Buch lesen: «Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845»

MARLBOROUGH. ¹

No. I

Alexander the Great said, when he approached the tomb of Achilles, "Oh! fortunate youth, who had a Homer to be the herald of your fame!" "And well did he say so," says the Roman historian: "for, unless the Iliad had been written, the same earth which covered his body would have buried his name." Never was the truth of these words more clearly evinced than in the case of the Duke of Marlborough. Consummate as were the abilities, unbroken the success, immense the services of this great commander, he can scarcely be said to be known to the vast majority of his countrymen. They have heard the distant echo of his fame as they have that of the exploits of Timour, of Bajazet, and of Genghis Khan; the names of Blenheim and Ramillies, of Malplaquet and Oudenarde, awaken a transient feeling of exultation in their bosoms; but as to the particulars of these events, the difficulties with which their general had to struggle, the objects for which he contended, even the places where they occurred, they are, for the most part, as ignorant as they are of similar details in the campaigns of Baber or Aurengzebe. What they do know, is derived chiefly, if not entirely, from the histories of their enemies. Marlborough's exploits have made a prodigious impression on the Continent. The French, who felt the edge of his flaming sword, and saw the glories of the Grande Monarque torn from the long triumphant brow of Louis XIV.; the Dutch, who found in his conquering arm the stay of their sinking republic, and their salvation from slavery and persecution; the Germans, who saw the flames of the Palatinate avenged by his resistless power, and the ravages of war rolled back from the Rhine into the territory of the state which had provoked them; the Lutherans, who beheld in him the appointed instrument of divine vengeance, to punish the abominable perfidy and cruelty of the revocation of the edict of Nantes – have concurred in celebrating his exploits. The French nurses frightened their children with stories of "Marlbrook," as the Orientals say, when their horses start, they see the shadow of Richard Cœur-de-Lion crossing their path. Napoleon hummed the well-known air, "Marlbrook s'en va à la guerre," when he crossed the Niemen to commence the Moscow campaign. But in England, the country which he has made illustrious, the nation he has saved, the land of his birth, he is comparatively forgotten; and were it not for the popular pages of Voltaire, and the shadow which a great name throws over the stream of time in spite of every neglect, he would bevirtually unknown at this moment to nineteen-twentieths of the British people.

It is the fault of the national historians which has occasioned this singular injustice to one of the greatest of British heroes – certainly the most consummate, if we except Wellington, of British military commanders. No man has yet appeared who has done any thing like justice to the exploits of Marlborough. Smollett, whose unpretending narrative, compiled for the bookseller, has obtained a passing popularity by being the only existing sequel to Hume, had none of the qualities necessary to write a military history, or make the narrative of heroic exploits interesting. His talents for humour, as all the world knows, were great – for private adventure, or the delineation of common life in novels, considerable. But he had none of the higher qualities necessary to form a great historian; he had neither dramatic nor descriptive power; he was entirely destitute of philosophic views or power of general argument. In the delineation of individual character, he is often happy; his talents as a novelist, and as the narrator of private events, there appear to advantage. But he was neither a poet nor a painter, a statesman nor a philosopher. He neither saw whence the stream of events had come, nor whither it was going. We look in vain in his pages for the lucid arguments and rhetorical power with which Hume illustrated, and brought, as it were, under the mind's eye, the general arguments urged, or rather which might be urged by ability equal to his own, for and against every great change in British history. As little do we find the captivating colours with which Robertson has painted the discovery and wonders of America, or the luminous glance which he has thrown over the progress of society in the first volume of Charles V. Gibbon's incomparable powers of classification and description are wholly awanting. The fire of Napier's military pictures need not be looked for. What is usually complained of in Smollett, especially by his young readers, is, that he is so dull – the most fatal of all defects, and the most inexcusable in an historian. His heart was not in history, his hand was not trained to it; it is in "Roderick Random" or "Peregrine Pickle," not the continuation of Hume, that his powers are to be seen.

