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Ensign Churchill’s company of 1st Foot Guards, one of those embarked on the fleet, was aboard the Duke of York’s flagship Prince. On 28 May the Dutch under Admiral de Ruyter found the Allies at anchor in Southwold Bay, expecting an attack, with the French in a single squadron on the south of the line and two English squadrons to the north, and the wind coming in from the east-north-east, giving the Dutch the advantage. When the Dutch came into sight, with sixty-four ships to the Allies’ eighty-two, the Duke of York led the English off northwards against the main body of the Dutch, but failed to make his intentions clear to the French, who sailed southwards and engaged the weaker Dutch vanguard.
The English lost their battle. Lord Sandwich, vice-admiral of the kingdom and Samuel Pepys’s patron, who commanded the leading squadron, was killed, and his flagship Royal James was burnt. Prince was in the thick of things, as Captain John Narborough tells us.
His Royal Highness went fore and aft in the ship and cheered up the men to fight, which did encourage them very much … Presently when [Captain] Sir John Cox was slain I commanded as captain, observing his Royal Highness’s commands in working the ship, striving to get the wind of the enemy. I do absolutely believe no prince upon earth can compare with his Royal Highness in gallant resolution in fighting his enemy, and with so great conduct and knowledge in navigation as never any general understood before him. He is better acquainted in these seas than many masters which are now in the fleet; he is general, soldier, pilot, master, seaman; to say all, he is everything that man can be, and most pleasant when the great shot are thundering about his ears.
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Prince lost her captain and a third of her complement, and was so badly damaged that James shifted his flag to St Michael, and when she too was too badly mauled to serve as flagship he shifted it again to London. The French had done rather better, but there was a bitter dispute between two French admirals, and the whole episode was discouraging.
We might pause to consider how the battle reflected on James. That he had been brave is beyond question. But the fleet he commanded, drawn up in the expectation of battle, had been beaten, with loss, by a significantly inferior force. When he set off on the port tack with his two northernmost squadrons he did not order the French to follow. Perhaps, as the naval historian N.A.M. Rodger surmises, he might have thought it too obvious to suggest. However, it was his duty to have either agreed on a standard operating procedure or to have sent the appropriate signals. John Narborough became Rear Admiral Sir John Narborough soon after the action thanks to James’s patronage, and we can scarcely blame him for describing his patron’s behaviour in the best possible light. After the battle there was a disagreeable bout of ‘blame the foreigner’, and what was evidently a lost battle could be attributed to French negligence or cowardice. In fact James’s behaviour should not escape censure: one does not become a successful admiral simply by being brave.
Whatever the reasons for the defeat in Southwold Bay, it is evident that John Churchill, war hero or not, did not stand high in royal favour. On 25 October 1672 Sir Winston Churchill told the Duke of Richmond that:
My poor son Jack, that should have waited on Your Excellency thither, has been very unfortunate ever since in the continuation of the king’s displeasure, who, notwithstanding the service he did in the last fight, whereof the Duke [of York] was pleased to give the King a particular character, would not give him leave to be of the Duke’s bedchamber, although his highness declared he would not dispose of it to anyone else. He has been pleased since to let him have my cousin Vaughan’s company, but with confinement to his country quarters at Yarmouth.
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The Lord Admiral’s Regiment had lost four of its captains at Southwold Bay, and on 13 June John Churchill was commissioned into one of the vacancies. This left the unlucky Lieutenant Pick, once his superior in his company of 1st Foot Guards, pressing Lord Arlington’s under-secretary for a captaincy, promising him £400 once his commission arrived, though there is no evidence that it ever did.
Captain John Churchill was now confined to his regiment’s garrison at Great Yarmouth, which was convenient for rapid embarkation aboard the fleet but rather less handy for access to the capital, and had been denied the post as gentleman of the bedchamber to the Duke of York. The inference is clear: Charles wanted him out of Whitehall. Barbara might no longer be the king’s favourite, but for a handsome young officer to get her with child was too much even for the merry monarch. Years later the Duchess of Portsmouth sent Churchill a rich snuffbox in memory of their (unspecified) association, and it is possible that the young cavalier had been fishing in forbidden waters again. Promoting Churchill out of the Foot Guards and into the Lord Admiral’s Regiment also made perfect sense, for the Lord Admiral’s was already warned for foreign service. Even so, John set off for the Continent well in advance of his regiment, and in June 1673 he was with the Duke of Monmouth’s party of gentleman volunteers, supported by thirty troopers of the Life Guards, in the trenches before Maastricht, besieged by Louis in person. There, a determined garrison disposed of a variety of ingenious contrivances which were a good deal more unpleasant even than the disapproval of Charles II.
