[271] But at the same time she clung with even greater devotion to the Church as her comforter under the pricks of conscience, and to the Tories as her shield against republican principles. However, the Queen preserved strict neutrality in public. “I was with my aunt [the Queen],” wrote Abigail to Harley (February), “last night on purpose to speak to her about Dr S[achevere]ll and asked her if she did not let people know her mind in the matter. She said no she did not meddle one way or other, and that it was her friends’ advice not to meddle.”^[272]

Behind all the intriguing doctrinal issues, from which our ancestors derived so much refined mental occupation, lay the broad discontents of the people. The war pressed heavily upon the masses. The harvest of 1709 had been bad; the price of bread was almost doubled;^[273] the taxes on the countryside were heavy. The press-gang was hot for the fleets, and under veiled forms compulsion chiefly recruited the armies. The distresses of the poor had been aggravated by the arrival of twelve thousand refugees from the ravaged Palatinate, to whom much charity already needed at home was directed. Alien immigration, it was said, deprived the poor of their meagre relief. Hatred of the unhappy foreigners rose in the streets. The London populace was against the Government. All grievances were ruthlessly exploited and inflamed by the resources of a great party. The long-drawn-out impeachment of Sacheverell made him the focus of nation-wide opinion, and the symbol of all that was hostile to the Whig Administration. Events and mismanagement tended to prolong the proceedings. Instead of a hearing at the bar of the House of Lords, it was resolved to fit Westminster Hall for a ceremony of the utmost formality. This required weeks of work from carpenters. The planning of the ‘scaffolds’ was entrusted to Sir Christopher Wren. The Queen had a special box built for herself. She refused vigorously to allow a gallery to be constructed above it. “She would have no one over her head,” so the saying ran.^[274]

HENRY SACHEVERELL
By permission of the President and Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford

From the earliest stages of the trial Sacheverell’s popularity with the crowd became obvious. Admitted to bail, he made a daily progress to Westminster escorted by enthusiastic throngs. The poorer people pressed to touch his hands or garments. When the Queen’s sedan chair threaded its way through the multitude her subjects beset her with loyal shouts and cries of “We hope your Majesty is for the Doctor.” Inside the Hall Sacheverell’s unctuous eloquence drew tears of partisan piety from Tory ladies, while the Whig beauties soon found the legal arguments tedious. Rioting broke out in the streets. The pews of Dissenting chapels were made into bonfires. Bishop Burnet saw one man cleave another’s head with a spade upon the learned issue. Threats to sack the palaces of the Whig nobles were freely uttered.

“This uneasy trial of Sacheverell,” wrote Godolphin to Marlborough (March 5), “does not only take up all my time, but very much impairs my health, and how it will end I am not at all certain. But I certainly wish it had never begun.”^[275] And (March 17) “The Duke of Somerset labours hard against us.”^[276] “I believe,” wrote John to Sarah (March 13/24), “the behaviour of the Duke of Somerset, the Duke of Argyll, and Lord Rivers, are true signs of the Queen’s being of their mind, which must inevitably bring a great deal of trouble to her. I do, with all my heart, wish I had not recommended the Duke of Argyll, but that can’t now be helped; nothing is good but taking measures not to be in the power of ungrateful people.” And the next day: “I can’t think it possible that the duke of Somerset will give his vote or opinion for the clearing of Sacheverell; if he does, there is nothing he would not sacrifice to have power: his behaviour in this matter will be a true weathercock of the Queen.”^[277] On March 23 Dr Sacheverell was found guilty by sixty-nine to fifty-two, a majority of seventeen votes. A motion to incapacitate him from preferment in the Church for three years was lost by one. “So all this bustle and fatigue,” exclaimed Godolphin, “ends in no more but a suspension of three years from the pulpit, and burning his sermon at the Old Exchange.”^[278]

The Sacheverell trial was a Whig disaster of the first magnitude. Beyond all doubt it turned the scale. They had hoped by a careful restatement of party fundamentals to rally all moderates and waverers, particularly in the Lords. The division lists on the impeachment showed only too plainly their miscalculation. Sacheverell was now the hero of the day. A lucrative living was bestowed on him by a Tory admirer. His journeys through the country were a triumphal progress. He was welcomed by thousands of ardent Churchmen at every town, and often also greeted by mobs who hailed the mixture of religion and politics for which he stood by riotous demonstrations against the Government.

It was at this inauspicious moment that Sarah came into final collision with the Queen. Feeling that her personal relations had become impossible, she had in February induced her husband to ask the Queen, first, to allow her to remain as much as possible in the country, and, secondly, that at the conclusion of peace she might resign her offices in favour of her two daughters, Lady Rialton and Lady Sunderland. Sarah affirmed that Anne had promised her this reversion upon a former occasion. The Queen, who was bidding farewell to her General starting for the wars, readily agreed to the first, but upon the second contented herself with saying that she hoped the Duchess would not leave her service. When later on, however, Sarah pressed for more precise assurances and mentioned a promise, the Queen said first, “I do not remember that I was ever spoke to about it.” On being further pressed she ended the discussion by saying impatiently, “I desire that I may never be troubled any more on the subject.”

Sarah, when she had returned fuming to the country, commented at table freely upon public affairs, and was by no means careful what she said about the Queen. It was a definite part of the Harley-Abigail campaign against her to report to Anne anything likely to make ill-will, and it is certain that their tales lost nothing in the telling. At the Court Sarah was accused of uttering atrocious sentiments and calumnies against her mistress. Indignant, she demanded an audience to clear herself. The Queen did her best to avoid seeing her. She found three separate hours unsuitable, named a fourth, and cancelled the appointment on the grounds that she was going to Kensington. Sarah followed her there, and asked the page of the backstairs to tell the Queen she begged to be received. Then she sat down, according to her account, in the window, “like a Scotch lady with a petition, instead of a trusted and lifelong confidant.”^[279] After a long interval she was admitted.

All accounts of what followed are based upon Sarah’s narrative in her Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough, which she published in 1742.^[280] The Queen began by saying, “I was just about to write to you.” As Sarah tried to unfold her case Anne said, “Whatever you have to say, you may put it in writing.” She repeated this interruption four or five times. Sarah protested that she only wished to clear herself from false aspersions. The Queen turned away her face from her. Sarah declared that there were those about the Queen who had made her believe that she had said things of her which she was no more capable of saying than of killing her own children, and “that I seldom named her Majesty in company, and never without respect.” To this the Queen observed generally, “Without doubt there are many lies told.”

Sarah then pressed to know what exactly it was that she was alleged to have said. The Queen used the second formula which her advisers had no doubt suggested. Sarah in her letter asking for the audience had written, “What I have to say in my own vindication will have no consequence in obliging her Majesty to answer.” Fastening upon this, the Queen repeated again and again, “You desired no answer and shall have none.” To all protestations and entreaties she made this unchanging reply. At length she moved towards the door. On this, in Sarah’s words, “when she came to the door I fell down in great disorder. Streams of tears flowed down against my will and prevented me speaking for some time.” There may have been a moment when Anne relented, for she certainly stayed and listened further. But presently, recovering herself, she repeated again and again her parrot sentence, “You desired no answer, and you shall have none.” At last Sarah could endure it no longer. “I am confident your Majesty will suffer for such an instance of inhumanity.” “That will be to myself,” said the Queen. These were the last words ever interchanged between the two women. They never saw each other again.

