Richard Holmes – Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General (страница 27)

The Duke got into the boat: and took good care of his dogs and some unknown persons who were taken, from that earnest care of his, to be his priests: the long boat went off with very few in her, though she might have carried off above eighty persons more than she did. One hundred and fifty persons perished, some of them men of great quality.²⁶

Lord Ailesbury, writing from the opposite viewpoint and with personal knowledge of many of the key players, also thought things were mishandled: ‘The Duke went into the shallop, calling out for Churchill, he being so greatly in favour.’ Ailesbury agreed that the boat could certainly have taken more passengers. Thomas Jermy, foot huntsman to the duke, managed to creep under the stern seat where he lay doggo and was mistaken for baggage. When the oarsmen discovered him they were so furious that they would have thrown him overboard had James not interceded.²⁷

Samuel Pepys was an eyewitness, and saw that the one available boat, which had been taken astern below the windows of the duke’s cabin, was sent off with the duke and John Churchill in her ‘to prevent his being oppressed with men labouring their escapes’. George Legge told his son that there had certainly been avoidable delay. He had pressed the duke to get into the boat, but James first argued that he needed to stay to help save the ship, and then ordered his heavy strongbox to be loaded. The resolute Legge, who had been responsible for getting the boat round to the ship’s stern, bluntly asked James what the box might contain that could possibly be worth a man’s life, and James replied that he would rather hazard his own life than lose the box. Eventually only a few of the duke’s closest adherents got into the boat, and it is unlikely that there were many priests amongst them: Father Ronché, the queen’s almoner, swam for his life and found a plank to cling to. There may indeed have been dogs in the lifeboat, but we know that at least one went overboard, for the duke’s physician, Sir Charles Scarburgh, found himself earnestly disputing the possession of a plank with the creature Mumper (evidently not a King Charles spaniel, but something of a more martial stamp), who was eventually rescued.

Sarah, commenting on Thomas Lediard’s biography of her late husband, recalled that John had

blamed the Duke to me excessively for his obstinacy and cruelty. For if he would have been persuaded to go off himself at first, when it was certain the ship could not be saved, the Duke of Marlborough was of the opinion that there would not have been a man lost. For though there was not enough boats to carry them all away, all those he mentions were drowned by the Duke’s obstinacy in not coming away sooner.²⁸

Sarah remembered that John had told her that the duke had given him his sword to prevent the boat from being stormed by panic-stricken men, and Sir John Berry agreed that Churchill had kept the boat free from intruders.

James himself told William of Orange that ‘considering the little time the ship was above water after she struck first’, the loss of life might reasonably have been greater, and if he had known that Ayres had survived the wreck he would ‘have been hanged up immediately, according to the custom of the sea’. Some other accounts emphasise that there was a delay between first impact and sinking, and if this is so one might conclude that James’s hesitation prevented more passengers from getting aboard the lifeboat, and his insistence that the ship might yet be saved probably delayed the issuing of an early order to abandon her. However, we cannot be certain how long Gloucester remained on the sandbank before slipping to her doom. Winston S. Churchill, with his own reasons for emphasising the delay, suggests that it was ‘about an hour’, but Sir John Berry, an eyewitness, though with a reputation at risk, recalled how ‘for a moment or two she beat upon the sands; then a terrible blow knocked off her rudder and tore her side open’.²⁹

The loss of life was certainly not all James’s fault: more seamen and passengers might have survived had they been able to swim. The tubby Sir John stayed on his quarterdeck until the vessel sank, and then swam to the Happy Return, which had anchored just short of the sands. The duke’s equerry Edward Griffin saved himself by clinging to a chicken-coop, and the Marquis of Montrose was hauled from the sea into James’s boat. Among those lost were Lords Roxborough and O’Brien and a number of gentlemen, including Laurence Hyde’s brother James, the ship’s lieutenant, and it was this loss of genteel life (almost like a microcosm of the Titanic) that struck contemporaries. Pepys was ‘sensible of God’s infinite mercy’, for he had no doubt that he would have drowned had he been aboard Gloucester: ‘For many will … be found lost as well or better qualified to save themselves by swimming than I might have been.’³⁰ James ordered donations to the widows and orphans of the drowned seamen, but there can be no doubt that the episode had done little to enhance his status in the eyes of many of those close to him.