The Imminent Deadly Breach (#ulink_66f080d9-3cbe-5809-8d7f-ea78bb7e1197)
Fortification and siegecraft had a grammar of their own, which John Churchill was now beginning to learn. The military historian David Chandler has observed that during the period 1680–1748 there were 167 sieges to 144 land engagements in Europe, and the Earl of Orrery affirmed in 1677: ‘We make war more like foxes than lions; and you have twenty sieges for one battle.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The high walls of medieval castles had offered but a poor defence against gunpowder, and this period saw the apogee of the new artillery fortification, the speciality of military engineers like the Frenchman Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban and his Dutch rival Menno van Coehoorn. The bastion, an arrow-shaped work jutting out from the main curtain wall of a fortress, was the key to the system. The cannon mounted on it could fire, from its flanking ramparts, along the wall and, from the ramparts on its angled faces, could sweep the gently-sloping glacis on the other side of the broad ditch protecting the brick or ashlar scarp, the wall which shored up the squat, solid mass of bastion and curtain. A ‘covered way’ enabled men to walk in safety along the top of the counterscarp, the wall which propped up the far side of the ditch, and a palisade of sharpened stakes protected the covered way against an enemy who might have fought his way up the glacis.
Outworks, like the half-moon-shaped demi-lune or ravelin, could be used to keep the attacker out of reach of bastion and curtain, and the hornwork, sometimes called a crownwork because of its spiky plan, might cover an attractive approach or an exposed suburb. A variety of ingenuity was employed to make life unpleasant for the attacker. Caponiers, hutch-like works whose name came from the Spanish for chicken house, sat smugly in the ditch, ready to blast storming parties who hoped to cross it. Tenailles were banks of earth rising up out of the ditch just in front of the curtain to prevent the attacker’s artillery pounding the base of the wall. Ditches themselves might be wet, which made it hard for attackers to mine beneath them, but were prone to icing over in the winter and were smelly in the summer. Or they might be dry, in which case they were often provided with countermine galleries sneaking off below the glacis in the hope of allowing the defending engineers to interrupt the attackers’ attempts at mining.
Faced with this intractable low-lying geometry, the attacker, having first ensured that he had his slow-moving battering train of siege guns to hand, would encircle the fortress, digging ‘lines of circumvallation’ to keep off raiding parties from the outside. At an early stage he would summon the fortress to surrender, but a cool-headed governor would usually reject such impertinence. When the Dutch were besieging Maastricht in 1676 the governor, Count Calvo, entered into the spirit of the witty exchanges that were common at this stage in the siege. George Carleton, then serving as a gentleman volunteer in the Prince of Orange’s Foot Guards, tells us that:
The governor, by a messenger, intimating his sorrow that we had pawned our guns for ammunition bread [the siege train was late in arriving], answer was made that in a few days we hoped to give him a taste of the loaves which he should find would be sent him into the town in extraordinary plenty … I remembered another piece of raillery which passed some days after between the Rhinegrave and the same Calvo. The former sending him word that he hoped within three weeks to salute the governor’s mistress within the place, Calvo replied that he would give him leave to kiss her all over if he kissed her anywhere in three months.
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The attacker formally began the siege by ‘breaking ground’ (tranchée ouverte), commencing his first line of trenches facing the part of the fortress he planned to assail. From this ‘first parallel’ zig-zag saps were pushed out, until a second parallel could be dug; more sapping would lead to a third. While the attacker’s engineers were busy grubbing their way forward, cannon would be mounted just forward of the parallels to bring fire to bear on the chosen front. A clear bell-like ring announced a direct hit on the exposed muzzle of a defending cannon, probably sending it spinning from its carriage, to the discomfiture of its detachment. Eventually, having first sent gusts of grapeshot scudding up the glacis to weaken the palisade, the attacker would try to storm the covered way.
This is where grenadiers came into their own. The hand grenade, its name deriving from the Spanish for pomegranate, which the little projectile resembled, was carried by specialist infantrymen who wore crownless caps rather than the more common tricorn hats, which made it easier for them to sling their muskets across their backs, leaving both hands free to light the fuse on their grenade before hurling it. The process required strength and courage, and by this time grenadiers, usually recruited on the basis of one company in each battalion, were the elite of the infantry. Although grenades could be used in a variety of circumstances, it was in the attack on the covered way that they were indispensable. The song ‘The British Grenadiers’ describes the process perfectly.
Whene’er we are commanded to storm the palisades
Our leaders march with fusees and we with hand grenades
We throw them from the glacis, about our enemies’ ears,
Sing tow row, row, row, row, the British Grenadiers.
A good deal could go amiss long before the victorious grenadiers fell to ‘drowning bumpers’ and tow-row-rowing. A Scots grenadier, Private Donald McBane, was about to hurl his grenade over the palisades at Maastricht when it exploded
in my hands, killing several about me, and blew me over the palisades; burnt my clothes so that the skin came off me. I … fell among Murray’s Company of Grenadiers, flayed like an old dead horse from head to foot. They cast me into the water to put out the fire about me.
