Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845

Upon Churchill's return to London, the brilliant reputation which had preceded, and the even augmented personal advantages which accompanied him, immediately rendered him the idol of beauty and fashion. The ladies of the palace vied for his homage – the nobles of the land hastened to cultivate his society. Like Julius Cæsar, he was carried away by the stream, and plunged into the vortex of courtly dissipation with the ardour which marks an energetic character in the pursuit whether of good or evil. The elegance of his person and manners, and charms of his conversation, prevailed so far with Charles II. and the Duke of York, that soon after, though not yet thirty years of age, he obtained a regiment. In 1680 he married the celebrated Sarah Jennings, the favourite lady in attendance on the Princess Anne, second daughter of the Duke of York, one of the most admired beauties of the court, and this alliance increased his influence, already great, with that Prince, and laid the foundation of the future grandeur of his fortunes. Shortly after his marriage he accompanied the Duke of York to Scotland, in the course of which they both were nearly shipwrecked on the coast of Fife. On this occasion the Duke made the greatest efforts to preserve his favourite's life, and succeeded in doing so, although the danger was such that many of the Scottish nobles perished under his eye. On his return to London in 1682, he was presented by his patron to the King, who made him colonel of the third regiment of guards. When the Duke of York ascended the throne in 1685, on the demise of his brother, Churchill kept his place as one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber, and was raised to the rank of brigadier-general. He was sent by his sovereign to Paris to notify his accession to Louis XIV., and on his return he was created a peer by the title of Baron Churchill of Sandbridge in the county of Hertford – a title which he took from an estate there which he had acquired in right of his wife. On the revolt of the Duke of Monmouth, he had an opportunity of showing at once his military ability, and, by a signal service, his gratitude to his benefactor. Lord Feversham had the command of the royal forces, and Churchill was his major-general. The general-in-chief, however, kept so bad a look-out, that he was on the point of being surprised and cut to pieces by the rebel forces, who, on this occasion at least, were conducted with ability. The general and almost all his officers were in their beds, and sound asleep, when Monmouth, at the head of all his forces, silently debouched out of his camp, and suddenly fell on the royal army. The rout would have been complete, and probably James II. dethroned, had not Churchill, whose vigilant eye nothing escaped, observed the movement, and hastily collected a handful of men, with whom he made so vigorous a resistance as gave time for the remainder of the army to form, and repel this well-conceived enterprise.

Churchill's mind was too sagacious, and his knowledge of the feelings of the nation too extensive, not to be aware of the perilous nature of the course upon which James had adventured, in endeavouring to bring about, if not the absolute re-establishment of the Catholic religion, at least such a quasi-establishment of it as the people deemed, and probably with reason, was, with so aspiring a body of ecclesiastics, in effect the same thing. When he saw the headstrong monarch break through all bounds, and openly trample on the liberties, while he shocked the religious feelings, of his people, he wrote to him to point out, in firm but respectful terms, the danger of his conduct. He declared to Lord Galway, when James's innovations began, that if he persisted in his design of overturning the constitution and religion of his country, he would leave his service. So far his conduct was perfectly unexceptionable. Our first duty is to our country, our second only to our benefactor. If they are brought into collision, as they often are during the melancholy vicissitudes of a civil war, an honourable man, whatever it may cost him, has but one part to take. He must not abandon his public duty for his private feelings, but he must never betray official duty. If Churchill, perceiving the frantic course of his master, had withdrawn from his service, and then either taken no part in the revolution which followed, or even appeared in arms against him, the most scrupulous moralist could have discovered nothing reprehensible in his conduct. History has in every age applauded the virtue, while it has commiserated the anguish, of the elder Brutus, who sacrificed his sons to the perhaps too rigorous laws of his country.

