certainly become a man of the world. It was common for young officers to serve on campaign or on warships of the fleet as volunteers, even if their own regiments were not involved. There is circumstantial evidence that in 1668–70 he served in the garrison of Tangier. Some contemporaries believed that either the roving eye of the Duchess of York or Churchill’s relationship with Barbara Villiers caused tension at court, and that ‘the jealousy of one of the royal brothers was the cause of his temporary banishment’. Archdeacon Coxe thought the story absurd, for Churchill was not away from court for long, and was, so Coxe argued, recalled by the Duke of York.38
Tangier lay in a hollow under the hills of the Barbary coast in North Africa, and came under intermittent attack by local Moors, as cunning as they were cruel. In 1663 the governor, the Earl of Teviot, was killed when a hitherto-successful sortie pushed on too far and was swamped by superior numbers. In 1678 the Moors took two outlying forts, but in 1680 the beleaguered garrison sallied out to inflict such a serious defeat on the Moors that they were able to negotiate a truce that lasted four years. Yet it was clear that the place had no lasting value, and the 1683 mission led by Lord Dartmouth, with Pepys as his henchman, concluded that the city should be given up, and so it was, after the destruction of the Mole, built with much trouble and expense in a vain effort to turn the place into a usable port.
Tangier was hot and uncomfortable: when Pepys was there he was ‘infinitely bit by chinchies’, presumably the local mosquitoes, from whom he gained some refuge only by covering his face and hands before going to sleep. He hated the place. There was ‘no going by a door but you hear people swearing and damning, and the women as much as the men’.39 The behaviour of the governor, Colonel Percy Kirke, appalled him.
I heard Kirke, with my own ears walking with him and two others to the Mole … ask the young controller whether he had had a whore yet, since he came into the town, and that he must do it quickly or they would all be gone on board the ships, and that he would help him to a little one of his own size … 40
When a drunken soldier reeled into the governor as he walked in the street, Kirke simply said, ‘ “God damn me, the fellow has got a good morning’s draught already,” and so let him go without a word of reprehension.’41
Apart from a letter of 1707 in which he complained that Brabant in flaming June was as hot as the Mediterranean in August, we have no idea what Churchill made of the place. We do know, however, that there was fighting afoot, and it is reasonable to assume that his baptism of fire came in skirmishes under the walls of the city. In August 1671 Sir Hugh Cholmley described how:
[The Moors] lodge their ambushes within our very lines, and sometimes they killed our men as they passed to discover, which they continually do without any other danger than hazarding a few shots, whilst they leap over the lines and run into the fields of their own country. This insecurity makes men all the more shy in passing about the fields, and cannot be prevented but by walling the lines about.42
Life was decidedly martial. The whole garrison paraded at seven or eight in the morning for an hour’s drill, after which guards were posted and duties allocated. The young Churchill would have grasped the essentials of his profession in a way that would scarcely have been possible with the staid finery of 1st Foot Guards in St James’s Park or at the Tower of London. In March 1670 Lord Castlemaine, Barbara Villiers’ husband, told Lord Arlington that he had great hopes that Tangier might become ‘a bridle for the pirates of Barbary’, and ‘neither is it a little honour for the Crown to have a nursery of its own soldiers, without being altogether beholding to our neighbours for their education and breeding’.43
On 21 March 1670 Charles signed a document acknowledging that Sir Winston Churchill was still owed £140 for his work in Ireland, noting that Winston had given John precisely this sum ‘for & towards his equipage & other expenses in the employment he is now forthwith by our command to undertake on board the fleet in the Mediterranean sea’. Charles wished ‘to give all due encouragement to the forwardness of the early affections of John Churchill’, and ordered that Sir Winston’s arrears should be paid forthwith.44 We can see from this that Sir Winston was yet again short of money, and that John Churchill was certainly not out of royal favour.
One of the illusory attractions of Tangier was that it might provide a base for putting pressure on the rulers of Algiers and Salee, whose enterprising corsairs ravaged trade in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and in 1687 even pushed up into the Channel, where they took two mail packets and carried a hundred passengers off into slavery. In 1669 Sir Thomas Allen blockaded Algiers, and he tried again in 1670; this time John Churchill was embarked with the fleet. The Lord High Admiral’s Regiment of Foot, its colonel James, Duke of York, had been formed in 1664, but other marine regiments were no sooner raised than disbanded: two had been sharply cut back after the humiliating Dutch raid into the Medway in 1667. In 1672 Prince Rupert raised a marine regiment for the Third Dutch War, but it was disbanded in 1674.
This meant that the task of providing marines to the fleet had to be shared out amongst the army’s infantry regiments, and normally every one of them had two of its companies embarked, rotating them from time to time. The soldiers provided unskilled labour (and no doubt much innocent mirth) during voyages, lined ships’ rails with their muskets in action, and could be sent ashore to destroy fortifications or harbour facilities. The practice seems to have been popular with sailors but less so with soldiers, not least because the army and navy ran incompatible accounting systems, leading to repeated difficulties over pay, allowances and rations.45
Thomas Allen’s blockade of Algiers in 1670 was no more fruitful than his efforts the previous years. Indeed, it was to take another century and a half for the menace of Barbary pirates to be brought under control by repeated international action which, amongst other things, put ‘the shores of Tripoli’ into the US Marine Corps’ hymn. We cannot say whether John Churchill saw any action or not, and certainly he was back in England by 1671, when Sir Edward Spagge caught seven Algerine cruisers in Bougie Bay and burnt them all.
Perhaps John Churchill and Barbara Castlemaine had already become lovers before he set off for Tangier, but more probably, as Winston S. Churchill suggests, it was his reappearance at Whitehall ‘bronzed by African sunshine, close-knit by active service and tempered by discipline and danger’ that did the trick. He certainly fought a duel with the future Lord Herbert of Cherbury at this time, getting run through the arm but pinking his opponent in the thigh. Whatever the reason for the fight, Churchill had the best of the propaganda. Sir Charles Lyttelton told a friend: ‘Churchill has so spoke of it, that the King and the Duke are angry with Herbert. I know not what he [Churchill] has done to justify himself.’46
Barbara Castlemaine had a hearty sexual appetite. Even in her sixties, by then Duchess of Cleveland in her own right, she conducted what turned out to be a bigamous marriage with Robert ‘Beau’ Fielding. She had not lost her taste for elegant men. For his part Fielding hoped to marry money, somehow forgetting that he had recently wed a Mary Wadsworth, imagining her to be a wealthy widow called Mrs Deleau. He certainly did not help matters by sleeping with Barbara’s granddaughter Charlotte Calvert, and the furious duchess duly sued him for adultery, ensuring that