“After I had come out from the Queen,” says Sarah, “I sat me down in the long gallery to wipe my eyes, before I came within sight of anybody.”^[281] She recovered her spirits before her temper: Gaultier reported that she “left the palace like a fury.”^[282]

Throughout the spring and summer an outpouring of addresses, organized by the Opposition, and expressing Tory sentiments and fervent loyalty, flowed to the Queen from all parts of England. Anne was delighted with these manifestations. She frequently received the deputations in person and made no secret of her sympathies. Even Lockhart, the leader of the Scottish Jacobites in the Commons, was welcomed by her. “Her Majesty,” he writes,

Shrewsbury had hitherto been a frequent visitor to the buildings at Blenheim. He lived but a few miles away at Heythrop. Lately his visits had ceased; and Sarah could only guess whether this was due to general politics or to her incautious disparagements of the Italian Duchess. While the Sacheverell trial hung in the balance, and when popular opinion ran strongly against the Government, it had been a matter of widespread curiosity which way the Duke of Shrewsbury would vote. He voted for acquittal. No one could reproach him for this. He was a free man. His vote on the merits was right and in harmony with the public mood, but the fact that one of King William’s most renowned Ministers walked through the lobby of the House of Lords against Sacheverell’s impeachment showed many people that the impeachment was as wrong as every one now saw it had been impolitic.

What set London agog was not Shrewsbury’s vote against the Government, but its sequel. On the afternoon of April 14 Anne sent for the Marquis of Kent and deprived him of his office of Lord Chamberlain. He could be consoled with a dukedom. The next morning Shrewsbury, within seven weeks of his hostile vote on the key issue of Sacheverell, was appointed in his stead. In this period the Lord Chamberlain, with his constant access to the Sovereign and his immense social and ceremonial power in the Court, was an officer of State almost as high as the Lord Chancellor. That such an office should be in hands independent of the Ministry and of the harassed Treasurer and First Minister was a political change of the first order. The Queen, sustained by her secret advisers, did not even mention the matter to Godolphin beforehand. She wrote to him (April 13) of her desire “to allay the heat and ferment that is in this poor nation. Since you went to Newmarket,” she continued, “I have received several assurances from the Duke of Shrewsbury of his readiness to serve me upon all occasions, . . . which offer I was very willing to accept of, having a very good opinion of him, and believing he may be of great use in these troublesome times. . . . I hope that this change will meet with your approbation, which I wish I may have in all my actions.”^[284]

The Treasurer on this wrote to the Queen in the most vehement terms:

He concluded with “two humble requests”:

But how could Godolphin resign? Was not Shrewsbury exactly the element with which he and Marlborough had wished to strengthen the Government? Was he not a national statesman who would keep the Queen high above the “merciless men” of both parties? Had not Marlborough himself half a year earlier wished for such a development? The doctrine that the Sovereign acts only on advice of Ministers responsible to Parliament was in its infancy. How could Godolphin boggle at a lapse in procedure, however unpleasant, however menacing? The first conclusion of the Junto, particularly of Sunderland, was that Shrewsbury’s appointment was a stroke by Marlborough and Godolphin to reconstruct the Ministry at their expense. This opinion seems to have been widely held outside ministerial circles.^[286] The Junto were therefore suspicious and dumb.

When Godolphin reached London on the 16th it was the Queen who was the first with reproaches. “He had shown,” she remarked, “more uneasiness in the new appointment than any of his colleagues.” When the Queen assured him that she intended no further changes Godolphin’s rejoinder was laconic: “The reports of the town run high on that subject.” His dismissal from the royal presence was cold and formal. When he met Somers and Sunderland he found them alive with distrust. His agitated manner and downcast mood convinced them that his fortunes were not divorced from theirs. There remained an even greater fear—the dissolution of Parliament. This now became the dominant factor. After Sacheverell the Whigs did not dare to face the country. They had forced themselves upon the Queen in the name of Parliament and the electors. They were now unsure of the electors; and they knew the Queen could soon get rid of the Parliament, already in its second year. There was nothing for it but to make the best of Shrewsbury and hope to conciliate him. “I have seen Lord Somers and Lord Sunderland to-day,” wrote Godolphin to Sarah.^[287] “Both appear to me to be mortified as much as myself, but thinking it reasonable enough to dissemble.”

Moreover, Shrewsbury was profuse in his expressions of friendship for the Lord Treasurer and of admiration for the General in the field. He wrote in the most ceremonious style to Marlborough. In a soothing interview he half persuaded Godolphin that he meant to work with him. Godolphin, therefore, submitted to what was none the less a royal affront to his office and status and a searing mark of his loss of credit with the Queen. “I have seen the Duke of Shrewsbury,” he wrote (April 17). “I find most people are of opinion that he will like very well to live easily with us, and I am not unapt to think so too. But I think ’tis very plain that he comes in by Mr Harley.”^[288] And on April 20: “The Lord Chamberlain was extremely full of professions to you, to me, and to Lady Marlborough; and that by whatever door he came in, it was always with an intention and a desire to live well with us three. I answered with compliments from you and me. . . . His Grace protested most solemnly to me that he never had spoken one word to Abigail in his life.”^[289]

Marlborough, banging away at Douai with the daily chance of a decisive battle upon his hands, had no doubts about what the new appointment meant. Shrewsbury had been brought into the Government not as his man, but Harley’s. He foresaw from the instant the truth, which was the worst. “I am very much surprised,” he wrote to Godolphin (May 5), “at the courage of the Duke of Shrewsbury to come so freely into the storm: I think you and I may see very plainly by neither the Queen’s nor his ever taking notice of it to us, that they have another scheme than what would be approved of by us.”^[290] And to Sarah: “If I know anything of the temper of the Queen, she would not have made this step, but that they are ready to go into all the extravagances imaginable. The chiefest care now should be, that the Parliament be preserved; for if that cannot be obtained, which I very much doubt, nothing will be worth the managing. Of all things, the Whigs must be sure to be of one mind, and then all things, sooner or later, must come right.”^[291]

Shrewsbury lavished reassurances upon Marlborough. After all, they had much in common in the past. Both at the peril of their lives had been in correspondence with King William. Each had played an historic part in driving out Popery and King James. Both had in remorse or reinsurance kept alive under the shadow of treason their correspondence with the exiles at Saint-Germain. Both had faced a mortal danger at the time of the Fenwick trial. Marlborough had borne the strain imperturbably. Shrewsbury had crumpled beneath it. In his nervous depression he had abandoned public office. Marlborough had marched on through dark years to world glory. The pair had everything in common, except that they were to sit in the same Cabinet in opposite interests. But even this glaring fact, which Marlborough discerned so plainly, was veiled by ceremony and soothing protestation. At no moment was any issue presented upon which Marlborough could make a stand either to the Queen or to the new Lord Chamberlain. All had to be passed off with bows and compliments.

