Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes
with the smoky little loyalties of club, coffee house and hunting field holding men together, like a covey of partridges in the same patch of stubble.
There was political movement too. During the last four years of his reign, in the early 1680s, Charles II managed to appeal to opinion in the wider political nation ‘out of doors’, reaching out past the Whigs in Parliament to find a solid majority of royalists in the country at large, encouraging meetings and addresses which undercut the Whigs’ claim to be speaking for the people. In contrast, Whig grandees like Wharton recognised that their own party, an essentially disparate alliance, could only hope to win if it emphasised its agreement on the key issues of the day: religious toleration for all Protestants; war with France; union with Scotland; and the Hanoverian succession. Although the Tories constituted a ‘solid phalanx’ based on the Church and landed interest, they were divided on all these issues.
The fact that the war was financed largely by a land tax of four shillings in the pound meant that however much Sir Roger and his cronies revelled in the spectacle of the French, widely regarded as England’s natural enemies, getting a good drubbing, they became increasingly concerned that their own broad acres were paying for it. It was easy enough to put this out of their minds ‘while Marlborough and Galway beat/The French and Spaniards every day’. But as the Allies’ early successes were followed by disaster in Spain and apparent stalemate in the Low Countries, so the Tories became increasingly sure that the war was neither in the nation’s interest, nor – perhaps more to the point – in their own.
Ruling the country actually involved a good deal more than securing a majority in Parliament, for what Tim Harris calls the ‘social history of politics’ reveals that, in order to make its writ run, any government needed to control
peers, gentry and merchants at the top level who served as Lord Lieutenants [of counties], deputy Lieutenants, grand jurors, JPs, mayors and common councilmen, down to the men of lesser social standing who served as petty jurors, militiamen, tax assessors, churchwardens, overseers, vestrymen, constables and other parish and ward officers.76
In this context Sir Roger’s neighbour, hacking into the county town with his spaniel at his side, was scarcely less important than the baronet himself. He was
a Yeoman of about an hundred Pounds a year, an honest man: He is just within the Game-Act, and qualified to kill an Hare or a Pheasant … He would be a good neighbour if he did not destroy so many partridges: in short, he is a very sensible man; shoots flying; and has been several Times Foreman of the Petty-Jury.77
Successive governments used their interest to try to ensure a favourable balance of power locally, in particular by removing those justices of the peace – in default of a paid bureaucracy the keystones of local administration – who were known to oppose their policy. This straightforward spoils system found supporters at both political extremes, but the majority, like Queen Anne herself, correctly feared that it caused local instability and increased political rancour. It is always as well to remember that while Marlborough’s England could be threatened, cajoled and bribed, it could not be coerced, and that solid and unremarkable truth, however elusive it might have seemed in Whitehall, underlies the febrile politics of the period.
* The George referred to here was the Riband Badge of the Order of the Garter, with a central depiction of St George killing the dragon, usually cut in cameo in hard stone, encircled by large rose-cut brilliants, usually diamonds. Sardonyx is a form of onyx in which white alternates with cornelian.
* They included Somers, Montagu (Halifax), Wharton and Russell (Orford). The word ‘Junto’ is derived from the Spanish junta.
It was 26 May 1650. Charles I had been beheaded on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall only sixteen months before, and England was a republic. True, it was not a very happy republic. The House of Commons, summoned by Charles in 1640, had long ago lost its royalists, had more recently been stripped of its Presbyterian Members, and was now too obviously the mere rump of its former self. The House of Lords had been abolished. There was no sense of political equilibrium. On the one hand there were complaints that those ‘persons of condition’ upon whom so much of the practical exercise of local government depended had simply withdrawn from active participation in it. On the other, although the army had put down Leveller mutinies in the spring of 1649, there were many who thought that England was nothing like republican enough.
These were uncertain times for everyone, and downright difficult ones for those who had demonstrably been on the wrong side in the recent Civil War. Fate chose this unpropitious moment to provide a son for a West Country gentleman called Winston Churchill, sometime captain of horse in the king’s army, and his wife Elizabeth. They named him John, for his paternal grandfather.
Winston and Elizabeth had married across the jagged political divide of the 1640s. John Churchill the elder was a prosperous lawyer, a member of the Middle Temple, and Deputy Registrar of Chancery before the Civil War, who had bought an estate at Newton Montacute in the parish of Wootton Glanville, near Sherborne in Dorset. Aged about sixty, he was too old to be in arms, but like Robert Browning’s ‘Kentish Sir Byng’ he ‘stood for his king/bidding the cropheaded Parliament swing’ and served as one of Charles’s commissioners. When he came to terms with the victorious parliamentarians he pleaded that he had broken his allegiance to the king in November 1645, after the decisive battle of Naseby but before the surrender of Oxford, the royalist capital, in May the following year. He was fined £440 in addition to the £400 he had already paid, and having thus ‘compounded’ with the victors he was allowed to keep his estate.
John Churchill had not simply bought his way into the gentry with money made in law, but had wed wisely too. In 1618 he married Sarah, daughter of a Gloucestershire knight, Sir Henry Winston, in the City church of St Stephen’s Walbrook, and the couple’s son Winston was born in 1620. Winston had been a student at St John’s College Oxford and, like his father, was destined for a career in the law, for he joined Lincoln’s Inn in January 1637. The Civil War changed his life. He joined the royalist army on the outbreak of war in 1642, and was the storybook cavalier: an early portrait shows a self-confident young man with luxuriant shoulder-length hair and a bright doublet with slashed sleeves, and, typically, he became a captain of cavalry.1 Captain Churchill has left us no account of his service, but a brother officer, Captain Richard Atkyns of Prince Maurice’s Regiment, a Gloucestershire gentleman whose background was much like Churchill’s, remembered how the King’s Horse, threadbare West Country regiments riding up from Devizes and a fresh brigade hurtling down from Oxford, between them beat Sir William Waller’s cavalry on Roundway Down on 13 July 1643. The royalists called it ‘Runaway Down’, as well they might, for they broke the roundhead horse and sent some of them tumbling to ruin down the steep western edge of the down.
I cannot better compare the figure of both armies than to the map of the fight at sea, between the English and the Spanish Armada … for though they were above twice our numbers; they being six deep, in close order and we but three deep, and open (by reason of our sudden charge) we were without them at both ends … No men ever charged better than ours did that day, especially the Oxford horse, for ours were tired and scattered, yet those that were there did their best.2
Winston