Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes
a time you take to ask a thing of that nature,’ said James. ‘I am just arrived and am all in disorder.’ He added that he did not have a secretary to hand, but the ever-helpful earl replied that he had already made out the warrant himself, and a simple signature would do the business. It was, though, too much for the harassed monarch.56 When Queen Mary died in 1694 her sister Princess Anne, James II’s younger daughter, seemed assured of the succession, and Sarah Marlborough saw how her popularity rocketed overnight. Suddenly ‘clouds of people’ came to pay their respects. This
sudden alteration … occasioned the half-witted Lord Carnarvon to say one night to the princess, as he stood close by her, in the hall, I hope your Highness will remember that I came to visit you, when none of this company did; which caused a great deal of mirth.57
The Stuarts created peers as they chose, and had three distinct peerages – of England, Ireland and Scotland – to pick from.58 James I ennobled a number of good-looking young men, and Charles II usually had a peerage to hand for his mistresses and their offspring. Although Nell Gwyn (‘pretty, witty Nell’ to the admiring Mr Pepys) was never ennobled, it was said that she held Charles Beauclerk, the elder of her two sons by the king, out of the window when the monarch visited her, lamenting that the infant had no peerage. ‘God save the Earl of Burford!’ shouted the happy father. James FitzJames, James II’s son by Marlborough’s sister Arabella, was created Duke of Berwick at the age of seventeen in 1687, and, already a major general in Emperor Leopold’s service, was given his own regiment of infantry and in February 1688 was made colonel of the Blues, replacing Aubrey de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who as lord lieutenant of his county had refused James’s order to appoint Roman Catholics to public offices, saying: ‘I will stand by Your Majesty against all enemies to the last drop of my blood. But this is a matter of conscience and I cannot comply.’59
Louis de Duras, marquis de Blanquefort in the French peerage, came to England in the retinue of James, Duke of York, and was given an English peerage as Baron Duras in 1693. He inherited his father-in-law’s earldom by special remainder, becoming Earl of Feversham. He was colonel of the King’s Troop of Life Guards, and commander-in-chief for the campaigns of 1685 and 1688. He was a nephew of the great Marshal Turenne, and fought under his command in the Dutch War. William gave many of his Dutch followers English or Irish peerages, leading Ailesbury to complain that: ‘Dutch Lords come in so thick, and the crown not being limited, it is a melancholy prospect for us English peers.’60 To avoid creating irritation amongst English peers, monarchs created Irish peerages to reward those for whom an English peerage might have been considered more than they merited. ‘In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,’ write Mark Bence-Jones and Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, ‘Irish peerages were frequently conferred on English, Welsh or Scots magnates who were not considered to have merited peerages of England or Great Britain; even though they may have had no family connection with Ireland at all.’61
The redoubtable John ‘Salamander’ Cutts, so called because he loved to be where the enemy’s fire was hottest, was created Baron Cutts of Gowran in the peerage of Ireland in 1690, and the Huguenot general Henri de Massue, marquis de Ruvigny, was made Viscount Galway in the Irish peerage in 1696. He had the misfortune to be badly beaten by Berwick at the battle of Almanza in 1707, and the mismatch between his name and his title has induced one writer to surmise that there were in fact two generals in command, the marquis de Ruvigny and his colleague Viscount Galway.62 Summoned to the bar of the English House of Lords to explain his defeat, Galway argued that his halting English and physical infirmities (he had lost a hand in one battle and been cut across the head in another) meant that he could not really explain himself, and the House allowed him to reply in writing.
Some men reached the House of Lords by sheer merit. John Somers was an Oxford-educated lawyer who was one of the counsel for the seven bishops tried before the King’s Bench in 1688 for petitioning James II against his Declaration of Indulgence, helped draft the Declaration of Rights, and rose through the ranks of the government’s law officers to become lord chancellor as Baron Somers in 1697. Charles Montagu was a Cambridge man who produced a little light poetry before establishing himself as the financial wizard of his age, initiating the national debt, setting up the Bank of England and overseeing a wholesale recoinage in 1695, though he had to raise window tax to pay for it. He was shoved upstairs into the Lords as Baron Halifax when the Tories came to power in 1699, and became an earl, and effectively prime minister, after the accession of George I.
Others rose without visible trace (it is good to note some continuity between this age and our own), often because there was interest to be repaid. Sarah Marlborough maintained that she had only personally asked Anne to create one peer, the result of a long personal obligation, but that she had failed in a subsequent attempt to get Lord Hervey promoted to an earldom. In January 1712 the queen was persuaded to create peers to overcome the Whigs in the Lords. The Tories enjoyed a comfortable majority in the Commons but were defeated in the Lords, and it seemed likely that the government would fall. But the lord treasurer, Robert Harley (whose audibly Welsh background had not prevented him from becoming Earl of Oxford and Mortimer in 1711), and the queen had agreed to create a dozen peers, amongst them the husband of the queen’s favourite (and Harley’s cousin) Abigail Masham, as well as Harley’s son-in-law and another of his cousins. One of the secretaries of state told the queen that although the creation was certainly legal, he ‘very much doubted the expediency, for I feared it would have a very ill effect in the House of Lords and no good one in the kingdom’.
Lord Wharton waspishly asked the new peers, when they took their seats, whether, like a jury, they voted by their foreman. Most had adopted grand territorial titles, apparently confusing the Italian-born Duchess of Shrewsbury. ‘Madam,’ she said to the pious Lady Oxford, ‘I and my Lord are so weary of talking politics. What are you and your Lord?’ Lady Oxford dourly replied that ‘she knew no Lord but the Lord Jehovah’. ‘O dear! Madam, who is that?’ enquired the duchess innocently. ‘I believe ’tis one of the new titles, for I never heard of him before.’63
We should not be surprised that the House of Lords grew steadily in size. In 1687 there were twenty-six lords spiritual (archbishops and bishops) and 154 lords temporal at Westminster. By 1714 this had risen to 171 lords temporal and sixteen representative Scots lords, elected by their peers. There was a substantial inflation at the upper end of the peerage, with the record number of forty-four dukedoms in 1726. Degrees in the peerage were a matter of very real concern. The Tory leader Henry St John, ennobled as Viscount Bolingbroke in 1712, regarded the appointment as a slap in the face, for he believed himself entitled to an earldom, like his ally Robert Harley. Earls usually had one or two subsidiary titles, the senior of which was borne as a courtesy title by their eldest son, and their daughters were styled ‘Lady’. Sidney Godolphin’s granddaughter, who became Duchess of Leeds, cheerfully signed a letter with all her family titles: ‘I am, dear sister, affectionately yours, M Leeds, Carmarthen, Danby, Latimer, Dumblin, Osborne.’64
The last words of Anne Hyde, James II’s first wife, were: ‘Duke, Duke, death is terrible, death is very terrible.’ An outraged duke, whose wife had tapped him gently with a fan, sharply observed that his first duchess had never taken such a shocking liberty, although ‘she was a Percy’.65 Peers’ brothers assiduously made use of their siblings’ titles. In 1704 Captain John Campbell wrote to his brother to say that he had survived Blenheim:
My Lord the post is going this minute so I have no time to write to Willie Primrose’s brother [Viscount Primrose] but I beg that your Lordship will be so kind as to tell him that his brother is wounded and without money.
He moved on to become a major in Hepburn’s