Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes
money, for he was doing perfectly well in suborning the opposition, and John was soon back with his master in Brussels. But James had had enough of the place, and obtained his brother’s leave to live in Scotland. He travelled to London, and then went overland to Edinburgh, taking thirty-eight days for the journey. John accompanied him, but Sarah, heavily pregnant, stayed behind in their Jermyn Street apartment.
They corresponded fondly. John unsuccessfully begged Sarah not to let her sister Frances marry a former suitor, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Talbot, an Irish Roman Catholic gentleman who had the character-forming distinction of having escaped from Drogheda when Cromwell stormed the place in 1649, and was himself caught up on the fringes of the Popish Plot. James later made Dick Talbot Earl of Tyrconnell and his viceroy in Ireland, and with the defeat of the Jacobites the Tyrconnells went into exile.16 Lady Tyrconnell makes one more brief entry on history’s stage. When James was beaten by William of Orange on the Boyne in 1690 he rode hard for Dublin, where Frances congratulated him on arriving so well in advance of his men, and offered him food. He replied that after such a breakfast he had no stomach for his dinner.
When James was summoned south by his brother in early 1680 John went with him, and urged Sarah to:
Pray for fair winds, so that we may not stay here, nor be long at sea, for should we be long at sea, and very sick, I am afraid it would do me great hurt, for really I am not well, for in my whole lifetime I never had so long a fit of headaching as now: I hope the red spots of the child will be gone against I see her, and her nose straight, so that I may fancy it be like the mother, so I would have her be like you in all things else.17
They were destined for cruel disappointment, for little Harriet (or Hariote, as her delighted father spelt her name) died in infancy, whether because those red spots were harbingers of something sinister, or for one of a dozen other reasons we cannot say.
James spent the summer of 1680 in London, and Charles hoped that he might be able not to order his brother into exile again. The Duke of York’s uncertain future made it hard for him to secure an appointment for his young protégé. Although the governorship of Sheerness, command of the Lord Admiral’s Regiment, and even the post of ambassador to France or Holland were spoken of, James was determined not to be separated from Churchill if he went into exile again. He was right to be concerned, for Charles feared that a new Parliament, due to meet on 21 October, would prepare a second Exclusion Act, and might even impeach his brother. The council was divided in its opinion, and James himself was all for facing down the opposition, and blamed the Earl of Halifax and the Duchess of Portsmouth for recommending his departure, but he reluctantly heeded his brother’s command to go back to Scotland. This time the Churchills could go north together, and they reached Leith after five days’ voyage.
James was not simply exiled to Edinburgh but was, by virtue of letters patent which John Churchill brought up to him in June 1681, the king’s commissioner in Scotland and effectively its viceroy. He had arrived in the aftermath of a rising by Covenanters, Lowland opponents of the episcopacy which had returned to Scotland with the Restoration. Monmouth had beaten them decisively at Bothwell Bridge near Glasgow in June 1679, doing much for his own reputation south of the border, but not snuffing out their resistance, which remained especially strong in the south-west. Many leading Covenanters fled to Holland, where they joined English opposition leaders who had escaped Charles’s reassertion of his authority, and, ironically, were soon joined by Monmouth himself, exiled at last by his exasperated father.
James persevered in the persecution of the Covenanters, often using Catholic highlanders as his chosen instruments, and there are those who see in his policy in Scotland in 1681–82 a foretaste of what he would have done in England after 1685 had he been given the chance. Judicial torture was still legal in Scotland, although it had to be authorised by the council. Gilbert Burnet, no unbiased critic, suggested that while most members of the council would have avoided watching a man being ‘struck in the boots’, as wedges were hammered in between an iron boot and his foot, James observed the process with ‘unmoved indifference’. The martyrology inevitably generated by this sort of conflict inflated some of the atrocities committed by the government and its supporters, but there is no doubt that some of James’s adherents plied boot, thumbscrews and smouldering cord with inventive zeal.
Churchill’s attitude to James’s policy in Scotland at this time helps us understand the process which was to lead to his decisive breach with his patron in 1688. James was anxious to be permitted to return to England, and early in 1681 sent Churchill to London to urge Charles not to allow Parliament to sit, to make an alliance with France, whose resultant subsidy would enable him to rule without Parliament, and then to summon him homewards. Churchill did his best for his master, but made it clear that he did not support James’s blustering threats to raise Catholic Scots and Irish to support him, which, after all, was precisely what many of his English opponents expected him to do.
When she was an old woman, Sarah recalled how much she and her husband had hated the persecution of the Covenanters.
I have cried at some of these trials, to see the cruelty that was done to some of these men only for their choosing to die rather than tell a lie. How happy would this country be if we had more of these sort of men! I remember the Duke of Marlborough was mightily grieved one day at a conversation he had heard between the Earl of Argyll … and the Duke of York. The Duke of Marlborough told me he never heard a man speak more reason than he [i.e. Argyll] did to the Duke and after he had said what he at first resolved, the Duke would never make an answer to anything, but ‘You shall excuse me, my Lord, You shall excuse me, my Lord,’ and continued so for a long time … I remember the Duke of Marlborough told me when we were in Scotland, there came a letter from Lewis the Grand to the Duke of York, writ by himself; which put all the family [i.e. household] into a great disorder, for nobody could read it. But it was enough to show that there was a strict correspondence between the Duke and the King of France.18
We must be cautious about accepting Sarah’s recollections at face value, for she could see, just as well as we can, how evidence of John’s growing concern at James’s policy might mitigate his action in 1688.
Yet her words cannot be brushed aside as the mutterings of a partisan octogenarian, for they are corroborated by those of John himself. James’s chief advisers at this time were Churchill, George Legge, later Lord Dartmouth, and the Duke’s brother-in-law Laurence Hyde, later Earl of Rochester.19 All agreed that James’s position would be much improved if he would consent to attend Anglican service, and the Earl of Halifax, the most supple of Charles’s ministers, warned that unless James complied ‘his friends would be obliged to leave him like a garrison one could no longer defend’. In September 1681 Churchill told Legge that they had failed to persuade James. ‘You will find,’ he wrote glumly, ‘that nothing is done in what was so much desired, so that sooner or later we must all be undone … My heart is very full, so that should I write to you of the sad prospect I fear we have, I should try your patience.’20
James soon found himself in conflict with the Earl of Argyll, who made his feelings clear by opposing a clause in the Scottish Test Act which sought to exempt members of the royal household from taking the Protestant oath of allegiance. Argyll swore the oath of allegiance himself, but qualified it by adding ‘so far as is consistent with the Protestant religion’, and went on to put his objections to the Test in writing. In December 1681 he was tried for treason, and James helped ensure that he was condemned to death. Churchill wrote at once to James’s private secretary Sir John Werden, an old friend, urging that James should show mercy, and received a hopeful reply: ‘now (in regard to your old friendship, which you put me in mind of) I hope he will have the King’s pardon and the effects of his bounty, and hereafter in some measure deserve both’.21 Argyll escaped from Edinburgh Castle shortly afterwards, and Churchill wrote at once to George Legge, hoping that the escape would not be taken too seriously. It was certainly not in the