Marlborough

Book 0: GREAT COMMANDERS

by John Hussey

Genres: Civil War Era

Synopsis

John Churchill was born in 1650, the son of a defeated Cavalier captain, in a household which had been ravaged and rendered almost destitute by the English Civil War. Yet by the time of his death in 1722 he was among the richest men in the country, with a dukedom, a palace and a principality to call his own.

His rise to power came through a combination of good luck, astute political manoeuvring, and a brilliance on the battlefield that made him easily the most successful general of his time. In this concise biography of the man and his military genius, John Hussey describes in detail the campaigns that made Marlborough famous: the 1704 campaign to save the Austrian empire, which culminated in the great victory of Blenheim, and the audacious invasion across Louis XIV's Ne Plus Ultra lines in 1711. These campaigns are put in the context of the times, to create a portrait of a man who is still celebrated as one of the world's greatest ever military commanders.

Release date: April 30, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 224

Sample

MARLBOROUGH WAS WITHOUT DOUBT one of the greatest military commanders in Anglo-American history; pre-eminent perhaps. Even the Duke of Wellington, the nearest British contender, was not called upon to operate at such a high politico-military strategic level. Eisenhower, with whom one might be tempted to compare Marlborough’s breadth and span of command, nowhere near approaches his skill as a field commander or his wide-ranging political responsibilities. On the accession of Queen Anne, Marlborough, who was already the English commander-in-chief in the Low Countries, was appointed captain general of land forces in England and Wales. In late twentieth-century terms this was the equivalent of combining the posts of c.-in-c. British Army of the Rhine and c.-in-c. United Kingdom Land Forces. In addition, Marlborough was entitled to give strategic advice to the Cabinet when English troops went to other war theatres, which today is the prerogative of the Chief of the Defence Staff. In addition to his other appointments, within weeks of becoming captain general Marlborough also secured the post of Master General of the Ordnance.

As John Hussey explains, to cover the ten great campaigns in which Marlborough served demands more space than he was given. For this masterly account he has chosen Marlborough’s 1704 campaign – the brilliant march from the North Sea to the Danube, culminating in the stunning victory of Blenheim – and his last campaign, which John Hussey characterizes as a masterpiece of manoeuvre.

We also get a vivid portrait of Marlborough’s development, including his early and formative years in the latter half of the seventeenth century, in which he lived two-thirds of his life. It was a century characterized by religious fear, hysteria, plots and betrayals – dangers through which Marlborough trod a ‘winding path’ with great skill. Although, as the author laments, there is no space for Marlborough’s personal life, we do get an insight into his abiding love for his wife, Sarah, illuminated by short extracts from his love letters.

The European political and grand strategic scene in which Marlborough operated is skilfully covered, as are the constraints of war practised at the time – an era of much change both tactically and operationally. The author draws attention to the flaw in Clausewitz’s analysis of warfare of the period: by hardly mentioning Marlborough, he overplays the conservatism of commanders at the tactical and operational level of war in the period between Gustavus Adolphus and Frederick the Great. By this oversight Clausewitz shows himself to be bounded by his own introverted Prussian experience.

John Hussey also provides an excellent résumé of the contemporary government machinery for administering the Army and managing the war. As he explains, Queen Anne’s army until 1707 consisted of three armies: English, Scottish and Irish. Up to that time Scottish and Irish regiments were transferred to the English establishment to serve abroad. Only in 1707, at the Union of Parliaments, did the British Army emerge from the combination of the Scottish and English establishments; the Irish being left separate. So, as he points out, in the first years of Anne’s reign it is correct to call the army overseas ‘English’, a distinction ‘the French maintained until the twentieth century’, and one which is used in this book.

We also get a very informative section on tactics, and how Marlborough surprised the French by his unorthodox deployments on the field of battle. By the early eighteenth century French military practice, as so often happens in successful armies, had ossified. Their commanders had failed to modify their tactics to meet the challenges brought about by new technology in weaponry; for example, improvements in the design of muskets.

