Richard Holmes – Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General (страница 26)

James persevered in the persecution of the Covenanters, often using Catholic highlanders as his chosen instruments, and there are those who see in his policy in Scotland in 1681–82 a foretaste of what he would have done in England after 1685 had he been given the chance. Judicial torture was still legal in Scotland, although it had to be authorised by the council. Gilbert Burnet, no unbiased critic, suggested that while most members of the council would have avoided watching a man being ‘struck in the boots’, as wedges were hammered in between an iron boot and his foot, James observed the process with ‘unmoved indifference’. The martyrology inevitably generated by this sort of conflict inflated some of the atrocities committed by the government and its supporters, but there is no doubt that some of James’s adherents plied boot, thumbscrews and smouldering cord with inventive zeal.

Churchill’s attitude to James’s policy in Scotland at this time helps us understand the process which was to lead to his decisive breach with his patron in 1688. James was anxious to be permitted to return to England, and early in 1681 sent Churchill to London to urge Charles not to allow Parliament to sit, to make an alliance with France, whose resultant subsidy would enable him to rule without Parliament, and then to summon him homewards. Churchill did his best for his master, but made it clear that he did not support James’s blustering threats to raise Catholic Scots and Irish to support him, which, after all, was precisely what many of his English opponents expected him to do.

When she was an old woman, Sarah recalled how much she and her husband had hated the persecution of the Covenanters.

I have cried at some of these trials, to see the cruelty that was done to some of these men only for their choosing to die rather than tell a lie. How happy would this country be if we had more of these sort of men! I remember the Duke of Marlborough was mightily grieved one day at a conversation he had heard between the Earl of Argyll … and the Duke of York. The Duke of Marlborough told me he never heard a man speak more reason than he [i.e. Argyll] did to the Duke and after he had said what he at first resolved, the Duke would never make an answer to anything, but ‘You shall excuse me, my Lord, You shall excuse me, my Lord,’ and continued so for a long time … I remember the Duke of Marlborough told me when we were in Scotland, there came a letter from Lewis the Grand to the Duke of York, writ by himself; which put all the family [i.e. household] into a great disorder, for nobody could read it. But it was enough to show that there was a strict correspondence between the Duke and the King of France.¹⁸

We must be cautious about accepting Sarah’s recollections at face value, for she could see, just as well as we can, how evidence of John’s growing concern at James’s policy might mitigate his action in 1688.

Yet her words cannot be brushed aside as the mutterings of a partisan octogenarian, for they are corroborated by those of John himself. James’s chief advisers at this time were Churchill, George Legge, later Lord Dartmouth, and the Duke’s brother-in-law Laurence Hyde, later Earl of Rochester.¹⁹ All agreed that James’s position would be much improved if he would consent to attend Anglican service, and the Earl of Halifax, the most supple of Charles’s ministers, warned that unless James complied ‘his friends would be obliged to leave him like a garrison one could no longer defend’. In September 1681 Churchill told Legge that they had failed to persuade James. ‘You will find,’ he wrote glumly, ‘that nothing is done in what was so much desired, so that sooner or later we must all be undone … My heart is very full, so that should I write to you of the sad prospect I fear we have, I should try your patience.’²⁰

James soon found himself in conflict with the Earl of Argyll, who made his feelings clear by opposing a clause in the Scottish Test Act which sought to exempt members of the royal household from taking the Protestant oath of allegiance. Argyll swore the oath of allegiance himself, but qualified it by adding ‘so far as is consistent with the Protestant religion’, and went on to put his objections to the Test in writing. In December 1681 he was tried for treason, and James helped ensure that he was condemned to death. Churchill wrote at once to James’s private secretary Sir John Werden, an old friend, urging that James should show mercy, and received a hopeful reply: ‘now (in regard to your old friendship, which you put me in mind of) I hope he will have the King’s pardon and the effects of his bounty, and hereafter in some measure deserve both’.²¹ Argyll escaped from Edinburgh Castle shortly afterwards, and Churchill wrote at once to George Legge, hoping that the escape would not be taken too seriously. It was certainly not in the government’s interest to execute Argyll, for a treason conviction meant that his lands and hereditary jurisdictions were already forfeit. But now, in the Low Countries with so many of the opposition leaders, he was another of James’s embittered opponents, and when Monmouth rose against James II in 1685 he led a rebellion in the western Highlands but was speedily captured and, this time, beheaded.

As early as 1681 Churchill grasped the essence of what would eventually ruin James. He was usually physically courageous and, as a recent biographer observes, ‘had high standards of honour and integrity, from which he deviated only rarely’.²² Yet the Earl of Ailesbury, who risked life and fortune for James, wrote that Charles II ‘was a great master of kingcraft and I wish to God that his royal father and brother had been endowed with the same talent and for the same motives’. James, he thought, ‘wanted for nothing but the talent of his royal brother’.²³ His religious conviction hardened moral courage but dissolved pliability, and as king he was to display ‘political incompetence’ laced with ‘sheer bad luck’.²⁴ Ultimately he lacked judgement, and those who, like John Churchill, owed their rise to his patronage, feared even before he ascended the throne that his fall would eventually encompass their own. James was impossible to steer, and much later, in the draft of a memoir ghosted by Gilbert Burnet, Sarah argued that he had been undone by flattery: ‘I saw poor K James ruined by this that nobody would honestly tell him of his danger till he was past recovery: and that for fear of displeasing him.’²⁵

James was allowed to return to England in the spring of 1682, and set off from Leith for Yarmouth on 4 May, with Churchill among his entourage. Sarah remained in Edinburgh. On 19 July 1681 she had given birth to a daughter, Henrietta, who was baptised at St Martin-in-the-Fields on the twenty-ninth, and then left in Jermyn Street in the care of a nurse. John Churchill had not yet seen her. After a stormy four-day voyage they arrived in Yarmouth, and went by road to Norwich and thence to Newmarket, where Charles was enjoying the horseracing. While they were there John wrote to tell Sarah, still in Edinburgh, that he had just received a letter from London saying that Henrietta was very well. ‘Everybody seems to be very kind to the Duke,’ he added, hoping that his recall would be permanent, enabling the Churchills to move back to London. Indeed it was. Charles asked his brother to return to Scotland, wind up his affairs there and return with his wife and youngest daughter, Anne.

The ducal party sailed from Margate on the frigate Gloucester on 4 May accompanied by a small squadron, including the yacht Catherine with Samuel Pepys aboard: he had hoped to sail with the duke but the cramped conditions aboard Gloucester made this impossible. Early on the morning of their second day at sea, while most of the passengers were asleep, Gloucester struck the sandbank known as Lemon and Ore off Cromer on the Norfolk coast. After hanging on to the sandbank for some time she slipped off into deep water and sank almost immediately. The ship’s pilot, Captain Ayres, was court-martialled and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment for negligence, and Pepys told his old associate Will Hewer that Ayres was doubly guilty because ‘Sir John Berry, his master, mates, Col Legge, the Duke himself’ had all agreed that the squadron should stand out further from the land. Although the sea was calm and there were ships in close company, there may have been as few as forty survivors from perhaps three hundred passengers and crew.

The loss of the Gloucester was soon politicised. Some, of a Tory persuasion, maintained that James did his best to save the vessel, and Sir John Berry, the vessel’s captain, affirmed that his sailors were so devoted to the duke that ‘in the midst of their affliction and dying condition [they] did rejoice and thank God that his royal highness was preserved’. Others, of a more whiggish view, had James leading the rush for the only available lifeboat, shouting, ‘Save the dogs and Colonel Churchill.’ Gilbert Burnet, in this latter camp, wrote: