as abbess of the Priory of St Nicolas in the Normandy town of Pontoise. James Douglas duly succeeded to his father’s dukedom, but was killed in that desperate duel with Lord Mohun.54
John Churchill’s affair with Barbara Castlemaine took place against a background of rising international tension. The Treaty of Dover had, as we have seen, bound Charles to support Louis XIV in his attack on the Dutch. Louis was characteristically pleased with himself in poising a mighty war machine over the heads of the Dutch. ‘After having taken precautions of all sorts,’ he wrote with his usual immodesty,
as much by alliances as raising troops, magazines, warships, and great sums of money … I made treaties with England, the Elector of Cologne, the bishop of Munster … also with Sweden, and to hold Germany in check, with the Dukes of Hanover and of Neuburg and with the Emperor … I made my enemies tremble, astounded my neighbours, and brought despair to my foes … All my subjects supported my intentions … in the army with their valour, in the kingdom with their zeal, in foreign lands with their industry and skill; France has demonstrated the difference between herself and other nations.55
It is easy to be attracted by the splendour of Versailles, the spectacle of the French court, or the saga of Louis and his mistresses, and to forget just what a challenge this devout and opinionated monarch presented to Europe.56 By invading Holland in the spring of 1672 he sought to improve upon the terms of the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle of 1668, which had given France useful gains on her northern frontier but had also left Dutch garrisons in Spanish-owned ‘barrier fortresses’ in an effort to restrict further French expansion. Louis’ apologists suggest that he launched the Dutch War in 1672 not simply because of ‘wounded pride or … insupportable arrogance’, though even they can scarcely deny a fair measure of both these commodities, but because France had good reason to control the ‘gates’ of the kingdom, especially Antwerp, and to achieve the ‘annihilation’ of the Dutch commercial fleet.57
To do this he presided over a nation whose nobility was largely exempt from taxation, and where famines (long unknown in England) regularly killed tens of thousands: perhaps 800,000 were to die in the severe winter of 1709. Judicial torture, outlawed in England and soon to be abolished in Scotland too, was routine in French criminal investigations. A shocked John Evelyn watched a suspect who had refused to confess to theft racked, a process which ‘severed the fellow’s joints in a miserable sort, drawing him out at length in an extraordinary manner’. The victim then had two buckets of water poured down his throat ‘with a horn (just such as they use to drench horses with)’, but still denied his guilt. The affronted investigator told Evelyn that under these circumstances they could not hang the fellow, but could at least pack him off as a galley-slave, ‘which is as bad as death’.58
The ‘affair of the poisons’, which diverted Louis’ court in the 1670s, eventually saw thirty-four people executed and almost as many sent to the galleys or banished. When the marquise de Brinvilliers was executed for widespread poisoning, after the customary tortures, the cultured Madame de Sévigné complained that the crowd around her pyre was so great that she had, disappointingly, only been able to catch a glimpse of the victim’s mobcap.59 A sketch by Charles le Brun of the marquise on her way to execution shows a plump face exhausted by pain. Nancy Mitford suggested that Mme de Brinvilliers’ ‘appalling tortures’ were ‘probably no worse … than those she had inflicted’.60 But one did not have to be a murderer to come to a bad end: a scurrilous cartoon of Louis’ equestrian statue in the place des Victoires, depicting the king being led in chains by four mistresses, earned hanging for the printer, the bookseller and, for good measure, the printer’s apprentice too.61
The republic which so affronted Louis was a federation of seven of the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries which had been under Spanish rule, and was governed by the States-General of the United Provinces, to which individual provinces sent delegates. The grand pensionary was its chief executive, and for some time successive ruling princes of Orange had been both stadholder (effectively an appointed constitutional monarch) and captain general. The British are fond of calling William of Orange, formally given both these offices in 1672, ‘Dutch William’. However, his principality of Orange was actually on the southern Rhône, his mother was Mary, daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, he had inherited some German blood from his grandfather William the Silent, French blood came through his maternal grandfather, Scots blood from his maternal great-grandfather, James I, and Danish blood through the latter’s wife, Anne of Denmark. If he was Dutch it was by birth, residence and the most passionate conviction. Some have hailed him as ‘the First European’, and it was certainly thanks in part to his efforts that Louis’ imperial dreams were to evaporate.
The first French attacks went unsurprisingly well, the Dutch frontier garrisons being overwhelmed with scarcely a shot fired. The Dutch government offered to make peace on generous terms, but Louis, beset by the blindness that so often afflicts dictators, rejected its offer. A riot in The Hague saw the grand pensionary, Jan de Witt, and his brother murdered by the mob, and now, under the determined leadership of William, the Dutch settled to their task. They opened their dykes, flooding thousands of acres of fertile land, and when the French began the systematic destruction of Dutch towns resistance only deepened.
If the Dutch had begun the war at a disadvantage on land, they enjoyed a comfortable supremacy over the French at sea, and this is what the Treaty of Dover was intended to counteract. Charles repudiated his debts by declaring a Stop of the Exchequer in January 1672, issued a Declaration of Indulgence, granting toleration to both dissenters and Roman Catholics, the following month, and looked forward to the French subsidies which would enable him to fight a war, and, so he hoped, strengthen his army, without needing to ask Parliament for funds. The English and French fleets met at Portsmouth in May, and then cruised round to the coast of Suffolk, hoping to bring the Dutch to battle and then land troops in Zealand.
Ensign Churchill’s company of 1st Foot Guards, one of those embarked on the fleet, was aboard the Duke of York’s flagship Prince. On 28 May the Dutch under Admiral de Ruyter found the Allies at anchor in Southwold Bay, expecting an attack, with the French in a single squadron on the south of the line and two English squadrons to the north, and the wind coming in from the east-north-east, giving the Dutch the advantage. When the Dutch came into sight, with sixty-four ships to the Allies’ eighty-two, the Duke of York led the English off northwards against the main body of the Dutch, but failed to make his intentions clear to the French, who sailed southwards and engaged the weaker Dutch vanguard.
The English lost their battle. Lord Sandwich, vice-admiral of the kingdom and Samuel Pepys’s patron, who commanded the leading squadron, was killed, and his flagship Royal James was burnt. Prince was in the thick of things, as Captain John Narborough tells us.
His Royal Highness went fore and aft in the ship and cheered up the men to fight, which did encourage them very much … Presently when [Captain] Sir John Cox was slain I commanded as captain, observing his Royal Highness’s commands in working the ship, striving to get the wind of the enemy. I do absolutely believe no prince upon earth can compare with his Royal Highness in gallant resolution in fighting his enemy, and with so great conduct and knowledge in navigation as never any general understood before him. He is better acquainted in these seas than many masters which are now