Once again the great armies assembled, and now more numerous than ever. Although the plans of the Allies contemplated converging inroads upon France from the Rhine, from Dauphiné, and upon the coast, all gravitated irresistibly to the main theatre. Apart from the separate, self-contained war in Spain, all the subsidiary operations languished. Marlborough’s diminished authority was incapable of infusing vigour into them. The Elector of Hanover threw up the command of the Imperial forces on the Rhine on the ground that they were relegated to a minor rôle. Even with a superiority of three to one he had only gaped at his opportunities in 1709. Victor Amadeus of Savoy felt that this was a season for politics rather than for war; and M. de Seissan, a French refugee of some mark, who had undertaken to raise the Cevennes, never found himself provided with the means to undertake this task.

All lay in the north and among the fortresses. Here Marlborough and Eugene would war with Villars supported by four other marshals; and every scrap of force that could be gathered by the war-wearied combatants was hurried to their respective camps. The confederate army marshalled 155 battalions and 262 squadrons, with 102 cannon, 20 howitzers, and 40 pontoons.^[292] France, rightly judging the impotency of the minor theatres, claimed to have available for Villars’s command no fewer than 204 battalions, 308 squadrons, and a full proportion of artillery and pontoons. Villars’s own statements of his strength vary. When making head against Marlborough and Eugene he boasted of a great superiority: in his memoirs he declares himself the weaker by 40,000. There is no doubt that the allied armies were far better equipped and supplied and thus stronger in war-power than their opponents, and all the movements of both sides were based upon this fact.

European and English public opinion expected that the two great commanders, superior in skill and in the numbers at their command, would soon bring the war to an end; but the task was not so easy. The dangers and cost of assaulting bravely held entrenchments were rated at a new high level after Malplaquet. The campaign still lay in the second and third lines of the French fortress zone, with all the obstinacies and time-losses that must be encountered there. The problem of feeding and foraging their enormous armies in ruined, famine-stricken regions confronted these lords of thirty or forty thousand cavalry with rigorous limitations. Eighteenth-century warfare had reached its maximum and its culmination as a result of squandered opportunities both of victory and of peace, and of a will-power on both sides which was alike unreasoning and indomitable. Meanwhile at Gertruydenberg the diplomatists and plenipotentiaries, surrounded by a host of agents and busybodies, official and unofficial, manœuvred sedately around the clauses of the peace treaty, incapable as were the armies of reaching a decision.^[293]

Two alternatives offered themselves to the Allies for the final penetration of the French fortress zone (see map, p. 239). The first, which no doubt Marlborough would have favoured because of the use he could make of British amphibious power, was near the coast, down the Lys by Saint-Venant and Aire, aiming at the creation of a new reinforcing base at Abbeville. This movement would turn the left and cut in behind the principal fortresses of the French barrier. It would also avoid the fortified line which Villars was preparing from La Bassée to Douai. A right-handed operation of this kind, however, though very agreeable to English interests and to the true strategy of a combination possessing the command of the sea, exposed the whole of Brabant to a northward thrust by strong French forces. The other choice was to punch at the French centre up the Scarpe to Douai and towards Arras, with further inclination towards Cambrai. Advance by this route was the most direct invasion of France. It covered Brabant and the Spanish Netherlands from French counter-strokes, and it threatened simultaneously five or six fortresses essential to the French defence, any of which might be attacked, all of which must be heavily garrisoned. Both routes led into unravaged regions where the advancing armies could feed themselves for many weeks. Both were sustained by good waterways. Marlborough controlled the Lys up to Armentières, and the Scheldt to beyond Tournai. By either of these rivers he could draw through Ghent the whole resources of the confederacy, and carry forward supplies, siege-trains, and munitions with ease and sureness. Upon the whole, the central punch, if successful, would lead into better ground for the operation of all arms, and especially the cavalry, then so dominant a factor. Thus the strategic choice was evenly balanced; but the political needs of the Dutch to have the main allied army between their regained territory and the enemy was decisive. There is no evidence that Marlborough at this time pressed seriously for the coastal movement. The councils of war were guided by him and Eugene towards the French centre. This meant the siege of Douai, followed if successful by that of Arras. There was complete agreement upon this.

The French placed four armies in the field—in Roussillon under Noailles, in Dauphiné under Berwick, on the Rhine under Harcourt, and the great mass under Villars, when he was fit enough, in the Netherlands. Owing to the stringency of food, forage, money, and equipment, these armies were to stand everywhere on the defensive. In the main theatre the winter was spent in strengthening the fortresses and collecting supplies. In March Berwick was offered the command till Villars had recovered sufficiently. Berwick demanded authority to assemble and forestall the impending attack. As this was contrary to Louis XIV’s general conception of a defensive campaign, he was not encouraged, and proceeded, as originally proposed, to his command in Dauphiné. Marshal d’Artagnan, who had succeeded to the title of Duc de Montesquiou by which he was in future to be known, was therefore placed in charge of the preparatory phase. He reinforced La Bassée and Ypres, with some difficulty persuaded Louis to let him use men and money to strengthen the lines about La Bassée, and clamoured for everything needed for war. Montesquiou as yet could only feed 40 battalions and 40 squadrons upon this front, and that for a short time.

THE CHOICE IN 1710

Marlborough, arriving at The Hague, decided to take the field at the end of March. He ordered Albemarle, who had been in command of the British troops in Flanders during the winter, to seize Mortagne and Saint-Amand, on the Scheldt, so as to open the water communications for a siege of Douai. Albemarle captured Mortagne on April 14. It was retaken the next day by Luxembourg, and finally mastered by the Allies on April 18. Saint-Amand, surrounded by inundations, was not yet found assailable. This preliminary thrust did not relieve the uncertainties of the French High Command. It might equally well be a feint down the Scheldt to cover an eventual movement by the Lys. However, the confederate army began to assemble around Tournai, and in the third week of April Marlborough and Eugene arrived together from The Hague at that fortress. In spite of the late spring and the consequent shortage of forage, they had decided to begin operations at once without waiting for all their troops to arrive or for the grass to grow.

To besiege Douai it was necessary first of all to pierce the French defensive lines. Only half the allied army had yet assembled; sixty thousand men were still to come, but it was known that the French would be largely immobile for some weeks, and a great operation to pierce their lines was planned, albeit with incomplete forces.

The map opposite shows the situation in the middle of April.

THE SITUATION IN APRIL 1710

“I hope to date my next on the other side of the lines,”^[294] wrote Marlborough on the 20th, when the Allies advanced. The Duke of Würtemberg and Count Feltz, with 15 battalions and 50 squadrons, were sent ahead to the Deule. The army followed in four columns. The next day Würtemberg, accompanied by Cadogan, entered the French lines at Pont-à-Vendin. The defenders retired without fighting. Feltz failed at Pont-Auby, but Eugene, coming up in heavy force, crossed at Courrières and Saut, and the main army followed across these captured bridges and pressed on to the south of Lens, where it halted, before the Vimy Ridge after a thirty-mile march. Montesquiou, who was evidently not expecting so early an attack, and could not in any case command the means to resist it, was caught foraging, and retreated across the Scarpe at Vitry, breaking his bridges behind him. On the 22nd the advance continued. Montesquiou, now joined by Luxembourg, withdrew precipitately, his front ruptured and his forces overweighted. On this day the Allies followed him across the Scarpe at Vitry, and camped on the south bank. Eugene remained north of the Scarpe to invest Douai from that side. Thus in three days Marlborough had advanced forty miles, and had crossed the Deule and the Scarpe without fighting. Douai was already almost isolated. Montesquiou could not attempt to stand along the Sensée. All the water from this river had been diverted to fill the inundations around Douai, and the river-bed was passable almost everywhere. He therefore fell right back to Cambrai. Here the shortage of supplies and the loss of all his forward magazines compelled him to disperse the greater part of his army, and Marlborough could begin the siege of Douai in most favourable circumstances.

