In the centre, though, the battle was now turning decisively against the French. The Allied cavalry began to pass through Orkney’s battalions, ‘and formed up’, as he tells us,
under [e.g. covered by] my fire. The enemy were in two lines on the other side of the retrenchment, and there was Boufflers at the head of the Maison du Roi and the gens d’armes. I took care not to fire even when they came pretty near – only some platoons to make them pay us respect, and to give us opportunity to form our horse on the other side of the retrenchments. But, as our horse got on the other side their horse came very near ours. Before we got 80 squadrons out they came down and attacked; and there was such pelting at each other that I really never saw the like. The French fired a little, but ours not at the first. We broke through them, particularly four squadrons of English. Jemmy Campbell, at the head of the grey dragoons, behaved like an angel, and broke through both lines. So did Panton, with little Lord Lumley, at the head of one [squadron] of Lumley’s and one of Wood’s. At first we pushed them, but it did not last long, for they pushed back our horse again so that many of them ran through our retrenchments … However, more squadrons went out, and sometimes they gained a little ground, and were as fast beat back again. I could see however it go better in other places … While the horse were engaged, I had little to do but encourage them, in which I was not idle, but oftentimes to little purpose.66
That genial soldier of fortune Peter Drake, now serving with the Maison du Roi, was shot in the calf and received two sword-cuts in the unavailing struggle to hold back the Allied horse. Drake believed that the second Allied cavalry attack worked because cannon had been hauled forward to support it. ‘The success of this last attack was greatly owing to a large number of cannon, and small mortars continually firing and throwing their shells into the woods, which tore down whole trees,’ he affirmed. He tried to surrender to a cavalry officer, but took the wise precaution of keeping his carbine cocked and handy. The officer aimed a pistol at him, and ‘his shot and mine went off instantaneously, I shot the upper part of his head, and he tumbled forward; his ball only gouged my shoulder, and tore the flesh a little’. An officer in the same regiment later accepted Drake’s surrender.67
De la Colonie thought that the first shock of cavalry was violent but indecisive, but that the Allies had the edge after they had rallied and passed through the redoubts again. He admitted that those grey-horsed dragoons – he called them ‘the Scots Guards of the Queen’ – were very good indeed. He reckoned that Villars was wounded during the second phase of the cavalry battle, and argued that if Boufflers had not ordered a retreat the battle might yet have been won, for there were fresh cavalry further back to support the Maison du Roi. All the evidence suggests that he was too sanguine, for the French infantry on both flanks had now begun to give way. Puységur’s men had at last been taken in the flank by Withers’ detachment, and the dogged Schulenberg had hauled seven twelve-pounder guns through the wood and begun to gall the French from its southern edge. Puységur knew that it was time to go, and ordered a retreat on Quiévrain. On the French right, d’Artaignan, who had taken command when Boufflers rode to the centre to assume command of the whole army, fell back on Bavay. Some historians suggest that he was forced from his entrenchments by another Dutch assault, but Marlborough admitted that ‘we were afraid to make them advance, having been twice repulsed’. De la Colonie was right to say that this was not broken infantry, seeking safety in flight, but formed brigades coming off, badly mauled but in good order. The Allied cavalry followed the French rearguard to the banks of the little Hogneau, but the chevalier de Luxembourg’s well-handled rearguard kept them at bay, and there was nothing approaching collapse and pursuit. Sensitive to French accusations of ‘our not pressing them in their retreat’, Marlborough told Sarah that ‘we had not foot’ to support the cavalry, as the infantry on his right were too far away and the Dutch on his left were too badly knocked about.68
Most combatants recognised at once that there was something wholly shocking about Malplaquet. The Allies probably lost just over 20,000 killed and wounded, with the burden falling disproportionately on the Dutch, with 8,462 casualties, and the French perhaps 12,000. Later that month Boufflers told Louis that 6,000 of his soldiers were still receiving treatment, and this takes no account of those killed on the spot or who died of wounds in the days after the battle. His official list gave 240 officers killed and 593 wounded, but only seventeen prisoners. Lord Orkney, who had seen many a stricken field, told his brother:
As to the dead and wounded, I leave you to the public letters: but depend on it, no two battles this war could furnish the like number. You will see great lists of generals and officers. I can liken this battle to nothing so much as an attack of a counterscarp from right to left; and I am sure you would have thought so, if you had seen the field as I did the day after. In many places they lie as thick as ever you saw a flock of sheep; and, where our poor nephew [Colonel Lord] Tullibardine was, it was prodigious. I really think I never saw the like; particularly where the Dutch guards attacked, it is a miracle. I hope in God it may be the last battle I may ever see … The French are very proud they have done so well. I doubt it is with us as it was with the French at the battle of Landen …
