Churchill never formally acknowledged his daughter with Barbara Castlemaine. She was styled Lady Barbara Palmer (for she was, in theory, an earl’s daughter, even if Roger Palmer did not actually sire any of his wife’s brood), though she was sometimes called Lady Barbara Fitzroy. However, Charles II never bestowed on her the surname which he gave to the acknowledged bastards that Barbara bore him, deliberately leaving her ‘without a token of royal bounty’. Her mother was either remarkably thick-skinned or had a broad sense of humour, because she took the child to Paris in 1676 and installed her in the Convent of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady in the rue Charenton. There, as the years went by, this witty and well-connected nun was visited by British travellers. Among them was James Douglas, Earl of Arran, heir to the Duke of Hamilton. Douglas had married Lady Susan Spencer in 1688, and John Evelyn thought him ‘a sober and worthy gentleman’. When he visited the convent in 1690 the lure of young Barbara, who had evidently inherited some of her mother’s temperament, proved too much for him, and she bore him a son, Charles Hamilton, on 20 March 1691. The boy (who took to styling himself the comte d’Arran) was sent off to live with his grandmother in Walpole House, Chiswick Mall, and Barbara ended her days as abbess of the Priory of St Nicolas in the Normandy town of Pontoise. James Douglas duly succeeded to his father’s dukedom, but was killed in that desperate duel with Lord Mohun.54
John Churchill’s affair with Barbara Castlemaine took place against a background of rising international tension. The Treaty of Dover had, as we have seen, bound Charles to support Louis XIV in his attack on the Dutch. Louis was characteristically pleased with himself in poising a mighty war machine over the heads of the Dutch. ‘After having taken precautions of all sorts,’ he wrote with his usual immodesty,
as much by alliances as raising troops, magazines, warships, and great sums of money … I made treaties with England, the Elector of Cologne, the bishop of Munster … also with Sweden, and to hold Germany in check, with the Dukes of Hanover and of Neuburg and with the Emperor … I made my enemies tremble, astounded my neighbours, and brought despair to my foes … All my subjects supported my intentions … in the army with their valour, in the kingdom with their zeal, in foreign lands with their industry and skill; France has demonstrated the difference between herself and other nations.55
It is easy to be attracted by the splendour of Versailles, the spectacle of the French court, or the saga of Louis and his mistresses, and to forget just what a challenge this devout and opinionated monarch presented to Europe.56 By invading Holland in the spring of 1672 he sought to improve upon the terms of the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle of 1668, which had given France useful gains on her northern frontier but had also left Dutch garrisons in Spanish-owned ‘barrier fortresses’ in an effort to restrict further French expansion. Louis’ apologists suggest that he launched the Dutch War in 1672 not simply because of ‘wounded pride or … insupportable arrogance’, though even they can scarcely deny a fair measure of both these commodities, but because France had good reason to control the ‘gates’ of the kingdom, especially Antwerp, and to achieve the ‘annihilation’ of the Dutch commercial fleet.57
To do this he presided over a nation whose nobility was largely exempt from taxation, and where famines (long unknown in England) regularly killed tens of thousands: perhaps 800,000 were to die in the severe winter of 1709. Judicial torture, outlawed in England and soon to be abolished in Scotland too, was routine in French criminal investigations. A shocked John Evelyn watched a suspect who had refused to confess to theft racked, a process which ‘severed the fellow’s joints in a miserable sort, drawing him out at length in an extraordinary manner’. The victim then had two buckets of water poured down his throat ‘with a horn (just such as they use to drench horses with)’, but still denied his guilt. The affronted investigator told Evelyn that under these circumstances they could not hang the fellow, but could at least pack him off as a galley-slave, ‘which is as bad as death’.58
The ‘affair of the poisons’, which diverted Louis’ court in the 1670s, eventually saw thirty-four people executed and almost as many sent to the galleys or banished. When the marquise de Brinvilliers was executed for widespread poisoning, after the customary tortures, the cultured Madame de Sévigné complained that the crowd around her pyre was so great that she had, disappointingly, only been able to catch a glimpse of the victim’s mobcap.59 A sketch by Charles le Brun of the marquise on her way to execution shows a plump face exhausted by pain. Nancy Mitford suggested that Mme de Brinvilliers’ ‘appalling tortures’ were ‘probably no worse … than those she had inflicted’.60 But one did not have to be a murderer to come to a bad end: a scurrilous cartoon of Louis’ equestrian statue in the place des Victoires, depicting the king being led in chains by four mistresses, earned hanging for the printer, the bookseller and, for good measure, the printer’s apprentice too.61
The republic which so affronted Louis was a federation of seven of the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries which had been under Spanish rule, and was governed by the States-General of the United Provinces, to which individual provinces sent delegates. The grand pensionary was its chief executive, and for some time successive ruling princes of Orange had been both stadholder (effectively an appointed constitutional monarch) and captain general. The British are fond of calling William of Orange, formally given both these offices in 1672, ‘Dutch William’. However, his principality of Orange was actually on the southern Rhône, his mother was Mary, daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, he had inherited some German blood from his grandfather William the Silent, French blood came through his maternal grandfather, Scots blood from his maternal great-grandfather, James I, and Danish blood through the latter’s wife, Anne of Denmark. If he was Dutch it was by birth, residence and the most passionate conviction. Some have hailed him as ‘the First European’, and it was certainly thanks in part to his efforts that Louis’ imperial dreams were to evaporate.
The first French attacks went unsurprisingly well, the Dutch frontier garrisons being overwhelmed with scarcely a shot fired. The Dutch government offered to make peace on generous terms, but Louis, beset by the blindness that so often afflicts dictators, rejected its offer. A riot in The Hague saw the grand pensionary, Jan de Witt, and his brother murdered by the mob, and now, under the determined leadership of William, the Dutch settled to their task. They opened their dykes, flooding thousands of acres of fertile land, and when the French began the systematic destruction of Dutch towns resistance only deepened.
If the Dutch had begun the war at a disadvantage on land, they enjoyed a comfortable supremacy over the French at sea, and this is what the Treaty of Dover was intended to counteract. Charles repudiated his debts by declaring a Stop of the Exchequer in January 1672, issued a Declaration of Indulgence, granting toleration to