A major western power decides to sell out a long-standing and war-stricken European ally, betraying its interests in order to cut a self-interested peace deal with its militaristic and expansionist enemy, led by a ruthless and absolutist leader. In order to legitimise its actions, it conducts a campaign of factually dubious propaganda to discredit anyone who opposes the deal, including its ostensible allies, accusing them of corruption and tyrannical behaviour.

No historical analogy with current events is perfect – history rhymes rather than repeats itself – but sometimes the rhythms of the past resonate very loudly indeed. This is certainly the case when we consider the striking parallels between current events in Ukraine and the controversy that raged in 1711-12 surrounding the ultimately successful attempt of a Tory-led British government to achieve peace with France after decades of almost continuous European warfare.

By 1711, Britain had been at war with France, in alliance with the Dutch Republic and the Habsburg Emperors, for 17 years of the previous 22. Whereas the war was existential for the Dutch, who had been invaded multiple times by France in the late 17^th century, for Britain it was a more complex question. The accession of William III, a Dutch monarch, to the English throne in 1689 had drawn Britain into close alliance with its Protestant cousins, and establishment opinion held that it was imperative to contain Louis XIV’s dreams of French (and catholic) European hegemony, by war if necessary. It was a question that was turbo-charged in 1702, when the possibility arose that the still-formidable riches of the Spanish Empire could fall into the hands of the French royal family: the obscure contingencies of politics in a dynastic age meant that, when the sickly Spanish monarch Charles II died without issue, both the Habsburgs and the Bourbons had a claim to the Spanish throne.

It was to prevent this that the British-Dutch-Habsburg alliance fought a surprisingly successful war against the formidable armies of Louis XIV between 1702 and 1712. France was the stand-out military superpower of the age, and previously the best that anyone had managed against them was grim, attritional stalemate. This was to change under the leadership of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who, with immense diplomatic and military skill, melded an Anglo-Dutch army into a hardened war machine, which embarked on a series of spectacular military successes. Although they loom small in Britain’s national imagination now, the names of those victories – Blenheim, Ramillies and Oudenard – were once as celebrated as Agincourt or Waterloo. Marlborough not only contained the French: for a while at least, he routed them. As a result, he became a national hero on a scale only matched by Nelson, Wellington and a certain descendant of his who was to face down another European tyrant in very difficult circumstances more than two centuries later.

Yet, by early 1712 Marlborough was subjected to a savage campaign of abuse, defamation and character assassination by a large section of the British press, orchestrated by a government that had, until only weeks earlier, retained him as the Captain-General of British forces. This went on while Britain remained formally at war with the French.

The standards of 18th-century political vituperation make even Trumpian broadsides seem a little tame. Pretty much every aspect of Marlborough’s personal morals, public life, and military career were savaged. One Tory veteran of ‘Grub Street’ wrote:

Amongst all the founding Names of Greek and Roman Heroes, to which they have parallelled our late General, can they find one who condescended to rob the Soldiers of their Bread? Or who suffered the Brave Men, wounded in the Field, to perish there, because their Leader pocketed the Money, allotted for those Contingencies, that were to preserve them.

Marlborough was painted as a callous, blood-thirsty monster: a man who, out of personal venality and a desire for self-aggrandisement, would happily let his own troops starve in order to line his own pockets. He had, it was (not altogether untruthfully) alleged, been bonking and bribing his way up the greasy pole for decades.

The Dutch were also savaged. One of the most famous political pamphlets of all time, Jonathan Swift’s The Conduct of the Allies (1711), presented the Dutch as cynical leeches who had bled Britain dry to further their own ends, egged on and assisted by their corrupt ally, Marlborough. Britain had become ‘the dupes and bubbles of Europe’, taxed to the hilt to pour money into an unwinnable conflict, all while the Dutch continued to profiteer from the war and Marlborough became one of the richest men in England.

Why had one of Britain’s greatest war heroes gone from unimpeachable national hero to cartoon villain in the space of a couple of years? Why did Britain suddenly turn on its longstanding Dutch allies, who on one reading of the situation were plucky underdogs who had been repeatedly invaded by their bullying French neighbours?

