During the Christmas celebrations in 1694 Queen Mary was stricken with smallpox. She rallied briefly, disappointing some Jacobite ladies who had planned a celebratory dinner, and died on 28 December. William was visibly distraught, and the unfeigned intensity of his grief helped Englishmen like him better, for, they now thought, he had really loved their queen, and not simply married her to draw England into a war. William had also, at long last, started behaving like an Englishman. When a Jacobite nobleman rode deliberately into his path on Newmarket Heath, William struck him with his whip, a forceful act which commended him to the squirearchy.
James, in contrast, refused to order court mourning, and his minister Lord Middleton announced coldly that: ‘The King, my master, does not consider her his daughter, because she had renounced her being so in such an open manner.’ Jacobite hopes that the death of Mary improved their chances were misplaced, not least because there was now an heir apparent who commanded wide support in England.
Anne had tried hard to see her sister before she died, saying that she would ‘run any hazard’ for a meeting. She made her peace with William on 29 December, saying how much she regretted ‘having fallen into her displeasure’. William was not sure what to make of this, but the Archbishop of Canterbury assured him that the quarrel should be settled. Anne, recovering from what seems to have been a phantom pregnancy, was carried in to see William on 13 January. Her guards had already been restored, her sister’s jewellery was passed on to her, and she was given St James’s Palace to hold court in, for she was now heir to the throne.
Marlborough did not return to favour immediately. In January 1695 Shrewsbury told Russell that
our friend [Marlborough] who has no small credit with her, seems very resolved to contribute to the continuance of this union … I do not see he is likely, at present, to get much by it, not having yet kissed the King’s hand, yet the reversion is very fair and very great.76
Marlborough duly kissed hands on 25 March. Sarah, however, was much more inclined to bury the hatchet in the head of an adversary than to make peace, and it took her another year to come to terms. Even then, she tells us, ‘I believe I should have continued it, but that my Lord Sunderland dissuaded me from it.’77
There were fresh Jacobite plots afoot. The Duke of Berwick visited England incognito and met several supporters, but ‘they continued firm in their resolution not to rise, till the King of England [James II] had landed with an army’. He agreed with them, for ‘In a battle with their raw, undisciplined troops, against a good number of tried and experienced soldiers … they must inevitably have been destroyed.’78 Louis, however, was not prepared to commit troops until a rising was under way. Early in 1696 a group of plotters prepared to attack William at Turnham Green on his return from hunting, but the plot was betrayed and some of those involved were executed. Lord Ailesbury felt that there was something fundamentally sound in popular judgement at moments like this, and that William’s advisers were right to punish ringleaders but not to embark upon a witch-hunt. ‘They are good at heart,’ he wrote,
and have compassion; and even in tumultuous occasions the mob ever reasons well, and seldom do they rise when not oppressed and weighed down. They have sudden starts … hasty enough to go to the execution, but after that some few have suffered, they would cry out ‘that is enough, some few must die for example.’79
A successful assassination would have triggered an attempted invasion, for the French fleet had concentrated in the Channel and the hopeful James II went to Calais to join the invasion army. But with no assassination, no rising in England and, above all, none of the naval superiority which riveted the whole business together, the moment passed.
Sir John Fenwick’s plot for the assassination of William was discovered that summer of 1696 and the accused man, facing a Bill of Attainder which, if passed, would simply declare him a traitor without the necessity for a trial, which would have demanded evidence, accused Marlborough, Russell, Godolphin and Shrewsbury of being in treasonable communication with the Court of St Germain. Shrewsbury privately admitted to William that he had indeed undertaken to help Lord Middleton, a Jacobite relative, and William at once forgave him. A nervous Godolphin resigned from the ministry, suggesting to many (including his biographer) that there was some truth in Fenwick’s accusations.
