Quote of the Day (Robert Southey, on a Costly British ‘Famous Victory’)

“ ‘They say it was a shocking sight  

  After the field was won,    

For many thousand bodies here  

  Lay rotting in the sun;  

But things like that, you know, must be  

  After a famous victory.’”— Robert Southey, “After Blenheim” (1798)  

Robert Southey, who wrote his best work as an early member of the Romantic movement, only to fall off sharply before being named poet laureate nearly two decades later, was born on this date in 1774 in Bristol, England. The eldest son of a draper who fell into poverty and death, he developed his manners at the home of his wealthy aunt. His college friend, fellow Romantic poet, and future brother-in-law Samuel Taylor Coleridge, not long after meeting him, remarked that he was “truly a man of perpendicular Virtue – a downright upright Republican!” (That was "republican" in terms of the style of government, not the political party, he preferred.)

Like friend (and poet laureate successor) William Wordworth, he was a kind of English forerunner of the neo-cons—a youthful radical who, appalled by the excesses of the revolution he had hailed, turned reactionary with age.

“After Blenheim” (sometimes called “The Battle of Blenheim”) was written before his swing to the right. Its stature as one of the greatest antiwar poems in the English language is strengthened by the fact that it was created over a century before WWI made such sentiments widespread. 

I have written a post about Blenheim (or, rather, its victor, Sir John Churchill—otherwise known as the Duke of Marlborough) before. I followed the lead of most histories by analyzing Blenheim’s importance (i.e., checking the continental designs of King Louis XIV of France), but far less about its cost. So, picking up on the poet’s thread about the “thousand bodies” everywhere on the battlefield: Total Allied losses (i.e., troops under the command of the duke and his co-commander, Prince Eugene of Savoy) were 12,000 killed and wounded, with 40,000 killed, wounded and captured for their French and Bavarian opponents.

Like Mark Antony’s “Brutus is an honorable man” in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the powerful connecting element of “After Blenheim” is a refrain that gains in searing irony with each repetition: in this case, the notion that, for all its carnage, Blenheim was a “famous victory.” Many more such victories, the poet suggests, and nobody will be left to appreciate the win.

You can be sure that “After Blenheim” was hardly the favorite poem of the Duke of Marlborough’s descendant and (not so coincidentally) worshipful biographer, Sir Winston Churchill. And you can rest assured that, in the three decades when Southey served as poet laureate, he never wrote anything so critical about his country again.

(The image accompanying this post shows part of the Battle of Blenheim tapestry at Blenheim Palace—the home built by the Duke of Marlborough--by Judocus de Vos.)

Quote of the Day (Edward Creasy, on the Duke of Marlborough, The “First Churchill”)

“There are few successful commanders on whom Fame has shone so unwillingly as upon John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, - victor of Blenheim, Ramilies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet, - captor of Liege, Bonn, Limburg, Landau, Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Oudenarde, Ostend, Menin, Dendermonde, Ath, Lille, Tourney, Mons, Douay, Aire, Bethune, and Bouchain; who never fought a battle that he did not win, and never besieged a place that he did not take. Marlborough's own private character is the cause of this.”—Sir Edward Creasy, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo (1851)

On this date in 1704, the Battle of Blenheim, a hinge moment in European history, was fought. The army of “The Sun King,” Louis XIV of France, never previously defeated, was checked on a battlefield in Bavaria by two of the great military commanders in history: Sir John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, and his redoubtable ally, Prince Eugene of Savoy, leading Europe’s Grand Alliance against France and Bavaria. For the first time since King Henry V at Agincourt, an English general had won a great victory on the Continent.

I’ve always thought it was a stroke of genius for Masterpiece Theatre to launch with a show titled The First Churchills. Nothing could be more calculated to win the fascination of Americans than a reference to one of the architects of “the special relationship” between Great Britain and the U.S.—in William Manchester’s wonderfully evocative phrase, the “last lion” who stood in the way of Nazi domination of the world.

“All men are worms, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm,” Sir Winston Churchill wrote. He was, indubitably, a bookworm, which makes me all the more convinced that he must have come across the assessment of his illustrious ancestor, Sir John Churchill, in Sir Edward Creasy’s 19th-century bestseller, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World.

Had I been Winston, researching my biography of my illustrious ancestor, I would have been practically standing on my feet and applauding through most of that long, glorious first sentence I quoted. Indeed, that was the feeling one would have come away with after sitting through all 12 episodes of The First Churchills, based on the Prime Minister's five-volume biography of the general.

(More than a decade after this filial labor of love, written during his years out of power in the 1930s, Churchill must still have been harking back to this book: one volume of his World War II memoirs is titled The Grand Alliance, perhaps a not-so-unconscious evocation of the multinational force led by his ancestor that, like the one he formed part of, helped to defeat Europe’s greatest Continental power.)

The costume drama was an Anglophile’s delight—12 episodes about a stalwart commander who stuck to his proverbial guns in the turbulent royal court of his time, aided only by his loving but sharp-tongued wife Sarah (the phrase I recall about her is a “torpedo in petticoats”).

I don’t think the writers of the show read Creasy on Marlborough, for if they had they might have painted a portrait of the hero with far more warts. True, he consistently demonstrated absolute mastery in the field—the “cool head” hailed by Voltaire—but these must be weighed against a “private character” with faults that were, in Creasy’s words, “of a peculiarly base and mean order,” including:

* Treachery and ingratitude—Creasy takes Marlborough to task for turning on the man who first noticed and promoted him, King James II. Historian A.L. Rowse and the creators of The First Churchills absolved the general for betraying his patron, claiming that he saw the Catholic James as a threat to English liberty. Maybe—but why, then, did Marlborough assure James of his undying loyalty only a few days before committing to William and Mary?

* Disloyalty—As William of Orange discovered, Marlborough couldn’t be bought, only rented. After the so-called Glorious Revolution, the new monarch learned that Marlborough was still secretly corresponding with James II, wanting to stay on his good side just in case the exiled king came to power again. William didn’t dismiss Marlborough then and there because he figured he could still make use of the talented soldier.

* Treason—Marlborough and his ally under William and Anne, Sidney Godolphin, seem to have been playing footsie with England’s rivals. In 1694, a British attack on the French port of Brest was foiled after Louis received intelligence of the planned landing. The English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay claimed that Marlborough leaked the military secret to James. Though recent historians have divided over the issue, Creasy appears to have accepted Macaulay’s version of events.

And that isn’t the end of it. For a Victorian, Creasy was pretty blunt on the role of sex in Marlborough’s ascent. Not only was the foundation of the family’s wealth built on the fact that his sister Arabella was mistress of James, but Marlborough himself as a young man was a “boy toy”—or, in Creasy’s wonderful phrase, “the paid lover of one of the fair and frail favorites of Charles II.”

The latter uttered what I think remains the definitive judgment on the future hero. Catching the handsome young soldier in bed with royal mistress Barbara Villiers, the Countess of Castlemaine, Charles barked (rather good-naturedly, I think, under the circumstances): “Go, you are a rascal, but I forgive you because you do it to get a living.”