Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/322

 commanded the St. Andrew in the battle of Barfleur. In 1693 Churchill withdrew from the service. His withdrawal was commonly attributed to jealousy at the promotion of Captain Aylmer to flag rank over his head [see ], but appears to have been rather the effect of the king's dislike of the family of Churchill, and of ill-will towards Russell, then first lord of the admiralty, whom Churchill believed to have influenced the king's decision (Add. MS. 31958, ff. 45-6). In 1699, when Russell, then earl of Orford, retired from the admiralty, and Marlborough had made his peace with the king, Churchill was appointed to a seat at the admiralty, which ne held till January 1701-2, when the Earl of Pembroke was made lord high admiral.

On the accession of Anne and the appointment of Prince George as lord high admiral, Churchill was appointed one of his royal highness's council (23 May 1702). His interest sufficed to make him chief, and his first step was to promote himself at a bound to be admiral of the blue, thus placing himself above Aylmer, who was tnen vice-admiral of the red. At the same time, to give the promotion an air of reality, as well as, perhaps, to insure the pay of the rank, he hoisted his flag for a few days at Portsmouth, on board the Triumph. This and a similar parade the following year were his whole service as a flag officer; but the star of the house of Churchill was just then in the ascendant, and for the next six years Churchill governed the navy, as his brother, the Duke of Marlborough, governed the army. Complaints of the mismanagement of the navy were loud and frequent. The trade, it was alleged, was inefficiently protected; even the convoys were insecure. The activity of the French privateers was notorious; and the English admiralty, with a force at their disposal immeasurably superior to that of France, so managed it that at the point of attack they were always inferior. The exploits of Duguay-Trouin, or Forbin, in the Channel Sir John [see ; }}, brought this home to the popular mind, and permitted Lord Haversham to say in the House of Lords; 'Your disasters at sea have been so many, a man scarce knows where to begin. Your ships have been taken by your enemies, as the Dutch take your herrings, by shoals, upon vour own coasts; nay, your royal navy itself has not escaped. These are pregnant misfortunes and big with innumerable mischiefs.' So also the attempted invasion by the Pretender in 1708 must have been utterly crushed, it was stoutly argued, if Byng's ships had been clean and effective [see ]. These numerous failures all brought discredit on the prince's naval administration, the head and real autocrat of which was Churchill, and added to the many causes of ill-will which were accumulating against the Duke of Marlborough. Churchill, indeed, seems to have been ignorant, incapable, and overbearing, and to have rendered himself hated by almost all who came in contact with him.

He accumulated a large fortune, no doubt garnered from the thousand nameless perquisites of office. On the death of Prince George in October 1708 he retired from the admiralty and lived mostly at a villa in Windsor Park, where he occuppied himself with the care of a magnificent aviary, which at his death, 8 May 1710, he bequeathed to the Duke of Ormonde and the Earl of Torrington. He was never married, and the bulk of his large fortune was inherited by a natural son. From 1700 to 1708 he was M.P. for St. Albans, and at the time of his death was member for Portsmouth. His portrait, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, is in the Painted Hall at Greenwich, to which it was presented by George IV.  CHURCHILL, JOHN (d. 1685), master of the rolls, was the son of Jasper Churchill of London, and grandson of Jasper Churchill of Bradford, Somersetshire, the great-grandfather of John, first duke of Marlborough [q. v.] He was admitted a student of Lincoln's Inn on 15 March 1639, and, having been called to the bar in 1647, practised in the court of chancery, where he acquired an extensive business. Roger North, in his 'Life of Francis North, Baron of Guilford' (1742), relates that he 'heard Sir John Churchill, a famous chancery practiser, say, that in his walk from Lincoln's Inn down to the Temple Hall, where (in the Lordkeeper Bridgman's time) causes and motions (out of term) were heard, he had taken 28l. with breviates, only for motions and defences for hastening and retarding hearings' (p. 199). It is to the credit of the Lord-keeper Guilford that he afterwards lopped off this 'limb of the motion practice.' Churchill was knighted on 16 Aug. 1670, and appointed autumn reader at Lincoln's Inn in the same year. In May 1661 'John Churchill, esq.'