John Hussey also challenges the view of eighteenth century warfare being frozen into total immobility by fortification and logistics, a perception partly fostered by Clausewitz, through his examination of Marlborough’s method of command and logistical skill. By caring for his men on the long march from the Low Countries to the Danube, the furthest the English had marched from a base since the Black Prince’s Spanish expedition over three centuries earlier, Marlborough showed that an eighteenth-century army could cover great distances and still arrive on the battlefield fit to fight.

We are reminded of the limitations of contemporary maps, and hence the careful and painstaking reconnaissance necessary to establish what routes existed, and even in which direction streams and minor rivers flowed. The staff work needed was all the more remarkable when one bears in mind how much of it was done by Marlborough himself. A staff system as we understand it did not exist.

This was an age when a successful commander had to spend an inordinate amount of time immersed in minor details, to a degree that a Montgomery, or a Patton, or most modern generals would not countenance. By the twentieth century highly trained and efficient staffs in most armies had relieved the commander of much of this time-consuming effort, allowing him to stand back and view the big picture. In Marlborough’s day a commander often stood or fell by the quality of his own staff work, and in this as in so many other respects Marlborough was a master.

He was truly a great commander.

TO WRITE AN ACCOUNT of Marlborough the commander as he served through ten great campaigns would require far more space than this volume can offer. I have chosen, therefore, to concentrate on two campaigns: an expedition, and then a masterpiece of bloodless manoeuvre.

It was natural to choose Marlborough’s 1704 campaign, that remarkable project to save the Habsburg Emperor in Vienna and thus the whole Alliance from collapse, the first fruit of which was the capture of the Schellenberg, which culminated in the great victory of Blenheim. Other Marlburian campaigns such as Ramillies may be more fascinating to a military specialist, but 1704 demands inclusion not only for its place of honour as the first in the sequence of his greatest campaigns, but because of the intrepidity with which Marlborough undertook to carry his army from the North Sea to the Danube, the skill with which he did it, and the gamble he was prepared to take in return for the prayers and the (poorly fulfilled) promises of his stricken ally.

I present also the duke’s last campaign, technically his masterpiece as a ‘manoeuvre’ general: bloodlessly crossing the strong Ne Plus Ultra Lines, followed by a most audacious siege successfully accomplished against considerable odds. My reading of the affair at Arleux which preceded the passage of the Lines (Chapter 19) differs from almost all previous studies of the campaign. In order not to encumber the text with argument I have placed the detailed reasons for my conclusion in an Appendix.

Histories of campaigns require a context. Because Marlborough’s role as a commander-in-chief in a great coalition war embraced international policy, strategy and diplomacy – as well as military administration and operations – I have prefaced my accounts of 1704 and 1711 with summaries explaining why the war came about, how governments coped with its problems, how armies were constituted, as well as outline sketches of the military operations in the campaigns of 1702–3 and 1705–10. I have to confess that I have used only one Dutch source to any great extent, van ’t Hoff’s The Marlborough-Heinsius Correspondence; Colonel Wijn’s military history has never been translated into English, though how a Dutch interpretation can affect purely English accounts of events was shown long ago by Professor Veenendaal’s analysis of the 1708 campaign and his later chapter on the war in the New Cambridge Modern History.

Marlborough was comparatively old before he secured the power and opportunities which he craved. His strangely insecure personality, formed by the difficulties of his childhood, drove him onwards and sometimes into dark and troubling conspiracies. The later seventeenth century was a time of religious fear and even hysteria, of plots and betrayals, through which Marlborough trod a very winding path. At the height of mid-Victorian certainty Macaulay in his History and Thackeray in Henry Esmond attacked Marlborough’s character, principally on this score; eighty years later Winston Churchill went to the other extreme. I hope to have set down the salient points without bias. Regrettably there is no space for his personal life, his love letters to Sarah, his joy in his garden and his delight listening to the nightingales as he lay in his camp bed, which would redeem the austerity of campaign history.