There is hardly any general that either is not shot in his clothes or his horse … many had 3, 4 and 5 horses shot under them. None alive ever saw such a battle.69
Major Blackader was soon to become Lieutenant Colonel Blackader, for his commanding officer, Colonel Cranston, had been ‘killed by a cannon-ball … shot in at the left breast and out at the back: he spoke not a word’. The morning after:
I went to view the field of battle … in all my life, I have not seen the dead bodies lie so thick as they were in some places among the retrenchments, particularly at the battery the Dutch guards attacked. For a good while I could not go among them, lest my horse should tread on the carcasses that were lying, as it were, heaped on one another … The Dutch have suffered most in this battle of any. Their infantry is quite shattered; so that it is a dear victory.70
Corporal Matthew Bishop and some comrades had hoped, ‘having no tents to fix’, that they could spend the night in a convenient house, but found it ‘full of miserable objects, that were disabled and wounded in such a manner that I thought them past all recovery’. They looked elsewhere, but ‘all the hedges and ditches were lined with disabled men … the horrible cries and groans of the wounded terrified my soul, so that I was in tortures and fancied I felt their sufferings’.71
Marlborough himself thought that ‘There never was a battle in which there has been so many killed and wounded as this, for there are very few prisoners, considering the greatness of the action.’72 He told Boyle that this was because ‘in the heat of the battle there was little quarter given on either side … Most of the officers we have taken are wounded.’73 On 13 September he wrote to Villars, lying wounded at Le Quesnoy, to wish him well after ‘the accident which you suffered in the battle’, and to propose measures ‘for the succour of officers and others of your army who have been left on the field of battle, or who have dragged themselves into neighbouring houses’. If Villars was to dispatch wagons to Bavay, the wounded would be collected and could then be sent, on parole, wherever Villars wished. Marlborough intended to send Cadogan there on the fourteenth, at whatever hour Villars thought suitable, to supervise ‘prompt succour and transport’. In case Villars was ‘no longer with the army’, he copied the letter to Boufflers.74
Failed Peace and Falling Government
Publicly Marlborough claimed a victory. Strictly speaking he was entitled to do so, for he had forced the French from a well-chosen position, though at appalling cost, and Boufflers himself opened his report to Louis with the words: ‘I am much afflicted, sire, that misfortune compels me to announce the loss of another battle, but I can assure your Majesty that misfortune has never been accompanied by greater glory.’75 On the afternoon of the action Marlborough told Godolphin
that ‘we have had this day a very murdering battle … If 110 [Holland] pleases it is now in our power to have what peace we please, and I have the happiness of being pretty well assured that this is the last battle I shall be in.’76 He took the same line with Sarah, telling her: ‘I have every minute the account of the killed and wounded, which grieves my heart, the numbers being considerable, for in this battle the French were more opinaitre [Fr: stubborn, obstinate] than in any other of this war. I hope and believe it will be the last I shall see, for I think it impossible for the French to continue the war.’77
With the French field army beaten, the Allies went on to besiege and capture Mons, which was no mean prize, although Cadogan was hit in the neck by a musketball on the night of 26 September when the besiegers opened their trenches before the fortress. ‘I hope he will do well,’ wrote Marlborough,
but till he recovers it will oblige me to do many things, by which I shall have very little rest. I was with him this morning when they dressed his wound. As he is very fat their greatest apprehension is growing feverish. We must have patience for two or three dressings before the surgeons can give their judgement. I hope in God he will do well, for I can entirely depend upon him.78
The real results of Malplaquet were political rather than military. As Marlborough hoped, it did bring Louis back to the conference table, although as he had feared, the Allies still pitched their terms too high. An Anglo-Dutch agreement, the first Barrier Treaty, signed that October, bound the Dutch to support the British demand for ‘No Peace without Spain’, and in return Britain supported Dutch territorial claims in the Netherlands, agreed to relinquish trading concessions secured by a secret treaty with Charles III, and to give up Minorca. Godolphin backed the treaty, but Marlborough, correctly recognising that it would cause trouble in Parliament because of the damage that the Tories feared it would do to British economic interests, refused to sign it.
