Chapter Two

There Was Once a War – A Glimpse at the Eyewitnesses

The quite wide range of journals, diaries and reminiscences that are available, show how very literate many soldiers were in the armies that took part in the War of the Spanish Succession. This is not at all surprising among the officers and noblemen who went on campaign, for they were plainly educated men; but the non-commissioned officer and the private soldier, wielding a musket in the ranks, are also well represented, although a number of these, such as the Hampshire farm labourer, Thomas Kitcher, recounted their stories after the war to others; in his particular case to the rector of the parish where he had returned to live after his campaigning days were over. The memoir, the ‘memory’ of the soldier of the adventures which befell them, whether stationed high or low, is the backbone of this book. Reminiscences of camp life, the labours of the hot and dusty march, the terror and exhilaration of the day of battle, the rigour of being under the surgeon’s knife, the daily details of feeding, clothing and moving an army, all make absorbing reading. Often the most intriguing details come out of accounts, not of the soldiers riding the lightning in the battle-line, but when embroiled with their families and camp followers in the homely drudgery of life in camp and on the march.

The letters and official correspondence of senior officers provide a mine of valuable detail and information. Prominent among these are The Letters and Despatches of the Duke of Marlborough. Fifty-two years old at the outbreak of the war, John Churchill, as Queen Anne’s close friend, adviser and Captain-General of her armies, oversaw the enormous military and, to a significant degree, the diplomatic effort of England (Great Britain from 1707 onwards) throughout most of the conflict for the throne of Spain. In so many ways, this was Marlborough’s war. Major campaigns, expensive in men, money and materiel alike, took place in the Tyrol, Spain, Portugal and Italy, on the Rhine frontier, in the Balearic islands, in the Caribbean, on the high seas and, latterly, in north America; but the army led by the Duke, in the Low Countries and in Bavaria (for a short season), was the epicentre of the Allied effort to limit the power of France. Marlborough was not only the Captain-General for England, he was also field commander of the Dutch armies, and as such he had under his hand the ground forces of the two main powers in the Grand Alliance. At the same time, he conducted, almost single-handedly, the foreign policy of Queen Anne and her governments, often turning aside from the reeking field of battle to attend to some princeling or potentate whose continued support for the war effort against France had to be secured or nurtured, or whose ruffled feelings, over some imagined slight, had to be smoothed over. On a larger scale, Marlborough fostered the continuance of good relations, by and large, between the awkward Dutch and the devious Imperial court in Vienna. He also persuaded the mercurial and exceptionally dangerous warrior king, Charles XII of Sweden, to stay out of the war, a strategic coup of enormous worth.

The Letters and Despatches, a monumental and immensely valuable work, are taken from fair-hand copies of the Duke’s original correspondence, found by chance in a storage chest in Blenheim Palace, then edited by General George Murray (a stalwart of the Duke of Wellington’s campaigns), and published in 1845. They are indispensable for the student of Marlborough’s campaigns. It is immediately apparent what a mass of detail, often quite minor, the Duke had to attend to on a daily basis; he might turn from drafting a letter to Queen Anne or their ‘High Mightinesses’, the States-General of Holland, announcing the successful result of a great clash of arms, to dictating a note to a junior officer concerning the manner of escorting prisoners along a hazardous stretch of road, or urging one of his generals to have a particular care for the horses, as forage was likely to be hard to find on the road ahead. On occasion, Marlborough was engaged in the diplomatic courtesies, exchanged between senior officers in the opposing armies, which made life a little more comfortable while on campaign. Although reading very strangely today, such civilities enabled generals to move relatively freely about, secure from the danger of being snapped up by an enemy patrol while on the road. In October 1703, the Duke wrote to his nephew, the Duke of Berwick, from his camp at Alderbeesten:

I take this opportunity of returning the pass, to repeat my wishes for your good journey, and should be glad in the mean time, if you think it proper, and not otherwise, that you should desire the Marechal de Villeroi to give me a pass for twenty pieces [casks] of burgundy or champagne to come to Huy or Liege.

Always, hanging over the Duke’s head, was the need to encourage the hearts, stiffen the resolve and allay the fears of politicians in both London and the Hague. Soon after the breakdown of apparently promising peace negotiations early in 1709, at a time when bitterly fought siege operations were daily in progress, and costing the lives of many of his veteran soldiers, the Duke wrote ‘I wish that the whole House of Commons took their turn at the citadel of Tournai. I am apt to believe they would be much tamer creatures when they came back again.’

