This successful wooer--afterwards Lord Churchill and Duke of Marlborough--who had entered the army at sixteen, was the son of a poor cavalier knight who had come to London after the Restoration. Love, not War, was the first stepping-stone to his subsequent high fortune. The Duke of York, heir to the Crown, "young and ardent in the pursuit of pleasure," became enamoured of Arabella Churchill one of the maids-of-honour to his first wife, and afterwards his avowed mistress. Through this lady's interest, her elder brother John obtained a pair of colours in the Guards. In his twenty-third year he made his first campaign in the Low Countries when Charles and Louis united their forces against Holland. Distinguished by his commanding stature and handsome face, he was known to the French soldiery as the "handsome Englishman." Turenne complimented him on his gallantry and "serene intrepidity" before the allied armies. The Marshal had been attracted to him by his courage, and is said to have laid a wager, which he won, on the subject of Churchill's gallantry, on the occasion of a post of importance having been abandoned by one of his own officers. "I will bet a supper and a dozen of claret," said he, "that my handsome Englishman will recover the post with half the number of men commanded by the officer who lost it." The event justified the Marshal's opinion. Emboldened by the praise of such a general, Churchill solicited but did not obtain the command of a regiment from Louis XIV.,[39] the great King refusing his services, as he declined those of Prince Eugene a few years later. He was esteemed one of the handsomest and most attractive gentlemen of the day. Lord Chesterfield, the _arbiter elegantiarum_, declared that the grace and fascination of young Churchill was such, that he was "irresistible either by man or woman." [39] This curious fact was lately ascertained by M. Moret, through the discovery of an inedited, but authentic document, in the _Archives de la Guerre_ in Paris. It appears in a letter of Lord Lockhart, the English Ambassador at Paris, who asks that the colonelcy of a regiment might be given to Churchill. It is dated 27th of May, 1674.--_Archives de la Guerre_, vol. 411, No. 193.