The duke and his party set off for England aboard the aptly named Happy Return on 15 May. The journey was an unpleasant one for Mary of Modena, so heavily pregnant that she had to be hoisted aboard in a chair-lift. The homeward voyage took twelve days, and it may be that its discomfort contributed to the premature birth of Charlotte Mary, who lived only till October. Just over a month after her death, on 21 December 1682, John was rewarded for his services with the barony of Churchill of Aynmouth in the peerage of Scotland. This made him a Member of the Edinburgh Parliament, which then sat in the great hall known as the Parliament House off the High Street. There the three estates, nobles, barons and burgesses, debated and voted together as a single chamber.³¹ In view of Churchill’s work over the past three years the grant of a Scots peerage was not as puzzling as it might seem. Although it was not of as much practical value as a seat in the English House of Lords, it was certainly more dignified than an Irish peerage, proverbially the cheapest coinage available to reward supporters of the government.

Domestic Bliss, Public Prosperity

Lord and Lady Churchill settled in Holywell House, Sarah’s family home near St Albans. John’s income – now increased by his appointment to the virtual sinecure of command of the Third Troop of Life Guards on £1 a day – had been sufficient to enable him to buy Frances Tyrconnell’s share of the Jennings family home in 1681, and three years later the Churchills demolished the old house and built a new one, with elegant gardens and fish ponds. It was their favourite home. Sarah said in 1714 that however ordinary it might be, she would not part with it for any she had seen on her travels, and on St George’s Day 1703 John wrote whimsically to her that: ‘This being the season I hear the nightingales as I lie in my bed I have wished them with all my heart with you, knowing how you love them.’³²

Churchill resumed court life with enthusiasm. Charles had long forgiven him for his affair with Barbara Castlemaine, and he was now one of the king’s regular tennis partners. He shared this honour with Louis de Duras, his comrade in arms from the Alsace campaign, who had now inherited his father-in-law’s peerage and become Earl of Feversham, and Sidney Godolphin: they were ‘all so excellent players that if one beat the other ’tis alternatively’. Godolphin, born on the family estate at Helston in Cornwall in 1645, was a short, ungainly and rather taciturn man. His poet grandfather had died fighting for the king in a West Country skirmish, and his father Francis – who sired no fewer than sixteen children – had raised a regiment of royalist foot.³³ Like Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Francis Godolphin was rewarded after the Restoration, and in 1662 young Sidney became a royal page. He had married Margaret Blagge in 1675, though he lost her, all too early, to puerperal fever. John Evelyn wrote that ‘She was the best wife, the best friend, the best mistress, that husband ever had,’ and he saw how Sidney, ‘struck with unspeakable affliction, fell down as dead’.³⁴ Their surviving child, Francis, was to marry the Marlboroughs’ daughter Henrietta in 1698.

Godolphin became MP for the family borough of Helston in 1668, and cut his teeth on a variety of diplomatic missions over the next decade. He was at once unobtrusive and indispensable: Charles II quipped that he was ‘never in the way and never out of the way’. In 1679 he joined Sunderland and Laurence Hyde in the short-lived governing group unkindly known as ‘the chits’ for the youth and inexperience of its members, but he managed to retain royal favour during the Exclusion crisis, possibly because he was ill at several crucial moments. Hyde, holding the important post of lord treasurer, became Earl of Rochester in 1682, and two years later he was, as Halifax put it, ‘kicked upstairs’ to the less demanding job of lord president of the council. Godolphin, raised to the peerage as Baron Godolphin of Rialton, replaced him. With the accession of James II in 1685 he became lord chamberlain to the queen, and when she attended chapel was ‘accustomed … to give her his arm as far as the door’. He sided with James in 1688 but soon made his peace with William and Mary.