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George Carleton was part of a ‘forlorn hope’ (two sergeants and twenty grenadiers, a captain and fifty musketeers, and then a party carrying empty sandbags) sent to rush a breach in one of Maastricht’s bastions. They got into the work well enough, but then:
One of our own soldiers aiming to throw one [grenade] over the wall into the counterscarp among the enemy, it so happened that he unfortunately missed his aim, and the grenade fell down again on our side of the wall, very near the person who fired it. He, starting back to save himself, and some others who saw it fall doing the like, those who knew nothing of the matter fell into a sudden confusion … everybody was struck with a panic fear, and endeavoured to be the first who should quit the bastion …
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There was, though, a silver lining to this dark cloud: an ensign in Sir John Fenwick’s Regiment was killed in the scuffle, and Carleton received the vacancy.
Once the grenadiers had duly taken the covered way, the attacker would ‘crown’ the spot with gabions, great wicker baskets filled with earth, and would then haul up his heavy guns to thunder out across the ditch at the base of the scarp. His gunners would try to adjust their fire so as to make a cannelure – a long groove – cutting through the retaining masonry, and eventually gravity would assert itself and the whole mass of scarp and rampart would tumble down into the ditch. To be deemed practicable for assault the breach had to be wide enough for two men to walk up it side by side without using their hands. The great Vauban would often check practicability himself, creeping forward after dark and scrambling back like some great earthy badger, muttering, ‘C’est mûre, c’est bien mûre.’
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The establishment of a practicable breach was usually the sign for the defender’s drummers to beat the chamade, requesting a parley, or for the attacker to formally warn the governor that, with a practicable breach in his wall and assault imminent, he should give in at once to avoid a needless effusion of blood. If a town was taken by storm the attacking troops could not be expected to respect either the possessions of the inhabitants or the virtue of their womenfolk, and a sensible governor would make what terms he could, although usually the longer he left the negotiation the worse the deal he could expect. The garrison of a fortress taken by storm could expect no mercy, a practice designed to discourage pointless last-ditch defence and reflecting the very real difficulty of controlling maddened troops who had just come boiling into the town through a defended breach.
Of course there were variations to this theme. A fortress might be taken by a coup de main, perhaps with a group of picked men in civilian clothes making their way covertly into the place and then suddenly opening a gate to admit troops hiding just outside. In 1702 the Bavarians took Ulm by this method, but a subsequent Austrian attempt against Maubeuge miscarried when a French sentry beat a particularly sullen ‘peasant’ in a line of carts awaiting entry, only for the man (in fact an infantry major) to lose his temper and grab a musket from under the hay on his cart, killing the sentry but alerting the garrison. While the siege was in progress each side would drop mortar bombs onto the other, and sometimes a lucky hit on a magazine would end the struggle at a stroke: in 1687 the Venetian siege of the Acropolis at Athens was decided by two mortar bombs which caused extensive damage to the Parthenon, then used by the Turks to store gunpowder. Sorties might set back the progress of the siege by wrecking trenches and carrying off or breaking engineers’ tools; mines could engulf whole bastions and discourage even the stoutest governor, or either side might run out of food or water.
In general, though, a siege, as Captain Churchill was now beginning to discover in the trenches before Maastricht, was rather like a formal dance, in which everyone stepped out to a rhythm they understood, with engineers calling out the time and gunners providing the percussion. Vauban reckoned that the average siege, if there was such a thing, would run for thirty-nine days from tranchée ouverte to the attacker’s formal entry after terms had been agreed. In April 1705 Louis XIV gently reminded his governors that they were expected to put up a proper defence, not merely surrender on terms as soon as the outworks were lost:
Despite the satisfaction I have derived from the fine and vigorous defence of some of my fortresses besieged during this war, as well as from those of my governors who have held their outworks for more than two months – which is more than the commanders of enemy fortresses have managed when besieged by my arms; nevertheless, as I consider that the main defences of my towns can be held equally as long as the outworks … I write you this letter to inform you that in the circumstances of your being besieged by the enemy it is my intention that you should not surrender until there is a breach in the main body of the enceinte, and until you have withstood at least one assault …
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On the other side of the lines, Brigadier General Richard Kane commended Captain Withers of Calthorp’s Regiment, who in 1696, ‘being posted in a chateau with only six men’, faced the French off for several hours. When he saw that they were preparing to storm, he beat the chamade and received the same terms as much bigger garrisons which had surrendered without firing a shot. This ought to show officers, declared Kane,
that they be not too forward in delivering up places committed to their charge; nor yet too foolhardy in standing out till an attack is begun, for then it will be too late. I mean, the attacking a breach, or such works as may be easily carried, especially when there is not a considerable force to oppose.
