Background
General John Churchill was born at Ashe, in Devonshire, May 26, 1650.
General John Churchill was born at Ashe, in Devonshire, May 26, 1650.
He attended St. Paul's School, was page to James, Duke of York, and in 1667 received a commission in the Foot Guards.
He saw service at Tangier (1670) and distinguished himself from 1672 to 1675 in the Flanders campaigns, attracting the attention of the great French general Turenne.
In 1678 he was made a colonel. He was entrusted with several confidential tasks by the Duke of York and accompanied the duke in his various exiles. He was made a baron of Scotland in 1682, and of England in 1685.
Churchill was second in command of the army that defeated Monmouth at Sedgemoor (1685), but retired from active affairs as James II's Catholic policy became more pronounced.
When William of Orange landed in England (1688), Churchill joined him and in 1689 he was created Earl of Marlborough. Though his change of sides inevitably bred mistrust, Marlborough was given a command in 1689 in the Netherlands and in 1690 in Ireland, where he showed excellent generalship. In 1692 he was imprisoned in the Tower and, though he was soon released, there is no doubt that he, like many other Englishmen, was maintaining a correspondence with the exiled James II; but the charge that his disclosure to the French of the attack on Brest in 1694 caused its failure is unfounded.
Restored to the king's grace in 1698, he advanced to even greater importance after the accession in 1702 of Queen Anne and was created duke in that same year. He was made commander-in-chief of the allied armies in the Low Countries, fighting against France. Notwithstanding the ineptitude and constant suspicion of the Dutch and the difficulty of working with the various German princes, Marlborough achieved a series of magnificent victories during the War of the Spanish Succession.
In 1704 his march across Central Europe to save Vienna from the French attack resulted in the Battle of Blenheim where he turned an imminent defeat into a decisive success. As a result of this victory Queen Anne and Parliament rewarded him with an estate at Woodstock and a great palace which he named after his victory.
Ramillies (1706) won for the allies Flanders and Brabant, Oudenarde (1708) was almost an impromptu victory, planned on the actual field of battle, and Malplaquet (1709) resulted in the capture of Mons. Marlborough had shown himself to be the greatest general of the age, by his exceptional strategic skill; after his brilliant forcing of Marshal Villars' famous line of defenses in northeast France in 1711, he could have marched on Paris had he not been hampered by political and personal opposition in England, where his wife was no longer the queen's favorite and the Whigs were out of office.
In December 1711, he was accused of misappropriating public money and dismissed from all his offices. The charges made against him were largely political and had little evidence to support them. After his dismissal, Marlborough retired to the Continent until Anne's death in 1714, when he was restored to favor by George I.
However, his days of power were over, and thereafter he took little part in public life.
In 1678 he married Sarah Jennings, brilliant, quick-tempered, and heiress to a very small fortune.
As his only son died young, the title was inherited by one of his daughters through a special act of Parliament . An important influence in Marlborough's career had been his wife, Sarah. They were both notorious for their parsimony and amassed an immense fortune. The duchess herself, intelligent and eager for power, played one of the most influential parts of any woman in English history. For many years, Princess, later Queen, Anne was emotionally dependent on her and received political direction from her.
The Marlboroughs were thus at the center of power beside the queen. But in the middle of the reign the duchess, overbearing and a Whig, lost her control over Anne, and this was a factor in Marlborough's fall.
The duchess completed Blenheim Palace in her husband's memory, for they had always been deeply in love with each other. The duchess spent her last twenty years quarreling with her family and trying to interfere in politics. She broke with Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole and supported the opposition to him, but with no particular success. In the years before her death in 1744 she was probably the richest woman in Europe. Her memoirs, titled An Account, are fascinating for the revelation of a strongly individualistic personality.
