A biographer who sought to present his readers with Marlborough’s political and military identities in parallel would be forced to intersperse correspondence on strategic policy, tactical detail, administrative minutiae, cabinet reshuffles, borough-mongering and monarch-management. The fact that no reference has been made here to Marlborough’s political tribulations does not, however, mean that they were not both real and present. A psychologist considering his behaviour after he received news of the loss of Ghent and Bruges might opine that those events were simply the trigger for the breakdown that followed, and that Marlborough had simply been doing too much for too long to tolerate the sudden and unexpected appearance of a new crisis. This, indeed, is why his well-wishers, like Natzmer and Grumbkow, found it hard to link the crisis itself to what seemed to them an extreme response. Relations between Sarah and the queen went from bad to worse, and, with more unwise insinuations of lesbianism from the prurient pen of Arthur Maynwaring, from worse to impossible.