But Churchill did not do this, and thence has arisen an ineffaceable blot on his memory. He did not relinquish the service of the infatuated monarch; he retained his office and commands; but he employed the influence and authority thence derived, to ruin his benefactor. So far were the representations of Churchill from having inspired any doubts of his fidelity, that James, when the Prince of Orange landed, confided to him the command of a corps of five thousand men, destined to oppose his progress. At the very time that he accepted that command, he had, if we may believe his panegyrist Ledyard, signed a letter, along with several other peers, addressed to the Prince of Orange, inviting him to come over, and had actually concluded with Major-General Kirk, who commanded at Axminster, a convention, for the seizure of the king and giving him up to his hostile son-in-law. James was secretly warned that Churchill was about to betray him, but he refused to believe it of one from whom he had hitherto experienced such devotion, and was only wakened from his dream of security by learning that his favourite had gone over with the five thousand men whom he commanded to the Prince of Orange. Not content with this, it was Churchill's influence, joined to that of his wife, which is said to have induced James's own daughter, the Princess Anne, and Prince George of Denmark, to detach themselves from the cause of the falling monarch; and drew from that unhappy sovereign the mournful exclamation, "My God! my very children have forsaken me." In what does this conduct differ from that of Labedoyere, who, at the head of the garrison of Grenoble, deserted to Napoleon when sent out to oppose him? – or Lavalette, who employed his influence, as postmaster under Louis XVIII., to forward the Imperial conspiracy? – or Marshal Ney, who, after promising at the court of the Tuileries to bring the ex-emperor back in an iron cage, no sooner reached the royal camp at Melun, than he issued a proclamation calling on the troops to desert the Bourbons, and mount the tricolor cockade? Nay, is not Churchill's conduct, in a moral point of view, worse than that of Ney; for the latter abandoned the trust reposed in him by a new master, forced upon an unwilling nation, to rejoin his old benefactor and companion in arms; but the former abandoned the trust reposed in him by his old master and benefactor, to range himself under the banner of a competitor for the throne, to whom he was bound neither by duty nor obligation. And yet such is often the inequality of crimes and punishments in this world, that Churchill was raised to the pinnacle of greatness by the very conduct which consigned Ney, with justice, so far as his conduct is concerned, to an ignominious death.

"Treason ne'er prospers; for when it does,None dare call it treason."

History forgets its first and noblest duty when it fails, by its distribution of praise and blame, to counterbalance, so far as its verdict can, this inequality, which, for inscrutable but doubtless wise purposes, Providence has permitted in this transient scene. Charity forbids us to scrutinize such conduct too severely. It is the deplorable effect of a successful revolution, even when commenced for the most necessary purposes, to obliterate the ideas of man on right and wrong, and leave no other test in the general case for public conduct but success. It is its first effect to place them in such trying circumstances that none but the most confirmed and resolute virtue can pass unscathed through the ordeal. He knew the human heart well, who commanded us in our daily prayers to supplicate not to be led into temptation, even before asking for deliverance from evil. Let no man be sure, however much, on a calm survey, he may condemn the conduct of Marlborough and Ney, that in similar circumstances he would not have done the same.

The magnitude of the service rendered by Churchill to the Prince of Orange, immediately appeared in the commands conferred upon him. Hardly was he settled at William's headquarters when he was dispatched to London to assume the command of the Horse Guards; and, while there, he signed, on the 20th December 1688, the famous Act of Association in favour of the Prince of Orange. Shortly after, he was named lieutenant-general of the armies of William, and immediately made a new organization of the troops, under officers whom he could trust, which proved of the utmost service to William on the unstable throne on which he was soon after seated. He was present at most of the long and momentous debates which took place in the House of Peers on the question on whom the crown should be conferred, and at first is said to have inclined to a regency; but with a commendable delicacy he absented himself on the night of the decisive vote on the vacancy of the throne. He voted, however, on the 6th of February for the resolution which settled the crown on William and Mary; and he assisted at their coronation, under the title of Earl of Marlborough, to which he had shortly before been elevated by William. England having, on the accession of the new monarch, joined the continental league against France, Marlborough received the command of the British auxiliary force in the Netherlands, and by his courage and ability contributed in a remarkable manner to the victory of Walcourt. In 1690 he received orders to return from Flanders in order to assume a command in Ireland, then agitated by a general insurrection in favour of James; but, actuated by some remnant of attachment to his old benefactor, he eluded on various pretences complying with the order, till the battle of the Boyne had extinguished the hopes of the dethroned monarch, when he came over and made himself master of Cork and Kinsale. In 1691 he was sent again into Flanders, in order to act under the immediate orders of William, who was then, with heroic constancy, contending with the still superior forces of France; but hardly had he landed there when he was arrested, deprived of all his commands, and sent to the Tower of London, along with several of the noblemen of distinction in the British senate.

