who was one of his mistresses. Captain Charles Godfrey went on to marry Arabella Churchill, and to serve under Churchill after he had become, as Duke of Marlborough, the most illustrious British soldier of his age.
If John Churchill is the best example of the gradual blurring of boundaries between professional and gentleman officers he is certainly not the only one. As civil war veterans outlasted their military usefulness, a series of wars against first the Dutch and then the French made it increasingly hard to maintain a standing army that only did duty at home and increased the demand for competent officers. Percy Kirke spelt his first name Piercy and probably pronounced it that way. He was the son of a court official and commanded enough interest to get commissioned into the (rather fragile) Lord Admiral’s Regiment in 1666 and then to go on into the (wholly more robust) Blues and to serve as a volunteer at Maastricht. He became colonel of the Tangier Regiment in 1682, and was made governor two years later. His behaviour shocked Pepys – there on a fact-finding mission with Lord Dartmouth. Kirke tolerated the drunken behaviour of soldiers and generously offered to find a conveniently sized whore for a vertically-challenged member of Dartmouth’s retinue, warning the young man that he needed to strike fast before all the ladies had gone aboard the fleet to accommodate the sailors. Kirke brought his regiment into English service, and was a brigadier for the Sedgemoor campaign. His regiment’s paschal lamb insignia and less than mild behaviour to the rebels earned it the nickname Kirke’s Lambs. He assured James II that he had no interest in becoming Roman Catholic. If he was to change his religious opinion he had already given the Emperor of Morocco first refusal and would become Muslim. He defected to William of Orange in 1688 and died a lieutenant general, in 1691.
In contrast, Theophilus Oglethorpe, scion of a Yorkshire Catholic family, served under Marshal Turenne in France. He was commissioned into the Tangier Horse, which came onto the English establishment as the Royal Dragoons in 1684, and then moved on to the Life Guards. In 1685, while commanding a flanking force of Feversham’s army as it marched west, he stumbled into a smoky little clash at Keynsham bridge. He was so well regarded by Feversham that Churchill, just ahead of him in the hierarchy, feared that he would scoop the campaign’s honours. In the event Churchill not only made the right dispositions at Sedgemoor but also profited from the widespread criticism of Feversham afterwards. Whereas Churchill changed sides in 1688, Oglethorpe did not, although the victors courted him assiduously and he knew that opposition to William of Orange must inevitably cost him his commission, and so it did. He is another good example of the well-connected officer with enough money to sustain himself in the army but a keen interest in his profession.
The contrast between Churchill and Oglethorpe in 1688 illustrates one of the dangers of the growing professionalisation of officers. The line of cleavage in 1688 was complex, for personal ambition and genuine political and religious conviction were often so closely interwoven it might have been difficult for a man to tell us just how he arrived at his decision. Although both Charles II and James II were Roman Catholic – the former fully reconciled to the Church only on his deathbed and the latter a proclaimed Catholic – theirs was in theory a Protestant army. Parliament, perennially nervous about Catholic plots that could imperil the whole Restoration settlement, pressed the king to require officers and men to swear the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy. In 1667 those who had not taken the oaths were turned out, a process which swept up just two officers in the ex-Cromwellian Royal Horse Guards but seventeen from the four regiments of foot. Some crept back in almost at once and others went off to raise troops to serve in France. When parliament passed the Test Act in 1673, Charles sweetly observed it applied to troops on land and not at sea, and quickly parcelled off lots of infantry to serve aboard the fleet. This royal prevarication could not go on forever, and although Charles used his dispensing power to free some Catholic officers from the Act, after the Popish Plot in 1678 he was forced to order the dismissal of all known Catholic officers and soldiers as well as those who had not taken the oath. Ninety-one soldiers and sixteen officers were dismissed from Monmouth’s Regiment of Foot alone.
James, disinclined to take his brother’s more serpentine approach, forced the issue. Sir Edward Hales, a baronet from Kent, stood high in royal favour, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1685. As colonel of a regiment of foot, he was obliged to take the oath yet did not do so. His coachman Arthur Godden (collusively acting on his master’s orders) brought an action against Hales, who was convicted at Rochester assizes in March the following year. Hales appealed to the Court of the King’s Bench, arguing that he had letters patent from the king that dispensed him from the need to take the oath. The judges found in his favour by a majority of eleven to one. The Lord Chief Justice affirmed that it was ‘an inseparable prerogative’ springing from ‘the ancient remains of the sovereign power’ for the monarch to ‘dispense with penal laws in particular cases and upon particular necessary reasons’. We may now doubt whether James seriously proposed to convert England to Catholicism, as was widely alleged at the time. But his action in favouring Catholics and sacking anyone who crossed him, in the army or any other branch of public life, aroused widespread fear. Worse, it was evident that Lord Tyrconnell, James’s lord lieutenant of Ireland, was indeed engaged in the comprehensive catholicisation of the Irish army, which might then come across to coerce England. As the last straw, in 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed freedom of worship to Huguenots; thousands of dispossessed French Protestants duly arrived in England with horrid tales of the rack, breaking-wheel and pyre.
Many officers disapproved of James’s policy. Captain Sandys of the Blues gruffly told him to his face that ‘I understand Your Majesty well enough. I fear God and honour the King, as I ought, but I am not a man that is given to change.’15 Many, including those who, like Churchill, knew him well, feared that he was riding for a fall and his destruction must inevitably encompass those of his adherents. Churchill admitted that his own experience of growing up on the losing side after the Civil War had given him a hatred of ‘poverty and dependence’. His wife Sarah was the prime confidante of Princess Anne, James’s youngest daughter. Anne’s sister Mary was married to William of Orange, head of the Dutch state and leader of the European opposition to Louis XIV’s dynastic and religious ambitions. The details of the military conspiracy against James II are necessarily vague, for the conspirators took good care to keep their tracks covered. The so-called ‘Treason Club’ met in the Rose Tavern in Covent Garden, and the ‘Tangerines’, a loose association of officers who had served there – many of them of a whiggish persuasion in any event – discussed how they might help unseat James. They were kept in contact with the English officers in William’s service by one of the latter’s lieutenant colonels, John Cutts. He had served as a volunteer against the Turks in Hungary, establishing an early claim to the reputation that was to give him the nickname ‘Salamander’ – after the mythical creature that lived in fire – by placing the Imperial standard on the ramparts of Buda. Cutts had no private fortune. Indeed, even after he had been made an Irish peer with a seat in the House of Commons and the governorship of the Isle of Wight he was never free of money worries. A professional rather than a gentleman officer by our earlier categorisation, Cutts had much to gain by a radical shift in patronage in England. We talk lightly about the Curragh affair of 1914 being a ‘mutiny’. In fact the 1688 conspiracy was a genuine mutiny, which succeeded by depriving the army of its leadership in its hour of greatest need.
Amidst all the smoke and shadow two things are evident. William would never have launched his expedition against the grain of autumn weather, with Lord Dartmouth’s royal fleet close at hand, to land in the West Country where Monmouth had been so easily bottled up in 1685, without being certain that James’s army would not fight. The stakes were very high, for the French tide lapped at the borders of Holland, and failure in England might compromise all William’s ambitions. Second, there was every chance that James’s rank and file would indeed have fought. Although we know annoyingly little about the men who plied their pikes and muskets in James’s regiments, this was now, with around 20,000 men, a much bigger army than anything his brother had dreamt of. It was well trained, and nothing in its past suggested that it would not follow its officers. Too many officers, however, declined to lead and those who did try to fight, like the Duke of Berwick, one of James’s sons by Arabella Churchill, and Lieutenant Patrick Sarsfield (big, brave,