The negotiations, carried on at Gertruydenberg in the spring of 1710, eventually hit the same sticking point as the peace talks of 1709: the future of Spain. Louis would not use troops to force Philip off his throne, and attempts to procure his voluntary withdrawal in return for compensation elsewhere, which might have moved him, failed because Charles would not make concessions. Marlborough, well aware that Spain had wrecked the 1709 talks, had no doubt that it would ruin those of 1710 too. Although publicly he toed the government line, privately he warned Heinsius:
I think it very unreasonable to press France to do so treacherous a thing as to deliver three towns in Spain, I think that they should deposit the three towns formerly mentioned: Thionville, Valenciennes and Cambrai, and that for the rest the preliminaries should continue as they are except the 37th article … If I could flatter myself that Holland were willing and able to continue for three years longer the war, you might then reject what is now proposed, and be assured that in that time and with the blessing of the Almighty you might impose what conditions you should see fit; but if the war can’t be continued, then this is a properer time [to make peace] than the [next] winter.79
The fact that Malplaquet eventually emerged as an empty victory was not Marlborough’s fault, and he took the field in the spring of 1710 with a heavy heart. By now the political balance at home was tilting against him, and he asked Sarah, ‘Am not I to be pitied that am every day in danger of exposing my life, for the good of those who are seeking my ruin?’ A few days later, recognising that negotiations at Gertruydenberg would indeed founder, he confessed unhappily: ‘I never in my life wished for peace more than I do now, being extremely dissatisfied with everything that is doing.’80
Some of Marlborough’s gloom stemmed from the fact that Sarah had now had her final meeting with the queen. Anne increasingly flouted Sarah’s traditional prerogatives over household appointments, and there was a major row in August 1709 over the appointment to the bedchamber of one Belle Danvers, who, Sarah maintained waspishly, ‘did not look like a human creature’. The queen’s dispute with Sarah became inextricably entwined with Marlborough’s continuing attempt to obtain the captain generalcy for life. Having made predictably poor progress in her efforts to secure proper respect from Sarah, the queen pointedly told Marlborough:
You seem to be dissatisfied with my behaviour to the Duchess of Marlborough. I do not love complaining, but it is impossible to help saying on this occasion, I believe nobody was ever so used by a friend as I have been ever since my coming to the crown. I desire nothing but that she would leave off teasing & tormenting me & behave herself with the decency she ought both to her friend and her Queen & this I hope you will make her do, & is what I am sure no reasonable body can wonder I should desire of you, whatever her behaviour is to me, mine to her shall be always as becomes me.81
Another royal trespass on her prerogative provoked Sarah into sending Anne a long and tendentious ‘Narrative’ of her relationship with the queen, complaining again of Abigail Masham’s influence. She followed it shortly with a fresh tirade which reflected some material from one of Maynwaring’s tasteless insinuations about ‘passions between women’. To show how shamefully her enemies were treating her, she included large chunks of the even more tasteless Secret Memoirs and Manners … from the New Atlantis, the work of Mrs Mary de la Rivière Manley, a catspaw of Harley’s, which defamed both of the Marlboroughs in a barely concealed and often quasi-pornographic way. Upon whom can Mrs Manley have modelled ‘Stauvatius the Thracian’?
