THE DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH. 1
Mr Alison's Life of the Duke of Marlborough is an enchaining romance – the romance of a dazzling but stern reality; and Marlborough is its equally stern and dazzling hero. It is, moreover, a romance equally exciting and instructive to both soldier and civilian; told, too, with the scrupulous truthfulness befitting reality, and by one of sagacity sufficient to perceive that, by so doing, he would preserve the ethereal essence of the romance, rendering it intense to the reader for mere excitement, (whose name, alas! is now legion,) while irradiating the path of the plodding inquirer after mere matter of fact. We assert that in these volumes are to be found many essential elements of the most enthralling romance of actual life.2 Hairbreadth personal 'scapes of the hero, from captivity and death; glorious battles, but of long doubtful issue; devouring and undying love; plots and counterplots without end, now on a grand, then on a paltry scale, national and individual; implacable animosities, deadly jealousies; enthusiastic gratitude suddenly converted into execrable ingratitude; court favour now blazing in its zenith, then suddenly and disastrously eclipsed; stern fortitude, magnificent heroism amidst exquisite trials and tremendous dangers; the wasting anxieties of the stateman's cabinet and the warrior's tent; what would one have more? And yet there is more, and much more, to be found in these volumes, as we shall hereafter see.
Mr Alison's hero is he who was known as "the handsome Englishman;" a title conferred upon him, not by sighing ladies fair, but by a man who saw him in his blooming youth, in his twenty-second year – by no less a personage than the great warrior Turenne, under whose auspices he began playing, very eagerly, the brilliant game of soldiering. This was in the matter (as the lawyers say) of the French against the Dutch, wherein he learned the art by which he afterwards gave his teachers fearful evidence of the extent of his obligation to them. – And he was handsome. Of that fact Mr Alison has enabled us to judge, by a fine portrait, after Sir Godfrey Kneller, of Marlborough, when in the prime of manhood. We cannot conceive a nobler countenance than here looks on the reader; it is the perfection of manly beauty. There is a certain serene frankness, a dignity, a subdued vivacity and power in those symmetrical features which would have enchanted Phidias. The Englishman thinks, and his pulse quickens the while, of that countenance, now so tranquil, suddenly inflamed at Blenheim, Ramilies, Oudenarde, Lille, Malplaquet; then excited by the anxieties of harassing statesmanship, and the indignities inflicted by envy, malevolence, and ingratitude; by and by relaxed with grief, by the loss of an only son; and finally beaming with proud tenderness upon a beautiful, gifted, idolised, and idolising wife – one who, after his death, loftily spurned a ducal suitor for her widowed hand, saying, "If you were the emperor of the world, I would not permit you to succeed in that heart which has been devoted to John Duke of Marlborough."3 No man or woman can read these words without a swelling heart, and a belief, which he would be loth to have disturbed, that they indicated a noble nature. What must such a man, he will say, have thought of such a woman? what must such a woman have felt for such a man? Each bound to the other, through all the vicissitudes of life, in adamantine bonds of love and admiration! each, too, possessing great qualities, materially affecting those of the other, as well for good as for evil. Nor was this remarkable man possessed of a handsome countenance only. His person and gesture were dignified, graceful, and commanding. He had indeed a signal presence; he was a perfect master of manner, and his address was so exquisitely fascinating as to dissolve fierce jealousies and animosities, lull suspicion, and beguile the subtlest diplomacy of its arts. His soothing smile and winning tongue, equally with his bright sword, affecting the destinies of empires. Before the bland, soft-spoken commander, "grim-visaged war" in the person of Charles XII. of Sweden, "smoothed his wrinkled front," and the rigid warrior-king, at his instance, bade adieu to the grand and importunate suitor for his alliance, Louis XIV., whom it was the great mission of Marlborough to defeat and humble. The consummate diplomatist was never – no, not for an instant – thrown off his guard: his watchfulness knew no relaxation; and his penetration into the designs of the most astute was quick as profound. He was, in fact, equally great in camp and cabinet – born for the conduct of affairs, which he regulated with a sort of frigid masterliness: a condition, however, which he maintained by rigorous self-command; for, as we shall in due time see, he had powerful feelings and quick sensibilities. Lord Bolingbroke said of him, that "he was the greatest general and greatest minister that this country or any other had produced – the perfection of genius, matured by experience." If we may presume to say it, he appears to have been one of those raised by Providence as a great instrument, for a great exigency in the affairs of mankind. It is true that Marlborough had his faults, and grave ones; but the genius of history is, in such a case, equally outraged by an attempt at suppression or exaggeration. "In estimating the character of the dead," justly observes Mr Aytoun, in his able vindication of the memory of Claverhouse against certain incautious allegations of Mr Macaulay, "some weight ought surely to be given to the opinion of contemporaries;" and one of the Duke of Marlborough's most eminent military rivals and political opponents, the celebrated Earl of Peterborough, said of him, in a noble spirit, "He was so great a man, that I have forgotten his faults."4 But can History? No: she abdicates her functions, unless she records truthfully, for the guidance of mankind, both the faults and the excellencies of the great characters whom she has undertaken to delineate. Without scrupulous fidelity here, history may degenerate into a libel, and a lie – a lie of unspeakable baseness, for it is regarding the dead, who cannot burst indignant from the tomb in which they were laid with honour, it may have been amidst the tears and sighs of a proud and bereaved nation; – a lie of unspeakable wickedness, for it is designed to live, and, living, to lie to all future ages, in proportion to the strength of the pen which writes it. These are truths to which the heart of mankind instantly responds; and we enunciate them here, only by way of making continual claim, to adopt the now exploded phraseology of English law, upon the attention of all biographers and historians. Not that we think this to have been rendered necessary by any recent and glaring cases – for we know of none whatever among English men of letters, in the departments just referred to, in which we have detected any intention to slander the dead, or misrepresent the living. We indignantly repudiate the bare possibility; and only desire to impress the necessity of a caution all but excessive, in making derogatory imputations upon the dead, through placing too great a reliance upon the tittle-tattle of days gone by, written or spoken; upon the means of knowledge possessed by those who gave currency to discreditable rumours; and the trustworthiness of contemporaries, often eager rivals outwitted in the game, and distanced in the race of life and distinction, by him whom they thereupon revengefully resolve to blacken before the eyes of posterity. We concur, in a word, cordially with Lord Mahon in saying that which we are bound to add he has uniformly acted up to, in his candid, luminous, and elegant History: "Unjustly to lower the fame of a political adversary, or unjustly to raise the fame of an ancestor – to state any fact without sufficient authority, or draw any character without thorough conviction, implies not merely literary failure, but moral guilt."5
That the Duke of Marlborough is one of the foremost figures in the picture of England's glory, in that radiant quarter crowded by her warriors and statesmen, is undeniable; and so is Lord Bacon, who stands forth among her philosophers a very giant. But would any biographer or historian deal justly, who failed to apprise us of the real blot upon the character of each? Surely, however, he would not dwell upon that blot with eagerness or exultation! but point it out in the spirit of a benignant sadness – in the reluctant discharge of a painful duty – and that only after having deliberately weighed everything that a judicial mind would require, before arriving at a conclusion so humiliating to humanity.
Four living writers – of high personal character, of great eminence in the ranks of literature, and characterised almost equally by painstaking industry in the collection of materials, but clothing the results of their researches in very different styles of composition – have respectively placed on record their deliberate estimate of the moral and political character of the Duke of Marlborough. These writers are – Mr Hallam, Lord Mahon, Mr Macaulay, and Mr Alison. Mr Hallam's writings are already English