Much of the Duke’s correspondence is, of necessity, of a formal and, to modern eyes, long-winded nature. That was the custom of the time, and flowery compliments and lengthy descriptive passages were what was expected.

His competent and urbane manner, in addition to an eye for detail, shines through, and the letters sent to close friends, such as the Lord Treasurer, Sidney Godolphin, or his beloved wife, Duchess Sarah, are warm and intimate. The Letters and Despatches do not, regrettably, very often contain the replies to the Duke’s correspondence, and so we can see only one half of the picture; but what a vivid picture it is all the same, and with good reason free use has been made of these papers in preparing this book. Occasionally, however, it is possible to find letters of reply and instruction from Queen Anne to her Captain-General; often these are written in her own handwriting ‘All my strange scrawls’ as she would modestly describe them. Her concern for Marlborough is evident, as in her reply to the momentous news of the victory at Blenheim in the high summer of 1704: ‘The good news Colonel Parke brought me yesterday was very welcome, but not more, I do assure you, than hearing you are well.’ Even when their friendship had cooled, and Marlborough was very ill-advisedly pressing the Queen to make him Captain-General for life, her letters to him remained courteous and her refusals, when so inevitably given, were phrased as to spare the feelings of her old friend, as far as was possible.

The tale of Marlborough’s wars from a far humbler British perspective is to be found in A Journal of Marlborough’s Campaigns During the War of the Spanish Succession 1704–1711, the day to day journal of John Marshall Deane, a private ‘centinell’ in Her Majesty’s 1st English Foot Guards. This valuable work, evidently written by an educated man with some, slightly archaic, literary ability, was known as the ‘Hunter Journal’ and came to the attention of the Society of Army Historical Research in the 1970s. David Chandler undertook to edit the journal, and this was then published by the Society in 1984 as SAHR Special Publication No.12. Copies are scarce, but can be found with diligent searching, and give an intriguing insight into the life on campaign of the foot soldier in Marlborough’s time. Deane’s account of the battles in which he participated is sketchy; this is not surprising, as the common soldier’s view of what was going on during a teeming battle is understandably limited, and he is to be commended for not ‘inventing’ what he did not actually see in order to embellish his tale, a temptation that others, on certain occasions, seem to have been unable to resist. Deane’s ability to record quite minor detail is valuable, throwing light on events that are otherwise made murky with the passage of time. It can be seen, for example, that at least one British battalion, his own, approached the battle at Oudenarde in July 1708 through the town itself, rather than by using the pontoon bridges laid over the Scheldt earlier in the day. This was no doubt expedient, but Marlborough’s inability to complete the destruction of the French right Wing at the battle was due to in large part to Overkirk’s failure in getting his Dutch and Danish corps into place in good time. They, too, had to use the route through Oudenarde town, and if they had to share that road, as Deane states, with British troops trying to get into position in the line along the Diepenbeek and Marollebeek streams, then, perhaps, the Veldt-Marshal’s delay is more understandable than is otherwise the case.

The Irish marching captain, Robert Parker, whose Memoirs appeared in the 1740s and were republished (together with those of the Comte de Merode-Westerloo – see below) in 1968, also have a rather dry flavour to them. This does not detract from the value of the reminiscences, although the rather portly veteran in the well-known portrait of the captain gives few clues as to the nature of the man as a dashing young officer, making his way in an uncertain world. Parker’s service with the Royal Irish Regiment took him, under William III, to the storm of Namur and the carnage of Landen; then, with the Great Duke, to the triumphs of Blenheim, Ramillies and Oudenarde; so he was witness to monumental events. Parker’s accounts are not by any means always dull, as when he describes the manoeuvres to try and catch the French on the heaths of Peer in 1702:

Both armies were drawn up on a large heath, within less than half an English mile of each other, and it was thought impossible for us to part without blows. The cannon on both sides fired with great fury, and killed a number of men. Here I narrowly escaped a cannon-ball, which I plainly saw coming directly to me, but by stepping nimbly aside, had the good fortune to escape it.

A great admirer of Marlborough, as were most of his comrades, Parker wrote of the bitterness and consternation in the army at the Duke’s dismissal. He goes on to complain of the numbering system allotted to the regiments that survived to serve on at the end of the war, feeling that the Royal Irish should have been given a more senior number than the 18th. This was of particular importance to the officers of the regiment, as the disbanding of units would affect the higher (and therefore more junior) numbered regiments first; unemployment and destitution would result. Parker missed the battle of Malplaquet in 1709, as he was in Ireland at that time at the request of Lieutenant-General Ingoldsby, on recruiting and training duties. His colleagues recounted to him their experience in the battle, and he wrote in detail of the close-range contest in those awful woods between the Royal Irish and their émigré Roman Catholic countrymen serving with the French-recruited Régiment Royal d’Irlandaise, when the superior firepower and musketry techniques of the British regiment prevailed.