A man who at present, and for some time past, has seen himself as the greatest subject upon earth, who never undertook any adventure that he did not perform to his satisfaction; whether it were to subdue a mistress, to win a battle, to take a town, or to secure himself such and such heaps of money, employment, grant or contribution … could one repeat the individual distresses of so many brave officers and soldiers, upon whose shoulders he has mounted to victory, through whose blood he has so often waded to conquest, one would detest, despise and loathe that abominable, sordid, despicable vice, which makes him more the hated of his own army, than their bravery has made him the dread of his enemies.82
Mrs Manley was prosecuted for seditious libel, but the case against her was not pressed, and as soon as the Tories were in power she was one of the most notable anti-Marlborough pamphleteers, accusing him of prolonging the war for his own profit.
In the autumn of 1709, before he returned to England after the fall of Mons, Marlborough made it clear to Sarah that he sided with her against Anne, who was ‘set so entirely wrong’. He thanked her for the draft of the letter he was to send the queen, assuring her that ‘I shall be careful in making the alterations as they are marked.’ This was the basis of his letter of 10 October in which he again demanded the captain generalcy for life and begged the queen ‘to be sensible of the long and faithful services of Lady Marlborough’. But he went on to warn Sarah that he had had quite enough of politics, and that
all the honours and riches in the world could not tempt me to take any other part in Ministry than what belongs to my employments, which in time of peace is very little. As I hope you will approve of this resolution and that no consideration will make me depart from it. I would not have my friends deceived by taking other measures for me.83
When he returned home in November the Whigs, who were perforce his supporters, though not his friends, seemed at the very zenith of their power. They had at last forced the queen to accept Orford at the Admiralty, and her speech at the formal opening of Parliament on 15 November described Malplaquet as ‘a most remarkable victory, and with such other great and important successes, both before and after it, that France is thereby become much more exposed and open to the impression of our arms, and consequently more in need of a peace, than it was at the beginning of this campaign’.84 However, Arthur Maynwaring told Sarah that the queen’s voice was fainter, and her manner ‘more careless and less moving’ than it had been on previous occasions.85
Dr Henry Sacheverell had preached his inflammatory sermon, ‘The Perils of F
alse Brethren in both Church and State’, on 5 November, and the events of the next four months went on against the backcloth of his trial. During this period Harley capitalised on the fierce passions raised by the trial, used Abigail Masham to give him secret access to the queen, and worked hard at the creation of an opposition party founded, as Edward Gregg tells us, on two principles: ‘The queen should be liberated from the tyranny of the Marlborough family and England should be given a respite from the war.’ Both planks of his policy attracted widespread and increasing support for many reasons.
First, it was and remains the nature of British politics for tall poppies to excite the malice of small boys with big sticks, and there were no fairer flowers than John and Sarah. Marlborough’s thirst for wealth was remarkable even by the standards of the age, and those who felt inclined to forgive a successful commander were less inclined to tolerate the frequency with which Cadogan’s plump fingers also slid into the till. Some of their perquisites, although wholly unjustifiable to us, were tolerated then. Other sources of income were far more suspect, and Cadogan’s conduct aroused particular indignation. Van den Bergh, who served alongside him on the Anglo-Dutch condominium, called him ‘the greatest thief in the whole army’, and Giulio Alberoni, Vendôme’s secretary during the period in question, maintained that Cadogan had ‘carried off more than 200,000 pistoles from Flanders, quite apart from other unknown thefts’.86