Upon this part of the history of Marlborough there hangs a veil of mystery, which all the papers brought to light in more recent times have not entirely removed. At the time, his disgrace was by many attributed to some cutting sarcasms in which he had indulged on the predilection of William for the continental troops, and especially the Dutch; by others, to intrigues conducted by Lady Marlborough and him, to obtain for the Princess Anne a larger pension than the king was disposed to allow her. But neither of these causes are sufficient to explain the fall and arrest of so eminent a man as Marlborough, and who had rendered such important services to the newly-established monarch. It would appear from what has transpired in later times, that a much more serious cause had produced the rupture between him and William. The charge brought against him at the time, but which was not prosecuted, as it was found to rest on false or insufficient evidence, was that of having, along with Lords Salisbury, Cornbury, the Bishop of Rochester, and Sir Basil Ferebrace, signed the scheme of an association for the restoration of James. Sir John Fenwick, who was executed for a treasonable correspondence with James II. shortly after Marlborough's arrest, declared in the course of his trial that he was privy to the design, had received the pardon of the exiled monarch, and had engaged to procure for him the adhesion of the army. The Papers, published in Coxe, rather corroborate the view that he was privy to it; and it is supported by those found at Rome in the possession of Cardinal York.3 That Marlborough, disgusted with the partiality of William for his Dutch troops, and irritated at the open severity of his Government, should have repented of his abandonment of his former sovereign and benefactor, is highly probable. But it can scarcely be taken as an apology for one act of treason, that he meditated the commission of another. It only shows how perilous, in public as in private life, is any deviation from the path of integrity, that it impelled such a man into so tortuous and disreputable a path.

Marlborough, however, was a man whose services were too valuable to the newly-established dynasty, for him to be permitted to remain long in disgrace. He was soon liberated, indeed, from the Tower, as no sufficient evidence of his alleged accession to the conspiracy had been obtained. Several years elapsed, however, before he emerged from the privacy into which he prudently retired on his liberation from confinement. Queen Mary having been carried off by the smallpox on the 17th of January 1696, Marlborough wisely abstained from even taking part in the debates which followed in Parliament, during which some of the malcontents dropped hints as to the propriety of conferring the crown on his immediate patroness, the Princess Anne. This prudent reserve, together with the absence of any decided proofs at the time of Marlborough's correspondence with James, seems to have at length weakened William's resentment, and by degrees he was taken back into favour. The peace of Ryswick, signed on the 20th of September 1697, having consolidated the power of that monarch, Marlborough was, on the 19th of June 1698, made preceptor of the young Duke of Gloucester, his nephew, son of the Princess Anne, and heir-presumptive to the throne; and this appointment, which at once restored his credit at court, was accompanied by the gracious expression – "My lord, make my nephew to resemble yourself, and he will be every thing which I can desire." On the same day he was re-appointed to his rank as a privy councillor, and took the oaths and his seat accordingly. So fully had he now regained the confidence of William, that he was three times named one of the nine lords justiciars to whom the administration of affairs in Great Britain was subsequently entrusted, during the temporary absence of William in Holland; and the War of the Succession having become certain in the year 1700, that monarch, who was preparing to take an active part in it, appointed Marlborough, on 1st June 1701, his ambassador-extraordinary at the Hague, and commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in Flanders. This double appointment in effect invested Marlborough with the entire direction of affairs civil and military, so far as England was concerned, on the Continent. William, who was highly indignant at the recognition of the Chevalier St George as King of England, on the death of his father James II., in September 1701, was preparing to prosecute the war with the vigour and perseverance which so eminently distinguished his character, when he was carried off by the effects of a fall from his horse, on the 19th March 1702. But that event made no alteration in the part which England took in the war which was commencing, and it augmented rather than diminished the influence which Marlborough had in its direction. The Princess Anne, with whom, both individually and through Lady Marlborough, he was so intimately connected, mounted the throne without opposition; and one of her first acts was to bestow on Marlborough the order of the Garter, confirm him in his former offices, and appoint him, in addition, her plenipotentiary at the Hague. War was declared on the 15th May 1702, and Marlborough immediately went over to the Netherlands to take the command of the Allied army, sixty thousand strong, then lying before Nimeguen, which was threatened by a superior force on the part of the French.

