Ashe House had been too badly damaged to be habitable, and that in consequence she moved to her son John Drake’s house at Great Trill, in the parish of Axminster. The question is anything but academic. As Winston Churchill was living with his mother-in-law, Ashe House and Great Trill vie for the honour of being the birthplace of the future Duke of Marlborough. However, the parish register of St Michael’s church Musbury tells those who can penetrate its spidery scrawl: ‘John the son of Mr Winston Churchill, born the 26th day of May 1650,’ and the majority of scholars, including Archdeacon Coxe, whose life overlapped the duke’s, agree that it was indeed in Ashe House that John Churchill first saw the light of day.7
Winston and Elizabeth Churchill had at least nine children. Four sons, Winston (b.1649), Henry, Jasper and Mountjoy, died in infancy or youth. Theobald, born in Dublin in 1662, took holy orders and died in 1685. The remaining four children, Arabella (1647–1730), John, the subject of this book (1650–1722), George (1653–1710) and Charles (1656–1714) all enjoyed careers which abutted on their better-known brother’s, and we will hear from them later.8 The circumstances of John Churchill’s childhood are largely surmise, for he himself tells us nothing of it. The anonymous author of The Lives of the Two Illustrious Generals, published in 1713, assures us that:
He was born in the time of the grand rebellion, when his father siding with the royal party against the usurpers, was under many pressures, which were common to such as adhered to the king. Yet, notwithstanding the devastations and plunderings, and other nefarious practices which were daily committed by the licentious soldiery, no care was omitted on the part of his tender parents for a liberal and gentle education. For he was no sooner out of the hands of women than he was given into those of a sequestered clergyman, who made it his first concern to instil sound principles of religion into him, and that the seeds of humane literature might take deeper root, and he from a just knowledge of the omnipotence of the creator, might have a true sense of the dependence of the creature.9
Things were certainly not easy for the king’s supporters. In 1656 an abortive royalist rising in the south was led by Colonel John Penruddock, who surprised the judges at Salisbury and got as far as South Molton in Devon before he was surrounded and captured. This encouraged Oliver Cromwell, searching fruitlessly for some enduring constitution, to divide England and Wales up into twelve military districts, each under a major general charged with enforcing not only security but also laws against drunkenness and sexual licence. The rule of the major generals was paid for by a ‘decimation tax’ of 10 per cent on royalists. Although the troops of horse who enforced the central government’s will on the regions were sometimes brutal, they were generally ‘honest and efficient’. There was little of the plundering and devastation that our anonymous author complains of, and certainly no licentiousness from these psalm-singing bigots whose efforts did so much to instil in contemporaries a deep hatred of military rule and a suspicion of standing armies.
While Cromwell’s Protectorate fumbled on in its quest for a settlement, Winston Churchill – called to the bar in 1652, though he made no use of it and did not keep term – remained at Ashe, living in the part of the house left unburned by Lord Poulett’s men, in an atmosphere redolent of old dogs and young children, painfully aware that he had backed the wrong horse. He busied himself with the family genealogy, discovering, at least to his own satisfaction, an ancestor who had come over with William the Conqueror, and edging gingerly past the decided possibility that his great-great-great-grandfather had been a blacksmith who had married his employer’s widow. Sarah Marlborough was forthright about all this, and in 1736 commented on Thomas Lediard’s biography of her husband that:
This history takes a great deal of pains to make the Duke of Marlborough’s lineage very ancient. This may be true for aught I know; but it is no matter whether it be true or not in my opinion, for I value nobody for another’s merit.10
There was, sadly, no denying either the fact that the Drakes were a more substantial family, or that without Lady Drake’s generosity Winston Churchill would have no roof over his head. We simply cannot be sure what all this meant in terms of the relationship between Winston Churchill, his growing family and his mother-in-law: young John was certainly proud enough of the Drake connection to take the title of his own earldom from that of Eleanor’s sister’s royalist husband.11 However, he was brought up in a household that demonstrated all too clearly the consequences of being on the losing side and having neither money nor influence: in this respect the child was father to the man.
The King Comes Home in Peace Again
Oliver Cromwell, almost broken by the agonising death of his favourite daughter, died in September 1658, leaving not the stable settlement he had so craved, but a shifting and unstable coalition headed, at least in name, by his son Richard. In an air of worsening political breakdown General George Monck, commander of the army in Scotland but a Devonian by ancestry, who had served the king until his capture in 1646, marched southwards, reaching London in February 1660. He dissolved Parliament, no less than the reinstated Rump of the Long Parliament which had met before the Civil War, and issued writs for another, for which royalists would be allowed to vote. Monck now began to receive letters written to him by the exiled Charles II, but there was still no certainty that the monarchy would be restored.
The Declaration of Breda, issued by Charles on 4 April, made known the conditions on which he would accept restoration to his father’s throne. He proposed to take ‘possession of that right which God and nature hath made our due’, guaranteed a general pardon to all who returned to ‘the loyalty and obedience of good subjects’, apart from those specifically excepted by Parliament, and promised a free Parliament and ‘liberty to tender consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of religion which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom’. The army would receive arrears of pay, and there was an attempt to reassure landowners, great and small, by affirming that grants and purchases of estates made ‘in the continued distractions of so many years and so many and great revolutions’ would be determined by Parliament.12
The declaration and accompanying letters were received by the new ‘Convention’ Parliament, which declared the monarchy restored, and Charles duly returned to the royal palace of Whitehall on 29 May 1660, his thirtieth birthday. ‘All the world in a merry mood,’ wrote Samuel Pepys, ‘because of the king’s coming.’13 John Evelyn was even more elated.
I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God. And all this was done without one drop of blood shed, and by that very army which rebelled against him; but it was the Lord’s doing, for such a Restoration was never mentioned in any history ancient or modern, since the return of the Jews from their Babylonish captivity; nor so joyful a day and so bright ever seen in this nation, this happening when to expect or effect it was past all human policy.14
The vast quantity of scholarly work produced since Samuel Rawson Gardiner wrote on the subject over a century ago has not diluted the fundamental truth of his assertion that: ‘The majority of political Englishmen … thought that Charles II ought to be their king.’15 The issues which were to bedevil the whole of John Churchill’s career were not about monarchy as opposed to republicanism, but about the nature of that monarchy. In this sense the Declaration of Breda was a carefully drafted compromise. It spoke
