Marlborough Quotes

Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived

When we aim high, pressure and stress obligingly come along for the ride. Stuff is going to happen that catches us off guard, threatens or scares us. Surprises (unpleasant ones, mostly) are almost guaranteed. The risk of being overwhelmed is always there. In these situations, talent is not the most sought-after characteristic. Grace and poise are, because these two attributes precede the opportunity to deploy any other skill. We must possess, as Voltaire once explained about the secret to the great military success of the first Duke of Marlborough, that "tranquil courage in the midst of tumult and serenity of soul in danger, which the English call a cool head.

Blenheim Palace, home of the Dukes of Marlborough, whose achievements over the last eleven generations could be inscribed with a Sharpie on the side of a peanut.

- Ay! Thornton o' Marlborough Mill, as we call him. - He is one of the masters you are striving with, is he not? what sort of master is he? - Did yo' ever see a bulldog? Set a bulldog on hindlegs, and dress him up in coat and breeches, and yo'n just getten John Thornton.

It’s always darkest before the dawn. This elderly chestnut occurred to Rob Martin as the ambulance he drove rolled slowly along Upper Marlborough Street toward home base, which was Firehouse 3. It seemed to him that whoever thought that one up really got hold of something, because it was darker than a woodchuck’s asshole this morning, and dawn wasn’t far away.

I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter’s homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put toothpaste on his brush for him, and as a consequence the duke was unaware that dental implements didn’t foam up spontaneously. I rest my case.

The duke married her anyway, but life with this millionairess didn’t prove any better than with the last one. Gladys once brought a revolver to dinner and, when asked why, remarked, “Oh, I don’t know, I might just shoot Marlborough.” Hubby had her committed,

And the black shoes bought in Marlborough Street that declared themselves on the box to be impregnable. You got a little tin of dubbin free with every pair. You might as well wear blotting paper. Ah but sure it was all part of it. Nothing was what it was made out to be. The truth included. The Gardaí. The country.

When I was twelve, my mother said to me, ‘I’ve entered you for Marlborough and Repton. Which would you like to go to?’ Both were famous Public Schools, but that was all I knew about them. ‘Repton,’ I said. ‘I’ll go to Repton.’ It was an easier word to say than Marlborough. ‘Very well,’ my mother said. ‘You shall go to Repton.

When we aim high, pressure and stress obligingly come along for the ride. Stuff is going to happen that catches us off guard, threatens or scares us. Surprises (unpleasant ones, mostly) are almost guaranteed. The risk of being overwhelmed is always there. In these situations, talent is not the most sought-after characteristic. Grace and poise are, because these two attributes precede the opportunity to deploy any other skill. We must possess, as Voltaire once explained about the secret to the great military success of the first Duke of Marlborough, that “tranquil courage in the midst of tumult and serenity of soul in danger, which the English call a cool head.” Regardless of how much actual danger we’re in, stress puts us at the potential whim of our baser—fearful—instinctual reactions.

In his life of Marlborough, Churchill had accused the notorious 2nd Earl of Sunderland of being ‘one of those dangerous beings who, with many gifts of mind, have no principle of action; who do not care what is done, so long as they are at the centre of it; to whom bustle, excitement, intrigue, are the breath of life; and whose dance from one delirium to another seems almost necessary to their sanity.

He had come to prospect the intentions of Charles towards the French and the Anglo-Austrian coalition, and even if Charles had thrown his jack-boot at his head, it would not have disturbed him from his mission. Marlborough was a slow negotiator. He was never in a hurry to make propositions or ask questions, preferring under cover of a banal conversation to use his extremely acute faculties of observation, and his art of unraveling other men’s motives, as it were, sideways. The ablest diplomat will never boast of understanding a man, but only his intentions.

That's richt. When we were campaignin' wi' Marlborough oor lads had mony time to sleep wi' the canon dirlin' aboot them. Ye get us'd to't, as Annalpa says aboot bein' a weedow woman. And if ye hae noticed it, Coont, there's nae people mair adapted for fechtin' under difeeculties than oor ane; that's what maks the Scots the finest sogers in the warld. It's the build o them, Lowlan' or Hielan', the breed o' them; the dour hard character o' their country and their mainner o' leevin'. We gied the English a fleg at the 'Forty-five,' didnae we? That was where the tartan cam' in: man, there's naethin' like us!

When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead" When you see millions of the mouthless dead Across your dreams in pale battalions go, Say not soft things as other men have said, That you'll remember. For you need not so. Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know It is not curses heaped on each gashed head? Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow. Nor honour. It is easy to be dead. Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto, "Yet many a better one has died before." Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you Perceive one face that you loved heretofore, It is a spook. None wears the face you knew. Great death has made all his for evermore.