There is no extended ‘summing up’, no comparison of Marlborough against Alexander, Hannibal, Napoleon, Wellington, Lee, Moltke, Haig, Eisenhower or Alanbrooke. How can you compare or rank Lister against McIndoe, the Oxford crew of 1928 against the Cambridge eight of 1956, or Fred Archer against Lester Piggott, let alone Princess Diana against Charles Darwin (as BBC viewers think they can)? Even for Marlborough’s great comrade Eugene of Savoy, it is with considerable hesitation that I set down a very brief and tentaive assessment. But there is one comparison implicit throughout: that with John Churchill’s exact contemporary William of Orange, who was for thirty years of his life Louis XIV’s greatest opponent, and whose policies extended beyond his death in 1702.

In the calm of later life Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, wrote not only the finest short account of Marlborough’s campaigns, which is inscribed on the Column of Victory at Blenheim Palace, but also an assessment of William III and Marlborough in Letter VIII of The Study and the Use of History. The passage I now quote leaves out matters which concern the Partition Treaties and Utrecht, but the words illuminate the circumstances and personal qualities which the Column of Victory does not mention: ‘By [William III’s] death, the Duke of Marlborough was raised to the head of the army, and indeed of the confederacy: where he, a new, a private man, a subject, acquired by merit and by management a more deciding influence, than high birth, confirmed authority, and even the Crown of Great Britain had given to King William.’ Those words ‘new’, ‘subject’, ‘merit’ had a particular resonance in the hierarchical society of the eighteenth century and would at that epoch have sharpened the contrast between the two men. More recently Correlli Barnett has identified Marlborough’s special quality as ‘enduring such strains and grappling with such a weight and variety of responsibility as have befallen no other English soldier in history’. Those assessments of 1736 and 1974 go to the heart of the matter. They place Marlborough in military history.

JOHN CHURCHILL – WHO EVENTUALLY BECAME among the richest and was certainly the greatest of his sovereign’s subjects, the most uniformly successful general of his time with a dukedom, a palace and a principality as rewards – was born in a half-wrecked wing of a Devonshire house in May 1650 to a defeated Cavalier captain of horse, in a household which had been ravaged and rendered almost destitute by the English Civil War.

The Churchills had risen through the law to the minor squirearchy, helped by marriages to more prominent families, the Winstons in one generation and the Drakes in the next. Captain Winston Churchill was an ardent Royalist, but his widowed mother-in-law, Lady Drake, held for the Parliament in the Civil War: her house was sacked by the Cavaliers and she herself ejected, but with the collapse of Charles I’s cause she returned to one wing of her house, giving shelter to her daughter and son-in-law and their babies. The Churchills endured fines and sequestrations, and, if they drew upon Lady Drake’s charity for the first ten years of John’s life, Winston must silently have smarted under his benefactress’s unwelcome political opinions within doors, and feared eavesdroppers, informers and malicious neighbours without. The Churchill children likewise learned very early to speak and act with caution.

We know little of John’s childhood; no boyhood friend recorded anything and he himself never referred to these years of refuge and poverty, but they are the probable source of his lifelong insecurity, his frugality and craving for money, his habit of insuring with both sides, of conciliating, and of keeping his own counsel. Winston sired twelve children of whom five died in infancy, John being the third-born and second surviving child; John would prove a good son and a faithful brother, finding military appointments for the boys and later ensuring that his beloved elder sister Arabella’s second family obtained places at Queen Anne’s court.1

For Winston himself could do little for them, even when Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 enabled him to enter Parliament and gain minor office – and a knighthood in lieu of financial compensation for his sufferings. John at least scrambled through several terms at St Paul’s School, while Arabella became a maid of honour to the first wife (d. 1671) of James, Duke of York, the heir to the throne and Lord High Admiral. Imbued since childhood with the Cavalier doctrine that the royal Stuarts’ virtues and defects enjoyed divine sanction and their demands required unquestioning obedience, the Churchills were complaisant when Arabella became James’s mistress and delighted when John consequently obtained a page’s post in the duke’s household, aged 16.2

This page proved so pleasing and able that in 1667 Duke James procured him a free commission in the King’s Guards. The puny Army of John Churchill’s youth numbered under 6,000 men (Cromwell’s had been over 40,000), whereas in France the finest army in the world, led by Condé and Turenne, had a peacetime establishment of 150,000 men. The English Army was employed mainly as guards, or in garrison at home or in the new colony of Tangier. It knew little of Continental warfare, for war with the principal enemy, Holland, was usually fought at sea – with soldiers as marines. Although John did not go to Tangier, where colonial warfare was continuous, he served as a marine with Allin’s naval expedition to the western Mediterranean in 1670 and saw Lisbon, Gibraltar, the Mediterranean ports of France, Italy, Spain and the Balearics, memories that he drew upon in his years of power.