Marlborough’s early victories against the French war machine were (like early Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s invasion) as stunning as they were frankly unexpected. By 1708 France – battered by famine as well as the allied armies – appeared at his mercy. A Whig-dominated British government offered peace terms to the French that were so humiliating that, despite being on the verge of apparent invasion and national disintegration, Louis XIV felt obliged to turn them down. No matter: Marlborough, who had increasingly thrown his lot in with the stridently anti-French, pro-war Whigs, would simply have to finally crush any vestige of French resistance on the battlefield.

But he and his political allies fatally overreached. Astonishingly, the French managed to rally and, at the Battle of Malplaquet, Marlborough’s string of miraculous victories evaporated. It was a bloody score draw: the French armies did enough to forestall an allied invasion of their homeland. Victory would be at best postponed.

At home, the seeds of a major political revulsion were germinating. Britain was becoming bone-achingly war-weary. By major financial innovations – such as the creation of the Bank of England and the National Debt – it had managed to bankroll much of the war against the French, but the long struggle had taken its toll. Britain’s economy was not much healthier than France’s, and hunger and poverty stalked the land.

In any case, enthusiasm for entanglement in expensive continental ‘forever wars’ had never been universal or even widespread. The Tory Party, the party of the landed gentlemen who bore the brunt of the cost of the war (taxation at the time falling heaviest on land), had at best been lukewarm about the whole enterprise from the beginning. Why, they asked, did so much of our blood and treasure have to be spent on a war that was far more in the interests of the Dutch? In their eyes, it was no coincidence that the men who profited from continual warfare – those who lent money to the British government to fund it, those like Marlborough who had found much glory (and profit) in fighting it – leaned towards the pro-war party, the Whigs. They would do, wouldn’t they?

So, when a popular revolt against perceived Whig hostility to the Church of England, provoked by the notorious prosecution of the fiery High Church divine Dr Henry Sacheverell, led to a crushing Tory landslide in the 1710 election, the scene was set for a push for peace.

The new Tory-led government was a fractious coalition united in the short term by one goal: peace. But even that shared goal divided as well as united them. Led by moderate, pragmatic Robert Harley, it relied on the support of aggressive Tory backbenchers who cared little for Dutch interests. They wanted peace and lower taxes, they wanted them last Michaelmas, and they had a man at the top table who was prepared to give them leadership: dashing rake and all-round glamorous scoundrel Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke.

Harley was more cautious than Bolingbroke, but hardly a political naïf. He knew that any peace deal would result in the carving up of the territorial and commercial goodies of the Spanish Empire. If Britain was prepared to cut the Dutch out of the (real) negotiations altogether, it could achieve a speedy peace, cut domestic taxes, and divide up the loot with the French with little or no regard to Dutch interests, ensuring that Britain received the lion’s share. Negotiating with France secretly and separately meant that Britain would have no obligation to take into account the claims of its allies: it could extract excellent terms out of a weakened France and ensure that it monopolised the benefits. If the Dutch complained, then it was a case of ‘tough luck’: the Dutch had no chance of being able to carry on the war successfully without Britain’s financial and military might behind it. It would have to accept whatever crumbs from the secret peace negotiations the British were prepared to give it.

There was a very strong argument that such a course was in Britain’s national interest. So long as not too much was conceded to the French and their military expansionism was genuinely constrained, why would Britain want to share the spoils of peace with the Dutch? There was certainly a very good case for an immediate peace after years of expensive warfare that had shown that, while the French might be humbled, they couldn’t be utterly destroyed.

There were two big flies in the ointment. First, although the Allies had more-or-less won the war in the Low Countries, they had been far less successful in the other major theatre of war: Spain itself. As such, the original aim of the war – to ensure that the Spanish throne went to the Habsburgs, not the French Bourbons – was impracticable if any peace was to be achieved. Ignoring this would infuriate the Habsburgs (and their Whig allies in England), who bet their political chips on ‘No Peace without Spain’.

Second, any such deal was a blatant betrayal of the Dutch. The previous Whig administration had made lavish promises to them, pledging that Britain would protect and indeed gold-plate any peace terms concerning their security and trading interests. The plan for a separate peace could only work by reneging on these promises, lying to the Dutch and conducting negotiations with the enemy behind their back.

The Tory government decided that these were prices worth paying. Spain was lost anyway, and continuing the war indefinitely for an unachievable objective made no sense. As for the Dutch, the Tory ministers were unsentimental: they weren’t elected to work for the Dutch national interest. It wasn’t their fault, in any case, that the Whigs had made such imprudent promises in the past. Ultimately, diplomacy was a hard game: ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’.

