and persons as they think fit without asking the leave or depending upon the will of any man.’ Locke could get away with this in Britain, but these were dangerous ideas elsewhere: the Enlightenment was still two generations away, and few contemporary European monarchs would have tolerated such words.
For some historians the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw James II replaced by William and Mary, is the real turning point, although it accomplished less than many contemporaries hoped. For others, though, the real break comes with the Hanoverian succession, which brought George I bloodlessly to the throne in 1714, even though Jacobitism was to remain a threat until the defeat of Charles Edward Stuart, James’s grandson the ‘Young Pretender’, in 1745–46. Were our focus here European rather than more narrowly British then we might see the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession, and with it the more extravagant ambitions of Louis XIV, as a sharp bend in history’s long and rutted road.
It is not my purpose to answer the undergraduate question as to whether the seventeenth century really ended in 1688 or 1714. Suffice it to say, though, that the most important years of Marlborough’s active career lay between these dates, and that he lived through a period of quite extraordinary change and uncertainty. This was much more the case with the military profession than most biographers acknowledge. He was commissioned into an army which, with its pikes, matchlock muskets and lobster-tail helmets, would not have surprised Oliver Cromwell, and he died as captain general of a force whose infantry had made its reputation with those measured volleys that Wellington so admired.
What is history to us was an unknown and challenging future to John Churchill; even to begin to grasp him we must break from what some historians call ‘presentism’, the inability to see anything save through the lens of the present moment. None of the events of 1688–1714 was predestined. A more adroit James II might have retained the kingdom bequeathed to him by his more supple brother; the ‘Protestant Wind’ of 1688 might so easily have blown up into a Catholic gale; the cannonball which grazed William III at the Boyne in 1690 might have killed him just as surely as another ball decapitated the very capable Jacobite commander, the marquis de St Ruth, at the deciding moment at the battle of Aughrim the following year.
There were no certainties for a man like John Churchill. He was stripped of all his offices twice in his career, imprisoned in the Tower on the first occasion and effectively exiled on the second. He ran the risk of the battlefield death that snatched so many of his comrades and opponents: at Ramillies a cannonball took the head off his equerry as he held the duke’s stirrup for him to mount a fresh charger. He lived in a world where disease was rife and today’s hero was tomorrow’s corpse. Smallpox was no respecter of persons: King William lost his parents and his wife to the disease, and it carried off Queen Anne’s only surviving son the Duke of Gloucester and Marlborough’s own heir the Marquess of Blandford. Indeed, of the five children in that carefully posed Clostermann painting of Marlborough’s family only two lived beyond their twenties. We must judge Marlborough in the light of his times, not our own, and a biographer’s first task must be to sketch out the background to the portrait he is painting.
There are indeed moments when the immediacy of the spoken word strips away the years. The Reverend Andrew Paschall, rector of the Somerset village of Chedzoy, tells us how, when the rebel Duke of Monmouth’s men were first detected in their night attack on the royal army’s bivouac at Sedgemoor in 1686, a trooper of the Horse Guards galloped
full speed to the camp, calls with all imaginable earnestness, 20 times at least, ‘Beat your drums, the enemy is come. For the Lord’s sake beat your drums.’ He then rode back with the like speed the way he had come … Now the drums beat, the drummers running to it, even barefoot for haste. All fly to arms.30
Yet there are as many times when the period seems more ancient than modern. It is easy to forget how deep the iron of Charles I’s execution had entered into the royalist soul. On 17 September 1661 (with young John Churchill still unbreeched) John Evelyn wrote:
Scot, Scroope, Cook and Jones, suffered for reward of their iniquities at Charing Cross, in sight of the place where they put to death their natural Prince, and in the presence of the King his son who they also sought to kill. I saw not their execution, but met their quarters mangled and cut and reeking as they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle. Oh the miraculous providence of God!31
Male traitors were hanged, drawn and quartered, a gruesome process that involved being dragged through the streets on a hurdle, partially strangled, and then castrated and disembowelled. The victim’s guts were ‘burnt before his face’ before he was beheaded and quartered. By 1745 the executioner would customarily leave his victim hanging long enough for him to be unconscious, but as late as 1715 some men were ‘bowelled alive and seeing’. The victim’s quarters, duly pickled for longevity, were stuck up at suitable points to ensure that the message was widely distributed. When Captain-Lieutenant Sir Thomas Armstrong of the Life Guards was executed as a traitor in 1683 one of his quarters was sent off to Stafford, where he had been Member of Parliament. The monarch might, by exercise of his prerogative, remit the punishment to beheading or simple hanging. At the time of the Popish Plot (1678–81), William, Lord Russell, had argued that the king did not have it in his power to show such leniency, and when he himself was convicted of treason in 1683 he bravely made no personal appeal for clemency. He was granted the favour of the axe, although the executioner botched his job.
Female traitors, whether they were guilty of high treason towards the monarch or petty treason – an act against what was perceived as being the natural order of things, like the murder of a husband or employer – were burnt at the stake. This too might be commuted to beheading (as it was for Alice Lisle, executed in the square at Winchester in 1685), or the executioner might be privately ordered by the sheriff to stab or strangle his victim before the fire took hold. The devout and philanthropic Elizabeth Gaunt, convicted of harbouring rebels after Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685, probably has the dreadful distinction of being the last woman in Britain to be burnt alive by judicial process. She met her end with exemplary courage, but the spectacle was profoundly shocking even to spectators used to brutality. Gilbert Burnet wrote that ‘Penn, the Quaker, told me, he saw her die. She laid the straw about her for burning her speedily, and behaved herself in such a manner, that all the spectators melted in tears.’32
There was a widespread feeling that such savagery went against the spirit of the age, and James II’s inability to understand this was not least amongst the causes of his failure as a monarch. It also ran squarely against what seemed to be natural justice. Lord Grey of Wark, who had commanded Monmouth’s cavalry with towering ineptitude, bought his life for a full confession, the surrender of large parts of his estates, and the promise to give evidence against other prominent members of the rebellion. When he testified against Lord Delamere, arraigned before his peers on 16 January 1686, he proved such a poor witness that Delamere got off. The first peer to give his verdict that day was John, Lord Churchill, the junior baron present, who announced: ‘Not Guilty, upon my honour.’
The barbarity of gallows, pyre, block and pillory sits uncomfortably alongside the poetry of John Dryden or the witty dramas of Aphra Behn. It was there in the background when Steele sketched out that genial baronet, Sir Roger de Coverly.
He is now in his Fifty sixth year, cheerful, gay and hearty, keeps a good House both in Town and Country; a great Lover of Mankind; but there is such a mirthful Cast in his Behaviour, that he is rather beloved than esteemed: His Tenants grow rich, his Servants look satisfied, all the young Women profess Love to him, and the young Men are glad of his Company: When he comes into a House he calls the Servants by their Names, and talks all the way up Stairs to a Visit. I must not omit that Sir ROGER is a Justice of the Quorum; that he fills a chair at a Quarter-Sessions with great abilities, and three months ago
