quality:corruption, linguistic:translation, information:extraction, stylistic:style_transfer
Dismissal

To prevent the serious renewal of warfare in the spring, it was considered essential to replace Marlborough with a general more in touch with the Queen's ministers and less in touch with their allies. To do this, Harley (newly created Earl of Oxford) and St John first needed to bring charges of corruption against the Duke, completing the anti-Whig, anti-war picture that Jonathan Swift was already presenting to a credulous public through his pamphleteering, notably in his Conduct of the Allies (1711).

Two main charges were brought to the House of Commons against Marlborough: first, an assertion that over nine years he had illegally received more than £63,000 from the bread and transport contractors in the Netherlands; second, that he had taken 2.5% from the pay of the foreign troops in English pay, amounting to £280,000. Despite Marlborough's refutations (claiming ancient precedent for the first allegation, and, for the second, producing a warrant signed by the Queen in 1702 authorising him to make the deductions instead of secret service money for the war), the findings were enough for Harley to persuade the Queen to release her Captain-General. On 29 December 1711 (O.S.), before the charges had been examined, Anne, who owed to him the success and glory of her reign, sent her letter of dismissal: "I am sorry for your own sake the reasons have become so public which makes it necessary for me to let you know you have rendered it impracticable for you to continue yet longer in my service". The Tory-dominated Parliament concluded by a substantial majority that "the taking of several sums of money annually by the Duke of Marlborough from the contractor for foraging the bread and wagons... was unwarrantable and illegal", and that the 2.5% deducted from the pay of foreign troops "is public money and ought to be accounted for". When his successor, the Duke of Ormonde, left London for The Hague to take command of British forces he went, noted Bishop Burnet, with "the same allowances that had been lately voted criminal in the Duke of Marlborough".

The Allies were stunned by Marlborough's dismissal. The French, however, rejoiced at the removal of the main obstacle to the Anglo-French talks. Oxford (i.e. Harley) and St John had no intention of letting Britain's new Captain-General undertake any action, and issued Ormonde his "restraining orders" in May, forbidding him to use British troops in action against the French – an infamous step that ultimately ruined Eugene's campaign in Flanders. Marlborough continued to make his views known, but he was in trouble: attacked by his enemies and the government press; with his fortune in peril and Blenheim Palace still unfinished and running out of money; and with England split between Hanoverian and Jacobite factions, Marlborough thought it wise to leave the country. After attending Godolphin's funeral on 7 October (O.S.), he went into voluntary exile to the Continent on 1 December 1712 (O.S.).