in the field against them in December 1645, and in the winter of 1649 he was duly charged with ‘delinquency’. He fought a stiff rearguard action, trying both to haul in money owed him by others and to delay the government’s case against him, no doubt hoping that if it eventually went against him he would have some money for the fine. He could delay the evil day but not avoid it, and on 29 April 1651 the Commissioners for Compounding ordered that:
Winston Churchill of Wootton Glanville in the county of Dorset, gent. do pay as a fine for his delinquence the sum of four hundred and four score pounds; whereof four hundred and forty-six pounds eighteen shillings is to be paid into the Treasury at Goldsmith’s Hall, and the thirty-three pounds two shillings received already by our treasurer Mr Dawson of Sir Henry Rosewell in part of the money owing by him to John Churchill, father of the said Winston, is hereby allowed of us in part of the said four hundred and four score pounds.3
Although the fine was severe enough for a gentleman worth £160 a year, he had paid it by the end of 1651. However, he could not afford to house his family, and we know that he was on bad terms with his stepmother, whom his father had married in 1643, for there was eventually to be an acrimonious squabble over John Churchill’s will.4 Instead, he turned to his mother-in-law, Eleanor, Lady Drake, widow of a Devonshire gentleman, Sir John Drake of Ashe, and daughter of John, Lord Boteler of Bramfield. The Drakes were a substantial Devonshire gentry family, with connections by marriage to the Cornish Grenvilles, and were of the same tribe, though a different branch, as the Elizabethan seaman Sir Francis Drake. Indeed, one of the Musbury Drakes, from whom Sir John Drake descended, had knocked down Sir Francis for daring to use the armorial wyvern that he believed to be his by right.5
Lady Drake lived at Ashe House, a substantial Elizabethan E-shaped building in the parish of Musbury, on the right of the main road winding south from Axminster. She was ‘of good affection’ to the Parliament, had ‘animated her tenants in seven adjoining parishes’ to its cause, and her son John was serving with its forces. She feared a royalist descent upon Ashe and asked the local parliamentarian garrison of Lyme to send troops. They duly arrived, but before they could fortify the place a royalist force under John, Lord Poulett, leader of the Somerset royalists, arrived and took the house. Poulett’s men fired the chapel and an adjoining wing, and ‘stripped the good lady, who, almost naked and without shoe to her foot but what she afterwards begged, fled to Lyme for her safety’.6
No sooner had Eleanor Drake arrived at Lyme than it was besieged by Prince Maurice, one the king’s nephews and brother of the better-known Rupert. The royalists hoped for help from a fleet commanded, in the topsy-turvy way of the loyalties of the day, by the grandson of Lady Drake’s sister, James Ley, Earl of Marlborough. The earl remained in the Channel Islands, and the siege was raised when the Earl of Essex’s main parliamentarian army arrived in the West Country in 1644, enabling Lady Drake to get to London where, on 28 September, she was allocated the house of Sir Thomas Reynell, a gentleman then in arms for the king. When he came to terms with Parliament and compounded for his house in 1646 he accused Lady Drake of wrecking the place in search of concealed treasure, but she continued to live there for some time, herself pursuing compensation from Lord Poulett for the substantial damage his men had inflicted on her own house. In the spring of 1648 she was awarded £1,500, but £500 of this was still owing in July 1650, possibly because Poulett himself had died in 1649.
We cannot be wholly certain of Eleanor Drake’s residence at this time. There is an argument that Ashe House had been too badly damaged to be habitable, and that in consequence she moved to her son John Drake’s house at Great Trill, in the parish of Axminster. The question is anything but academic. As Winston Churchill was living with his mother-in-law, Ashe House and Great Trill vie for the honour of being the birthplace of the future Duke of Marlborough. However, the parish register of St Michael’s church Musbury tells those who can penetrate its spidery scrawl: ‘John the son of Mr Winston Churchill, born the 26th day of May 1650,’ and the majority of scholars, including Archdeacon Coxe, whose life overlapped the duke’s, agree that it was indeed in Ashe House that John Churchill first saw the light of day.7
Winston and Elizabeth Churchill had at least nine children. Four sons, Winston (b.1649), Henry, Jasper and Mountjoy, died in infancy or youth. Theobald, born in Dublin in 1662, took holy orders and died in 1685. The remaining four children, Arabella (1647–1730), John, the subject of this book (1650–1722), George (1653–1710) and Charles (1656–1714) all enjoyed careers which abutted on their better-known brother’s, and we will hear from them later.8 The circumstances of John Churchill’s childhood are largely surmise, for he himself tells us nothing of it. The anonymous author of The Lives of the Two Illustrious Generals, published in 1713, assures us that:
He was born in the time of the grand rebellion, when his father siding with the royal party against the usurpers, was under many pressures, which were common to such as adhered to the king. Yet, notwithstanding the devastations and plunderings, and other nefarious practices which were daily committed by the licentious soldiery, no care was omitted on the part of his tender parents for a liberal and gentle education. For he was no sooner out of the hands of women than he was given into those of a sequestered clergyman, who made it his first concern to instil sound principles of religion into him, and that the seeds of humane literature might take deeper root, and he from a just knowledge of the omnipotence of the creator, might have a true sense of the dependence of the creature.9
Things were certainly not easy for the king’s supporters. In 1656 an abortive royalist rising in the south was led by Colonel John Penruddock, who surprised the judges at Salisbury and got as far as South Molton in Devon before he was surrounded and captured. This encouraged Oliver Cromwell, searching fruitlessly for some enduring constitution, to divide England and Wales up into twelve military districts, each under a major general charged with enforcing not only security but also laws against drunkenness and sexual licence. The rule of the major generals was paid for by a ‘decimation tax’ of 10 per cent on royalists. Although the troops of horse who enforced the central government’s will on the regions were sometimes brutal, they were generally ‘honest and efficient’. There was little of the plundering and devastation that our anonymous author complains of, and certainly no licentiousness from these psalm-singing bigots whose efforts did so much to instil in contemporaries a deep hatred of military rule and a suspicion of standing armies.
While Cromwell’s Protectorate fumbled on in its quest for a settlement, Winston Churchill – called to the bar in 1652, though he made no use of it and did not keep term – remained at Ashe, living in the part of the house left unburned by Lord Poulett’s men, in an atmosphere redolent of old dogs and young children, painfully aware that he had backed the wrong horse. He busied himself with the family genealogy, discovering, at least to his own satisfaction, an ancestor who had come over with William the Conqueror, and edging gingerly past the decided possibility that his great-great-great-grandfather had been a blacksmith who had married his employer’s widow. Sarah Marlborough was forthright about all this, and in 1736 commented on Thomas Lediard’s biography of her husband that:
This history takes a great deal of pains to make the Duke of Marlborough’s lineage very ancient. This may be true for aught I know; but it is no matter whether it be true or not in my opinion, for I value nobody for another’s merit.10
There was, sadly, no denying either the fact that the Drakes were a more substantial family, or that without Lady Drake’s generosity Winston Churchill would have no roof over his head. We simply cannot be sure what all this meant in terms of the relationship between Winston Churchill, his growing family and his mother-in-law: young John was certainly proud enough of the Drake connection to take the title of his own earldom from that of Eleanor’s sister’s royalist husband.11