Marlborough by Richard Holmes

Author:Richard Holmes [Richard Holmes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007380329
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

6

The Lines of Brabant

Ripples of Victory

It took the hard-riding Dan Parke eight days to reach London, and Sarah immediately sent him on, hot-hoofed, to Windsor. When he arrived the queen and Prince George were playing chequers on the terrace. Anne told Sarah that ‘this glorious victory … next to God is wholly owing to dear Mr Freeman’.1 It is, though, noticeable that her letter to Marlborough himself was rather warmer than that to Sarah. The duchess had, over the past year, devoted herself to dislodging the remaining High Tories from government just as surely as her husband had concentrated on beating the French and Bavarians. The Duke of Buckingham, lord privy seal, was, for the moment, her own Schellenberg, though she did not defeat him till the following year. She justified her intransigence by telling Anne that she was simply telling her the truth, but although she seems to have been blissfully unaware of the fact, she was doing serious long-term damage to her relationship with the queen.

Blenheim was almost as much of a shock to the Tories as it was to Louis. They at once did their best to belittle it by equating it to Sir George Rooke’s capture of Gibraltar, enabling Sarah, at her vituperative best, to snap that Blenheim was apparently ‘an unfortunate accident, and by the visible dissatisfaction of some people on the news of it one would imagine that, instead of beating the French, he had beat the Church’.2 Marlborough, always nervous about his wife’s political views, at first tried to avoid getting involved in her assault on Buckingham, but eventually he fell into step, and told Godolphin that Buckingham should go and be replaced by the Whig Duke of Newcastle. There is, however, good reason to doubt his personal inclination in the matter, for on 20 October 1704 he had told Sarah: ‘I am very little concerned what any party thinks of me … I will endeavour to leave a good name behind me, in countries that have hardly any blessing but that of not knowing the detested names of Whig and Tory.’3

That autumn the political scene was enlivened by an attempt by the Tories to tack an Occasional Conformity Bill onto a Bill modifying the land tax. This was a piece of constitutional sharp practice, for the Lords could not, by well-established precedent, throw out a financial Bill, and the Tories hoped to bring in their favourite measure through the back door.4 Salamander Cutts, as an Irish peer able to sit in the Commons and, as governor of the Isle of Wight, every bit as able (despite frequent absences to smell gunpowder and deal with perennial money worries) to secure his return for the borough of Newport with its twenty-four electors, regarded the decision as ‘of the utmost importance’, for the success of this sort of tacking would have produced irreconcilable enmity between the two Houses, forcing the queen to dissolve Parliament and imperilling ‘the common cause against France’.

The queen, who attended several

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