But it was with perfect confidence that Marlborough, speaking coolly and with complete self-possession, told the Lords:
Nobody can wonder that a man whose head is in danger should try to save himself by accusing others. I assure your Lordships that, since the accession of his present Majesty, I have no intercourse with Sir John on any subject whatever, and this I declare on my word of honour.80
The ‘impeccably Whiggish’ Colonel Godfrey, who had married Marlborough’s sister Arabella, spoke warmly on his brother-in-law’s behalf, while George Churchill, also an MP, muttered that dead men told no tales and hoped to see Fenwick dealt with, one way or another. Marlborough himself voted for Fenwick’s attainder, and helped persuade Prince George, not a regular attender in the Lords, to avail himself of the rights of his English dukedom by going to the House and voting the same way. If there had indeed been an original Camaret Bay letter this would surely have been the moment for the Jacobites to use it: simply hinting that the document might be shown to William would have been sufficient to stop Marlborough in his tracks. The vote was close, and Godolphin voted in Fenwick’s favour. Sir John Fenwick was duly beheaded on 28 January 1697, and Marlborough had safely weathered the last of the season’s storms.
Even as Fenwick’s fate trembled in the balance, the war was drawing to a close, for Louis opened secret peace negotiations with William late in 1696. William’s Grand Alliance had been under terrible strain, with Victor Amadeus of Savoy making a separate peace with France in August 1696 and Britain, Holland and France all financially exhausted. The terms of the Treaty of Ryswick, concluded in the autumn of 1697, were essentially a return to the status quo ante bellum. The most fundamental exception was Louis’ recognition of William and his heirs as de facto monarchs of Great Britain, and his promise not to afford assistance, directly or indirectly, to any of William’s enemies. Although, as we shall soon see, Louis was perfectly capable of breaking his word, for mere promises did not bind Sun Kings, this provision was nevertheless a turning point in the history of the British Isles, for it finally took them out of the French sphere of influence.
The French gave up the fortresses they had captured in the Spanish Netherlands – Luxembourg, Chimay, Mons, Courtrai, Charleroi, Ath and Dinant. Barcelona, seized in the last year of the war, was also restored to the Spanish. The French obtained legal title to Strasbourg, though they had to give up their other fortresses on the Rhine. The Dutch gained a favourable commercial treaty with France, but the English asked for nothing, believing that ‘The balance of trade, as it now stands, is evidently on the English side.’81 The French merchant fleet had declined from 750 sizeable ships to 533, while the British, despite the damage done by privateers like Jean Bart, was larger at the war’s end than its beginning. Perhaps most seriously for the long-term future of Europe, the French were unable to reform their financial institutions, and raised money to fuel the war by selling offices connected with trade, increasing restrictive practices.
England faced a crisis which was no less serious, and brought the fleet to the edge of mutiny. As N.A.M. Rodger has observed, ‘All naval activities cost more money than was coming in. There was virtually no long-term system of borrowing, and the short-term credit of the Navy and the government wilted rapidly.’82 The government revolutionised public finances by introducing the land tax, exchequer bills and the concept of national debt, and in 1694 Charles Montagu set up the Bank of England. Two years later, with the help of John Locke and Isaac Newton, Montagu carried out a total recoinage, getting rid of clipped and counterfeit coins. There was a brief dearth of currency, and the Bank of England, having over-issued its notes, might well have foundered. However,
England had begun to initiate the reforms which would give her the financial and economic strength to fight another, even larger, war, and none of Marlborough’s achievements on the battlefield would have been possible without them.
In the meantime, though, a Parliament dead-set on making economies pressed for the reduction of the army from its wartime strength of around 90,000 to an establishment of 7,000 in England and 12,000 in Ireland. These were all to be native-born, and the Dutch Guards were sent back to Holland, despite William’s plea, in a personally-written note to Parliament, to be allowed to keep them. The capricious English, who had once seen these big men in blue coats as a symbol of Dutch domination, now grew quite fond of them as they marched to the coast. Many of them had married local girls, and somehow it was sad to see them all go.