Another stalwart in the ranks of Marlborough’s army was Donald McBane, whose salty, and often rather disreputable, memoirs were published in Edinburgh in 1728, as part of his treatise on fencing techniques: The Expert Swordsman’s Companion. While some memoirists and diarists of the time can be said to be a little dry in their tone, this charge cannot be levelled at McBane, who tells a racy story, spiced with entertaining anecdotes and exciting events. It is tempting to think that he embellishes his story rather too much, assuming for himself a more prominent part in the events than might be truly the case. However this may be, much of his tale has the ring of truth, whether in minor, but bloody, skirmishes with French dragoons while out on patrol, engaged in throwing hand grenades for eight hours without a pause during the storming of a breach, or recounting the seamier side of life to be found when in camp. McBane was not bashful in describing activities in which he took part, such as his involvement in running one of the many brothels which accompanied the Allied army, and the rather cavalier way in which he treated the girls he employed: ‘They stripped our wives and sent them to us. Many of us would rather they had kept them’. As a noted swordsman he was not slow to pick fights, often for a large wager, with those he knew to be less skilled with the blade than himself, and thus was able to profit from the unequal encounter. He comes across as rather an unpleasant character, but he was a veteran soldier, wounded and left for dead at Blindheim village in 1704, and a valuable witness to those stirring times. Soldiers are not required to have engaging personalities and charming manners, and McBane’s account of his life in Marlborough’s army, for all its rather sordid content, is a valuable original resource.

The story of the Irish-woman Mrs Christian (or Catherine) Davies, Christian Walsh/Welsh or Mother Ross (as she was variously known) is intriguing. Enlisting in the army in order to follow her errant husband, who had sauntered out for a drink one day and never come back, having ‘gone for a soldier’, this intrepid female masqueraded successfully as a man for some twelve years, serving through many campaigns, until receiving a head wound at Ramillies in 1706. She then served on as a sutleress with the army until demobilised at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713. Her lively reminiscences, thought at one time to have been related to Daniel Defoe when she was an elderly in-pensioner at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, contain considerable embellishment and padding, apparently thought necessary for a ‘history’ of her services. Some of this is tedious stuff, leading to the suspicion that this is, in fact, a work of pure Defoe fiction, a sort of military Moll Flanders. This is not, on examination, really credible, as Defoe would have made a better job of a plain fictitious work. The eminent military historian, Sir John Fortescue, accepted their worth when he edited the 1929 version The Life and Adventures of Mrs Christian Davies, commonly called Mother Ross. In any case, Kit Davies undoubtedly existed, and certainly served as a soldier – she was granted a pension, and admitted to the Royal Hospital in Chelsea on 19 November 1717: ‘A jolly, fat breasted woman, received several wounds in the service, in the habit of a man.’ In time she was buried with full military honours and her tale, while undeniably lurid in parts, has much that is plausible about it. Her memory of minor events, the officers with whom she served, and the various exploits to which her adventurous nature led her rings very true, as in the case of the subaltern who fouled his pants in fright during a siege late on in the war ‘and never recovered his reputation’.

Any account of the war for Spain would be curiously incomplete without some telling of the arduous and hazardous soldiering and desperate battles fought on the peninsula itself. These, in a strict sense, are not Marlborough’s campaigns, as the Duke never went there, although the thought occurred to him more than once that he should do so. However, an anonymous private soldier, serving with Raby’s (The Royal) Dragoons, left an extensive and informative account of his service in Spain. This work was published as A Royal Dragoon in the Peninsular War, and edited by C.T. Atkinson for the Society of Army Historical Research in 1936. It provides us with a fascinating account, from a plain soldier’s view, of life in those terrible campaigns, scorched by the fierce sun in summer and frozen by the Iberian frosts of winter, in a way that would be familiar to many of the soldiers in the Duke of Wellington’s army a hundred years or so later. Once again, as with John Deane, the rather odd grammar used by this soldier can occasionally be disconcerting, but his tale of this far-off campaign is both entertaining and illuminating of the hardships endured by the common soldier in camp, on the march to victory at Saragossa, or, following the calamity at Brihuega, when held in durance vile as a prisoner of war. Among other things, we see the privation that had to be endured, and the extraordinary patience that had to be employed, when taking ship to cross to the Iberian peninsula ‘On Saturday the 30 of August 1703 we went on board the Samuel … on 13 March we landed at Belem.’ The condition of the troops (their horses did not, perhaps fortunately, accompany them) on at last setting foot on dry land, after seven months on board ship, may well be imagined.

