BERWICK, THE DUKE OF, was natural son of James II. by Mrs. Arabella Churchill, sister to the great Duke of Marlborough. He followed the fate of his father, and, after the revolution of 1688, went to France, where he was recommended to the court by his superior merit. He was created marshal of France, knight of the Holy Ghost, duke and peer of France, grandee of Spain, and commander in chief of the French armies; nor were these honours and employments greater than his services merited. He lived in an age when the prince of Orange and many other great generals commanded against him; yet his reputation as a warrior of the highest class suffered no abatement from this rivalry, while the victory of Almanza, which secured Spain to the Bourbon dynasty, stamped his character as a great and successful commander. His courage was cool, steady, and equal; and he was eminently remarkable for entire self-possession in all circumstances, even the most critical;—watchful, cautious, and persevering; ever ready to take advantage of a fault or an oversight committed by an antagonist, yet, throughout his whole career, frugal of the blood of his soldiers, and anxious that it should not, on any occasion, be wantonly or unnecessarily shed. The system of discipline he maintained was rigid; and although the wants of the soldier were scrupulously attended to, no commander ever punished with greater severity his excesses.
The Duke of Berwick was much blamed by the more zealous and violent adherents of the Stuart family, for not being sufficiently attached to the Jacobite party, which was that of his own family. But on a cool examination of his actions, it will appear that his behaviour in this particular was, like the rest of his conduct, equally sensible and just. When he accepted of employments, received honours and dignities, and became a naturalized Frenchman, he thought it his duty, as an honest man, to become a Frenchman in reality, and a true subject of the monarch who gave him bread; and to be or not to be in the interest of the Stuart family, according to the will and pleasure of the sovereign whom he served, and the interest of France, his
adopted country. But when commanded by his king to promote the views of that family, he acted with the greatest sincerity, and took the most sensible and effectual methods to serve his unhappy house. This the following anecdote, if true,—and it has some appearance of probability on its side,—clearly evinces. After the signing of the treaty of Utrecht, the Duke of Marlborough, having been censured by the British parliament on account of some army contracts for bread and forage, retired into France; and it has been asserted that his grace was then brought over to the interest of the Stuart family; for it is now certain that Queen Anne had at one time serious intentions of taking measures for settling the succession on her brother after her own death; and several circumstances made people connect the known wishes of the queen with the fact above mentioned. And if the Duke of Berwick had been, directly or indirectly, instrumental in gaining over his uncle to that interest, he would have more effectually served it than that body of rash and unhappy gentlemen who were taken prisoners at Preston in 1715, had it in their power to do. In a word, the Duke of Berwick was, without being a bigot, a moral and religious man; and he showed by his life and actions that morality and religion are very compatible and consistent with the life of a statesman and a great general, and that if they were oftener united in these two professions, it would be much happier for the rest of mankind. He was killed by a cannon-ball at the siege of Philipsburg in 1738.