There never was a Churchill from John of Marlborough down who had either morals or principles,” intoned William Gladstone, and, after reading Mary Lovell’s account of the family, it’s hard to disagree with him, albeit with the one caveat that he didn’t know Winston Churchill well enough to include him in his blanket denunciation.[1] In that sense, as in so many others, the British wartime premier broke the mold.

Although it is true that most of the rest of the early Churchills were a fairly sorry bunch in terms both of morals and principles, it hardly matters, because John, 1st Duke of Marlborough, was the greatest general in British history. The next five dukes of Marlborough were not in a position to sully that glorious reputation, and, however much whoring and over-spending and scandalizing they got up to, the family’s antics cannot detract from the Great Duke’s achievement in defeating Louis XIV in the War of Spanish Succession. Like his descendant Winston Churchill, who worshipped him and wrote his biography, he kept Britain free.

Indeed if John Churchill had owned sound morals and principles, there is a very good chance that he would never have been in a position to save Britain at all. The son of a minor Royalist squire and sometime MP, he used his good looks and fine physique to seduce none other than King Charles II’s mistress, the twenty-year-old sex goddess Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine (later Duchess of St. Albans). Royal courtesans