Battles are the principal milestones in secular history. Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy. But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.

(...) I only know That when I have a son of mine, He shan't be made to droop and pine, Bound down and forced by rule and rod To serve a God who is no God. But I'll put custom on the shelf And make him find his God himself. Perhaps he'll find him in a tree, Some hollow trunk, where you can see. Perhaps the daisies in the sod Will open out and show him God. Or will he meet him in the roar Of breakers as they beat the shore? Or in the spiky stars that shine? Or in the rain (where I found mine)? Or in the city's giant moan? - A God who will be all his own. To whom he can address a prayer And love him, for he is so fair, And see with eyes that are not dim And build a temple to meet for him.

Kay suffered from a congenital lack of energy, and after taking books out of W.H. Smith's lending libraries in Swindon and Marlborough she would succumb to a mysterious, destructive lassitude which prevented her from returning them until long after the dates written on the little tickets dangling reproachfully from their spines. Conscious of having incurred a debt which mounted terrifyingly with every day that went by, and unable to compute with even approximate accuracy the sum of the fines to which she might eventually be liable, she would postpone their settlement yet further. When at last Kay feared that some river of no return had been fatally crossed, she judged it too much to much of a risk to be seen passing W.H. Smith's shop windows in either town, and to escape notice, recognition and exposure she would condemn herself to inconvenient detours, dodging down side alleys or hiding behind traffic in the main streets except on safe Sundays and early-closing afternoons. Most of the borrowed books did in the end find their way back to the libraries(sometimes conveyed there by me) but one of her favourites - Without My Cloak by Kate O'Brien - still remained in her possession. Kay's sense of guilt at having in effect stolen Without My Cloak had become so overwhelming that she now refused to visit Marlborough or Swindon at all unless she was covered up in some sort of wrap as a token disguise - in fact(I made myself laugh at the thought as I waited for the hours to pass in my lonely dark hilltop watch) in those places she was never without her cloak!

Perhaps the hardest part of the job was simply being attached to and dependent on people who didn’t think much of you. Virginia Woolf’s diaries are almost obsessively preoccupied with her servants and the challenge of maintaining patience with them. Of one, she writes: “She is in a state of nature: untrained; uneducated … so that one sees a human mind wriggling undressed.” As a class they were as irritating as “kitchen flies.” Woolf’s contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay was rather more blunt: “The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all.” It was unquestionably a strange world. Servants constituted a class of humans whose existences were fundamentally devoted to making certain that another class of humans would find everything they desired within arm’s reach more or less the moment it occurred to them to desire it. The recipients of this attention became spoiled almost beyond imagining. Visiting his daughter in the 1920s, in a house too small to keep his servants with him, the tenth Duke of Marlborough emerged from the bathroom in a state of helpless bewilderment because his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put the toothpaste on the brush for him, and the Duke was unaware that toothbrushes didn’t recharge automatically. The servants’ payoff for all this was often to be treated appallingly. It was common for mistresses to test the honesty of servants by leaving some temptation where they were bound to find it—a coin on the floor, say—and then punishing them if they pocketed it. The effect was to instill in servants a slightly paranoid sense that they were in the presence of a superior omniscience. Servants were also suspected of abetting burglars by providing inside information and leaving doors unlocked. It was a perfect recipe for unhappiness on both sides. Servants, especially in smaller households, tended to think of their masters as unreasonable and demanding. Masters saw servants as slothful and untrustworthy. Casual humiliation was a regular feature of life in service. Servants were sometimes required to adopt a new name, so that the second footman in a household would always be called “Johnson,” say, thus sparing the family the tedium of having to learn a new name each time a footman retired or fell under the wheels of a carriage. Butlers were an especially delicate issue. They were expected to have the bearing and comportment of a gentleman, and to dress accordingly, but often the butler was required to engage in some intentional sartorial gaucherie—wearing trousers that didn’t match his jacket, for instance—to ensure that his inferiority was instantly manifest.* One handbook actually gave instructions—in fact, provided a working script—for how to humiliate a servant in front of a child, for the good of both child and servant.