THE ADVANCE: APRIL 19-22, 1710

This masterly movement of extraordinary rapidity was made possible only by dry forage brought by water. It succeeded because it was launched before the enemy could feed on the ground enough troops to man their extensive lines. All these fortifications, upon which so much labour had been spent, proved perfectly useless. They were simply walked over, and a very great tract of country, which might well have been disputed for the whole campaign, passed at a stroke into Marlborough’s possession. We are often told of the leisurely and ceremonious methods of eighteenth-century war. Here are movements of large armies as swift and sudden as any in military annals.

John to Sarah

Marlborough to Godolphin

Douai was a fortress of the first order, well prepared and supplied for a siege. The Deule and the Scarpe were joined by a canal in the town, which was therefore an important key to the waterways. It was protected by a number of strong outlying posts, and by Fort Scarpe, a large detached work which guarded the north-western approaches. Water played a great part in its defences, and the inundations severely limited the sectors open to the attackers. General Albergotti commanded the fortress with a garrison of over eight thousand men, comprising 17 battalions in Douai and 3 in Fort Scarpe.

The lines of circumvallation were completed on April 28. Forty battalions and as many squadrons under the command of the Princes of Anhalt and Orange conducted the siege, which Marlborough and Eugene covered. It was generally hoped that the town would be reduced before the grass grew and Villars could assemble an army strong enough to attempt relief; but the siege-train of two hundred guns, including 80 heavy pieces, did not reach the camp till May 9. The fact that the French had control of the sluices made water communications difficult. They were also able, by galleys from Condé operating down the Scheldt, to threaten water convoys moving south from Tournai. Marlborough therefore collected large quantities of wagon transport, and also developed the water communications up the Deule from Lille. The heavy batteries began to play on May 11.

THE SIEGE OF DOUAI

Louis XIV hoped that by this time Montesquiou would be strong enough to impede the task of the besiegers. He was answered that the Allies, even after undertaking a siege, were still superior, and that the French army could not yet take the offensive. Villars arrived at Péronne on May 14, and took command. His army could not be fully assembled till the end of the month. Although strategically the great King was upon the defensive, the idea of a battle to relieve Douai, if a good chance offered, was cherished. Berwick, recalled from Dauphiné, joined the army for the same purpose as Boufflers before Malplaquet. Commanders-in-chief fought so hard in the battles of those days that it was indispensable to have a recognized understudy fully versed in the part. The gallant Villars was still suffering from his wound. His knee discharged, and from time to time threatened an abscess. He had had a steel “machine” made which held the joint rigid on horseback. He could not ride for more than two hours without fatigue and pain. But he was none the less overflowing with vitality and what in any man less brave and skilful would be called braggadocio. His army began to draw together around Cambrai. Far from minimizing his forces to safeguard his reputation, he declared that he was at the head of 160,000 men. Actually he had a little over 100,000.

Innumerable sieges took place in these long wars, and most of them were merely matters of routine. But the siege of a fortress as strongly garrisoned as Douai, with the two main armies in close contact around it, created a situation in which on any day one of the decisive battles of the world might explode. The fact that no great battle was fought does not mean that an intense trial of strength and skill was not proceeding between these armies, upon whose interplay all European eyes were fixed. Marshal Villars rejected the idea of a move against the allied left by crossing the Scheldt about Valenciennes. This would enable practically the whole of the besiegers to join the covering armies, while still leaving Douai isolated. He could not hazard forcing the Scheldt in the face of such opposition. He rejected also a move against the allied centre by crossing the streams of the Sensée and the Moulinet under virtually the same conditions. He resolved, therefore, to move round the allied right between the Scarpe and Lens, while leaving a force at Bouchain which, if Marlborough withdrew his besiegers from that side of Douai, could march into the place with men and supplies, and break the siege. Thus he hoped to pin the besiegers to their task at no great expense in numbers, and to bring a superior field army to bear upon Marlborough and Eugene in the region of their communications.

VILLARS’S CHOICE OF ACTION (MAY 1710)

According to Villars, Berwick and Montesquiou deprecated a battle, and Villars admits in his memoirs that he did not mean to fight one. He thought, however, that it would do his army good to march up to close contact with the enemy, and that if they were found well posted he could easily retire. He represented his manœuvre from the outset to his colleagues as a reconnaissance with the whole army. Announcing by word and manœuvre that he intended to attack from Bouchain, he concentrated forward in that direction, brought in all the troops from Arras, and advanced north-westward full of menace. The Ally cavalry patrols detected, as Villars desired, the eastward march of the Arras detachment. Marlborough and Eugene personally reconnoitred all the possible battlefields between Douai and the front Valenciennes-Arleux, and the confederate army was deployed in that direction. Only 30 battalions were left at the siege and 12 squadrons at Pont-à-Rache. The whole of the cavalry, which had been feeding its horses from the Deule barges south of Lille, were also brought across the Scarpe by Vitry.

As this confrontation developed day by day both sides received strong reinforcements: Villars from the Rhine and Dauphiné; Marlborough of the Hessians on the spot, of the Palatines coming into Brabant, and of several cavalry regiments which Eugene had summoned from the Rhine. By May 22 the armies faced each other, Marlborough and Eugene being astride of the Scarpe. These two Commanders, acting as ever in the most perfect harmony, of course realized that Villars might only be making a feint, and one fine night would move suddenly back to the west. They therefore built no fewer than twenty bridges across the Scarpe between Vitry and the lines of circumvallation, so that their whole army, moving on interior lines, could swing round to the new quarter of the compass without the slightest impediment.

On May 25 Villars made this move. Under the cloak of darkness he crossed the Scarpe by eight bridges just east of Arras, and debouched into the plain of Lens. On May 27 the three French marshals, Villars, Berwick, and Montesquiou, reconnoitred the allied right wing and, not liking the look of it, continued their left-handed movement towards Lens. Simultaneously Marlborough and Eugene extended their right, drew in the bulk of the siege troops, and formed a front facing west, leaving only the Dutch under Tilly south of the Scarpe. On May 30 Villars advanced directly to within barely two miles of the confederate line, which was now covered by a chain of redoubts. Simultaneously Albergotti began a series of vigorous sorties from Douai. Marlborough none the less brought up Tilly and the Dutch troops, and battle from all appearances seemed imminent. Both the allied Commanders feared this was not true. But Marlborough’s letters still convey a sharp impression of this crisis of war.