In 1695 the Allied governors of Dixmude and Diest were court-martialled for premature surrender. Nobody expected ‘that they should stand a general assault, for the design … was only to keep the enemy employed as long as they could’. The Danish Major General Elnberger, governor of Dixmude, admitted that ‘a panic seized him, which he could not get over, nor account for’, and he was beheaded ‘by the common executioner of the Danish forces’ in November, after William of Orange had confirmed his sentence. He had served blamelessly for forty years until this single error of judgement cost him his life. The commanding officers who signed the capitulation with him lost their commissions, as did Brigadier O’Farrell, ‘a man of long service, who had always behaved well’ but had surrendered tiny Diest without even a show of resistance.
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Besiegers had their own hierarchy, with a general of the trenches doing duty for a day at a time, assisted by a trench major to oversee daily routine. The French, with their British allies, opened their trenches before the Tongres gate of Maastricht on the night of 17–18 June 1673, and a week later they were ready to assault a hornwork and ravelin in front of the gate. The Duke of Monmouth was trench general that day, and his contingent took part in the assault: Captain Churchill, it was said, planted a colour on the ramparts of the outwork. The night was spent consolidating the captured position, and Monmouth’s men had scarcely retired to their tents after dawn the next day when the thud of a mine and an outbreak of firing announced that the governor, Jacques de Fariaux, a French gentleman in Dutch service, had mounted a sortie and recaptured the ravelin. Monmouth at once sent word to a nearby company of the French king’s Mousquetaires Gris, commanded by Charles de Batz de Castelmore, comte d’Artagnan, and set off hot-foot for the ravelin.
Colonel Lord Alington was an eyewitness to what happened next, as he told Lord Arlington.
After the duke had put on his arms [i.e. body armour], we went not out at the ordinary place, but leapt over the bank of the trenches, in the face of our enemy. Those that happened to be with the duke were Mr Charles O’Brien, Mr Villiers, Lord Rockingham’s two sons, and Capt Watson their kinsman, Sir Tho Armstrong, Capt Churchill, Capt Godfrey, Mr Roe and myself, with the duke’s two pages and three or four more of his servants, thus we marched with our swords in our hands to a barricade of the enemy’s, where only one man could pass at a time. There was Monsieur d’Artagnan with his musketeers who did very bravely. This gentleman was one of the greatest reputation in the army, and he would have persuaded the duke not to have passed that place, but that being not to be done, this gentleman would go along with him, but in passing that narrow place was killed with a shot in his head, upon which the duke and we passed there where Mr O’Brien had a shot through his legs. The soldiers at this took heart the duke twice leading them on with great courage; when his grace found the enemy begin to retire, he was prevailed with to retire to the trench, the better to give his commands as there should be occasion. Then he sent Mr Villiers to the king for 500 fresh men and to give him an account of what had passed. When those men came, the enemy left us without any further disturbance … Some old commanders say, this was the bravest and briskest action that they had seen in their lives, and our duke did the part of a much older and more experienced general, and the king was very kind to him last night.
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Fariaux was a wily campaigner, and had stood siege five or six times before. Louis, in overall command, noted that he ‘was used to dealing with narrow approach trenches which were untenable against the smallest sortie’ – which had probably encouraged his sortie against the Tongres gate outworks – but saw that he could not cope with Vauban’s new technique of moving forward in sweeping parallels ‘almost as if we were drawn up for a field battle’. Having secured the outworks in front of the Tongres gate the French allowed Fariaux to capitulate, and on 1 July his 3,000 survivors marched out with the honours of war – drums beating, colours flying, musketeers with their slow-matches alight and bullets in their mouths, and all ranks with their ‘bag and baggage’ – with safe conduct to the nearest Dutch garrison.
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The Handsome Englishman (#ulink_91d86721-c823-542a-89d7-06458087e741)
On their return to Whitehall at the close of the campaigning season that autumn Monmouth presented John Churchill to the king as ‘the brave man who saved my life’, which seems to have been instrumental in restoring him to royal favour. As succeeding events were to show, Monmouth was not the brightest of Charles’s bastards. Although Monmouth was the monarch’s eldest son, by the ‘actress’ Lucy Walter (who even Charles could not bring himself to ennoble), when Gilbert Burnet asked the king if it might not be wise to legitimise him and make him his successor instead of his Roman Catholic brother James, Charles ‘answered him quick that, well as he loved him, he had rather see him hanged’.
(#litres_trial_promo) However, Monmouth’s approval strengthened Churchill’s hand. Barbara Castlemaine had borne him a daughter the previous summer and, we may conclude, was now helping him financially; the Duke of York, already favourably disposed to his former page and having an affair with his sister, had seen him fight bravely at Southwold Bay; and now Monmouth told his indulgent father that John Churchill had saved his life. This was interest in full spate, and it would have been astonishing had our hero not been swept onwards by it.
