Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes

       The King Comes Home in Peace Again

      Oliver Cromwell, almost broken by the agonising death of his favourite daughter, died in September 1658, leaving not the stable settlement he had so craved, but a shifting and unstable coalition headed, at least in name, by his son Richard. In an air of worsening political breakdown General George Monck, commander of the army in Scotland but a Devonian by ancestry, who had served the king until his capture in 1646, marched southwards, reaching London in February 1660. He dissolved Parliament, no less than the reinstated Rump of the Long Parliament which had met before the Civil War, and issued writs for another, for which royalists would be allowed to vote. Monck now began to receive letters written to him by the exiled Charles II, but there was still no certainty that the monarchy would be restored.

      The Declaration of Breda, issued by Charles on 4 April, made known the conditions on which he would accept restoration to his father’s throne. He proposed to take ‘possession of that right which God and nature hath made our due’, guaranteed a general pardon to all who returned to ‘the loyalty and obedience of good subjects’, apart from those specifically excepted by Parliament, and promised a free Parliament and ‘liberty to tender consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of religion which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom’. The army would receive arrears of pay, and there was an attempt to reassure landowners, great and small, by affirming that grants and purchases of estates made ‘in the continued distractions of so many years and so many and great revolutions’ would be determined by Parliament.¹²

      The declaration and accompanying letters were received by the new ‘Convention’ Parliament, which declared the monarchy restored, and Charles duly returned to the royal palace of Whitehall on 29 May 1660, his thirtieth birthday. ‘All the world in a merry mood,’ wrote Samuel Pepys, ‘because of the king’s coming.’¹³ John Evelyn was even more elated.

      I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God. And all this was done without one drop of blood shed, and by that very army which rebelled against him; but it was the Lord’s doing, for such a Restoration was never mentioned in any history ancient or modern, since the return of the Jews from their Babylonish captivity; nor so joyful a day and so bright ever seen in this nation, this happening when to expect or effect it was past all human policy.¹⁴

      The vast quantity of scholarly work produced since Samuel Rawson Gardiner wrote on the subject over a century ago has not diluted the fundamental truth of his assertion that: ‘The majority of political Englishmen … thought that Charles II ought to be their king.’¹⁵ The issues which were to bedevil the whole of John Churchill’s career were not about monarchy as opposed to republicanism, but about the nature of that monarchy. In this sense the Declaration of Breda was a carefully drafted compromise. It spoke of the authority conferred on Charles by ‘God and nature’, but recognised that much of the implementation of that authority was a matter for Parliament.

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

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

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

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

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