It is at this period – time 1702 – that the great and memorable, and withal blameless period of Marlborough's life commenced; the next ten years were one unbroken series of efforts, victories, and glory. He arrived in the camp at Nimeguen on the evening of the 2d July, having been a few weeks before at the Hague; and immediately assumed the command. Lord Athlone, who had previously enjoyed that situation, at first laid claim to an equal authority with him; but this ruinous division, which never is safe, save with men so great as he and Eugene, and would unquestionably have proved ruinous to the common cause if shared with Athlone, was prevented by the States-General, who insisted upon the undivided direction being conferred on Marlborough. Most fortunately it is precisely at this period that the correspondence now published commences, which, in the three volumes already published, presents an unbroken series of his letters to persons of every description down to May, 1708. They thus embrace the early successes in Flanders, the cross march into Bavaria and battle of Blenheim, the expulsion of the French from Germany, the battle of Ramillies, and taking of Brussels and Antwerp, the mission to the King of Sweden at Dresden, the battle of Almanza, in Spain, and all the important events of the first six years of the war. More weighty and momentous materials for history never were presented to the public; and their importance will not be properly appreciated, if the previous condition of Europe, and imminent hazard to the independence of all the adjoining states, from the unmeasured ambition, and vast power of Louis XIV., is not taken into consideration.

Accustomed as we are to regard the Bourbons as a fallen and unfortunate race, the objects rather of commiseration than apprehension, and Napoleon as the only sovereign who has really threatened our independence, and all but effected the subjugation of the Continent, we can scarcely conceive the terror with which a century and a half ago they, with reason, inspired all Europe, or the narrow escape which the continental states, at least, then made from being all reduced to the condition of provinces of France. The forces of that monarchy, at all times formidable to its neighbours, from the warlike spirit of its inhabitants, and their rapacious disposition, conspicuous alike in the earliest and the latest times;4 its central situation, forming, as it were, the salient angle of a bastion projecting into the centre of Germany; and its numerous population – were then, in a peculiar manner, to be dreaded, from their concentration in the hands of an able and ambitious monarch, who had succeeded for the first time, for two hundred years, in healing the divisions and stilling the feuds of its nobles, and turned their buoyant energy into the channel of foreign conquest. Immense was the force which, by this able policy, was found to exist in France, and terrible the danger which it at once brought upon the neighbouring states. It was rendered the more formidable in the time of Louis XIV., from the extraordinary concentration of talent which his discernment or good fortune had collected around his throne, and the consummate talent, civil and military, with which affairs were directed. Turenne, Boufflers, and Condé, were his generals; Vauban was his engineer, Louvois and Torcy were his statesmen. The lustre of the exploits of these illustrious men, in itself great, was much enhanced by the still greater blaze of fame which encircled his throne, from the genius of the literary men who have given such immortal celebrity to his reign. Corneille and Racine were his tragedians; Molière wrote his comedies; Bossuet, Fénélon, and Bourdaloue were his theologians; Massillon his preacher, Boileau his critic; Le Notre laid out his gardens; Le Brun painted his halls. Greatness had come upon France, as, in truth, it does to most other states, in all departments at the same time; and the adjoining nations, alike intimidated by a power which they could not resist, and dazzled by a glory which they could not emulate, had come almost to despair of maintaining their independence; and were sinking into that state of apathy, which is at once the consequence and the cause of extraordinary reverses.

