A genius but not a hero

If anyone ever wondered why Marlborough has so seldom enjoyed the reputation his abilities warrant he could do a lot worse than start with Richard Holmes’s new biography. England’s Fragile Genius is probably as comprehensive an account of Marlborough as a single volume can hope to be, and yet at the end of 500-odd closely argued and sympathetic pages he remains so completely the creature of his age in all its factionalism, double dealing and venality, that it is hard to see him ever comfortably fitting the popular notion of the British hero.

Even those who dislike Wellington’s politics can hardly deny the consistency or integrity of the man, but Marlborough presents a different range of difficulties. It would be absurd to judge him by modern standards, but even in the age of the South Sea Bubble, Blenheim Palace was something of a facer. And then what is to be made of a man whose success was based so heavily on the largesse of one king’s mistress, the influence of a sister who was the mistress of another king, and of a wife who was the intimate — and hostile gossip suggested more than that — of the Queen? Of a courtier who owed everything to James II only to betray him in 1688? A Williamite who kept in touch with the deposed James? A captain general and leader of the grand alliance against France who flirted with the offer of a pension from Louis XIV? Which is he? The grasping and corrupt monster of the Tory pamphleteers or, as Richard Holmes suggests, a sort of martial Vicar of Bray writ large?