MAY 27-30, 1710

“This minute they bring me word,” he wrote to Godolphin (May 22),

And (May 26):

Marlborough to Townshend

And (June 2):

All day the great masses watched each other within cannon, and at some points within musket, shot. The French marshals, including Villars, were agreed that the Allies were too strong to be attacked, and in the evening the French withdrew out of immediate striking distance. This was no doubt a wise decision. The question arises, however, why if the numbers of men were approximately equal, as Marlborough writes, he and Eugene did not themselves advance and attempt to force a battle. The answer must be that they did not intend at this time to run any supreme risks. They thought the war was certainly won, and that they need only continue to conduct it successfully to compel a peace. Time, they believed, was on their side. There was no warrant for staking the overwhelming advantages that had been gained. This reasoning was no doubt sound upon all the military facts. Perhaps Marlborough was not himself satisfied with it. His mind was oppressed by the hostility of the Queen and the growing power of his foes in England. He did not feel that confidence in victory which had inspired him at Blenheim and Ramillies. “I am not so fully pleased with those sanguine thoughts as formerly, that God would protect and bless us,” is a sentence which shows that the strains and stresses to which he had been so long subjected had worn him down. Had he felt the same need and urge for battle as in his campaign of 1705 it is by no means certain that Villars could have paraded and promenaded north of the Scarpe with impunity.

As part of the siege works, a dam had been built across the Scarpe at Biache to turn the waters for a time into the neighbouring marshes and thus prevent the flooding of the trenches. This dyke was defended by a fortified post. Villars was attracted by a plan to overpower this post, destroy the dam, and with the pent-up waters break an important bridge behind it, as a prelude to an attack on the allied sector between the Scarpe and the Sensée. Oddly enough, at the same time Marlborough began to feel uneasy about Biache and this particular dam. On the morning of June 2 he rode thither himself with Count Tilly. He reinforced the garrison with eighty men, and personally gave orders to the commanding officer to defend himself to the last extremity, assuring him that he would be supported in good time. The very same night about nine o’clock it happened that the enemy attacked. Whether from cowardice or treachery, the officer surrendered the post without any resistance, and with six officers and 150 men was taken prisoner. The dam was partly broken, and some waters released before the counter-attack drove out the intruders. The bridge, however, was not swept away by the scour. The incident is of interest because, unless it was pure coincidence, it not only illustrates Marlborough’s attention to detail, but is another example of the uncanny efficiency of his Secret Service.

The siege of Douai was strongly contested. Albergotti is said to have made no fewer than thirty-two sallies during its course. But the Prince of Anhalt’s attack in particular progressed steadily. The covered way was mastered by the middle of June, and on the 19th two important ravelins of the inner defences were stormed in a bloody assault. During the night of the 24th the besiegers were so much the masters that they were filling up the ‘capital ditch’ and building galleries across it. On the morning of the 25th Albergotti beat a parley, offering to surrender Douai but not Fort Scarpe. This was refused, but after some haggling he yielded, and on the 26th articles of capitulation were agreed.

On the morning of the 29th General Albergotti marched out with 4527 effective men. He led his troops past Marlborough and Eugene with mutual salutations. After having ridden some little distance he turned back and joined the two Princes, and all proceeded to dine together, while the survivors of the garrison made their way to Cambrai, escorted to the French lines by some squadrons of allied horse.

The losses of the siege had been severe. Albergotti had lost a third of his men. The Allies had paid eight thousand casualties for the acquisition of the fortress; but, what was even more costly, they had consumed the whole of May and June, and their campaign, which had started so early and so brilliantly, was now a month behind their plans. Marlborough’s depression was extreme. “I long,” he wrote to Godolphin (June 12),

Not only the resistance of the fortress but the ravages of typhus had smitten the besiegers. “My last quarters,” wrote Marlborough to Godolphin (June 16),

Harley’s tentacles now extended in all directions. He had brought into being a group of officers clustered around the Duke of Argyll who were actively disloyal to the Commander-in-Chief, under whom they were serving, and eagerly bidding for promotion in the Army from the régime that was rising into power.

CHARLES BOYLE, FOURTH EARL OF ORRERY
Charles Jervas
National Portrait Gallery

Orrery to Harley

And again from the camp before Béthune (July 31):

It is not often that personal motives are so nakedly exposed.

JULY 12, 1710

The flow of Ally reinforcements was continuous. Marlborough replaced the weakened regiments from his numerous garrisons, and in the first week of July he and Eugene stood at the head of 182 battalions and 284 squadrons, all in good strength, a total of 120,000 men. It was still their intention to strike at Arras, the keystone of the last line of the French fortress barrier. In the face of bad weather it took a fortnight from the fall of Douai to recondition the army, to replenish its food and forage, and to place it upon a new front north of the Scarpe between Douai and Lens. On the 12th the Allies moved forward past and over the Vimy Ridge, and lay along the Scarpe with Arras in full view. Villars, denuding the French garrisons not immediately threatened, had concentrated an even larger army in his new lines stretching along the Crinchon stream from Arras to the Somme. These fortifications, held in force by the main army of France, offered bluntly to the Allies another Malplaquet. Upon the acceptance or refusal of this challenge the decisive character of the campaign depended. Afterwards, as will be seen, Argyll attacked Marlborough for timidity in not having besieged Arras, as he had already attacked him for temerity in fighting at Malplaquet; but at the time the allied high command was united in declining to play so high a stake as the great frontal attack upon the whole French army in its entrenchments which was the needful preliminary. All were agreed that the French position was too strong to assault. General Kane, a competent officer not involved in the highest affairs or intrigues, says, “Villars’s army much outnumbered ours, and he retired behind the Sensée, so that there was no coming at him nor laying siege to Arras.” It was therefore resolved to lay siege to Béthune, a place of minor importance on the southern tributary of the Lys, which opened a waterway for a subsequent attack on Saint-Venant and Aire. This decision was in fact a reversion to the discarded alternative of a coastal advance, at a season too late to reap its rewards. Marlborough revolved deeply an attack upon Calais and Boulogne. Political deterrents were added to the military difficulties. He wrote to Godolphin (August 2):

Béthune, which was defended by fifteen battalions, was invested on July 15, and capitulated on August 29.^[308] The siege was bloody, and cost 3500 men, apart from sickness and desertion. Villars continually threatened a battle for its relief, but he, like the allied commanders, was not prepared to “venture.” Once again, after the capture of Béthune, Marlborough and Eugene pondered the question of a general assault upon the French entrenchments, and once again they decided not to try. “Our sickness continues,” wrote Marlborough to Sarah (August 28), “but I thank God I have my health, and will take the best care I can to keep it. My poor coachman, that has lived so long with me, died of this fever yesterday; and poor Daniel, my favourite cook, is not yet recovered; but they hope he will.”^[309] Although there had been no battle, the losses of the campaign had been heavy: eight thousand at Douai, 3500 at Béthune, and fourteen thousand sick or deserted. Nevertheless, while resigning the main objective, and in spite of “a very unlucky accident,”^[310] they felt strong enough to attack two fortresses at once.