There was, though, a sudden faltering in the flood. Early in 1673 Charles had to summon his Parliament to ask it for money to fight the Dutch War. He found it in a predictably curmudgeonly frame of mind. The war and the French alliance were unpopular, and the Declaration of Indulgence, which Charles had issued by virtue of his royal prerogative, was seen (perfectly rightly, in view of what we now know of the Treaty of Dover) to be giving encouragement to Roman Catholics. Although Parliament was prepared to grant him funds for the war, it did so at the price of his withdrawal of the Declaration of Indulgence and, even worse from the royal standpoint, passed the Test Act. The Corporation Act of 1671 had already prescribed that all members of corporations, besides taking the Oath of Supremacy, were to take communion according to the rites of the Church of England. The Test Act compelled all office-holders, military or civil, to ‘declare that I do believe that there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’, and to take Anglican communion within three months. In 1678 the Act was extended, compelling all peers and MPs to make a declaration against transubstantiation and invocation of saints.
The Duke of York was an early casualty, and resigned all his offices. Prince Rupert headed the commission which took on his work as lord high admiral, and was already at sea with the fleet. He had failed to defeat the Dutch in two clashes in the Schoonevelt, and on 11 August his Allied fleet had the worst of a two-day battle against de Ruyter off Texel. Rupert had never much liked the French alliance, and lost little time in telling his countrymen what they already believed: that the French were useless at sea. Admiral d’Estrées had let him down, and the spectacle of d’Estrées blaming failure on his own second in command (who, in the great tradition of punishing the poorly-connected guiltless, was promptly clapped into the Bastille) made matters worse. The alliance was dead on its feet, but it was not until early 1674 that peace was made, although its terms allowed British troops who were serving as French-paid auxiliaries to remain on the Continent.
While all this was in progress the cabal fragmented, and by the end of the year Charles’s new chief minister was his lord treasurer, Sir Thomas Osborne, known to posterity, by the title he soon acquired, as the Earl of Danby. Parliament, irritated by James’s marriage to Mary of Modena, a Roman Catholic princess, and by the news of his conversion to Catholicism, debated a Bill for securing the Protestant religion by preventing any royal prince from marrying a Catholic without its consent. That summer Charles prorogued it, declaring that he would rather be a poor king than no king, and relying on the attentive Danby to improve his finances.
Charles had sent 6,000 men to France after the outbreak of the Dutch War, and after the conclusion of peace in 1674 much of this force remained in France, now under French pay and command, and connected with Britain only through recruiting. Its plight was made even more bizarre by the fact that the old Anglo-Dutch brigade in Dutch service, its members formally summoned back by Charles in 1672, was still soldiering on, with many of its British-born officers and men having become naturalised Dutchmen. There were awkward scenes in Brussels in 1679 when officers of the Anglo-Dutch brigade tried to find recruits amongst the British battalions that were then leaving for home after their stint in French service.
The British brigade sent to France in 1672 was commanded by the Duke of Monmouth, commissioned as a French lieutenant general, but, much as he enjoyed diverting scrambles like the siege of Maastricht, he exercised no overall command, for the regiments of his brigade were spread out across the Flanders and Rhine fronts. His colonels were, in consequence, very powerful men, and Robert Scott of the Royal English Regiment held his own courts-martial, appointed officers as he pleased, and happily swindled officers and men of their pay. Amalgamations and reductions were frequent, and in early 1674 Bevil Skelton’s Regiment was merged with the Earl of Peterborough’s Regiment to emerge as the 1st Battalion of the Royal English Regiment.
(#litres_trial_promo) On 19 March 1674 a newsletter from Paris announced:
Lord Peterborough’s Regiment, now in France, is to be broken up and some companies of it joined to the companies that went out of the Guards last summer, and to be incorporated into one regiment, and to remain there for the present under the command of Captain Churchill, son of Sir Winston.
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His colonelcy, of course, was French, and his English rank did not begin to catch up for almost another year, when he became lieutenant colonel of the Duke of York’s Regiment.
Much of the British brigade was destined to serve on France’s eastern borders against the German coalition forces of the Emperor Leopold I and the Elector of Brandenburg, whose entry into what had begun as a Dutch war reflected the way in which it was tilting out of Louis’ control. The French army on this front was commanded by Marshal Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne. Turenne was arguably the greatest captain of his age, and might have done even better during this war had it not been for his long-standing quarrel with the marquis de Louvois, Louis’ formidable war minister.
When Field Marshal Lord Wolseley wrote his biography of Marlborough more than a century ago, he concluded that Turenne had been ‘tutor in war’ to the young Jack Churchill.
(#litres_trial_promo) We know that Turenne called him ‘the handsome Englishman’. There is also a story, widely repeated though without a reliable primary source to back it up, that, when a French colonel was forced back from a position, Turenne bet that Churchill, with fewer men under his command, would retake it: he won his money.
