[2] During the next eighty years fighting was going on between England and France, directly or indirectly, for a great part of the time. [3] Seeley’s “Expansion of England.”

509.  Marlborough; Blenheim, Gibraltar, and Other Victories (1702-1709).

John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough (S491), commanded the English and Dutch forces, and had for his ally Prince Eugene of Savoy, who led the German armies.  The Duke, who was known in the enemy’s camps by the flattering name of “the handsome Englishman,” had risen from obscurity.  He owed the beginning of his success to his good looks and a court intrigue.  In politics he sympathized chiefly with the Tories (S479), but his interests in the war led him to support the Whigs (S479).

He was avaricious, unscrupulous, and teacherous.  James II trusted him, and he deceived him and went over to William (S491); William trusted him, and he deceived him and opened a treasonable correspondence with the dethroned James; Anne trusted him, and he would undoubtedly have betrayed her if the so-called “Pretender” (SS490, 491) had been able to bid high enough, or if he could have shown him that his cause was likely to be successful.  In his greed for money the Duke hesitated at nothing; he took bribes from army contractors, and robbed his soldiers of their pay.[1]

[1] See Hallam, Macaulay; and Thackeray’s “Henry Esmond.”

As a soldier, Marlborough had no equal.  Voltaire says of him with truth that “he never besieged a fortress which he did not take, nor fought a battle which he did not win.”  This man, at once so able and so false, to whom war was a private speculation rather than a contest for right or principle, now opened the campaign.  He captured those fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands which Louis XIV had garrisoned with French troops to menace Holland, but he could not induce the enemy to rish a battle in the open field.

At length, Marlborough, by a brilliant movement (1704), changed the scene of the war from the Netherlands to Bavaria in southern Germany.  There, at the little village of Blenheim,[2] he, with Prince Eugene, gained a victory over the French which saved Germany from the power of Louis XIV. (See map opposite.) England, out of gratitude for the humiliation of her powerful enemy, presented the Duke with the ancient royal Park of Woodstock, near Oxford, and built for him the palace of Blenheim, which the architect called “the biggest house for the biggest man in England.”  It is still occupied by descendants of the Duke’s family.  A few days before the battle of Blenheim, a powerful English fleet had attacked and taken Gibraltar (1704).  England thus gained and still holds the command of the great inland sea of the Mediterranean.  In the course of the next five years Marlborough fought three great battles,[3] by which he drove the French out of the Netherlands once for all, and finally beat them on a hotly contested field in northern France.  The power of Louis XIV was now so far broken that England no longer felt any fear that he would overcome her colonies in America (S508).