SIEGES OF AIRE AND SAINT-VENANT

On September 6 Anhalt with forty battalions and as many squadrons besieged Aire, and Nassau-Friesland (the Prince of Orange) with twenty battalions and five squadrons Saint-Venant. Of the two towns Aire was incomparably the stronger, and held a garrison of fourteen battalions, double that which defended Saint-Venant. Marlborough stood midway between his sieges and Arras. Upon the whole, this phase offered Villars his best opportunity. With sixty battalions and forty-five squadrons withdrawn from the allied army for the sieges, and with all Brabant exposed except for its fortresses, the possibility was open to him of taking the offensive. He suggested this course to Louis XIV, but in a half-hearted manner. The King, who was watching the English Court even more closely than the fighting front, would not allow him to run such risks. Villars therefore contented himself with harassing the communications, and one sharp action occurred with Eugene’s foraging parties and their escorts, in which the French sustained a rebuff. Saint-Venant fell on September 30. Aire made a more obstinate and formidable resistance. The slaughter was heavy, and the weather terrible. “Our poor men,” wrote Marlborough, “are up to their knees in water.” It was not until November 9 that the capitulation was signed. The garrison had lost more than a third of its strength, and the Allies nearly seven thousand men, apart from sickness. Villars, whose wound required repeated attention, had handed over the command of his army to Harcourt after the fall of Béthune some six weeks earlier. It was now too late to attempt an advance on Abbeville and the creation of a new base there, and both armies dispersed into winter quarters.

Although this campaign, so costly in casualties and disease, was conducted impeccably by Marlborough, and the results achieved were substantial, it was nevertheless a disappointment. That Marlborough and Eugene with 120,000 men should not have been able to bring the enemy to battle or take Arras seems surprising in view of the achievements of their great years. Reasons other than military must be invoked in explanation. Marlborough, ageing rapidly, undermined at home, uncertain of the loyalty of some of his principal officers, could bring himself to do no more than play military chess with his accustomed skill, and wait for the enemy to make some fatal mistake. If he had run the supreme risk, if he had hurled his army upon the French entrenchments, or if, repeating his manœuvre of 1705 and carrying eight days’ supplies in his wagons, he had marched through the intervals between the French fortresses and forced a crisis, he might have ended the war at a stroke, or, on the other hand, have ruined all. No one can pronounce. The authority of the twin Captains cannot lightly be set aside by posterity. What they deemed imprudent must certainly have been perilous. What they declared to be impossible was probably beyond the reach of mortal man.

Hitherto the forces gathering against the domestic system and foreign policy of Marlborough and Godolphin had been numerous and powerful, but disunited. After the trial of Sacheverell they became sentient and focused. There emerged the same group of powerful nobles loosely attached to either party which had played its part in 1708 and was to do so again in 1714. But this time their weight was cast on the Tory side. The encouragement which the Queen gave to almost all elements hostile to her own leading Ministers offered prospects of favour and power to both honest antagonism and selfish aims. To control the government of Britain, which Marlborough’s sword had raised so high, was an attraction captivating the great nobles and magnates of the day. At the root lay Harley with the Tory Party, and now, somewhat incongruously, with the Church. The jealous or disaffected officers in the Army found their leader in the Duke of Argyll. In the Cabinet the Duke of Somerset was incited by the craft of Harley and the smiles of Anne to pursue his dream of heading a Government. He found support at this time from the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Privy Seal. He saw himself upon the high road to mastery; he did not hear the slighting comments which those whom he aspired to lead, and whose interests for a time he served, were accustomed to make upon him behind his back. Already, as has been described, Shrewsbury had begun in his cautious manner to work with Harley. All these men in the months following the Sacheverell fiasco ‘entered into measures’—to use their dignified expression—with one another. Harley, in close touch with St John, guided from the House of Commons; Argyll glared in the camp; Somerset flaunted himself at the Court; and Shrewsbury lent an aspect of prudence and disinterested moderation to the whole cabal. A novel term now came into British politics. The five Whig lords had been called the Junto. The new group was nicknamed the Juntilla. “There is a Juntilla in imitation of the Junta,” Count Maffei^[311] wrote to Victor Amadeus, “and the Duke of Somerset, who is called by the nickname of ‘the Sovereign,’ plays the figure of a chief, although the others, who are of his society, make him depend on their counsels, and only make use of him to inspire the Queen with what they think proper.”^[312]

Behind them gathered a train of minor figures, peers and Members, some in the Ministry, some in the Army, all in high expectation of office or promotion. Among these the Earl of Orrery, Earl Rivers, and Earl Poulett were the most prominent and bitter. Orrery and Rivers were general officers of the army. Rivers had made the campaign of 1702 under Marlborough, who promoted him lieutenant-general. Hoping to advance more rapidly, he procured Marlborough’s aid in obtaining the command of the ‘descent’ planned by Guiscard on the French coast in 1706. When this force was diverted to Spain he found himself confronted with the choice of serving under Galway or returning home. He preferred to return home after disparaging Galway to the best of his ability at the Court of Charles III. In April 1708 Marlborough nominated him to the Queen for promotion to general of horse, and also had him sworn a Privy Councillor. This ambitious man foresaw the downfall of the Whigs, and by the winter of 1709 was intimate with Harley and active in his interest. We have seen how serviceable this interest proved to him when the post of Constable of the Tower fell vacant. Thenceforward he became the unscrupulous and virulent enemy of the Commander-in-Chief under whom he served, and to whom his whole rise had been due. Macky says of Rivers:

to which Swift adds “an arrant knave in common dealings, and very prostitute.”^[314]

Earl Poulett, nicknamed “Swallow,” had played some part in the Union with Scotland in 1706, and was a Tory politician of minor consequence. Macky describes him as “a mean figure in his person, and not handsome.” He rarely spoke in Parliament, but was busy behind the scenes. He was one day to make a speech which got him into trouble.

Apart from Argyll and Orrery, who were actually serving in Flanders, these personages were not acting beyond their rights. Harley’s combination, however disreputable and clandestine in its methods, is not to be dismissed as mere intrigue. It represented powerful forces in the land, and stood for a definite and arguable policy both at home and abroad. Harley had never diverged from the principle on which he had accepted the Secretaryship of State before Blenheim, of a broad-based centre administration to serve the Queen and make her independent of the extremists of either faction. This had also been the conception of Marlborough and Godolphin, but they had been forced to abandon it, and had become the agents or prisoners of the Whig Junto. They had done this against their will and better judgment; but the fact remained that they had done it. Neither had the Queen altered her general position of wishing to reign above either party with the assistance of leading statesmen from both sides. Harley had received in the Sacheverell turmoil an unexpected and most powerful source of strength from the excited and now arrogant Church party and clergy. This did not harmonize with his general view, but it was none the less welcome and potent. Nor could even the Jacobites be disdained. They proffered their goodwill to a movement which promised to them the disintegration of the European coalition which had so long waged successful war against their true King—as they saw it—and against the chivalrous French monarch who had sheltered him, and who championed the Catholic faith.