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On 16 June 1674 Turenne fought the emperor’s army at Sinsheim, roughly midway between Philippsburg on the Rhine and Heilbronn on the Neckar. Both sides were roughly equal in numbers, and the Imperialists were strongly posted behind the River Breusch, on a slab of high ground. Turenne managed to turn both enemy flanks by making good use of unpromising terrain, getting his men onto the plateau by ‘a narrow defile on one side and a steep climb on the other’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even French sources suggest that it was the disciplined fire of the British infantry that checked the counterattacks of Imperialist cuirassiers.
(#litres_trial_promo) The careful historian C.T. Atkinson noted that Churchill’s regiment was not present at the battle, but it is clear that both Churchill and his fellow colonel, George Hamilton of the Irish Regiment, accompanied Lord George Douglas, who had been sent off to reconnoitre with 1,500 musketeers and six light guns.
Serving as a volunteer, with no formal command responsibility, Churchill would have had the opportunity to see just how Turenne went about his business, and the French army, at around 25,000 men, was small enough for a well-mounted observer to follow its movements closely. The essence of Turenne’s success at Sinsheim was his swift reading of the ground to see what chance it gave him to get at the enemy, and the routes he selected had not been identified by the Imperialists as likely avenues of approach. The French commemorative medal for the battle bore the words Vis et Celeritas (vigour and speed), which might so easily have been Churchill’s own watchwords.
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By the time that Turenne had moved south to fight the battle of Ensheim, on 4 October 1674, in weather which worsened from drizzle to a downpour, Churchill’s regiment was indeed present with the main French army. The fight hinged on possession of a little wood on the Imperialist left, eventually carried by the French, though with great bloodshed. Churchill’s men fought their way through it, overran a battery, and cleared the Imperialist infantry from ‘a very good ditch’ which they then occupied, obeying the orders of ‘M. de Vaubrun, one of our lieutenant generals’ to hold that ground and advance no further. ‘I durst not brag too much of our victory,’ wrote our young colonel, ‘but it is certain that they left the field as soon as we. We have three of their cannon, several of their colours and some prisoners.’ Louis de Duras (later Earl of Feversham) commanded a troop of Life Guards at that battle, and was eventually to assume command of the British brigade. He declared that ‘No one in the world could have done better than Mr Churchill could have done and M de Turenne is indeed very well pleased with all our nation,’ and Turenne’s official dispatch paid handsome tribute to Churchill and his men.
(#litres_trial_promo) In his report to Monmouth, Churchill recorded the loss of eleven of his twenty-two officers, but added that Monmouth’s own regiment of horse had fared far worse, losing its lieutenant colonel and almost all its officers killed or wounded, as well as half the troopers and several standards. He was anything but an uncritical admirer of Turenne’s, though, and admitted that ‘half our foot was posted so that they did not fight at all’.
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On 5 January 1675 Turenne won the battle that decided the campaign. He pulled back from the Rhine near Haguenau, and allowed many of his officers (including Louis de Duras) to take leave in Paris, giving the impression that he had ended the campaign, for armies usually slunk into winter quarters in October and emerged from their hibernation in April. But in fact he swung in a long fish-hook march round the Vosges, through Epinal and the Belfort gap, to find his opponents relaxed in their winter quarters near Colmar – and what better place to relax, with so much of the golden bitter-sweet Gewürztraminer conveniently to hand? Although the Imperialists managed to rally and face him at Turckheim, he kept them pinned to their position by frontal pressure before sending an outflanking force through the rough country on their left. Turenne took the village of Turckheim after a stiff tussle in which British musketry proved decisive, and went on to drive his opponents from Alsace. In July that year Turenne was killed by a cannonball, a loss that France could ill afford.
The campaign certainly showed Churchill the crueller side of war. In the summer of 1674 Turenne’s men ravaged the Palatinate as they marched through it. This was done partly to obtain supplies and partly to prevent the Imperialists from obtaining them, but also, as Turenne told the Elector Palatine, who complained about the sufferings of his people, because the local populace attacked stragglers and isolated groups, murdering soldiers with the most appalling cruelty.
(#litres_trial_promo) Turenne’s harsh treatment of the Palatinate was not on the same scale as the deliberate destruction of the whole area seven years later, on the specific orders of Louis XIV, but even so the damage was frightful. Archdeacon Coxe quotes a letter written to Churchill from Metz in 1711 in which the widow Saint-Just thanks him because ‘The troops who came and burnt everything around my land at Mezeray in the plain spared my estate, saying that they were so ordered by high authority.’