The influence of these causes had distinctly appeared in the extraordinary good fortune which had attended the enterprises of Louis, and the numerous conquests he had made since he had launched into the career of foreign aggrandizement. Nothing could resist his victorious arms. At the head of an army of an hundred thousand men, directed by Turenne, he speedily overran Flanders. Its fortified cities yielded to the science of Vauban, or the terrors of his name. The boasted barrier of the Netherlands was passed in a few weeks; hardly any of its far-famed fortresses made any resistance. The passage of the Rhine was achieved under the eyes of the monarch with little loss, and melodramatic effect. One half of Holland was soon overrun, and the presence of the French army at the gates of Amsterdam seemed to presage immediate destruction to the United Provinces; and but for the firmness of their leaders, and a fortunate combination of circumstances, unquestionably would have done so. The alliance with England, in the early part of his reign, and the junction of the fleets of Britain and France to ruin their fleets and blockade their harbours, seemed to deprive them of their last resource, derived from their energetic industry. Nor were substantial fruits awanting from these conquests. Alsace and Franche Comté were overrun, and, with Lorraine, permanently annexed to the French monarchy; and although, by the peace of Nimeguen, part of his acquisitions in Flanders was abandoned, enough was retained by the devouring monarchy to deprive the Dutch of the barrier they had so ardently desired, and render their situation to the last degree precarious, in the neighbourhood of so formidable a power. The heroic William, indeed, had not struggled in vain for the independence of his country. The distant powers of Europe, at length wakened to a sense of their danger, had made strenuous efforts to coerce the ambition of France; the revolution of 1688 had restored England to its natural place in the van of the contest for continental freedom; and the peace of Ryswick in 1697 had in some degree seen the trophies of conquests more equally balanced between the contending parties. But still it was with difficulty that the alliance kept its ground against Louis – any untoward event, the defection of any considerable power, would at once, it was felt, cast the balance in his favour; and all history had demonstrated how many are the chances against any considerable confederacy keeping for any length of time together, when the immediate danger which had stilled their jealousies, and bound together their separate interests, is in appearance removed. Such was the dubious and anxious state of Europe, when the death of Charles II. at Madrid, on the 1st November 1700, and the bequest of his vast territories to Philip Duke of Anjou, second son of the Dauphin, and grandson of Louis XIV., threatened at once to place the immense resources of the Castilian monarchy at the disposal of the ambitious monarch of France, whose passion for glory had not diminished with his advanced years, and whose want of moderation was soon evinced by his accepting, after an affected hesitation, the splendid bequest.

Threatened with so serious a danger, it is not surprising that the powers of Europe were in the utmost alarm, and erelong took steps to endeavour to avert it. Such, however, was the terror inspired by the name of Louis XIV., and the magnitude of the addition made by this bequest to his power, that the new monarch, in the first instance, ascended the throne of Spain and the Indies without any opposition. The Spanish Netherlands, so important both from their intrinsic riches, their situation as the certain theatre of war, and the numerous fortified towns with which they were studded, had been early secured for the young Bourbon prince by the Elector of Bavaria, who was at that time the governor of those valuable possessions. Sardinia, Naples, Sicily, the Milanese, and the other Spanish possessions in Italy, speedily followed the example. The distant colonies of the crown of Castile, in America and the Indies, sent in their adhesion. The young Prince of Anjou made his formal entry into Spain in the beginning of 1701, and was crowned at Madrid under the title of Philip V. The principal continental powers, with the exception of the Emperor, acknowledged his title to the throne. The Dutch were in despair: they beheld the power of Louis XIV. brought to their very gates. Flanders, instead of being the barrier of Europe against France, had become the outwork of France against Europe. The flag of Louis XIV. floated on Antwerp, Brussels, and Ghent. Italy, France, Spain, and Flanders, were united in one close league, and in fact formed but one dominion. It was the empire of Charlemagne over again, directed with equal ability, founded on greater power, and backed by the boundless treasures of the Indies. Spain had threatened the liberties of Europe in the end of the sixteenth century: France had all but proved fatal to them in the close of the seventeenth. What hope was there of being able to make head against them both, united under such a head as Louis XIV.?