Lord Mahon has brought to the subject of the history of England from the treaty of Utrecht to that of Aix-la-Chapelle, talents of a kind much better adapted for doing justice to Marlborough's campaigns. He has remarkable power for individual narrative. His account of the gallant attempt, and subsequent hair-breadth escapes of the Pretender in 1745, is full of interest, and is justly praised by Sismondi as by far the best account extant of that romantic adventure. He possesses also a fair and equitable judgment, much discrimination, evident talent for drawing characters, and that upright and honourable heart, which is the first requisite for success in the delineation, as it is for success in the conduct of events. His industry in examining and collecting authorities is great; he is a scholar, a statesman, and a gentleman – no small requisites for the just delineation of noble and generous achievements. But notwithstanding all this, his work is not the one to rescue Marlborough's fame from the unworthy obscurity into which, in this country, it has fallen. He takes up the thread of events where Marlborough left them: he begins only at the peace of Utrecht. Besides this, he is not by nature a military historian, and if he had begun at the Revolution, the case would probably have been the same. Lord Mahon's attention has been mainly fixed on domestic story; it is in illustrating parliamentary contests or court intrigues, not military events, that his powers have been put forth. He has given a clear, judicious, and elegant narrative of British history, as regards these, so far as it is embraced by his accomplished pen; but the historian of Marlborough must treat him as second to none, not even to Louis XIV. or William III. Justice will never be done to the hero of the English revolution, till his Life is the subject of a separate work in every schoolboy's hands. We must have a memoir of him to be the companion of Southey's Life of Nelson, and Napier's Peninsular War.

Voltaire, in his "Siècle de Louis XIV.," could not avoid giving a sketch of the exploits of the British hero; and his natural impartiality has led him, so far as it goes, to give a tolerably fair one. It need hardly be said, that coming from the pen of such a writer, it is lively, animated, and distinct. But Voltaire was not a military historian; he had none of the feelings or associations which constitute one. War, when he wrote, had been for above half a century, with a few brilliant exceptions, a losing game to the French. In the War of the Succession they had lost their ascendancy in continental Europe; in that of the Seven Years, nearly their whole colonial dominions. The hard-won glories of Fontenoy, the doubtful success of Laffelt, were a poor compensation for these disasters. It was the fashion of his day to decry war as the game of kings, or flowing from the ambition of priests; if superstition was abolished, and popular virtue let into government, one eternal reign of peace and justice would commence. With these writers the great object was, to carry the cabinets of kings by assault, and introduce philosophers into government through the antechambers of mistresses. Peter the Great was their hero, Catharine of Russia their divinity, for they placed philosophers at the head of affairs. It was not to be supposed that in France, the vanquished country, in such an age justice should be done to the English conqueror. Yet such were the talents of Voltaire, especially for making a subject popular, that it is on his work, such as it is, that the fame of Marlborough mainly rests, even in his own country.

Marlborough, as might be expected, has not wanted biographers who have devoted themselves, expressly and exclusively, to transmit his fame and deeds to posterity. They have for the most part failed, from the faults most fatal, and yet most common to biographers – undue partiality in some, dulness and want of genius in others. They began at an early period after his death, and are distinguished at first by that rancour on the one side, and exaggeration on the other, by which such contemporary narratives are generally, and in that age were in a peculiar manner, distinguished. I. An abridged account of his life, dedicated to the Duke of Montague, his son-in-law, appeared at Amsterdam in 12mo; but it is nothing but an anonymous panegyric. II. Not many years after, a life of Marlborough was published, in three volumes quarto, by Thomas Ledyard, who had accompanied him in many of his later travels, and had been the spectator of some of the last of his military exploits. This is a work of much higher authority, and contains much valuable information; but it is prolix, long-winded, and diffuse, filled with immaterial documents, and written throughout in a tone of inflated panegyric. III. Another life of Marlborough, written with more ability, appeared at Paris in 1806, in three volumes octavo, by Dutems. The author had the advantage of all the resources for throwing light on his history which the archives of France, then at the disposal of Napoleon, who had a high admiration for the English general, could afford; but it could hardly be expected that, till national historians of adequate capacity for the task had appeared, it was to be properly discharged by foreigners. Yet such is the partiality which an author naturally contracts for the hero of his biography, that the work of Dutems, though the author has shown himself by no means blind to his hero's faults, is perhaps chiefly blameable for being too much of a panegyric. IV. By far the fullest and most complete history of Marlborough, however, is that which was published at London in 1818, by Archdeacon Coxe, in five volumes octavo. This learned author had access to all the official documents on the subject then known to be in existence, particularly the Blenheim Papers, and he has made good use of the ample materials placed at his disposal; but it cannot be said that he has made an interesting, though he certainly has a valuable, work. It has reached a second edition, but it is now little heard of: a certain proof, if the importance of his subject, and value of his materials is taken into account, that it labours under some insurmountable defects in composition. Nor is it difficult to see what these defects are. The venerable Archdeacon, respectable for his industry, his learning, his researches, had not a ray of genius, and genius is the soul of history. He gives every thing with equal minuteness, makes no attempt at digesting or compression, and fills his pages with letters and state-papers at full length; the certain way, if not connected by ability, to send them to the bottom.