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If there had been any doubts about where John Churchill stood in royal favour, his campaigning under Turenne resolved them. His English lieutenant colonelcy had materialised in early 1675, and three years later he was appointed colonel of one of the regiments of foot to be raised, not this time to support the French, but to help defend the Dutch: the realignment of English foreign policy was now complete. There is, though, no evidence that Churchill’s new regiment was ever actually formed. His colonelcy (carefully dated a day after that of George Legge, who was to be Pepys’s master on the Tangier mission) was simply a device to ensure that John Churchill had ‘precedence and pay equivalent to the very important work he was now called upon to discharge’. He had reached a key break in his career, and was striding out to bridge the narrow gap between soldiering and diplomacy: the young cavalier had come of age.
* (#ulink_420681a8-6782-56f8-a514-ecf397bce3ab) In the seventeenth century the regiment’s ancestor, Hepburn’s Regiment, in French service, was in dispute with the Regiment de Picardie over the dates of their respective foundations. In the process, the Scots claimed to have been on duty when Christ was crucified.
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From Court to Coup (#ulink_e62f7fa9-3d71-5fdd-8d65-90b8bccbd3a1)
Love and Colonel Churchill (#ulink_0c1ad532-de5d-5a18-9bed-983dcb8f7483)
John Churchill was in love. Sarah Jennings, the object of his affections, had been born on 5 June 1660, the week after Charles II returned from exile.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her father, Richard Jennings, came from a family of Somerset gentry which had moved up to Hertfordshire and lived at Holywell House near St Albans. Richard’s father had been high sheriff of the county and MP for St Albans. He himself sat for the same constituency, and had supported John Pym, one of the leaders of the opposition to Charles I in the early days of the Long Parliament, but had later, as a member of the Convention Parliament, backed the return of Charles II.
Although Richard Jennings was in theory a wealthy man, with perhaps £4,000 a year from property in Hertfordshire, Somerset and Kent, his estates were encumbered with debt and he had many younger siblings who had to be provided for. Sarah was the youngest of five children, with two brothers and two sisters, and it may have been the strains of a large family and hopeless debts that drove her parents to split. She moved to London with her mother Frances, who sought (unavailingly) to rescue her dowry from the shipwreck of Richard’s finances. In 1673 Sarah followed her sister Frances into the household of the Duchess of York. Frances had served James’s first wife Anne Hyde until her death in 1671, and soon became a maid of honour to Mary of Modena. The comte de Gramont called her ‘la belle Jenyns’, who was as lovely as ‘Aurora or the promise of spring’. It speaks volumes for her determination that she resisted the Duke of York’s roving eye and busy hands, but remained on sufficiently good terms to get her sister a place in the household.
In 1668 Richard Jennings died, and Sarah’s mother, who inherited little but his creditors, moved into an apartment in St James’s Palace with her daughters. The scurrilous Mrs Manley, author of The New Atlantis, a Tory scandal-sheet, was later to accuse her of witchcraft. She was like ‘the famous Mother Shipton, who by the power and influence of her magic art had placed her daughter in the Court’.
(#litres_trial_promo) There are too many contemporary complaints about Mrs Jennings for us to attribute them simply to political malice. She was certainly evil-tempered, may actually have been unhinged, and some suggested that she dabbled in the black arts and the procurement of that commodity most sought after by the court, pretty girls. In any case, the maids of honour were hardly above suspicion. Samuel Pepys grumbled that they bestowed their favours as they pleased without anyone taking any notice, and Frances and a friend once amused themselves by dressing up as orange sellers (a common cover for prostitution) and standing outside a playhouse to accost two gentlemen of their acquaintance. They were given away by their expensive shoes.
Sarah met John towards the end of 1675, and they began to dance together at balls and parties. Sarah had a blazing row with her mother at about this time, and eventually Mrs Jennings was ‘commanded to leave the court and her daughter in it, notwithstanding the mother’s petition, that she might have her girl with her, the girl saying she is a mad woman’. Theirs was a relationship which prospered only at a distance, and attempts at reunion regularly resulted in hot words. Some time after her marriage, after yet another furious argument in which she urged her mother to get into the coach and not freeze to death outside it, Sarah affirmed that ‘I will ever be your most dutiful daughter, whatever you are to me.’
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Just as John Churchill’s character was shaped by growing up in straitened circumstances, so Sarah’s was influenced by her own experience of poverty, genteel though it was, and by her inability to tolerate her mother’s company, however much both of them genuinely hoped that their next meeting would bury bad feelings for ever. We often pay out in adult life the coins we receive as children, and in Sarah’s tumultuous relationship with her mother we have a foretaste of her dealings with her own daughters. Sarah was certainly beautiful, not with the classical good looks of her sister Frances, but with that thin edge of imperfection that men often find even more attractive. She had long fair hair that she always made the most of, full, firm lips, a naturally pink complexion, and a nose that turned up, ever so slightly, at its tip.
