Being Strongly Entrenched: The Schellenberg
Hark Now the Drums Beat up Again
Favourites, Bishops and the Union
The Devil Must have Carried Them: Oudenarde
8. Decline, Fall and Resurrection
Failed Peace, Thwarted Ambition
A Very Murdering Battle: Malplaquet
Failed Peace and Falling Government
Portrait of an Age
Marlborough and the Weight of History
Some will tell you that John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, was Britain’s greatest ever general. John Keegan and Andrew Wheatcroft, two wise judges, affirmed that:
There was no talent for war which he did not possess. He had imagination and command of detail to plan a grand strategy: he was an able generalissimo of allied armies, always ready to flatter a foreign ruler for some political advantage. His capacity for innovation really lay off the battlefield … But his greatest strength lay in his attention to the economic underpinning of the war, and in his concern for the morale and welfare of his men … In this combination of military virtues Marlborough’s greatness nestled, but most of all in his understanding that the army was precious and that its value resided in the officers and men who made it up.1
Winston S. Churchill concluded his six-volume biography of his distinguished ancestor by declaring:
He had consolidated all that England had gained by the Revolution of 1688 and the achievements of William III. By his invincible genius in war and his scarcely less admirable qualities of wisdom and management he had completed that glorious process that carried England from her dependency upon France under Charles II to ten years’ leadership of Europe … He had proved himself the ‘good Englishman’ he aspired to be, and History may declare that if he had had more power his country would have had more strength and happiness, and Europe a surer progress.2
Another assessment added private virtue to public achievement to make Marlborough the very model of the Christian soldier:
He was by nature pure and temperate, kind and brave. He had supreme genius, personal beauty, and the art of pleasing. He was born to shine in courts, and understood the graces of life to perfection. He met with glory and ingratitude, infamy and fame. So, moving splendidly through a splendid world, he saw more fully to the share of most men, of human nature and the human lot.
He
