[In the following review, Barbour discusses the merits of the final volume of Churchill's biography of Marlborough, assessing the unity of the multi-volume work as a whole.]

With this volume [Marlborough: His Life and Times, Volume VI, 1708-1722] Mr. Churchill lays down his pen as one who sheathes an avenging sword. Marlborough, persistently vilified by two of the sharpest, most incessant pens of his own day, Swift's and Defoe's, his memory brilliantly aspersed in the nineteenth century by Macaulay and Thackeray, has now found a sharp, tireless, brilliant pen to defend him. In this vindication Mr. Churchill has been anticipated by G. M. Trevelyan's sympathetic portrait of Marlborough in his England under Queen Anne, but in that temperate and humane work there is a charity widely inclusive of mortal frailty.

Mr. Churchill's assumption is that where there is knavery there must be knaves, and where there is heroism there must be a hero. He is baffled by mixtures. Unable to deny that Harley's peace policy was wise, that St. John's diplomacy was able, he is disconcerted that it should be so, as he is disgusted that Marlborough should have humiliated himself—and vainly—for the sake of his wife's offices, and that he should have reminded Louis XIV of an offer of two million livres, drawing a delicate hairline between accepting the sum as a bribe and accepting it as payment for something he proposed to do anyway. Mr. Churchill's roots are in Victorian England, Marlborough's in the England of Charles II, and there are planes of conduct on which they cannot meet by whatever effort of biographical imagination. Disillusioned no less by the politics of his own age than by those of Marlborough's, Mr. Churchill constantly prefers the large, simple conclusions of the battlefield. On the inevitable transmutation of values by time he observes almost despairingly: “One rule of conduct alone survives as a guide to men in their wanderings: fidelity to covenants, the honour of soldiers, and the hatred of causing common woe” (p. 600). But this, one may protest, is not one rule but three, and Mr. Churchill's refusal to admit that the three monitors may fall out and point in three directions is the root of his wrongheadedness—as it seems to the reviewer—about the ultimate wisdom of the Peace of Utrecht, though there can be little doubt that the playing-fields of Eton and Harrow would justify him.

So much has already been said of this work, as the earlier volumes appeared (Am. Hist. Rev., XLI, 332; XLIII, 376), that a brief estimate of the biography as a whole will here suffice. Perusal will not exempt a cautious reader from consulting Trevelyan, Feiling, Clark, Leadam, and Morgan, among recent writers, and from turning back to Klopp and Macaulay. But the cautious reader will have incautiously enjoyed Mr. Churchill's six volumes for the very length and leisureliness of the story, for the spontaneity and the free play of wit and malice, for the gift of style, and not least for the inherent interest of the unceasing battle between Mr. Churchill's cynicism and his conviction that man is above the brutes and must act accordingly. Mr. Churchill's view of history is fundamentally aristocratic. For him history is shaped by, is almost identical with, the gesta of great men inspired by noblesse oblige. The life of Marlborough has been, therefore, apart from family pride, a congenial task. If Mr. Churchill is here and there rasher and more partisan than the professional historian, he has not flouted the professional historian's verities. His experience in public affairs has constantly enriched the interest of his narrative. Without immersing himself to the drowning point in the polemical literature of the age of Anne, he has supplemented a painstaking and reflective study of the most important sources in several languages with hitherto unused material from the Blenheim archives. This latter, while unimportant for establishing facts of the first political or military consequence, is serviceable in rounding out the story and in throwing light on some of the more perplexing episodes of Marlborough's career.