Even at the age of sixteen she had unstoppable determination and a flaming temper. There is a great deal about Sarah Marlborough that is hard to admire, but the three centuries that separate us cannot dull the impact of this outspoken, uncontrollable and self-willed beauty. One can see why, once John Churchill had met her, he never thought seriously about marrying anybody else, and we can never practically separate John Churchill, soldier and politician, from John Churchill, husband and lover, nor usefully speculate on what he might or might not have become without Sarah. One incident throws their relationship into sharp perspective. When Marlborough was captain general of Queen Anne’s armies and one of the most important men in the kingdom, he entered Sarah’s dressing room to tell her that Sidney Godolphin, the lord treasurer, was going to dine with them. She was brushing a hank of her yellow hair over one shoulder and, furious at having her evening spoiled, seized a pair of scissors and cut it off, then flounced out in a fury. He picked up the severed tress, tied it up with ribbon, and kept it in his strongbox until he died. She found it there, and it broke her heart.
Some of the letters written during their courtship have survived. All are undated, most are from John to Sarah, and she herself assures us that the correspondence started when she was not more than fifteen. She told him to burn her letters, and he seems to have obeyed her, because the eight that survive are only copies. Sarah, in contrast, kept his letters and read them from time to time, and when she had only a year to live, wrote on one: ‘Read over in 1743 desiring to burn them, but I could not do it.’ His letters, in black ink and a slightly sloping hand, show all the symptoms of courtly love. ‘You are, and ever shall be, the dear object of my life,’ he tells her, ‘for by heavens I will never love anybody but yourself.’ In another he assures her:
If your happiness can depend upon the esteem and love I have for you, you ought to be the happiest thing breathing, for I have never loved anybody to the height I do you. I love you so well that your happiness I prefer much above my own; and if you think meeting me is what you ought not to do, or that it will disquiet you, I promise you I will never press you more to do it. As I prefer your happiness above my own, so I hope you will sometimes think how well I love you; and what you can do without doing yourself an injury, I hope you will be so kind as to do it – I mean in letting me see that you wish me better than the rest of mankind; and in return I swear to you that I never will love anything but your dear self, which has made so sure a conquest of me that, had I the will, I will not have the power ever to break my chains. Pray let me hear from you, and know if I shall be so happy as to see you tonight.
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He gave her presents. First she had a choice of two puppies, and then he sent her a waistcoat: ‘I do assure you there is not such another to be had in England.’
(#litres_trial_promo) From what we already know of Sarah we will not be surprised to hear that there were rows. ‘To show you how unreasonable you are in accusing me,’ he wrote, in a letter which still bears red seals and threads of green ribbon,
I dare swear you yourself will own that your going from me in the Duchess’s drawing-room did show as much contempt as was possible. I may grieve at it, but I will no more complain when you do it, for I suppose it is what pleases your humour … Could you see my heart you would not be so cruel to say I do not love you, for by all that is good I love you and only you. If I may have the pleasure of seeing you tonight, please let me know, and believe that I am never truly pleased but when I am with you.
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This correspondence dates from 1675–76, after John’s service under Turenne in Alsace and the Palatinate. However, it is hard to be sure of exact dates. Courtin, the French ambassador in London, had kept Louvois apprised of the goings-on at court, and when there was first talk of John Churchill commanding a French regiment, Louvois advised against it, arguing that Churchill’s real concern at that moment was ‘to give more satisfaction to a rich and faded mistress’ rather than to serve his own royal master, undoubtedly a reference to his relationship with Barbara Castlemaine. Some time later, Courtin reported that ‘Mr Churchill prefers to serve the very pretty sister of Lady Hamilton than to be lieutenant colonel of Monmouth’s regiment.’ In 1665 Frances Jennings had married Sir George Hamilton, Marlborough’s fellow colonel, who commanded the Irish Regiment until his death in action in 1676. Winston S. Churchill dates Courtin’s second letter to November 1676. It raises the question as to why Churchill might have been interested in being lieutenant colonel to Monmouth, at best a sideways move in the hierarchy, but it does suggest that he was now so heavily preoccupied with Sarah that he was unwilling to accept a full-time command appointment.
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Several things blocked the path of true love. First, John Churchill’s relationship with Barbara Castlemaine was common knowledge at court, and Courtin reported to Paris that Sarah’s parents had refused their consent to her marriage with John. This cannot be true, for Sarah’s father was long dead, but it may well reflect the opposition of Sarah’s mother. Next, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill were firmly against the union. They hoped that John would marry another of the maids of honour, Catherine Sedley, daughter and heiress to the wealthy Sir Charles Sedley. Her portrait suggests that she was by no means as attractive as Sarah (the attentive Courtin called her ‘very rich and very ugly’), and she certainly had a caustic wit. It may be that rumours linking her name with John’s were the reason for Sarah’s accusation in the last of his letters quoted above. Catherine eventually became yet another of James’s mistresses, though when Queen Mary reminded her of the fact after 1688 she riposted: ‘Remember, ma’am, if I broke one of the commandments with your father, you have broken another against him.’
