The rules governing the purchase of commissions changed from time to time, and in 1684 the whole practice was outlawed, but with or without official approval it clinked cheerfully on. There was no reason why young men needed to understand their profession before buying their way into it: some young officers could not ‘relieve a guard without arousing the merry glee of spectators’. Moreover, there were many gentlemen ‘whom nothing but captaincies would contest’, thus leaving a residue of subalterns who frequently saw ignorant men buy their way in above them. One of the disappointed tells us that:
the subaltern … let him be never so diligent, faithful and industrious; nay never so successful too; and although he has spent so much of his own money in carrying arms … or in small posts, as would have bought a company; yet if he has not the ready – he must be sure to find one that has put over his head; and too often one that neither is, nor ever will make a soldier.29
However, the system, such as it was, was in a state of evolution, and during John Churchill’s career there were attempts to prevent the worst abuses: for instance, the commissioning of youths and children was theoretically banned in 1705. Churchill, as we shall see, had his own firm views on the subject, and it was at least in part thanks to his efforts that, between the reigns of Charles II and George I, a career in the army came increasingly to offer genuine professional advancement rather than sporadic achievement based on money and patronage, inflated by wartime promotion but imperilled by peacetime reductions. Yet throughout the period many officers, especially those in the most recently raised regiments, which would be the first to go on the outbreak of peace, were uncomfortably aware that the spectre of compulsory retirement on half-pay always beckoned:
This week we shine in scarlet and in gold
The next, the cloak is pawned, the watch is sold.
None of this was yet of much concern to Ensign Churchill of the 1st Foot Guards, commissioned without purchase by the kindly intervention of James, Duke of York. He carried his company’s colour (until about 1690 each company of foot had a colour of its own, and thereafter most regiments had a royal colour and a colonel’s colour) and watched the pikemen and musketeers of his company, now in the proportion of about one pikeman to four musketeers, stepping through their stately evolutions. Their captain enjoined them to ‘Have a care: shoulder your pikes and muskets; to your right hand, face; to your front, march.’ Off they stepped, stiff-legged, slow, and mighty proud of themselves, with the captain and half the musketeers at their head, the ensign and his colour in the middle with the pikes, then the remainder of the musketeers and last of all the lieutenant, with a keen eye on the alignment of the ranks and the behaviour of the men.
The foot guards were quartered in and around the capital, even then easily the largest city in the kingdom, with a population of more than 300,000 souls (almost one in sixteen of the total English population of over five million), and growing all the time to outstrip Paris in 1700 and Constantinople in 1750.30 It straggled along the north bank of the Thames, then crossed only at London Bridge, though there was a ferry between Westminster and Lambeth, long replaced by Lambeth Bridge but remembered by Horseferry Road, that now leads onto it. The City itself, the ancient commercial heart of London, comprised the original square mile bounded by the Roman walls, with Blackfriars to its west and Southwark just across London Bridge. To its west lay Westminster, approached by the Strand, which took the traveller to Charing Cross, whence King Street ran slightly north of the line of the modern Whitehall to Westminster Hall, where Parliament met.
The palace of Whitehall, frequented by John Churchill for much of this period, was the monarch’s principal residence. It stretched along the river for about half a mile, just a little to the north of the present Embankment, which was reclaimed in the nineteenth century. The traveller arriving by King Street from the City would enter the precincts of the palace by the Holbein Gate, with the Banqueting House to his left and a muddle of galleries and apartments around the little Pebble Court behind it. As he passed on through Holbein Gate our traveller would cross the north side of the Privy Garden, with a run of buildings on his right which from 1664 included quarters for a permanent guard of fifty private gentlemen of the Life Guards. Entry to St James’s Park, where the king loved to walk briskly with a selection of his dogs and to which access was strictly controlled, was monitored by these troopers, and passes to the park were much coveted.
This cavalry guardhouse stood for nearly a century; the present one, called Horse Guards like its predecessor, dates from the 1750s. Leaving through King Street Gate, and now conscious of Westminster Hall and the Abbey filling his horizon, the traveller would see a scattering of more apartments and the royal bowling green to his left. The whole place was a mixture of medieval and more modern, with Inigo Jones’s great Banqueting House, built for Charles’s grandfather James I to replace an earlier building destroyed by fire, as its most striking feature.
Court life mixed formality and practicality. Samuel Pepys was predictably gratified to see a royal mistress’s petticoats hanging out to dry in the Privy Garden, though the vision gave him rather lurid dreams. Privacy could be rare. When Margaret, wife of John Churchill’s future political ally Sidney Godolphin, was dying of puerperal fever in 1678, her shrieks rang out right across the palace’s riverfront. Many marriages of the period were made by conniving old men in smoky rooms, but this had been a love-match, and the distraught Godolphin wrote that his loss was ‘never to be supplied this side of heaven’.31 He never remarried.
John Evelyn admired Charles, that ‘prince of many virtues’, but complained that:
He took delight in having a number of little spaniels follow him and lie in his bed-chamber, where he often suffered the bitches to puppy and give suck, which rendered it very offensive, and indeed made the whole court nasty and stinking.32
Royal mistresses, in ‘unimaginable profusion’, according to the straitlaced Evelyn, might be ushered in via Whitehall Stairs from the river, or up the backstairs from Pebble Court, with the more permanent fixtures actually housed within the palace, though safely away from the queen’s apartment, just off the gallery where Pebble Court and the Privy Garden met. The place was full of courtiers, place-holders and hangers-on, sleeping (and sometimes pissing) where they could, and hoping to make themselves indispensable to Charles. He was ‘easy of access’, and
had a particular talent in telling a story, and facetious passages, of which he had innumerable; this made some buffoons and vicious wretches too presumptuous and familiar, not worth the favour they abused.33
Gilbert Burnet was less impressed by the monarch’s skill as a raconteur. ‘Though a room might be full when the king began one of his stories,’ he wrote, ‘it was generally almost empty before he finished it.’34
This royal rabbit-warren was badly damaged by fire in January 1698, and the Banqueting House was one of the few buildings to survive. Christopher Wren was told that ‘His Majesty desires to make it a noble palace, which by computation may be finished in four years.’ But there was never enough money, and although ‘the spectre of a grand palace at Whitehall haunts English architectural history in the seventeenth century’, the ghost never assumed substantial form.35 After the destruction of Whitehall the court moved to St James’s and Kensington Palaces in London. Charles liked Windsor Castle, with its romantic wooded surroundings, and William III was very taken by Hampton