New year 1712 was not a happy one for the great Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), the commander of the allied forces against the French during the War of the Spanish Succession, and heroic victor of such momentous battles as Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet. He started the year in real trouble. On New Year’s Eve his political foe, Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford (1661-1724), had persuaded Queen Anne to dismiss him from all his military posts, and on New Year’s Day his sacking was duly published in The London Gazette for all to read.

It is surely some measure of the greatness of this astonishing man that he accepted his downfall with the same sort of calm equanimity with which he faced the ebb and flow of fortune when conducting military operations: simply re-evaluating his position, cool as a cucumber.

Among the many commiserating letters from the great and the good — including monarchs and princes — was a note from a neighbour called Sir Thomas Wheate, from Glympton, not far from Blenheim (where building work had halted). He offered the Duke some beagles; and the Duke, ever courteous, replied: “I am very much obliged to you for being mindful to my want of beagles, though I am yet at a loss where to keep them; however I should be glad to know where they are, and if the huntsman will undertake to keep them till I have a proper place, and upon what terms, to which I shall pray your answer at your leisure.”

Apt that, because the Duke, throughout his life, had been accused of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds when it came to whether or not he wanted to see James II, his erstwhile master, restored to the British throne. Indeed, he sailed so close to the wind of treason on this account that he had even seen the inside of the Tower of London in 1692 — when he was imprisoned there for five weeks, accused of treachery. He was released when an incriminating letter about the restoration of James and the kidnap of William was judged to be a forgery — though there can be no doubt that Marlborough continued to correspond with Jacobites, until his death.

The fact is, to switch metaphorical animals, he was as wily as a fox; and as good at looking after his own interests. Luckily his own interests were compatible with the business of ensuring that Louis XIV of France never achieved hegemony over the whole of Europe. All the same, he was a true European rather than a little Englander. For instance, extraordinary as it may seem to modern minds, he continued on friendly terms with his nephew the Duke of Berwick, the illegitimate son of his sister Arabella and James II, even though he became a marshall of France. He also worked closely in his earlier career with the German Duke of Schomberg, who was created an English Duke and was Dutch William’s second in command at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

It is extraordinary how many of those involved in the wars had Oxfordshire connections. The Duke of Shrewsbury, one who signed the letter to William inviting him to invade, lived at Heythrop; Lord Oxford had been educated in Shilton; Lord Clarendon, the brother of Queen Anne’s mother Anne Hyde, lived at Cornbury Park, Charlbury; and of course the great Duke himself was given Blenheim by Queen Anne.

And why was Marlborough disgraced in 1712? Lord Oxford maintained that Marlborough — by that time by far the richest man in England — had illegally received £60,000 from the contractors operating army bread wagons, and that he had also received two-and-a-half per cent of British money paid to foreign troops.

He found it necessary to go into voluntary exile in 1712, but had his honours restored before the queen died. He was greeted as an old friend when the King of Hanover became King George I of Britain in 1714. His correspondence with the Jacobites was merely an “insurance policy” taken out by a man who applied the same kind of ruthless caution to his politics as he did to his warfare.