With a little help from our friends

Blenheim, 1704: Marlborough’s Greatest Victory
by James Falkner
Pen & Sword Military, £10.99, pp. 144, ISBN 184415050X

By rights the battle of Blenheim in 1704 ought to be as well known as Waterloo. It was just as momentous, just as exciting, just as victory-snatched-from-the-jaws-of-defeat. In fact you could argue — as Winston Churchill did — that it was the event which opened for Britain ‘the gateways of the modern world’. So how come all most of us remember about it today is that it was won by John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough and that it had a palace in Woodstock named after it?

One reason may be that since it involved neither Stalin nor the Nazis and since its hero was a toffy Englishman (his father, Sir Winston, was a Royalist cavalry officer), it will not have been taught in our schools for many years. But the main reason, perhaps, is that it happened in the awkward post-Middle Ages and post-Civil War but pre-Victorian period of British history on which most of us tend to be rather shaky.

So thanks then to Charles Spencer for putting us right with this pacy and enjoyable account of his distant relative’s exploits, published to coincide with the battle’s 300th anniversary. Though it does cash in on his nob credentials a bit cheesily — ‘he achieved world-wide attention after speaking passionately at the funeral of his sister Diana,’ announces the fly-leaf — this is a fine, intelligent, patriotic book which deserves to be read, rather than merely to languish on shelves as a trophy signed copy purchased from the Althorp gift shop.

One fascinating aspect of the Blenheim story is the extent to which it prefigured the course of the Napoleonic wars a century later. Louis XIV played the role of the tyrannical Frenchman with expansionist ambitions, John Churchill that of the brilliant strategist sniped at by politicians, let down by some of his allies and with an army so much smaller than those of the opposition that he couldn’t afford to lose a single battle.