Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes
Feversham ‘had no parties abroad, he got no intelligence, and was almost surprised, and like to be defeated, when he seemed under no apprehension, but was abed without any care or order’. We have already seen how Feversham’s precautions were wholly professional. Had Oglethorpe not shifted the crucial picket Monmouth’s advance would have been detected sooner, but as it was Compton’s screen did precisely what was expected of it. The Reverend Andrew Paschall heard from a church official in Westonzoyland that an unnamed lord sought a local guide to take him away from the battle, but it is impossible to link this firmly to Feversham, though some have tried. There were repeated suggestions that Feversham, a Frenchman and thus by definition a fop, took a long time to dress after the alarm was given and insisted on breakfasting before leaving his quarters. The most that we can say is that he had been injured by a falling timber in one of the Whitehall fires and had subsequently been trepanned: this might have made it harder for his servants to wake him.
Winston S. Churchill claimed that:
Nothing could free the public mind from the fact that Churchill had saved and won the battle. The whole Army knew the facts. The officers included the Household troops, the Guards, and all the most fashionable soldiers about the court. They all said what they thought. Feversham’s martial achievements became a laughing-stock … The impression that this slothful foreigner was slumbering on his couch and that the vigilant Englishman saved the situation had more truth in it than the popular version of many historical events.80
If these well-placed officers did indeed know discreditable facts about Feversham, and trailed them about court, we may wonder why James appointed him to command his army in 1688 when the threat was infinitely more serious.
Feversham does not have to be a villain for Churchill to be a hero. Whatever the rumours of drunkenness or lack of vigilance, the royal infantry, his prime responsibility as the army’s second in command, was camped in good order with well-understood alarm drills, and Dumbarton’s provided an alert grand guard which established the right marker for its battle line. Once the fight was joined, Churchill shifted dragoons to both flanks, and paid special attention to his right, where Dumbarton’s Scots were under pressure. He moved his two left-hand regiments off to the right some time afterwards, but by this time the rebel attack was broken. John Tincey, whose recent scholarly account of Sedgemoor comes as close as we can hope to being definitive, reckons that: ‘By the time Feversham arrived the battle was won and he had little to do but, with the dawn, to organise the pursuit of a beaten enemy … Sedgemoor may not have been John Churchill’s most spectacular victory, but it must rightfully be considered to be his first.’81
Any historian surveying the next three years must account for the fact that the nations which applauded the defeat of Monmouth and Argyll in 1685 offered remarkably little support for James II in 1688. For Churchill’s biographers the task is even more specific: what made a man who acknowledged himself to owe everything to James, and who had helped keep him on the throne in 1685, betray him in his hour of need? We have the usual clash of polemics. James II’s many critics see him as a monster bent on imposing Roman Catholicism on his three kingdoms and obliterating those legal defences which stood in his way. In contrast, the Jacobite Life of James II, based partly on his own memoirs, maintained that James was a benevolent and paternalistic figure who
had given all the marks of love, care and tenderness of his subjects, that could be expected from a true father of his people: he had … encouraged and increased their trade, preserved them from taxes, supported their credit, [and] made them a rich, happy and more powerful people than they had ever appeared in the world.82
It is perhaps easiest to see 1685–88 as a sequence of interlinked royal miscalculations, in which maladroitness and bad luck loomed larger than malice or cruelty; and though James won most of the individual legal battles he lost the war. The Bloody Assizes had the effect (not wholly unlike the Dublin executions of 1916) of alarming many moderate men who had never wished the rebels well but did not relish the severities meted out to them. James’s own overt Roman Catholicism, the arrival in London of a papal nuncio and the apparent influence of James’s Jesuit confessor Father Petre created tension in themselves. They were, though, made far more disturbing to Protestants by the fact that in 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given religious toleration to his Protestant subjects, and embarked upon a policy of forced conversion which drove tens of thousands of Huguenots into exile with dreadful stories to tell.
John Evelyn was shocked by what he heard.
The French persecution of the Protestants raging with the utmost barbarity, exceeded even what the very heathens used; innumerable persons of the greatest birth and riches leaving all their earthly substance and barely escaping with their lives, dispersed through all the countries of Europe. The French tyrant abrogated the Edict of Nantes … on a sudden demolishing all their churches, banishing, imprisoning and sending to the galleys all the ministers; plundering all the common people, and exposing them to all sorts of barbarous usages by soldiers sent to ruin and prey upon them; taking away their children; forcing people to mass, and then executing them as relapsers … 83
In the spring of 1686 English congregations were asked to contribute to a fund for the exiles. This ‘was long expected, and was at last with difficulty procured to be published, the interest of the French ambassador obstructing it’. The government ordered a book detailing the outrages inflicted on the Huguenots to be burnt by the common hangman, but even Evelyn, a committed royalist, thought that this was ‘no refutation of any facts therein’ but simply showed the French ambassador’s ‘great indignation at the pious and truly generous charity of all the nation’.84
Between 50,000 and 80,000 Huguenots arrived in England, where they were generally welcomed as fellow Protestants, even by the constrictive guilds of the City of London, for the skills they brought. The tales they told confirmed the worst English fears of an absolute monarchy with the stink of incense in its nostrils. Martha Guiscard of Fleet Street ‘came out of France, because Jean Guiscard, her father, was burnt at Nérac, accused of having irreverently received the host’. A wealthy gentleman who had to ‘abandon a great estate [was] condemned to be hanged: and his house demolished, and his woods destroyed’.85 Gilbert Burnet saw all this as ‘a real argument against the cruel and persecuting spirit of popery, wherever it prevailed … the French persecution came very seasonably to awaken the nation’.86 Another contemporary observer thought that: ‘The whole of Europe … is inundated with the enemies of Louis XIV since the expulsion of the Huguenots,’ and even Marshal Vauban lamented that France’s loss included ‘sixty millions of money, nine thousand sailors, twelve thousand tried soldiers, six hundred officers, and its most flourishing manufacturers’.87
English concern at the persecution of the Huguenots had two specific aspects. First, it was carried out without regard to class or wealth: indeed, it was the threat to ‘their property, rights or privileges’ that persuaded many Huguenot noblemen to give up their religion. To nervous Protestant gentlemen across the Channel, the process posed a revolutionary threat to the established social as well as religious order. Second, the regular army was the chosen instrument of terror. Dragoons were often quartered on Huguenot villages with licence to behave abominably, giving the process the name of the dragonnades and founding the verb ‘to dragoon’ in the English language. Armed resistance was crushed remorselessly: the marquis de Louvois told a military commander to ‘cause such destruction in the area’ that the example would teach other Huguenots ‘how dangerous it is to rise against the King’.