Eighteen centuries have now passed away since God sent forth a few Jews from a remote corner of the earth, to do a work which according to man's judgment must have seemed impossible. He sent them forth at a time when the whole world was full of superstition, cruelty, lust, and sin. He sent them forth to proclaim that the established religions of the earth were false and useless, and must be forsaken. He sent them forth to persuade men to give up old habits and customs, and to live different lives. He sent them forth to do battle with the most grovelling idolatry, with the vilest and most disgusting immorality, with vested interests, with old associations, with a bigoted priesthood, with sneering philosophers, with an ignorant population, with bloody-minded emperors, with the whole influence of Rome. Never was there an enterprise to all appearance more Quixotic, and less likely to succeed! And how did He arm them for this battle? He gave them no carnal weapons. He gave them no worldly power to compel assent, and no worldly riches to bribe belief. He simply put the Holy Ghost into their hearts, and the Scriptures into their hands. He simply bade them to expound and explain, to enforce and to publish the doctrines of the Bible. The preacher of Christianity in the first century was not a man with a sword and an army, to frighten people, like Mahomet,—or a man with a license to be sensual, to allure people, like the priests of the shameful idols of Hindostan. No! he was nothing more than one holy man with one holy book. And how did these men of one book prosper? In a few generations they entirely changed the face of society by the doctrines of the Bible. They emptied the temples of the heathen gods. They famished idolatry, or left it high and dry like a stranded ship. They brought into the world a higher tone of morality between man and man. They raised the character and position of woman. They altered the standard of purity and decency. They put an end to many cruel and bloody customs, such as the gladiatorial fights.—There was no stopping the change. Persecution and opposition were useless. One victory after another was won. One bad thing after another melted away. Whether men liked it or not, they were insensibly affected by the movement of the new religion, and drawn within the whirlpool of its power. The earth shook, and their rotten refuges fell to the ground. The flood rose, and they found themselves obliged to rise with it. The tree of Christianity swelled and grew, and the chains they had cast round it to arrest its growth, snapped like tow. And all this was done by the doctrines of the Bible! Talk of victories indeed! What are the victories of Alexander, and Cæsar, and Marlborough, and Napoleon, and Wellington, compared with those I have just mentioned? For extent, for completeness, for results, for permanence, there are no victories like the victories of the Bible.

Grace and poise are, because these two attributes precede the opportunity to deploy any other skill. We must possess, as Voltaire once explained about the secret to the great military success of the first Duke of Marlborough, that “tranquil courage in the midst of tumult and serenity of soul in danger, which the English call a cool head.

a letter of the great Duke of Marlborough, in which he said: “To remove a General in the midst of a campaign—that is the mortal stroke.

The greatest writers of the Whig party, Burke and Macaulay, constantly represented the statesmen of the Revolution as the legitimate ancestors of modern liberty. It is humiliating to trace a political lineage to Algernon Sidney, who was the paid agent of the French king; to Lord Russell, who opposed religious toleration at least as much as absolute monarchy; to Shaftesbury, who dipped his hands in the innocent blood shed by the perjury of Titus Oates; to Halifax, who insisted that the plot must be supported even if untrue; to Marlborough, who sent his comrades to perish on an expedition which he had betrayed to the French; to Locke, whose notion of liberty involves nothing more spiritual than the security of property, and is consistent with slavery and persecution; or even to Addison, who conceived that the right of voting taxes belonged to no country but his own. Defoe affirms that from the time of Charles II. to that of George I. he never knew a politician who truly held the faith of either party; and the perversity of the statesmen who led the assault against the later Stuarts threw back the cause of progress for a century.

I hold friendship higher than snobbery.

Hartington, when asked what he considered the best answer to the usual American greeting, 'pleased to meet you,' replied: If the fellow addressed me like that, I should say, "So you damn well ough to be!

It is very difficult to convey any idea of Sorley’s vivid personality, but, old and young, all were held captive by it. All life to him was an adventure full of delight. He revelled in big horizons, natural or social: he loved alike the boundless sweep of the Marlborough downs and the wide problems of human life.

I am just discovering Thomas Hardy. There are two methods of discovery. One is when Columbus discovers America. The other is when someone begins to read a famous author who has already run into seventy editions, and refuses to speak about anything else, and considers every one else who reads the author’s works his own special converts. Mine is the second method. I am more or less Hardy-drunk. Read him, if you ever get hold of him, though he’s dull in places. Of course at Marlborough he is non-existent.

What is even more shocking, among the largest receivers of CAP subsidies are some of the most prestigious aristocratic families of Britain, as well as the present owners of the large collective farms privatized after the fall of East Germany’s communist regime. According to a study by professor Richard Baldwin of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva (reported by the International Herald Tribune (Castle 2007) in the 2003–2004 farming year, the Queen of England and Prince Charles received 360,000 euros in EU farm subsidies, the Duke of Westminster 260,000 euros, and the Duke of Marlborough 300,000 euros. Incidentally, the capture by powerful national interests of what was supposed to be the core of a ‘welfare state for farmers’ exemplifies the kind of problems that a European welfare state – advocated by some to correct the alleged neo-liberal bias of the EU – would have to face.

