Sarah Churchill Duchess of Marlborough The Queen's Favourite

Chapter One Sarah Jennings (or Jenyns) was born on 5 June 1660, the week after Charles II returned from exile and was installed on the restored throne. Her mother was Mrs Frances Thornhurst Jennings, married to Mr Richard Jennings of Sandridge, near St Albans. They were minor gentry with property in Somerset, Kent and Hertfordshire. There were many men like Sarah's father, who had been a supporter of John Pym, an architect of the revolt against Charles I, but then subsequently a member of the Convention Parliament that had recalled Charles II. Most of the gentry had greeted the monarchy back with relief and even jubilation, but also with a new sense that its authority was dependent upon their support. Some men, like Sarah's father, expressed no clear enthusiasm. Sarah recognised the snobbishness of genealogies and disapproved of them in biographies. In 1736 when she read Thomas Lediard's biography of her husband, she noted: 'This History takes a great deal of pains to make the Duke of Marlborough's extraction very ancient. That may be true for aught I know; but it is no matter whether it be true or not in my opinion, for I value nobody for another's merit.' This might have been a convenient view to take when her own extraction was not particularly grand, but Sarah never tried to disguise this. When asked, she said simply that her father's family background 'was reckoned a good one'. Nor need much be said about her early childhood. In this post-Freudian era we tend to think we cannot know someone properly unless we are aware of where he or she came from. In Sarah's era, where character was considered a fixed thing carried around like a suitcase, childhood was viewed as an irrelevant period before one did one's packing. People kept little record of their own or others' childhoods, and in the absence of facts, biographers used to invest their subjects with precocious qualities that foreshadowed their adult characters or actions. In the History of Prince Mirabel (1712), a fictionalised biography of Marlborough, he is shown reviving a schoolfriend struck by lightning as a precursor to his later military heroism. The biographer Frank Chancellor was doing the same thing in 1932 when he imagined Sarah to have been something of a 'spitfire' as a child. Sarah was the youngest of five children, with two brothers and two sisters. Her eldest sister, Barbara, died at twenty-seven, leaving a widower who would later pester Sarah for financial and political favours until, as she put it, he 'turned her head'. Both brothers, John and Ralph, were also to die relatively young, leaving little on the historical record but property disputes with their mother. The other sister, Frances, lived to a ripe old age like Sarah, but made very different choices. When Sarah was five, London was overwhelmed by the plague. Another child living in Cripplegate, Daniel Defoe, later wrote a vivid account of this catastrophe as though he had experienced it as an adult. Sarah was less exposed to the horrors - the recorded death toll in St Albans was only 121 - but her parents would have known many people who died in London, and she might have witnessed the crowds of displaced people living in 'great extremities in the woods and fields' of Hertfordshire. The following year, 1666, the Great Fire of London lit up the sky 'like the top of a burning oven'. The conflagration was visible as far north as St Albans and the smoke cast a pall over the countryside for fifty miles. If we look for major events that might have affected Sarah as a child, we must include the separation of her parents when she was eight. Divorce was rare, but private deeds of separation could be arranged and informal separations were not uncommon. In 1668 Sarah moved to London with her mother and sisters just as the city was being frenetically rebuilt. Why her parents separated is unknown, but it probably had to do with her father'sField, Ophelia is the author of 'Sarah Churchill Duchess of Marlborough The Queen's Favourite', published 2003 under ISBN 9780312314668 and ISBN 0312314663.