QUEEN ANNE AND MARLBOROUGH

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 99, 21 January 1935, Page 7

QUEEN ANNE AND MARLBOROUGH

From the outset and for nearly six years Marlborough, through one agent or another, managed nearly everything. Anne yielded herself gladly and often unconsciously tb his guidance; and thus the main direction of British, and presently of European, affairs came to reside in Marlborough’s hands. But Anne knew without the slightest doubt what she wanted, and where she wanted to go, and she knew still better where she would i-ever be made to go. Her relations with Marlborough were always the relations of mistress and servant. Never, in private or in public, in the dark times of William and the Tower, or in the European glories of Blenheim and Ramillies, never on the flowing tide of over-lavish favour, or in the hour of injustice and dismissal, did John Churchill lose for one moment the instinct of submission to the august personage he served. A servant confronted with impossible tasks, or subjected to undue strain might claim to retire; a mistress might beseech him to remain—or might not; but the relation was dominant, tacit, and immutable. We must recognise this, for it is the keynote of the reign. The Queen was the crowned embodiment of the nation, and she often interpreted in a shrewd and homely way to a degree alaiost occult what England needed and. still more, what England felt. We portray her as a great queen, championed by a gre.it Constable — “Marlborough: His Life and Tinies,” by Winston S. Churchill.