Monsieur Lisieux would seek to arbitrarily carve up Europe into units based on the alleged blood kinship of its inhabitants, regardless of what all historical and legal precedent say, to speak nothing of simple convenience…” - Letter from a Concerned Gentleman #35, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough – published 1804, later mockingly quoted in The North Briton, 1810   *

Mijn huis staat met boeken volgestapeld, het zijn er nu over de dertienduizend, denk ik, maar iedere keer als we in Engeland zijn brengen we er toch wel weer minstens honderd terug. Maar het is zo fascinerend om al die vaak kleine zaakjes na te speuren. In Totnes. In Westward Ho (nu helaas verdwenen). In Barnstaple. In Marlborough. In Ripon. In, ja, noem maar op. Een van de redenen is natuurlijk dat Engelsen zo'n enorm rijke literatuur hebben, ik zeg altijd: het creatieve genie van de Nederlanders is in de schilderkunst gegaan en van de Engelsen in hun literatuur; onze Shakespeare heet Rembrandt. En van al die boeken - zeker uit de eerste helft van deze eeuw - is dikwijls zo weinig herdrukt. Je moet dus de oorspronkelijke uitgaven hebben.

John Churchill, soon Duke of Marlborough, was a rare phenomenon: a brilliant English general. He

I'm looking forward tomorrow to a peaceful Sunday spent in bed with Churchill's 'Life Of Marlborough'. Funny that he should be Prime Minister at last.

He had played to Rasputin on the night of his murder. Rasputin, for all his psychic powers, had clearly not picked up on any of the tension in the atmosphere.

Sir Winston Churchill was born into the respected family of the Dukes of Marlborough. His mother Jeanette, was an attractive American-born British socialite and a member of the well known Spencer family. Winston had a military background, having graduated from Sandhurst, the British Royal Military Academy. Upon graduating he served in the Army between 1805 and 1900 and again between 1915 and 1916. As a British military officer, he saw action in India, the Anglo–Sudan War, and the Second South African Boer War. Leaving the army as a major in 1899, he became a war correspondent covering the Boer War in the Natal Colony, during which time he wrote books about his experiences. Churchill was captured and treated as a prisoner of war. Churchill had only been a prisoner for four weeks before he escaped, prying open some of the flooring he crawled out under the building and ran through some of the neighborhoods back alleys and streets. On the evening of December 12, 1899, he jumped over a wall to a neighboring property, made his way to railroad tracks and caught a freight train heading north to Lourenco Marques, the capital of Portuguese Mozambique, which is located on the Indian Ocean and freedom. For the following years, he held many political and cabinet positions including the First Lord of the Admiralty. During the First World War Churchill resumed his active army service, for a short period of time, as the commander of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. After the war he returned to his political career as a Conservative Member of Parliament, serving as the Chancellor of the Exchequer where in 1925, he returned the pound sterling to the gold standard. This move was considered a factor to the deflationary pressure on the British Pound Sterling, during the depression. During the 1930’s Churchill was one of the first to warn about the increasing, ruthless strength of Nazi Germany and campaigned for a speedy military rearmament. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty for a second time, and in May of 1940, Churchill became the Prime Minister after Neville Chamberlain’s resignation. An inspirational leader during the difficult days of 1940–1941, he led Britain until victory had been secured. In 1955 Churchill suffered a serious of strokes. Stepping down as Prime Minister he however remained a Member of Parliament until 1964. In 1965, upon his death at ninety years of age, Queen Elizabeth II granted him a state funeral, which was one of the largest gatherings of representatives and statesmen in history.

If Sunny had died without begetting an heir, Churchill would have become Duke of Marlborough, and would never have sat in the House of Commons, let alone become prime minister. As it was, he entered the Commons, where he would sit for more than sixty years.

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, into the influential and aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough, a branch of the Spencer-Churchill family, in the closely knit inner circle of Victorian society. Winston S. Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a direct descendent of John Churchill, the man who became first Duke of Marlborough early in the eighteenth century after fighting for king and country against Louis XIV of France during the War of Spanish Succession.

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The Captain drew a long breath, conscious deep within him of an enormous satisfaction. 'Write this down, and then send it to them. "To Flag Officer in Charge, Londonderry, v Marlborough. HMS Marlborough will enter harbour at 1300 today. Ship is severely damaged above and below waterline. Request pilot, tugs, dockyard assistance, and burial arrangements for one officer and seventy-four ratings." Got that?