Dean Swift's history of the four last years of Queen Anne, and his Apology for the same sovereign, contain much valuable information concerning Marlborough's life; but it is so mixed up with the gall and party spirit which formed so essential a part of the Dean of St Patrick's character, that it cannot be relied on as impartial or authentic.² The life of James II. by Clarke contains a great variety of valuable and curious details drawn from the Stuart Papers sent to the Prince Regent on the demise of the Cardinal York; and it would be well for the reputation of Marlborough, as well as many other eminent men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, if some of them could be buried in oblivion. But by far the best life of Marlborough, in a military point of view, is that recently published by Mr Gleig, in his "Military Commanders of Great Britain," – a sketch characterized by all the scientific knowledge, practical acquaintance with war, and brilliant power of description, by which the other writings of that gifted author are distinguished. If he would make as good use of the vast collection of papers which, under the able auspices of Sir George Murray, have now issued from the press, as he has of the more scanty materials at his disposal when he wrote his account of Marlborough, he would write the history of that hero, and supersede the wish even for any other.

The fortunate accident is generally known by which the great collection of papers now in course of publication in London has been brought to light. That this collection should at length have become known is less surprising than that it should so long have remained forgotten, and have eluded the searches of so many persons interested in the subject. It embraces, as Sir George Murray's lucid preface mentions, a complete series of the correspondence of the great duke from 1702 to 1712, the ten years of his most important public services. In addition to the despatches of the duke himself, the letters, almost equally numerous, of his private secretary, M. Cardonnell, and a journal written by his grace's chaplain, Dr Hare, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, are contained in the eighteen manuscript volumes which were discovered in the record-room of Hensington, near Woodstock, in October 1842, and are now given to the public. They are of essential service, especially in rendering intelligible the details of the correspondence, which would otherwise in great part be uninteresting, and scarce understood, at least by the ordinary reader. Some of the most valuable parts of the work, particularly a full detail of the battle of Blenheim, are drawn from Dr Hare's journal. In addition to this, the bulletins of most of the events, issued by government at the time, are to be found in notes at the proper places; and in the text are occasionally contained short, but correct and luminous notices, of the preceding or contemporaneous political and military events which are alluded to, but not described, in the despatches, and which are necessary to understand many of their particulars. Nothing, in a word, has been omitted by the accomplished editor which could illustrate or render intelligible the valuable collection of materials placed at his disposal; and yet, with all his pains and ability, it is often very difficult to follow the detail of events, or understand the matter alluded to in the despatches: – so great is the lack of information on the eventful War of the Succession which prevails, from the want of a popular historian to record it, even among well-informed persons in this country; and so true was the observation of Alexander the Great, that but for the genius of Homer, the exploits of Achilles would have been buried under the tumulus which covered his remains! And what should we have known of Alexander himself more than of Attila or Genghis Khan, but for the fascinating pages of Quintus Curtius and Arrian?