The men who had fought at Steenkirk and Landen were treated even worse than their descendants who were to fight on the Somme and at Passchendaele, for Britain’s national gratitude has all too short a lease. Despite a series of emergency measures, like opening up all trades to ex-officers and soldiers regardless of whether or not they had served an apprenticeship, there was significant unrest, and many ex-cavalrymen, allowed to keep their horses on demobilisation, simply became highwaymen. A line of guardhouses, manned by soldiers, was built on the road from London to Kensington to protect travellers from ex-soldiers. The problem of how to deal with them had not been solved by the time recruiting began for the next war.
The recoinage of 1696 strengthened Sarah’s position in Anne’s household, and it was through this that Marlborough’s route back to favour lay. The value of the guinea was reduced from thirty shillings to twenty-one, but Sir Benjamin Bathurst, the comptroller of the household, made up his accounts as if the change had not occurred. Sarah told Anne what had happened, but was urged to say nothing, for ‘there is nobody perfect but dear Mrs Freeman’. In April 1697 Sir Benjamin was found to have been selling posts in the household, and although Anne forgave him, this convinced her that she should have ‘a Mrs Freeman in every post in my family’.
On 24 July 1696, his seventh birthday, Anne’s son the Duke of Gloucester was inducted into the Order of the Garter in a ceremony at Windsor attended by the whole court. In April 1698 William invited Marlborough to become the boy’s governor on a salary of £2,000 a year, and soon restored him to both his rank in the army and the Privy Council. When William departed for Holland in July Marlborough was one of the lords justices left running the country in his absence.
Gloucester’s miniature court included Gilbert Burnet as his spiritual guide. Burnet had been made Bishop of Salisbury, but his influence at court had diminished with Mary’s death. William, who had once valued his advice, had grown tired of his badgering and indiscretions, calling him ein rechter Tartuffe (a real religious hypocrite). Shoving him off to the young duke’s court suited William, but Burnet himself was not eager to move, and Anne suspected his whiggish principles and maintained that the king appointed him simply in order to be disagreeable to her. At first Burnet was no more enamoured of the Marlboroughs than they were of him, but he soon fell under John Churchill’s spell. The published version of his History, written after he got to know them, is far more favourable to the Marlboroughs than the original rough draft.
Lord Churchill, the Marlboroughs’ surviving son, was master of the horse, one of Burnet’s sons was a page to young Gloucester, and Sarah’s cousin Abigail Hill, ‘daughter of a city merchant by a sister of my father’, was laundress to the little court. This, so the waspish Sarah assures us, ‘was a good provision for her’. Abigail’s parents had died leaving two sons and two daughters, and Sarah used Godolphin’s good offices to get one son into the customs house, and the other, Jack, into Gloucester’s household and then into the army. After Gloucester’s premature death Sarah took Abigail into Anne’s household as bedchamber woman. Bedchamber women were personal maids, unlike the ladies of the bedchamber who were social companions and often confidantes. At that stage Abigail’s duties were purely domestic, and Sarah had no idea that she was installing within Anne’s household a rival who would eventually supplant her.
Marlborough was busy carefully repairing the dynastic damage done by his disgrace. Although he was given no office of state till the summer of 1701, William now consulted him regularly, though Marlborough told Shrewsbury in May 1700 that he still found the king cold towards him. He spoke in the Lords against the wholesale reduction of the army, said nothing about the Dutch Guards, and later declined to join the clamour against the king’s grants of Irish land. His eldest daughter Henrietta had married Godolphin’s only son Francis in 1699, and his second surviving daughter Anne married Lord Spencer, Sunderland’s heir, the following year. It was a controversial match: Spencer was an extreme Whig and made no secret of his republican views. Princess Anne contributed £5,000 towards the bride’s portion in each instance, and made both of them ladies of her bedchamber. The resignation of Marlborough’s old enemy Portland in the summer of 1700 and his replacement in William’s favour by Joost van Keppel, now Earl of Albemarle, helped smooth the upward path. Marlborough crossed the king by supporting Prince George’s long-standing claim to the money owed him since 1689, but William soon forgave him, and Anne was delighted by his help, ‘it being wholly owing to your & his kindness’, she assured Sarah. When William went to Holland in 1700 Marlborough was again appointed one of the lords justices.
