Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes
debauchee’, the Whig leader Thomas, Lord Wharton, had, in contrast, a puritan and parliamentarian background, ‘but he owed his scepticism, his engaging manners and his loose morals to the Restoration society in which he had been brought up’. Jonathan Swift, churchman and Tory pamphleteer, hated him ‘like a toad’, but could not help admiring the way in which Wharton, when vigorously assailed by yet another pamphlet, would tell Swift that he had been ‘damnably mauled’ by it, but then chat with him as if nothing really mattered. The Tories made repeated attempts to see him off in a duel, but he disarmed their swordsmen one after another, and always spared their lives.
A contemporary gives us a pen-picture of Wharton wielding interest just as deftly as he did his small sword. He recommended two candidates of his own persuasion for the borough of High Wycombe, only to find that:
Some of the staunch Churchmen invited two of their own party to oppose them and money was spent on both sides … They found my Lord Wharton was got there before them and was going up and down the town with his friends to secure votes on their side. The [Tory] gentleman with his two candidates and a very few followers marched on one side of the street; my Lord Wharton’s candidates and a great company on the other. The gentleman, not being known to my Lord or the townsman, joined with his Lordship’s men to make discoveries, and was by when my Lord, entering a shoemaker’s shop, asked where Dick was? The good woman said her husband was gone two or three miles off with some shoes, but his Lordship need not fear him, she would keep him right. ‘I know that,’ says my Lord, ‘but I want to see Dick and drink a glass with him.’ The wife was very sorry Dick was out of the way. ‘Well,’ says his Lordship, ‘how does all thy children? Molly is a brave girl I warrant by this time.’ ‘Yes, I thank you,’ says the woman. And his Lordship continued: ‘Is not Jemmy breeched yet?’
It was all too much for the principal Tory, who ‘crossed over to his friends and cried: “E’en take your horse and begone; whoever has my Lord Wharton on his side has enough for this election.” ’72
Discussion of the importance of interest has already slid us deep into politics. Political parties as we understand them did not yet exist: there were no formally appointed party leaders, central offices, manifestos, whips or lists of approved candidates. Yet there were most certainly political groupings, and a rancour between them so intense that a Victorian editor of Sarah Marlborough’s papers warned his readers that ‘It is almost impossible to conceive the bitter hatred which they bear to each other, and the atrocious libels against their leaders which the press sent every day into the world.’73 I was taught history at a time when Sir Lewis Namier’s views on the politics of the age were very much current. He stressed the importance of connections – groupings based on family or interest – rather than party as we would now understand it. Recent research, especially the painstaking work carried out for the monumental History of Parliament project (whose House of Commons 1690–1715 has proved invaluable), now suggests that party was a good deal more important than Namier believed.
So what did Marlborough and his contemporaries understand by parties? As the historian Tim Harris has so brilliantly demonstrated, the political legacy of the Restoration was a complex one. For a start, it was different in England, Ireland and Scotland, for these three kingdoms were united only in the person of the monarch, and presented distinct problems of their own. In England, with whose politics Marlborough was most intimately concerned, there were two broad groups, each composed of men of similar political persuasions but subject to wide internal disagreement.
On the one hand the Whigs (dubbed ‘the party of movement’ by our Victorian editor, who saw them as the ancestors of the radicals of his own age) had welcomed the return of Charles II but emphasised that he had been called back by Parliament, and believed that the monarch should rule according to law. The Whigs were the least homogeneous of the parties, for they were an alliance of nonconformist churchmen at one end of the spectrum, and grandees at the other, their most notable figures known as the ‘Lords of the Junto’ in the first decade of the eighteenth century.* The more astute Whig leaders, like Lord Wharton, recognised that if they were to succeed it would be by a political organisation which their rivals lacked. On the other hand the Tories applauded the restoration of a monarch sanctified by God, and although most of them expected him to obey the law, they believed that there were times when he could use his royal prerogative to override it. Some High Tories went further, arguing that he held his throne by divine right and was accountable only to God, and not to man.
Supporters of the established Church, with its bishops and prayer book, tended to the Tory view. Presbyterians and the descendants of the Civil War puritans hoped to see the Church of England reformed before they could work within it. They agreed with the Anglicans in their dislike of separatist sects, but they were generally whiggish in sympathy. Both parties found their views easily misrepresented by opponents, and the pamphleteering of the age, unshackled by the removal of censorship in 1695, left no stone unhurled when it came to blackguarding opponents: the Tories were Popish and autocratic, seeking to turn England into Louis XIV’s France, while the Whigs were nonconformist republicans who would bring back the dark days of the interregnum.
In addition to declared Whigs and Tories, there were always some ‘Queen’s Servants’, who were inclined to support the government of the day. These were often numerous enough to swing the balance of the Commons, and Marlborough and Godolphin could scarcely have survived without the support of these gentlemen, most of whom were moderate Tories by persuasion. Service officers were often MPs: over the period 1660–1715 the Commons never had fewer than between 12 and 18 per cent of its members in the army or the navy. James II’s tendency to reward the political opposition of officers by removing their commissions meant that, in his reign and immediately after it, most officer MPs tended to be Tories. By 1702, though, most of them, like generals William Cadogan, George Macartney and Francis Palmes, were Whigs. John Webb, the victor of Wynendaele, was a Tory, and his fellow Tories made much of the fact that he had allegedly received scant recognition for his victory. In his private correspondence Marlborough professed disdain for party politics so often that one believes him. Given a choice, he would probably have been a moderate Tory, while Sarah, never one for half-measures, saw all Tories as closet Jacobites, and lost no opportunity to tell Queen Anne of the danger they posed. Whatever else united John and Sarah, it was certainly not politics.
There is no simple political map of the England of Marlborough’s day. Country squires like Sir Roger de Coverly were proverbially Tory, and the Spectator’s engaging sketches of the good-natured baronet show a man who behaved, in his own little kingdom, much as a benevolent monarch might act on a bigger stage. The parish clergy, whose comfortable liaison with the squirearchy produced the squarson, that hybrid of squire and parson who was more comfortable on his hunter than in his pulpit, were usually Tory, though Low Church bishops often tilted the political balance in the Lords in favour of the Whigs.
The City of London, so important to Parliament’s success during the Civil War, was firmly Whig. What Trevelyan called ‘the middling classes of society … rich merchants, small shopkeepers, freehold yeomen, artisans and craftsmen’ were whiggish, as were those, like younger sons and merchants trading overseas, who found ‘antique custom and privilege’ more hindrance than help.74 There were great noble houses on both sides, sometimes as much because of traditional rivalries and an eye for the main chance as because of genuine political conviction, and in terms of ‘wantonness, unbelief and faction’ there was little to choose between the High Tory Henry St John, champion of the bishops, and the Whig Lord Wharton, mainstay of the dissenters.75 Indeed, our earnest Victorian believed that it was all about interest: ‘The leading men of all parties aimed chiefly at getting into high