It is said by several authorities that on being in the saddle he declared, “This day I conquer or die.” Nothing was more unlike him. Months before in England he had used such words to Wratislaw, and assuredly they did not go beyond the truth. But, arrived at the point of action, it is more probable that he made some considerate inquiry about his horse’s forage or his man’s rations.

George Bernard Shaw said that if a man steals a hundred pounds he is sent to jail, but if he steals a million pounds he is sent to Parliament. I believe the same principle applies to male violence. If a man kills one person, he is sent to prison; if he kills ten, to a prison mental hospital; but if he is responsible for the death of thousands, he is crowned emperor, made the Duke of Marlborough, or elected President of the United States. The opposite of shame is honor; and the highest honor given by the United States is the Congressional Medal of Honor. Who is it given to? Men. And for what? For violence, or more precisely, for turning themselves and other men into objects of each other's violence.

I'd smoked from quite a young age and the first thing I noticed when I went into the studio was a stack of Marlborough Lights on the table.

Churchill’s work took him to the scenes of Marlborough’s battles, including Blenheim, in Bavaria. It was a Jew, Solomon de Medina, the first practising Jew in England to receive a knighthood, who was Marlborough’s chief army contractor during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) supplying Marlborough with money, provisions and military intelligence.

Marlborough House Set’ in particular, denouncing them as frivolous, selfish and immoral: ‘wretched ignorant Highborn beings, who live only to kill time.’136

in our human state there is no separation between public deeds and personal psychology, and the story of the one would be incomplete without the other.

James had now made it clear that he would only be advised by Ministers who whole-heartedly accepted his view. If statesmen could not see their way to serve the King as he wished to be served, they had no expectation of ever being called again to public service. Indeed, the distinction was very nice between opposition and treason. What, then, was to be done? It was plain that the King, with all the downright resolution of his nature, was actively and of set purpose subverting the faith and Constitution of the country, contrary to all he had promised and to its inflexible resolve.

We see how strong was the structure of Christendom in these times and with what restraints even warring nations acted. Of course, nowadays, with the many improvements that have been made in international morals and behaviour all enemy subjects, even those whose countries were only technically involved, even those who had lived all their lives in England, and the English women who had married them, would, as in every other state based on an educated democracy, be treated within twenty-four hours as malignant foes, flung into internment camps, and their private property stolen to assist the expenses of the war. In the twentieth century mankind has shaken itself free from the all those illogical, old-world prejudices, and achieved the highest efficiency of brutal, ruthless war.

Marlborough echoed his monarch’s hope that consensus politics could prevail. ‘There is nothing more certain than what you say, that either of the parties would be tyrants if they were let alone,’[111] he wrote to Sarah. ‘All parties are alike. And as I have taken my resolution of never doing any hardship to any man whatsoever, I shall by it have a quiet in my own mind; not valuing to be a favourite to either of them.’[112]

With the clock close to 11 p.m., Carrington had gone home and McDonnell was just putting on his cloak when the gates of New Palace Yard were flung open and a caravan of motor-cars puttered through. Out of the first scrambled the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, and his wife, Clementine. The others disgorged Churchill’s mother and stepfather; his brother and sister-in-law; and Captain Hugh Warrender and the 9th Duke of Marlborough. Together, they advanced to the door. Churchill had made himself quite obnoxious in the days after Edward’s death. In one of his first meetings with the new King, he had tactlessly picked up where he had left off with his father, insisting that ‘a great change was necessary in the Constitution’. George had icily responded that he was ‘averse to violent changes’. Now, on the very eve of Edward’s funeral, the Home Secretary insisted on his right to a private viewing of the coffin. McDonnell refused point-blank. Churchill attempted to pull rank. Unwavering, McDonnell retorted that if he were not satisfied, he could go and rouse Carrington, who was asleep in a nearby house, and solicit a second opinion. For several minutes, the two men bickered on the threshold until the Home Secretary, thoroughly bested, flounced off with his relations. It was, the incandescent McDonnell wrote, ‘an amazing instance of vulgarity and indecency of which I should not have thought that even Churchill was capable’.

Superintending the proceedings was Victor Spencer, 1st Viscount Churchill. A member of Edward’s innermost circle, he was thoroughly embedded in the ranks of the aristocracy. Descended from the 4th Duke of Marlborough, he was in many ways the beau idéal of the English gentleman: a casual Anglican, a committed Tory and a passionate rider to hounds. A godson of Queen Victoria, he was proudly unintellectual, and often claimed he never read a book.