To the historian who is to go minutely into the details of Marlborough's campaigns and negotiations, and to whom accurate and authentic information is of inestimable importance, it need hardly be said that these papers are of the utmost value. But, to the general reader, all such voluminous publications and despatches must, as a matter of necessity, be comparatively uninteresting. They always contain a great deal of repetition, in consequence of the necessity under which the commander lay, of communicating the same event to those with whom he was in correspondence in many different quarters. Great part of them relate to details of discipline, furnishing supplies, getting up stores, and other necessary matters, of little value even to the historian, except in so far as they illustrate the industry, energy, and difficulties of the commander. The general reader who plunges into the midst of the Marlborough despatches in this age, or into those of Wellington in the next, when contemporary recollection is lost, will find it impossible to understand the greater part of the matters referred to, and will soon lay aside the volumes in despair. Such works are highly valuable, but they are so to the annalist or historian rather than the ordinary reader. They are the materials of history, not history itself. They bear the same relation to the works of Livy or Gibbon which the rude blocks in the quarry do to the temples of St Peter's or the Parthenon. Ordinary readers are not aware of this when they take up a volume of despatches; they expect to be as much fascinated by it as they are by the correspondence of Madame de Sevigné, Cowper, Gibbon, or Arnold. They will soon find their mistake: the book-sellers will erelong find it in the sale of such works. The matter-of-fact men in ordinary life, and the compilers and drudges in literature – that is, nine-tenths of the readers and writers in the world – are never weary of descanting on the inestimable importance of authentic documents for history; and without doubt they are right so far as the collecting of materials goes. There must be quarriers before there can be architects: the hewers of wood and drawers of water are the basis of all civilization. But they are not civilization itself, they are its pioneers. Truth is essential to an estimable character: but many a man is insupportably dull who never told a falsehood. The pioneers of Marlborough, however, have now gone before, and it will be the fault of English genius if the divine artist does not erelong make the proper use of the materials at length placed in his hands.

John Churchill, afterwards Duke of Marlborough, was born on the 5th July 1650, (new style,) at Ash, in the county of Devon. His father was Sir Winston Churchill, a gallant cavalier who had drawn his sword in behalf of Charles I., and had in consequence been deprived of his fortune and driven into exile by Cromwell. His paternal family was very ancient, and boasted its descent from the Courcils de Poitou, who came into England with the Conqueror. His mother was Elizabeth Drake, who claimed a collateral connexion with the descendants of the illustrious Sir Francis Drake, the great navigator. Young Churchill received the rudiments of his education from the parish clergyman in Devonshire, from whom he imbibed that firm attachment to the Protestant faith by which he was ever afterwards distinguished, and which determined his conduct in the most important crisis of his life. He was afterwards placed at the school of St Paul's; and it was there that he first discovered, on reading Vegetius, that his bent of mind was decidedly for the military life. Like many other men destined for future distinction, he made no great figure as a scholar, a circumstance easily explained, if we recollect that it is on the knowledge of words that the reputation of a schoolboy, of things that of a man, is founded. But the despatches now published demonstrate that, before he attained middle life, he was a proficient at least in Latin, French, and English composition; for letters in each, written in a very pure style, are to be found in all parts of his correspondence.

