Duchess’s drawing-room did show as much contempt as was possible. I may grieve at it, but I will no more complain when you do it, for I suppose it is what pleases your humour … Could you see my heart you would not be so cruel to say I do not love you, for by all that is good I love you and only you. If I may have the pleasure of seeing you tonight, please let me know, and believe that I am never truly pleased but when I am with you.6
This correspondence dates from 1675–76, after John’s service under Turenne in Alsace and the Palatinate. However, it is hard to be sure of exact dates. Courtin, the French ambassador in London, had kept Louvois apprised of the goings-on at court, and when there was first talk of John Churchill commanding a French regiment, Louvois advised against it, arguing that Churchill’s real concern at that moment was ‘to give more satisfaction to a rich and faded mistress’ rather than to serve his own royal master, undoubtedly a reference to his relationship with Barbara Castlemaine. Some time later, Courtin reported that ‘Mr Churchill prefers to serve the very pretty sister of Lady Hamilton than to be lieutenant colonel of Monmouth’s regiment.’ In 1665 Frances Jennings had married Sir George Hamilton, Marlborough’s fellow colonel, who commanded the Irish Regiment until his death in action in 1676. Winston S. Churchill dates Courtin’s second letter to November 1676. It raises the question as to why Churchill might have been interested in being lieutenant colonel to Monmouth, at best a sideways move in the hierarchy, but it does suggest that he was now so heavily preoccupied with Sarah that he was unwilling to accept a full-time command appointment.7
Several things blocked the path of true love. First, John Churchill’s relationship with Barbara Castlemaine was common knowledge at court, and Courtin reported to Paris that Sarah’s parents had refused their consent to her marriage with John. This cannot be true, for Sarah’s father was long dead, but it may well reflect the opposition of Sarah’s mother. Next, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill were firmly against the union. They hoped that John would marry another of the maids of honour, Catherine Sedley, daughter and heiress to the wealthy Sir Charles Sedley. Her portrait suggests that she was by no means as attractive as Sarah (the attentive Courtin called her ‘very rich and very ugly’), and she certainly had a caustic wit. It may be that rumours linking her name with John’s were the reason for Sarah’s accusation in the last of his letters quoted above. Catherine eventually became yet another of James’s mistresses, though when Queen Mary reminded her of the fact after 1688 she riposted: ‘Remember, ma’am, if I broke one of the commandments with your father, you have broken another against him.’8
Mrs Manley, writing long after the event, with the intention of damaging the Marlboroughs’ reputation and making money, provided two alternative versions of how John ended his relationship with Barbara Castlemaine and married Sarah. The first has him provide a virile ‘body double’ who, his face concealed, tumbled the ever-ready Barbara, enabling a supposedly furious John to catch the lovers in flagrante. The second has Sarah replace Barbara in bed before one of John’s visits. This time the lovers are caught by Sarah’s mother, who insists upon marriage to save her daughter’s honour and promptly produces a priest. Both stories are wholly improbable. Barbara had enjoyed a long sexual relationship with John and borne him a child, so the story of the body double is scarcely convincing. The stage-managing of the second scenario would have been difficult: how did Sarah gain access to Barbara’s bed, and where were priest and mother concealed?
The truth of this blazing courtship may actually be gleaned from the surviving love letters. Sarah told John that: ‘If it were true that you have that passion for me which you say you have, you would find out some way to make yourself happy – it is in your power.’9 In other words, if he really loved her then he should marry her or end the relationship. This clearly failed to move him (perhaps his parents, at this very moment, were reminding him how Catherine Sedley’s fortune would secure his future), and in another letter Sarah warned him: ‘As for seeing you, I am resolved I never will in private nor in public if I could help it.’10 Things went from bad to worse, and the affronted colonel wrote to Elizabeth Mowdie, Sarah’s waiting woman:
Your mistress’s usage to me is so barbarous that sure she must be the worst woman in the world, or else she would not be thus ill-natured. I have sent a letter which I desire you will give her. It is very reasonable for her to take it, because it will then be in her power never to be troubled with me more, if she pleases. I do love her with all my soul, but will not trouble her, for if I cannot have her love, I shall despise her pity. For the sake of what she has already done, let her read my letter and answer it, and not use me thus like a footman.11
Sarah responded that she had done nothing to deserve the sort of letter he had written her, and told him that it was entirely up to him whether or not he saw her, though she would be ‘extremely pleased’ if he decided against it.
The correspondence thundered on like the most obdurate battle between resolute opponents, with Sarah yielding nothing and John returning to the attack with as much determination. Even when they seemed to have agreed on marriage, John feared that the sudden reappearance of Sarah’s sister Lady Hamilton would wreck his plans; but Sarah assured him that he had nothing to fear if his intentions were honourable, and he should not worry that her sister’s arrival could ‘make any change in me, or that it is in the power of anybody to alter me but yourself’.12 We know that John formally asked the Duchess of York to consent to the marriage, and we can presume that both Sarah’s mother and his own parents agreed.
Sir Winston had his own reasons for giving consent, just as he had for pressing the advantages of the Sedley connection. The old cavalier was broke again, and could survive only if John agreed to give up his inheritance so that Sir Winston could sell off some property to pay his debts. A Sedley marriage would have prevented the need for this, and if we need further evidence of the intensity of John’s love for Sarah it is that he was prepared to give up his family estate for her. Even Macaulay was reluctantly prepared to admit that he must have been ‘enamoured indeed’ to let so much money slip past him. True, their poverty was relative, for he had his army pay and the £500 a year interest on the ‘infamous wages’ he had received from Barbara. Moreover, Mary of Modena had been charmed by the couple, and with her interest firmly engaged they married, probably in her apartments, in the winter of 1677–78. Colonel and Mrs Churchill could not afford to buy a suitable house, so they stayed in his lodgings in Jermyn Street (five doors along from St James’s, not far from where Wilton’s restaurant now dispenses its matchless Dover Sole) when he was in London, and she spent a good deal of time in Dorset with Sir Winston and Lady Churchill. Although her circumstances were not precisely the same as those in which her husband had grown up, it is not hard to see how the episode helped sharpen her desire to make money.
John Churchill, a full colonel in the English army from early 1678, was now a senior liaison officer, his tasks part-military and part-diplomatic, negotiating with the Dutch about arrangements for accommodating the British troops who were now on their way to Flanders to fight against the French as a result of the English government’s political realignment. He was very much in the Duke of York’s mind, and enjoyed a measure of devolved authority. In April that year the Duke of York told William of Orange, concerned about a French attack on Bruges, held by four British battalions, that ‘Churchill will speak to you more at large about it.’ Churchill was well aware that although the majority of Englishmen, and indeed the Duke of York himself, were in favour of vigorous prosecution of the war, the king himself was not.
In September 1678 he was back in Flanders, this time as a brigadier of foot, his command consisting of two battalions of foot guards, and a battalion each of the Holland, the Duchess’s and Lord Arlington’s regiments. However,
