Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes

       Politics, Foreign and Domestic

      John was perfectly right about the peace. The Treaty of Nijmegen ended Louis’ Dutch War. If he fell short of his aim of ‘annihilating’ the Dutch, Louis had improved his position along the frontier with the Spanish Netherlands, annexed Franche-Comté, and made important gains in Lorraine. Moreover, although Europe was to remain at peace for the next ten years, during this time Louis strengthened his hand by a variety of means. Some territories were declared to be réunis à la couronne, often on flimsy legal pretext; others were purchased from local rulers anxious to deal soon rather than fight later, and still others were simply occupied. Of special importance were Strasbourg, and its bridgehead Kehl, just across the Rhine, gateway into the Empire, and Casale on the Po, bought from the Duke of Mantua, on the edge of the Spanish-held Duchy of Milan. The industrious Vauban busied himself remodelling captured fortresses, and laying out his pré carré, a double line of strongholds, on the northern frontier. Although the army was reduced after the peace, thirty-six battalions were ready for immediate service and cadres were kept in place to aid rapid expansion. Louis believed that his ambitions had been checked temporarily, not halted for ever, and at once began to use diplomacy in an effort to dismantle the hostile coalition before he tried again. His interventions in English politics were designed to break the link between England and Holland. Nijmegen was not really a peace, more a ten years’ truce.

      The historian Keith Feiling affirmed that the Earl of Danby’s four years in office were ‘the most constructive of the reign, illustrating the forces which, beneath the surface of faction, were making a real advance’.¹⁴ Danby did wonders for the English royal finances, and helped lay the foundations of a civil service, with Samuel Pepys rebuilding the fleet and William Blathwayt bringing the beginnings of order to the administration of the army. The foundation of the Royal Hospitals at Chelsea and Kilmainham, in 1682 and 1684 respectively, showed that the nation was beginning to glimpse the debt it owed to its soldiers, though to this day it has never recognised it fully.

      Danby was close to being a real prime minister, and based himself on support in a carefully-managed Parliament, where interest was slapped on with a trowel, and in the wider nation. But if he could usually push through the king’s business, he could not prevent politics from becoming rancorously factional, and the terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ date from about this period. The Whigs were named after the radical kirk faction in Scotland, the word itself deriving from the shout of whiggam used by drovers to hasten their horses. A Tory was an Irish outlaw, for it was alleged that the Duke of York relied for his support on Irish papists.

      Louis may not have beaten the Dutch, but he certainly did for Danby. The ink was no sooner dry on the Treaty of Nijmegen than the Whigs, fearing that Charles would use his army to enforce Catholicism at home, demanded its disbandment. Danby’s opponents Shaftesbury and Russell were liberally provided with French gold and used it to buy votes, while the French ambassador helped them discredit Danby by demonstrating that, for all his anti-French and Protestant rhetoric, he had actually been receiving French subsidies. It was the end of Danby, at least for the moment: he was impeached for intriguing with foreign powers and imprisoned in the Tower, where he remained till 1684, when Charles granted him a pardon.

      The fall of Danby was subsumed within a greater crisis. In September 1678 a clergyman turned adventurer named Titus Oates revealed details of a ‘Popish Plot’ to murder the king and install the Duke of York in his place. Some fragments of truth seemed to make the rest of the story credible, and a new Parliament met in 1679 in a mood of Protestant hysteria. Charles tried to govern through a council that now included Monmouth and the opposition leaders. It produced a plan designed to limit the powers of a Catholic monarch, but the Commons went further, and drew up a Bill to exclude James from the succession. Monmouth, ‘our beloved Protestant Duke’, was the darling of the opposition: he hinted that there was a ‘black box’ whose contents proved that Charles had married his mother in exile. Charles’s latest mistress, Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, was seen as further evidence of francophilia at court, and when Nell Gwyn was held up by the mob at Oxford in 1681 she went straight to the crowd’s heart by yelling: ‘Pray, good people, be civil. I am the Protestant whore.’

      The Popish Plot and the Exclusion crisis dominated politics till 1683, and there were times when it did indeed seem as if ‘’41 is come again’. Charles weathered the storm because of his courage and sharp political acumen, so often cloaked in indolence or the pursuit of pleasure. The Earl of Ailesbury thought that the king ‘knew men better than any that hath reigned over us, and when he gave himself time to think, no man ever judged better of men and of things’.¹⁵ Although Charles may be censured for letting innocent men face a traitor’s death when he knew them to be guiltless, perhaps their lives were the price he paid for his throne. In 1681 he deftly summoned a new Parliament to the old royalist stronghold of Oxford, broke the back of the opposition, and dissolved Parliament: he did not summon another. A supportive public reaction enabled him to attack some of his most prominent opponents, and the fictitious Popish Plot was replaced, in 1683, by real attempts on his life. The Earl of Shaftesbury, the most dangerous of the opposition leaders, fled abroad, and the discovery of the Rye House conspiracy to murder Charles and his brother on their way back from Newmarket races saw the Earl of Essex kill himself in the Tower and Lord Russell leave it to be beheaded on Tower Hill.

      None of this was comfortable for John Churchill, and we must now see how his own career flew in these gusty winds. He had been made gentleman of the bedchamber to the Duke of York in 1673, and master of his wardrobe in 1679. He and Sarah were too firmly linked to the Yorks not to share the battering they took, and in 1679 they joined James, judiciously exiled by his brother, first in The Hague and then in Brussels, where they lived in the same house that had been occupied by Charles before his restoration. James began to make plans to settle there indefinitely, first calling for his fox-hounds and then for his daughter, Princess Anne. When Charles fell ill that autumn his advisers felt that James should be on hand in case he died, and Churchill, in England at the time, was sent to bring him over. No sooner did they arrive than Charles recovered, and his advisers now determined that James should return to Brussels.

      John, in the meantime, was sent to Paris to further negotiations for a subsidy from Louis, which would help Charles survive without calling another Parliament, and thus reduce the risk of an Exclusion Bill being passed. He was authorised to tell the French that his master would henceforth support the interests of Louis, and apologise for his support for William of Orange, not least for letting his daughter