From early youth, young Churchill was distinguished by the elegance of his manners and the beauty of his countenance and figure – advantages which, coupled with the known loyal principles of his father, and the sufferings he had undergone in the royal cause, procured for him, at the early age of fifteen, the situation of page in the household of the Duke of York, afterwards James II. His inclination for arms was then so decided, that that prince procured for him a commission in one of the regiments of guards when he was only sixteen years old. His uncommonly handsome figure then attracted no small share of notice from the beauties of the court of Charles II., and even awakened a passion in one of the royal mistresses herself. Impatient to signalize himself, however, he left their seductions, and embarked as a volunteer in the expedition against Tangiers in 1766. Thus his first essay in arms was made in actions against the Moors. Having returned to Great Britain, he attracted the notice of the Countess of Castlemaine, afterwards Duchess of Cleveland, then the favorite mistress of Charles II., who had distinguished him by her regard before he embarked for Africa, and who made him a present of £5000, with which the young soldier bought an annuity of £500 a-year, which laid the foundation, says Chesterfield, of all his subsequent fortunes. Charles, to remove a dangerous rival in her unsteady affections, gave him a company in the guards, and sent him to the Continent with the auxiliary force which, in those days of English humiliation, the cabinet of St James's furnished to Louis XIV. to aid him in subduing the United Provinces. Thus, by a singular coincidence, it was under Turenne, Condé, and Vauban that the future conqueror of the Bourbons first learned the art of scientific warfare. Wellington went through the same discipline, but in the inverse order: his first campaigns were made against the French in Flanders, his next against the bastions of Tippoo and the Mahratta horse in Hindostan.

Churchill had not been long in Flanders, before his talents and gallantry won for him deserved distinction. The campaign of 1672, which brought the French armies to the gates of Amsterdam, and placed the United States within a hair's-breadth of destruction, was to him fruitful in valuable lessons. He distinguished himself afterwards so much at the siege of Nimeguen, that Turenne, who constantly called him by his sobriquet of "the handsome Englishman," predicted that he would one day be a great man. In the following year he had the good fortune to save the life of his colonel, the Duke of Monmouth; and distinguished himself so much at the siege of Maestricht, that Louis XIV. publicly thanked him at the head of his army, and promised him his powerful influence with Charles II. for future promotion. He little thought what a formidable enemy he was then fostering at the court of his obsequious brother sovereign. The result of Louis XIV.'s intercession was, that Churchill was made lieutenant-colonel; and he continued to serve with the English auxiliary force in Flanders, under the French generals, till 1677, when he returned with his regiment to London. Beyond all doubt it was these five years' service under the great masters of the military art, who then sustained the power and cast a halo round the crown of Louis XIV., which rendered Marlborough the consummate commander that, from the moment he was placed at the head of the Allied armies, he showed himself to have become. One of the most interesting and instructive lessons to be learned from biography is the long steps, the vast amount of previous preparation, the numerous changes, some prosperous, others adverse, by which the mind of a great man is formed, and he is prepared for playing the important part he is intended to perform on the theatre of the world. Providence does nothing in vain, and when it has selected a particular mind for great achievement, the events which happen to it all seem to conspire in a mysterious way for its development. Were any one omitted, some essential quality in the character of the future hero, statesman, or philosopher would be found to be awanting.

Here also, as in every other period of history, we may see how unprincipled ambition overvaults itself, and the measures which seem at first sight most securely to establish its oppressive reign, are the unseen means by which an overruling power works out its destruction. Doubtless the other ministers of Louis XIV. deemed their master's power secure when this English alliance was concluded; when the English monarch had become a state pensioner of the court of Versailles; when a secret treaty had united them by apparently indissoluble bonds; when the ministers equally and the patriots of England were corrupted by his bribes; when the dreaded fleets of Britain were to be seen in union with those of France, to break down the squadrons of an inconsiderable republic; when the descendants of the conquerors of Cressy, Poitiers, and Azincour stood side by side with the successors of the vanquished in those disastrous fields, to achieve the conquest of Flanders and Holland. Without doubt, so far as human foresight could go, Louvois and Colbert were right. Nothing could appear so decidedly calculated to fix the power of Louis XIV. on an immovable foundation. But how vain are the calculations of the greatest human intellects, when put in opposition to the overruling will of Omnipotence! It was that very English alliance which ruined Louis XIV., as the Austrian alliance and marriage, which seemed to put the keystone in the arch of his greatness, afterwards ruined Napoleon. By the effect, and one of the most desired effects, of the English alliance, a strong body of British auxiliaries were sent to Flanders; the English officers learned the theory and practice of war in the best of all schools, and under the best of all teachers; that ignorance of the military art, the result in every age of our insular situation, and which generally causes the four or five first years of every war to terminate in disaster, was for the time removed, and that mighty genius was developed under the eye of Louis XIV., and by the example of Turenne, which was destined to hurl back to their own frontiers the tide of Gallic invasion, and close in mourning the reign of the Grande Monarque. "Les hommes agissent," says Bossuet, "mais Dieu les mène."

