stood in royal favour, his campaigning under Turenne resolved them. His English lieutenant colonelcy had materialised in early 1675, and three years later he was appointed colonel of one of the regiments of foot to be raised, not this time to support the French, but to help defend the Dutch: the realignment of English foreign policy was now complete. There is, though, no evidence that Churchill’s new regiment was ever actually formed. His colonelcy (carefully dated a day after that of George Legge, who was to be Pepys’s master on the Tangier mission) was simply a device to ensure that John Churchill had ‘precedence and pay equivalent to the very important work he was now called upon to discharge’. He had reached a key break in his career, and was striding out to bridge the narrow gap between soldiering and diplomacy: the young cavalier had come of age.
* In the seventeenth century the regiment’s ancestor, Hepburn’s Regiment, in French service, was in dispute with the Regiment de Picardie over the dates of their respective foundations. In the process, the Scots claimed to have been on duty when Christ was crucified.
John Churchill was in love. Sarah Jennings, the object of his affections, had been born on 5 June 1660, the week after Charles II returned from exile.1 Her father, Richard Jennings, came from a family of Somerset gentry which had moved up to Hertfordshire and lived at Holywell House near St Albans. Richard’s father had been high sheriff of the county and MP for St Albans. He himself sat for the same constituency, and had supported John Pym, one of the leaders of the opposition to Charles I in the early days of the Long Parliament, but had later, as a member of the Convention Parliament, backed the return of Charles II.
Although Richard Jennings was in theory a wealthy man, with perhaps £4,000 a year from property in Hertfordshire, Somerset and Kent, his estates were encumbered with debt and he had many younger siblings who had to be provided for. Sarah was the youngest of five children, with two brothers and two sisters, and it may have been the strains of a large family and hopeless debts that drove her parents to split. She moved to London with her mother Frances, who sought (unavailingly) to rescue her dowry from the shipwreck of Richard’s finances. In 1673 Sarah followed her sister Frances into the household of the Duchess of York. Frances had served James’s first wife Anne Hyde until her death in 1671, and soon became a maid of honour to Mary of Modena. The comte de Gramont called her ‘la belle Jenyns’, who was as lovely as ‘Aurora or the promise of spring’. It speaks volumes for her determination that she resisted the Duke of York’s roving eye and busy hands, but remained on sufficiently good terms to get her sister a place in the household.
In 1668 Richard Jennings died, and Sarah’s mother, who inherited little but his creditors, moved into an apartment in St James’s Palace with her daughters. The scurrilous Mrs Manley, author of The New Atlantis, a Tory scandal-sheet, was later to accuse her of witchcraft. She was like ‘the famous Mother Shipton, who by the power and influence of her magic art had placed her daughter in the Court’.2 There are too many contemporary complaints about Mrs Jennings for us to attribute them simply to political malice. She was certainly evil-tempered, may actually have been unhinged, and some suggested that she dabbled in the black arts and the procurement of that commodity most sought after by the court, pretty girls. In any case, the maids of honour were hardly above suspicion. Samuel Pepys grumbled that they bestowed their favours as they pleased without anyone taking any notice, and Frances and a friend once amused themselves by dressing up as orange sellers (a common cover for prostitution) and standing outside a playhouse to accost two gentlemen of their acquaintance. They were given away by their expensive shoes.
Sarah met John towards the end of 1675, and they began to dance together at balls and parties. Sarah had a blazing row with her mother at about this time, and eventually Mrs Jennings was ‘commanded to leave the court and her daughter in it, notwithstanding the mother’s petition, that she might have her girl with her, the girl saying she is a mad woman’. Theirs was a relationship which prospered only at a distance, and attempts at reunion regularly resulted in hot words. Some time after her marriage, after yet another furious argument in which she urged her mother to get into the coach and not freeze to death outside it, Sarah affirmed that ‘I will ever be your most dutiful daughter, whatever you are to me.’3
Just as John Churchill’s character was shaped by growing up in straitened circumstances, so Sarah’s was influenced by her own experience of poverty, genteel though it was, and by her inability to tolerate her mother’s company, however much both of them genuinely hoped that their next meeting would bury bad feelings for ever. We often pay out in adult life the coins we receive as children, and in Sarah’s tumultuous relationship with her mother we have a foretaste of her dealings with her own daughters. Sarah was certainly beautiful, not with the classical good looks of her sister Frances, but with that thin edge of imperfection that men often find even more attractive. She had long fair hair that she always made the most of, full, firm lips, a naturally pink complexion, and a nose that turned up, ever so slightly, at its tip.
Even at the age of sixteen she had unstoppable determination and a flaming temper. There is a great deal about Sarah Marlborough that is hard to admire, but the three centuries that separate us cannot dull the impact of this outspoken, uncontrollable and self-willed beauty. One can see why, once John Churchill had met her, he never thought seriously about marrying anybody else, and we can never practically separate John Churchill, soldier and politician, from John Churchill, husband and lover, nor usefully speculate on what he might or might not have become without Sarah. One incident throws their relationship into sharp perspective. When Marlborough was captain general of Queen Anne’s armies and one of the most important men in the kingdom, he entered Sarah’s dressing room to tell her that Sidney Godolphin, the lord treasurer, was going to dine with them. She was brushing a hank of her yellow hair over one shoulder and, furious at having her evening spoiled, seized a pair of scissors and cut it off, then flounced out in a fury. He picked up the severed tress, tied it up with ribbon, and kept it in his strongbox until he died. She found it there, and it broke her heart.
Some of the letters written during their courtship have survived. All are undated, most are from John to Sarah, and she herself assures us that the correspondence started when she was not more than fifteen. She told him to burn her letters, and he seems to have obeyed her, because the eight that survive are only copies. Sarah, in contrast, kept his letters and read them from time to time, and when she had only a year to live, wrote on one: ‘Read over in 1743 desiring to burn them, but I could not do it.’ His letters, in black ink and a slightly sloping hand, show all the symptoms of courtly love. ‘You are, and ever shall be, the dear object of my life,’ he tells her, ‘for by heavens I will never love anybody but yourself.’ In another he assures her:
If your happiness can depend upon the esteem and love I have for you, you ought to be the happiest thing breathing, for I have never loved anybody to the height I do you. I love you so well that your happiness I prefer much above my own; and if you think meeting me is what you ought not to do, or that it will disquiet you, I promise you I will never press you more to do it. As I prefer your happiness above my own, so I hope you will sometimes think how well I love you; and what you can do without doing yourself an injury, I hope you will be so kind as to do it – I mean in letting me see that you wish me better than the rest of mankind; and in return I swear to you that I never will love anything but your dear self, which has made so sure a conquest of me that, had I the will, I will not have the power ever to break my chains. Pray let me hear from you, and know if I shall be so happy as to see you tonight.