John Churchill came from an obscure family of minor provincial gentry impoverished by the Civil Wars. Its only real asset were social connections which enabled John's father Sir Winston to find places for his children at Court; thereafter everything depended on their using their opportunities to advance themselves. In the first decades after the Restoration the ruling class had not yet narrowed into an oligarchy, and ministers and leading politicians who originated in the gentry (although mostly from families more substantial than the Churchills) outnumbered those from established aristocratic and Court families and connections. Several upward routes existed for the politically and socially ambitious, of which the commonest way was through leadership in Parliament combined with patronage management, direction of royal finances or the execution of other major administrative and legal functions. But with the exception of Monck and possibly Sandwich, and both earned their distinction by bringing about the Restoration, nobody rose to the very top through military or naval service.

Certainly John Churchill did not. He owed his rise to prominence and great influence to his skills as a courtier, not a soldier. It was as an adept courtier that he obtained a succession of opportunities, all of which he turned to maximum advantage and which culminated in his command of the allied armies in the Low Countries in 1702–11.