But apart from self-interest and the wish to acquire control of the State the main bond between all these diverse elements was a common desire for peace. Harley’s policy was to stop the war. Shrewsbury was convinced not only that it should stop now, but that it might have been stopped in the spring of 1709. The Tory Party wanted peace, but peace with British profit. The Queen was the least convinced upon the peace. Her chief desire was to free herself from the Whigs, and now from the Marlboroughs, and to reign—to quote the phrase by which she was allured—“as Queen indeed.” But she had been too long in the war to think lightly of the abandonment of its aims. She was convinced that only by unquestionable victory could her throne be safe; and she saw no means of accomplishing this end but through Marlborough. Therefore, while the successive steps which Anne took to achieve her personal aims, or in response to the pressure of forces round her, wore the aspect of deliberate design, they were in fact only tentative, and were limited at every stage by the fear of a break-up of the Alliance or a financial collapse in the City of London.

In the winter of 1709 the leading members of the so-called Juntilla believed that a good peace was procurable at will. They continued to nurse this conviction in the spring of 1710; but although they remained eager for peace, they became, as the summer wore on and they approached nearer to direct responsibility, increasingly doubtful whether it could now be obtained on any terms which the nation would accept. They were not blind to the fact that as they weakened Marlborough, and as the shadow of his approaching fall spread across Europe, the goal they sought receded. They were in close enough contact with affairs to feel the stiffening of the French attitude. At length they realized that there was no chance of their being able to present a good peace to the nation before the election. To present a bad peace was to ruin their chances. Therefore, like the Queen, they reached the conclusion that the war must be continued for the present, and this in its turn imposed a certain restraint upon their action.

In this, rather than in any lack of power, lies the explanation of the gradualness with which the change of Government was effected. For, after all, it was upon the election that all political fortunes depended. All the news from the country was bad for the Whigs. There was keen political excitement and a great deal of discontent. The Tory Party was active and confident, and the Church vehement. The Whig leaders knew all this as soon as their opponents, and were completely unnerved thereby. With the estranged Queen on one side and a hostile electorate on the other they felt that they were doomed. They and their majorities in both Houses stood upon a trapdoor, and at his selected moment Harley could draw the bolt. This sour fact explains, though it does not excuse, their lack of loyalty to one another. Their only choice appeared to be either to resign together and at once or to be dismissed piecemeal. They drifted into the latter course largely because of their hope that the normal life of the Parliament on which alone they now depended might be preserved, and also that perhaps Marlborough, whom they had ridden so hard in the previous year, might produce some new victory which would once again retrieve all. In this unhappy plight they passed the summer.

With the appointment of Shrewsbury the Queen felt that she had gone far enough for the moment. She would not be pressed into action which would lead to Marlborough’s resignation. Neither would she free herself from the “bondage” of Sarah and the Whigs to submit to another thraldom of the Somersets and the Tories. She was well aware that the disgrace of Marlborough and his wife would not bring the country any nearer to the peace she was beginning apprehensively to contemplate. Harley had, therefore, to move with caution. Access to the Queen had been increasingly difficult since the rise of the Somersets at Court. A doleful letter from Abigail reveals this.

Abigail Masham to Robert Harley

If Shrewsbury, Somerset, and Harley could agree upon the next move, and gain the Queen’s support for acting, another Ministerial change would follow. Strenuous efforts were made throughout April and May to create this situation. Harley had his internal difficulties. The high Tory feeling aroused by the Sacheverell trial, unless carefully managed, might swamp his moderate schemes. His secret correspondence with Buys and the peace party in Holland had led to hostile comment in the House of Commons. There had been mutterings even of impeachment.^[316] Opinion among the Whigs was divided. Godolphin still hoped, though faintly, for an understanding between Shrewsbury and the Whigs. But how was this to be achieved? His own position became daily more embarrassed. He was reading one day to the Queen a reference in one of Townshend’s letters which mentioned rumours that the Treasury was to be put in commission. “She gave a sort of scornful smile,” wrote the Treasurer,

Marlborough to Heinsius

Sarah had retired to Windsor Lodge after her parting from the Queen in April. She was now disillusioned of the Whigs, and impatient at their weakness and vacillation. She despised the individual attempts they made to stand well with Somerset at the expense of Godolphin.^[319] She remained convinced that there was no comfort to be drawn from Shrewsbury. With sure instinct, she distrusted his affabilities, she recognized him throughout as an enemy. She was disgusted when the Whigs in their distress suggested even that she should seek a reconciliation with Abigail. Sunderland had toyed desperately with the idea of joining forces with Somerset. He had a three hours’ conversation with him, as between colleagues, and reported hopefully that Somerset had spoken with great coldness of Shrewsbury, and had declared that he had only met Harley once at Argyll’s house. Sarah was sure that her son-in-law was allowing himself to be deceived.

She now became the object of Whig solicitations to return to Court. We have need of “a good advocate with the Queen,” wrote Lady Cowper (May 14).^[320] Godolphin frequently advised her to come to town, and Maynwaring constantly warned her of the dangers of leaving the field open.^[321] But Sarah at this time followed Marlborough’s advice to keep clear of the Court and leave the Queen alone. She shared to the full his prescient pessimism. She took such pains to have her letters destroyed that history is indebted to Maynwaring for preserving the following sprightly epitome.

Sarah to Maynwaring

There was the root of the matter. They “fear an ill Parliament. . . . Their bottom is not very strong.” Was it, then, for these men of straw that she had toiled so long, to find that, having grabbed all at her expense, they could not even stand themselves, but must drag down Marlborough and Godolphin with them?

The Duke, from the impressions he could derive at the front, had still not entirely discarded hopes of Shrewsbury. He enjoined his wife not to be offended by the ignominious suggestions of the Whigs in their despair. He saw the whole scene with sombre vision; everything he wrote came true.

Rumour was now busy at Court and in the coffee-houses that Sunderland would be the next victim. Tory addresses were being framed against him in the City, in Surrey, in Shropshire. Tory partisans assailed him throughout the country. The talk was that the fall of Sunderland would be the prelude to the dismissal of the Parliament. Marlborough had heard of this in the camp from the high language of Argyll and his clique of officers.

John to Sarah

About a week later the following note reached Harley:

Somerset to Harley

Unknown as yet to Marlborough, Shrewsbury had taken his first important step. He had brought together Harley and Somerset, and he provided easy access for Harley to the Queen. At the head of the Juntilla a powerful triumvirate had come into being. A further attack could now be launched against the Whig holders of office. Sunderland was to be dismissed, and the hostile forces also felt themselves strong enough for another affront to Marlborough, which should produce a separate trial of strength.

After the campaign Marlborough had submitted a series of promotions to encourage the Army. He had, however, stopped on the roster only one short of the names of Mrs Masham’s brother, Colonel Hill, and of her husband, Colonel Masham. Harley and Somerset were not slow to point this out to the Queen. They saw, and so did she, an opportunity of renewing under more favourable conditions the rankling issue that had been fought out earlier in the year. The Queen invited Marlborough to propose both names, and meanwhile she delayed signing the whole list of promotions. Marlborough immediately complied in the case of Masham, but raised objections to Hill which were certainly justified on military grounds; for even in those days of favour such an appointment would create a scandal in the Army.

