Married to a harridan
Peter Quennell
The Great Marlborough and his Duchess Virginia Cowles (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £15)
0 ne of the happiest marriages in English
history was that of John and Sarah Churchill. The letters they exchanged dur- ing their spirited courtship might almost have passed between Congreve's Mirabell and Millamant. Both lovers showed a fine spontaneous eloquence as he attacked and she resisted: 'If it were true', wrote the 16-year-old Sarah, `that you have the passion for me which you say you have, you would find out some way to make yourself happy — it is in your power. Therefore press me no more to see you, since it is what I cannot in honour approve of and, if I have done too much, be so just as to consider who was the cause of it
To which her suitor replied: 'You say I pretend a passion for you when I have other things in my head. I cannot imagine what You mean by it, for I vow to God that you do so entirely possess my thoughts that I think of nothing else in this world but your own dear self ...
The exact date of their marriage is uncer- tain; but most probably it took place in the private apartments of the Duchess of York -- each was attached to the future James II's household — towards the end of 1678. It was indeed a marriage of love; their keen affection seems never to have died away. Despite a fashionably rakish past — Chur- chill had once been the lover of the King's extravagant mistress Lady Castlemaine (who is said to have remarked that he had cost her a good deal of money 'for very lit- tle service') — he became a conspicuously faithful husband; while Sarah astonished the free-living Court by her exemplary devotion.
Yet the story that Virginia Cowles retells has another, far less pleasant side. In later life, still handsome, devoted and gifted, they must have been a formidable pair. Perhaps the almost perfect understanding that had developed between them produced a kind of egoism-d-deux that was apt to preclude any real sympathy with their fellow human beings. They excited envy and admiration; they didn't invariably arouse affection. Sarah, for example, was a harsh parent; and although John Churchill, by then the great Duke of Marlborough, was devoted to his children, when, in June 1722, he lay at last upern his death-bed, she had so thoroughly estranged her two surviv- ing daughters that (Sarah herself records) they 'rose up', as she entered the room, 'and made curtsies but did not speak to me ...'
At a much earlier period, the Churchills had formed a political-military alliance, through which, while the husband con- ducted his triumphant campaigns abroad, the wife managed their sovereign in London by exploiting poor Queen Anne's semi- amorous infatuation for her beloved 'Mrs Freeman'. The story of 'Mrs Freeman's' relationship with 'Mrs Morley', and of Sarah's unbridled rage when she discovered that she had somehow been supplanted by her own protegee and poor relation Abigail Hill — she began to hint that the Queen had lesbian tendencies: 'there yet are many things untold for want of a name' she sug- gested — does neither of them much credit and produces a sad picture of neurotic weakness on the one hand and of cold, calculating cleverness on the other.
At 46, while she continued to dominate the Court, Sarah was still a remarkably at- tractive woman. Lord Harvey, Pope's bisexual ISporus' and the author of the ad- mirable 'Memoirs', wrote in a letter to a friend: Did you but know her but half as well as I have the happiness to do, she would make you think of her as one said of the sea, that it infinitely surprised him the first time he saw it, but that the last sight of it made as wonderful an impression as if he had never observed it before.
Virginia Cowles's portraits of The Great Marlborough and his Duchess, and par- ticularly the portrait of her devious heroine, are a shrewd but sympathetic piece of work. Not surprisingly, she likes her hero better. He was not only a victorious but a remarkably popular general, always con- cerned for the welfare of his men — 'their Kindness ... transported me', he said attentive to the proper care of the wounded, and personally courageous on the battle- field. Thus, at Elixim, 'Marlborough rode up to the front line of the English cavalry and took his place among them as an or- dinary trooper . .. The Duke gave the order to charge. This was done knee to knee at a fast trot the Scots Greys routed four squadrons without losing a single man. The enemy attempted a counter- charge, but Marlborough attacked a second time, again riding with his troopers'.
As a politician, however, he was at least as unscrupulous as most of his contem- poraries; and, when James It fell, having served with his wife in James's household for 20 years, he expeditiously joined the Prince of Orange. Worse, no doubt, when the Marlboroughs had suffered joint eclipse and decided they must leave the country, fearing that Lord Oxford's government might now impeach him and seize his enor- mous personal fortune, he engaged in clandestine negotiations with both the exiled Stuarts and the Hanoverian claimants. To the French Foreign Minister he went so far as to suggest that, provided Louis XIV could persuade Oxford to refrain from im- peachment proceedings, he would willingly support the Stuart cause, and even talked vaguely of an armed invasion of England under his own command as Captain General.
That the Great Duke should have invited the King of France 'against whom he had been waging war for ten years' to help him save his English fortune 'surpassed the nor- mal bounds of audacity and bordered on the bizarre', his new biographer remarks. Notwithstanding occasional lapses into the style of a popular biography — her young heroine once becomes 'pert little Sarah'; Louis XIV, 'the periwigged tyrant at Ver- sailles' — Virginia Cowles has covered her complex subject in a workmanlike and lucid manner. It is an enjoyable book to read. Even the detailed account of Marl- borough's long campaigns, and of the brilliant strategy he employed on his many battlefields, can quite easily be followed.
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