Blacksmith to Blenheim

THE EARLY CHURCHILLS (378 pp.)--A. L. Rowse--Harper ($6.50).

When Charles II visited his wealthy mistress, Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, and surprised her in bed with bone-poor Ensign Jack Churchill, the monarch kept his head and, addressing the young man, said: "You are a rascal, but I forgive you, for you do it to get your bread." How right Charles was may be seen by the fact that after a year or two of bundling with Barbara and shrewdly investing her handouts, Churchill had founded the fortunes of his family and embarked on one of the most glamorous careers in British history.

John, Duke of Marlborough (as he became), and his wife Sarah are hero and heroine of this latest hymn to grandeur and glory by British Historian A. L. Rowse (The Expansion of Elizabethan England; The English Past). When empires decline and the spirit of reckless adventure ebbs, there are always a few men like Rowse to blow the old trumpet furiously and trot out the glorious dead as an example to the pusillanimous living. "History," says Rowse, "is an extension of life into the past: there are lessons to be learned, and people should learn them."

The First Rumblings. Presumably, the lesson of The Early Churchills is how Nobodies may become Somebodies if they have the right stuff in them. The very early Churchills were so obscure that Author Rowse dispatches five centuries of them in eight pages. One such was apparently a plain 12th century blacksmith, whose presence in the family tree the present Sir Winston has found "disquieting." The blacksmith's son married a widow a cut above him, and by dint of a few generations of such nimble marriages, the Churchills became gentry, landed but impoverished. The clan's private golden age began in the mid-17th century with Sir Winston Churchill, a loyal colonel in the forces of Charles I, whose budding career was clipped off in 1649 as neatly as his sovereign's head. But with the agility of his 20th century namesake, he snatched up the pen as quickly as he dropped the sword, wrote Divi Britannici, a monarchical history of England. In its lament for the plight of the Cromwellian realm, one hears the first rumblings of the famed Churchillian rhetoric: "The two great luminaries of law and gospel were put out: such as could not write supplied the place of judges, such as could not read, of bishops. Peace was maintained by war, licentiousness by fasting and prayer."

Next, there was Sir Winston's daughter Arabella who caught the eye of "the most unguarded ogler of his time," James, Duke of York, later James II, while she was lying flat on the turf after a riding spill. Timid, pale and thin, she was shortly installed as the duke's mistress in a mansion in St. James Square. A model of discreet industrious domesticity, she bore him several bastards, one of whom was ancestor of the illustrious Spanish Dukes of Alba. Helped by Arabella's prestige, her brothers did well too: George became a very unpopular admiral, while Charles became a fairly decent general. But John--who had already got his start in that affair with Barbara--was to outstrip them all.

The Queen Surrounded. In portraying John, Author Rowse takes his cues and many a quote from the latter-day Sir Winston's Blenheim prose palace, the six-volume, 2,561-page Marlborough, His Life and Times. John was slim and handsome, brave as a lion, as full of twists as a corkscrew. He was ambitious beyond belief, but never lost his temper or learned to spell. Through sheer brilliance he worked himself up to the rank of general. But it was not until Queen Anne came to the throne that John Churchill had the chance to astonish Europe. And even then, he would never have succeeded without the backing of his amazing wife Sarah.

Pretty, vigorous Sarah had been the playmate of dull and plain little Princess Anne. When Author Rowse says bluntly that "Anne was in love" with Sarah, he is probably not exaggerating. For Sarah's smile Anne was prepared to do anything--and Sarah made sure she did. Under Queen Anne, Sarah became Groom of the Stole, Mistress of the Robes and Comptroller of the Privy Purse: soon "the Queen was surrounded by Churchills," all on the make and growing richer every day. John was given command of the Anglo-Dutch armies, and with Sarah holding the fort at home, began his unrivaled series of British military triumphs.

He was 54 when he won his first grand victory, the Battle of Blenheim (1704). By that age "Wellington had won his last and Napoleon was dead," notes Author Rowse. To the warfare of his time--a static business of formal sieges, sedate marches and textbook battles--Churchill brought a degree of speed, flexibility and dash that horrified friends and foes. After Blenheim, he fought nine more campaigns, won nine more major battles.

Proper Admiration. But the string of superb victories looked to some Britons of Marlborough's day like an endless series of bloody shambles. Good Queen Anne began to cry aloud, "Oh, Lord, when will all this dreadful bloodshed cease?" Sarah, fighting desperately to keep the Queen under her thumb, only succeeded in losing Anne's affections. The Churchills' many enemies closed in--and with a crash like falling idols, both Sarah and John were thrust from their offices. But, by then, they were millionaires.

Author Rowse finds it hard to understand why satirists such as Swift and Pope fired some of their nastiest arrows at the glittering Marlboroughs. He bridles at the refusal of most Britons (which persists to this day) to regard the mighty pair with proper awe and admiration. To have boundless ambition, to become fabulous millionaires, to seize the power behind the throne coldly and calculatingly--these, as Rowse sees them, are not only natural characteristics in great men and women, but a small price to pay for national greatness and security. Be that as it may, the Marlboroughs, all of whose five sons died young, left to no one their remarkable gusto for such a role. One of Sarah's more enterprising daughters formed a liaison with a "low poet" of the Restoration named Congreve, and the son she bore died a hopeless drunkard. This was an omen perhaps of the centuries the family would lie fallow until another Churchill, half American by blood (great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of John and Sarah), would rise to rally and astonish the Western world.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.