While Cardonnel was at the front Walpole acted as Secretary-at-War.^[325] The Queen sent for him. She remarked that if the promotion list were stopped only one short of Mrs Masham’s brother it would be thought by all the world to be done out of prejudice to him. She then told Walpole “to notify her Secretary of State for three more commissions of Brigadiers.”^[326] Walpole knew that Sarah had not been satisfied with his attitude about the Hill promotion in January. He was sincerely attached to the Whig interest, to Marlborough, and especially to Sarah, to whom he felt himself indebted for his advancement, and of whose reproaches he stood at this time in awe. He therefore expostulated boldly with the Queen, reminding her that she had already told him that, though she wished Colonel Hill to be Brigadier, she would not insist upon it if the Duke objected. With his quiet force, already noticeable, he used all the arguments about the mortification such a step would be to the Commander-in-Chief, and how it would lessen his credit and authority in the Army. “I shall be in a very unhappy circumstance,” he wrote to Marlborough, “if I venture to say that to the Queen which perhaps few servants have done, and at the same time shall be thought to act a trimming game.” There is no doubt that he went very far in his remonstrances, and also that the Queen was shaken thereby. She consented at length not to order the three extra commissions until Walpole had been able to write to Marlborough about them. Till then, however, she would sign none of the other commissions. At this point she blurted out that she had stopped them in order to force the Hill promotion. Walpole continued to protest, and the Queen had misgivings about the admission she had made. She no doubt saw how it might be represented that she was holding up the entire promotion of the Army in order to favour Abigail’s brother.

“She commanded me strictly,” wrote Walpole to Marlborough, “not to tell anybody, in particular not to let you know that she stopped the commissions on this account, but would have it thought, as it hitherto has been, that the delay was accidental.” Walpole ends his letter to Marlborough:

The busy circles at Court were soon astir with this new mischief. We may admire the cleverness of selecting a point which at the same time enlisted the Queen’s affection for Abigail, revived her vexation over the January dispute, and threatened Marlborough with a thrust which must, if it went home, humiliate him before his army. Moreover, this was the very point on which it had already been found impossible to marshal Whig resistance. It seemed to the Whig leaders no more, one way or the other, than a petty piece of patronage—of which there was plenty—and a chance of pleasing the Queen cheaply. They were concerned that Marlborough should take it so seriously. They did not see that it would rot the Army, and treated it entirely as a matter to be smoothed. Marlborough’s daughter, Lady Sunderland, was no doubt expressing the prevailing view in Whig circles when she wrote her mother in the last days of May:

And Godolphin to Marlborough (June 2):

Meanwhile Marlborough, in reply to Walpole, gave reasons which might seem unanswerable.

ROBERT WALPOLE
J. M. Rysbrack
By permission of the Marquis of Cholmondeley

Anne was conscious of the weight of these reasons which Walpole urged resolutely upon her. “The Queen was,” wrote Walpole to Marlborough, using ciphers for names,

Marlborough, painfully aware of his lack of support at home, was so far mollified by these expressions that he published the commission at once. Colonel Hill became a Brigadier. The Army did not, however, receive any immediate benefit from his military skill. He repaired at once to Spa to undergo a thorough cure before subjecting himself to the rigours of active service. As this treatment did not quite carry him on till the end of the campaign, he found it necessary in due course to write to Marlborough:

The Triumvirate at the head of the Juntilla found the Queen very ready to get rid of Sunderland, and relieved that they thought it could now be safely done. The question of his successor was more delicate. Harley, true to his plan of a Government of the Centre, wished to offer Sunderland’s Secretaryship of State to the mild Whig Newcastle. The Tories pressed hard for a wholehearted member of their own party. Anglesey and “Swallow” Poulett both heard their claims discussed in their presence at Harley’s house. Harley had need of all his tact. Anglesey was too extreme to suit his combination in the vacant office. Such a choice would alienate all middle opinion. He made Poulett, who really had no chance, flatter himself with the idea that he should make a high-minded and voluntary sacrifice of what he was in no case going to receive. It was difficult, he suggested, to bring in a man so close a friend of his as “Swallow.”^[333] If he must have a Tory Harley preferred a colourless figure.

Godolphin, still wearily confiding, in spite of Sarah’s scepticism, in Shrewsbury’s benevolence, saw no other way to save Sunderland than that Marlborough should appeal to the Lord Chamberlain. Marlborough’s remaining influence was begged in aid all through the summer not only by Godolphin but by the Whigs. He had no illusions: but out of loyalty he complied with his friend’s request. He wrote to Shrewsbury. The letter is not extant. It would in any case have been futile. Actually it arrived too late. Sarah’s disapproval of such a gesture was anticipated, and the letter was kept secret from her. “Lady Marlborough,” wrote Godolphin, “has been, and is still, so much dissatisfied with the Duke of Shrewsbury that I thought it would rather do hurt to acquaint her with your letter to him.” Shrewsbury contented himself with disclaiming all responsibility. He threw the blame on Abigail. * “She could make the Queen,” he remarked to Sarah, “stand on her head if she chose.”^[334] By June 1 Godolphin was certain of Sunderland’s coming dismissal, and that the question of a successor alone caused delay.

“I am told,” wrote Sarah to Maynwaring (June 1), “that the persecution against Lord Sunderland is renewed again, with more violence than ever. . . . I conclude the Duke of Shrewsbury, Lord Halifax, the Duke of Newcastle and Mr Harley are pretty near of one mind.”^[335] Sarah was entitled, according to her and also our ideas, to apply the word “violence” to the turning out of Ministers who still possessed effective majorities in both Houses. Her own “violence” was of a simpler character. About this the talebearers were again active.

Martha, Lady Mansell,^[336] to Harley

It cost Harley nothing to bring the Whigs into these discussions, and feed them with false hopes. Somers was clearly ready to preserve his own position by agreeing to sacrifice Sunderland. He none the less obtained from Godolphin another payment of a thousand pounds from the Secret Service fund the receipt for which is dated June 14—the day before Sunderland’s dismissal.^[338] Somers evidently thought himself safe whatever happened, and that a moderate Government would include leading Whigs. He became anxious that Marlborough should not by a resignation create a crisis which would render this impossible. He wrote to him (June 6) urging his concentration upon the campaign, as the sole chance was a victory in the field. “You have done wonders for us, and I hope you are resolved to complete them, and I am sure you will do all that is possible. It is very natural to say then, why is the Duke of Marlborough so imprudently interrupted when he has the cause of all Europe upon him?”^[339]

Somers might urge Marlborough to hazard another battle to save the political situation. But this was exactly what Marlborough would not do. He allowed nothing to disturb his duty to the Army. The military facts alone could render a battle possible. He was coming increasingly to regard his military fame as all that might soon be left him. * “I am with drawing my self,” he wrote to Godolphin (June 5), “as fast as the Service will permit, out of all that sort of intelligence with the foraine Courts, so that it may naturally fall into the hands of the two Secritarys.”^[340] Isolated and unsupported, Marlborough awaited the impending blow. That it might injure his authority with the Army to the utmost, Argyll spread through the camp that the Queen was weary of Marlborough’s services, “which would quickly appear by the removal of Lord Sunderland.” Sad, toiling, prescient, the Captain-General watched narrowly the operations of the great armies, never being drawn by one hair’s-breadth from his professional art.

John to Sarah

And (June 19):

To please Godolphin Marlborough wrote him one more letter (June 9/20) which the Treasurer could read to the Queen.