Upon Churchill's return to London, the brilliant reputation which had preceded, and the even augmented personal advantages which accompanied him, immediately rendered him the idol of beauty and fashion. The ladies of the palace vied for his homage – the nobles of the land hastened to cultivate his society. Like Julius Cæsar, he was carried away by the stream, and plunged into the vortex of courtly dissipation with the ardour which marks an energetic character in the pursuit whether of good or evil. The elegance of his person and manners, and charms of his conversation, prevailed so far with Charles II. and the Duke of York, that soon after, though not yet thirty years of age, he obtained a regiment. In 1680 he married the celebrated Sarah Jennings, the favourite lady in attendance on the Princess Anne, second daughter of the Duke of York, one of the most admired beauties of the court, and this alliance increased his influence, already great, with that Prince, and laid the foundation of the future grandeur of his fortunes. Shortly after his marriage he accompanied the Duke of York to Scotland, in the course of which they both were nearly shipwrecked on the coast of Fife. On this occasion the Duke made the greatest efforts to preserve his favourite's life, and succeeded in doing so, although the danger was such that many of the Scottish nobles perished under his eye. On his return to London in 1682, he was presented by his patron to the King, who made him colonel of the third regiment of guards. When the Duke of York ascended the throne in 1685, on the demise of his brother, Churchill kept his place as one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber, and was raised to the rank of brigadier-general. He was sent by his sovereign to Paris to notify his accession to Louis XIV., and on his return he was created a peer by the title of Baron Churchill of Sandbridge in the county of Hertford – a title which he took from an estate there which he had acquired in right of his wife. On the revolt of the Duke of Monmouth, he had an opportunity of showing at once his military ability, and, by a signal service, his gratitude to his benefactor. Lord Feversham had the command of the royal forces, and Churchill was his major-general. The general-in-chief, however, kept so bad a look-out, that he was on the point of being surprised and cut to pieces by the rebel forces, who, on this occasion at least, were conducted with ability. The general and almost all his officers were in their beds, and sound asleep, when Monmouth, at the head of all his forces, silently debouched out of his camp, and suddenly fell on the royal army. The rout would have been complete, and probably James II. dethroned, had not Churchill, whose vigilant eye nothing escaped, observed the movement, and hastily collected a handful of men, with whom he made so vigorous a resistance as gave time for the remainder of the army to form, and repel this well-conceived enterprise.

Churchill's mind was too sagacious, and his knowledge of the feelings of the nation too extensive, not to be aware of the perilous nature of the course upon which James had adventured, in endeavouring to bring about, if not the absolute re-establishment of the Catholic religion, at least such a quasi-establishment of it as the people deemed, and probably with reason, was, with so aspiring a body of ecclesiastics, in effect the same thing. When he saw the headstrong monarch break through all bounds, and openly trample on the liberties, while he shocked the religious feelings, of his people, he wrote to him to point out, in firm but respectful terms, the danger of his conduct. He declared to Lord Galway, when James's innovations began, that if he persisted in his design of overturning the constitution and religion of his country, he would leave his service. So far his conduct was perfectly unexceptionable. Our first duty is to our country, our second only to our benefactor. If they are brought into collision, as they often are during the melancholy vicissitudes of a civil war, an honourable man, whatever it may cost him, has but one part to take. He must not abandon his public duty for his private feelings, but he must never betray official duty. If Churchill, perceiving the frantic course of his master, had withdrawn from his service, and then either taken no part in the revolution which followed, or even appeared in arms against him, the most scrupulous moralist could have discovered nothing reprehensible in his conduct. History has in every age applauded the virtue, while it has commiserated the anguish, of the elder Brutus, who sacrificed his sons to the perhaps too rigorous laws of his country.