However, party politics in 1711-12 was a viciously polarised game. Under increasingly fevered Whig polemical fire, the Tories needed to find some way of justifying their behaviour to the Dutch. As Marlborough was also using his considerable prestige to oppose the Tory peace deal, they also needed to discredit him. Hence the great outpouring of vituperation against Marlborough and the orgy of anti-Dutch propaganda pumped out by Tory newspapers like the Examiner.

The parallels with the Trump administration’s strategy are striking. It seems clear that President Trump is gearing up to come to a secret agreement with Vladimir Putin that will betray Ukraine comprehensively in much the way that Britain went behind the Dutch Republic’s back to cut a deal with Louis XIV. Ukraine, like the Dutch in 1711-12, will have little choice but to swallow such an outcome. The efforts of Trump and Musk to paint Zelensky as a corrupt tyrant loudly echo the campaign to assassinate the character of Marlborough and discredit his Dutch allies. The Tories also depicted Marlborough as a would-be tyrant who would stop at nothing to expand his own power, perhaps to the extent of even declaring himself King.

However, the story is a little more complicated than this may make it appear. Two considerations should make us guard against a simple moralistic comparison between the two cases.

First, the Tory case against Marlborough and the Dutch may have been exaggerated and was sometimes what we would call ‘misinformation’, but it nonetheless contained more than a kernel of truth. Marlborough had enriched himself massively from the war, even if accusations about mistreating his troops were unfair. He had also made a colossally stupid mistake when he demanded that Queen Anne make him supreme commander of the armed forces for life. Such a request was constitutionally unprecedented and would have undermined the queen’s prerogative to sack her own military commanders: it raised understandable suspicions about his motives.

More importantly, Britain had shouldered the largest burden of the war costs, and the Dutch had regularly failed to make the commitments of money and troops that they had promised. Indeed, many Dutch traders continued to do business with the French while the war was raging. It was quite reasonable to suggest that Britain’s contribution to the war effort was disproportionate and its allies were not pulling their weight, particularly considering that the Dutch had more of a dog in the fight by virtue of being France’s next-door neighbours (sound familiar?).

Second, the Tory government’s approach to peace was crucially different to Trump’s in one important respect. Harley’s ministers were actually divided in 1711-12 on the peace. Harley himself may have been hard-headed, but he drew certain red lines when negotiating with the French. On issues of trade and overseas territory, he saw no reason not to prioritise British interests over the Dutch, but when it came to security issues he was more reasonable. He realised that it was in Britain’s interests to give the Dutch reasonable security. The last thing he wanted was to leave the Dutch wide open to another French invasion: such an outcome would simply risk another war. So he was determined to ensure that the Dutch were allowed an adequate ‘barrier’ of fortresses against France as part of the peace deal. He clearly also felt some moral qualms about betraying the Dutch totally.

His rival Bolingbroke was a lot more cynical. As well as being a great lover of French culture (and women), he hated the Dutch and was prepared – indeed, eager – to sell them out as hard as possible to the French as part of a very quick and very dirty peace deal. He cared not a fig about Dutch security and advocated signing a peace with no adequate ‘barrier’ provisions. He was quite happy to carve up Europe (and its colonial outposts) between England and France, and to let the Dutch go to hell completely.

The view that (more or less) prevailed was Harley’s. Although Bolingbroke’s fingerprints were all over the extraordinary scandal of the ‘restraining orders’ – whereby, with peace close, Britain gave orders to its armies not to engage the French under any circumstances, and then promptly informed the French of this fact before its actual allies – Harley ensured that, although Dutch interests were heartily compromised, they weren’t totally sold out. Their security at least was, more or less, guaranteed.

The result was that the eventual peace – signed in Utrecht in 1712 – was a conspicuously successful act of diplomacy, especially from Britain’s point of view. It marked a key staging post on Britain’s rise to megapower status. It secured the longest period of continental peace in the 18^th century and contained French aggression for decades. A hard-headed and unsentimental approach to national interests and peace yielded considerable benefits. Being hard-headed did not, however, mean being cynically treacherous for the sake of it. As we enter a geopolitical environment that seems rather more 18th-century in its complexion, in which interests and great power rivalries trump ideals (or perhaps delusions) about the liberal rules-based order, these are perhaps lessons of peculiar contemporary relevance.