Marlborough: His Life and Times
by
[Scribners, 2 vols., $3.00 each]
No English statue honors England’s greatest soldier. Forgotten generals in bronze ride high above London traffic; the man who made the tradition of the British Army and brought his country to the pinnacle of world influence is held up to contumely in countless volumes which record his vast achievements. Abuse is the common portion of greatness, but the vilification which pursued Marlborough while he lived has suffered no surcease. Where the pamphleteer dropped the scent, the historian took it up. For two centuries and more, every important chronicle has added its tribute of obloquy. Not only the great partisans, Swift, Pope, Thackeray, Macaulay, have portrayed him as the ArchEnemy, but judicious and impartial writers have accepted the thrice-told tale of his avarice, his perjury, and his treason. John Richard Green, who takes no joy in blackening a reputation, says of him: ‘Of honor and the finer sentiments of mankind he knew nothing. . . . He is perhaps the only instance of a man of real greatness who loved money for money’s sake,’and no writer of note has defended him from the damning charge of playing false to country and to King.
To vindicate such a reputation calls for a doughty champion. But when it comes to vindications, Winston Churchill is a supreme artist. In half a dozen volumes, part history, part reminiscence, he has vindicated himself. In two others, which for artistry and skill have not been surpassed in our generation, he vindicates his father. Now in a further exercise of piety he essays the exoneration of that grandsire who began life as the penniless son of another Winston Churchill, and became one of the richest and surely the most tremendous subject the Crown of England ever had.
The best defense is offense. So Churchill believes, and makes his central onslaught directly upon the most famous of the Duke’s detractors. Very engaging is his order of battle as he deploys his arguments against Lord Macaulay. Every charge that iproved to the hilt he admits with candor, but every doubtful one he repels with the vigor of outraged conscience, and upon the document on which the crowning baseness of the indictment rests he swoops with a cold fury which literally demolishes it. The infamous betrayal of the Brest Expedition through a treasonable letter to the exiled James, upon which Macaulay and the host of detractors relied for the summation of their charge, is proved through ingenious and minute inquiry to be pure Jacobite invention, while the double-dealing of which Marlborough was certainly guilty is represented as little more than the prudent self-interest of a realistic age.
Mr. Churchill is at his best, I think, when he is his own hero. As his grandfather’s apologist he lacks some-
thing of the lofty insolence with which he repels aspersions on his own career. But, in this critic’s judgment at least, he is the noblest master of narrative prose in our generation. And what a story he has to tell! Marlborough belongs to the supreme order of mankind — the soldier-statesman, inerrant in counsel, unconquerable in war, moderate, firm, and wise. The ten years of ceaseless warfare in which he never suffered a defeat are reserved for the two final volumes of this august work. Enough for these first two are fifty years of preparation, mostly in adversity; the loves and intrigues of his youth, the long idyllic perfection of his marriage with the redoubtable Sarah Jennings, his stern and silent duel, and then his reconciliation with the other superlative statesman of the age, William III, are all studied in relief against a background of infinite life and color, peopled by a hundred living portraits not easily to be forgotten A rich and varied story richly told!
E. S.