Anne suffered another miscarriage on 14 January 1700, producing a boy who was judged to have been ‘dead in her a month’. It was probably her seventeenth pregnancy, and was certainly her last. A deeper tragedy followed: on 30 July the ten-year-old Duke of Gloucester died of smallpox. Anne, suggests a biographer, never really recovered from the blow, and thereafter habitually wrote to Sarah as ‘your poor unfortunate faithful Morley’, a play on the Churchill family motto, ‘Faithful but Unfortunate’.83 Although Gloucester’s death deprived Marlborough of his only office, he found himself at the very centre of the discussions on the succession. He was involved, this time on Anne’s behalf, in discussions with the omnipresent Jacobite agents (with the customary camouflage of secrecy laced with deception), and it seems likely that Anne was endeavouring to secure her own unopposed succession to the throne on the death of William by implying that the Jacobite claimant (the twelve-year-old James, Prince of Wales) might succeed her. She was probably never serious in this, and most well-placed contemporary observers believed that she was genuinely committed to the official line.
This policy, championed by William and his predominantly Tory ministry, was that the Protestant succession should be assured. They supported the dowager Electress Sophia of Hanover, who, as a granddaughter of James I, had some of the old Stuart blood in her veins, and who herself had a grandson, the Electoral Prince Georg August. William was now visibly in failing health, and the issue needed speedy resolution. In June 1701 Parliament passed an Act of Settlement which vested the crown in Electress Sophia and her heirs should Anne die without children, as then seemed almost certain.
Marlborough was not simply influential in steering the measure through the Lords, but also supported the election as speaker of the Commons of Robert Harley, a kinsman of Sarah’s, and Harley’s careful management nudged the Bill through the Commons. The Act did more than determine the succession. It declared that future monarchs must be communicating members of the Church of England, they were forbidden to leave their three kingdoms without permission from Parliament, only the native-born could hold office, and the full Privy Council must consider major matters of policy. The terms, indeed, were so restrictive that Georg August genuinely believed that the measure was designed to make him refuse the crown and thus assure a Jacobite succession. While Anne saw the need for a Protestant succession, she was, and remained throughout her reign, very sensitive about the issue. She wanted no heir apparent looking over her shoulder, and no cloud on the horizon to dim the glory of her own accession, an event that evidently could not be delayed for long.
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Europe changed gear with a palpable jerk in 1700–02. The Treaty of Ryswick had delayed but not expunged Louis’ plans for dominating Europe. The death of the childless and decrepit Charles II of Spain had been widely anticipated, and negotiations between the major powers considered ways of partitioning the Spanish Empire, in the New World and the Old, so that neither the French nor their potential adversaries gained decisive advantage from it and that whoever succeeded to the throne of Spain (and there were a number of credible claimants) would not immediately join their realm to France or the Empire. Charles died in November 1700, and his will provided for his entire empire to be offered to Louis’ grandson Philippe, duc d’Anjou. If Anjou refused it, then it was to go to the Hapsburg Emperor Leopold’s younger son, the Archduke Charles. Louis thought for some time before acting, but eventually decided to back his grandson, introducing him to a room full of waiting courtiers and ambassadors with the pregnant words: ‘Gentlemen, here is the king of Spain.’ The delighted Spanish ambassador whispered that the Pyrenees no longer existed.
The French may genuinely have hoped, as their foreign minister Colbert de Torcy told William, that this would simply ensure smooth succession and that the two Bourbon kingdoms would remain distinct. However, the French army was now at a high level of readiness, and in February 1701 Louis’ troops moved into the barrier fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands with the connivance of the Spanish authorities. William had just issued orders authorising their Dutch garrisons to withdraw, but the French moved too quickly and grabbed them all, releasing them only after a firm line had been established on the Dutch border. Max Emmanuel, Elector of Bavaria, an Allied general in the previous war and now governor of the Spanish Netherlands, threw in his lot with France and departed to Bavaria to raise troops.