In 1671, bronzed and dashing, this penniless subaltern became the ardent lover of the spendthrift, promiscuous Duchess of Cleveland, one of the King’s most active bedfellows. Even then his obliging charm averted all retribution other than Charles’s sneer that Churchill did it for wages – and certainly when the duchess did give him £4,500 he promptly invested it in an annuity.

Churchill served aboard Duke James’s flagship in the 1672 war with the Dutch, where his bravery earned him a captaincy; by 1673 he was advanced to the privileged post of one of James’s gentlemen of the bedchamber. When Charles II sent troops under his bastard son Monmouth to act as land auxiliaries with the French against the Dutch and Germans, Churchill went likewise; he saw action under the great Turenne in operations near Heidelberg and in Alsace in 1674, invariably winning praise for his intrepidity and skill, although he clearly disliked French methods and their treatment of civilians. His cool ability, his charm, his invariable luck brought him the recognition of the great, including Louis XIV. His contemporaries were more divided: some began to form a ‘Churchill ring’ – others disliked him for his luck, greed for money and stinginess, and his reputation for ‘carrying tales’ to the great.

At 25, after eight years in the army and with plentiful experience of fighting by sea and land, Lieutenant Colonel Churchill returned to the court and met the love of his life. Sarah Jennings, a 15-year-old maid of honour to James’s second wife, was virtuous, pretty, imperious, highly ambitious – and penniless.3 She enslaved Churchill so absolutely that to overcome his needy father’s opposition to the match John resigned to him his reversion to £1,000. They were married when she was 17. He always loved her to distraction and she – whose influence was so greatly to help and then ruin his career – adored him despite all her tantrums. What he meant to her blazes from her message when she was 32 and he was incarcerated and in great danger: ‘wherever you are, whilst I have life my soul shall follow you, my ever dear Ld Marl, and wherever I am I shall only kill the time, wish for night that I may sleep, and hope the next day to hear from you’.

JOHN WAS A MODERATE ANGLICAN and Sarah ‘low church’. They were the intimate servants of the heir to the throne and his wife, and yet the Duke and Duchess of York were proudly Catholic in a country that had for over a century feared, hated and harassed Catholicism. That English Catholics were few in number made no difference: the threat always loomed. The Civil War had been between Protestants, and the Restoration represented a compromise between Anglicans and the ‘sects’, though once back in Parliament the Anglicans again monopolized power and suppressed residual Cromwellianism. But soon the growing power of France, its threats to Protestant Holland and its worsening persecution of Huguenots at home revived anti-Catholic fears. In 1670 James, heir to the throne, had announced his conversion to Rome and there was a well-founded suspicion that the ostensibly Protestant Charles II would like to turn over England to Catholicism. In 1673 taking Anglican communion became an obligatory ‘test’ for public office and rather than conform, James resigned his posts. Remarrying, he chose a foreign Catholic. Thus Anglicans began sensing a dilemma: how to protect their creed if the ‘divinely appointed’ Stuart dynasty promoted Catholicism, how to remain ‘passively obedient’ to a monarch if he menaced the established church. Matters worsened when Protestant hysteria in 1678 over a ‘Popish Plot’ threatened James’s reversion to the succession and forced him into exile in Brussels and then Edinburgh.

Churchill did not immediately or willingly face the dilemma. He remained his master’s trusted servant in secret missions to secure the help of Louis XIV and Charles II in defence of James’s rights. Yet he was too observant not to realize how James’s personality was deteriorating from that of an energetic if imperceptive man to that of an obstinate, blinkered bigot who was indecisive in a crisis. In Scotland James proved himself a harsh viceroy; when he and his suite were wrecked aboard the Gloucester his obstructiveness, interference and last-minute departure by the ship’s only boat (loaded with. . .