Another campaigner in Spain to leave an account of his exploits was Captain George Villiers Carleton, whose Military Memoirs were originally published in 1727. He was a great admirer of the Earl of Peterborough, the brilliant and erratic English commander in chief during the early years of the war in Valencia and Catalonia, and much of his account comprises a eulogy of his patron’s apparent qualities and achievements. Charles III, the Habsburg claimant, and the Huguenot Earl of Galway, who commanded for Queen Anne in Portugal (both of whom were thoroughly glad to see the back of Peterborough when he was recalled), may well have taken exception to some of Carleton’s rather uncritical comments. Still, Sir Walter Scott, who composed an erudite introduction for 1830 reprint of the memoirs, wrote that Carleton’s account was ‘Plain and soldier-like, without any pretence or ornament’ and this is so. His story of the brutal guerrilla campaign waged by the largely unsympathetic population of Aragon and Castile against the Allied soldiers is graphic and horrifying, with an unmistakable off-hand ring of truth. It is interesting that one modern author, who left an otherwise very useful account of the Spanish wars between the two young kings and their proxies, stated that the memoirs were a work of fiction, but then went on to quote from them all the same. Well, it is not possible to have things both ways, when choosing sources from which to quote, and there is no doubt that Carleton, who was born in Oxfordshire in 1652, served in Spain with Peterborough as a volunteer, in the capacity of an engineer officer, having been cashiered early in the century after forcing a duel on a junior officer, contrary to standing orders.

Both Carleton’s reminiscences and those of the anonymous dragoon of the Raby’s Dragoons, allow us an insight into this arid and thankless theatre of war, far from the glory of the campaigns waged by the Duke of Marlborough in Germany and the Low Countries. The luckless soldiers who strove in the cause of Charles III were kept short of money, supplies, ammunition and reinforcements, and led by commanders who chose, as often as not, to argue among themselves when not engaging in combat with opponents who were able to deploy greater resources, and more finely developed skills, than they themselves could muster. In this particular connection, it is worth pausing to comment that the Duke of Marlborough, when at the height of his power and influence, and while pressing that such a campaign must proceed, failed to ensure that the Allied effort in Spain was properly financed, provisioned and manned. This must count against him as one of his few strategic errors.

At least of equal interest, and possibly more, than the tales of the soldiers who fought in Marlborough’s armies, are the memoirs left by those who served Louis XIV. These soldiers were by no means always French, as the complicated political landscape of the time obliged many men to seek their fortune with their swords, and in the service of a foreign monarch. This was not looked down upon, or considered, as it would be to later generations, as treachery, as long as the service was regular, properly recorded, and done in the open. Little mercy was shown to spies and informers, and sometimes to deserters, if an example was thought necessary to be made – as recorded by the dragoon in Spain who saw ten men face the firing squad in one day, or when Donald McBane wrote of the daily hanging of deserters from the Allied army.

In this way, ‘Captain’ Peter Drake, an impoverished and exiled Irishman of Roman Catholic persuasion (and thus unable to secure a commission with the army of Queen Anne), was able to seek his fortune as a gentleman volunteer in one of the Jacobite Irish regiments in the service of France. His rather verbose Memoirs were published in 1755, and edited and republished in 1960 with the title Amiable Renegade – The Memoirs of Captain Peter Drake. Among other exploits, he heard the gunfire coming across the fields from the fight at Elixheim in 1705, while marching to re-enlist in the French army. He was able to write vividly of the chaos that engulfed the French and Bavarian armies at Ramillies in May 1706, and of the headlong and panic-stricken flight from the field of battle of Marshal Villeroi’s forces. When it suited Drake, though (usually in winter), he switched his allegiance and went back home; once actually taking up a career as a privateer on the high seas. In this venture he did not prosper, and he was convicted of piracy in 1708, in London. Drake managed to talk his way out of trouble, so that, by autumn 1709, he was able to fight in the ranks of the French Maison du Roi cavalry at the murderous battle of Malplaquet, where he was severely wounded and soon afterwards met the Duke of Marlborough, who ordered that his injuries be tended to. Drake’s graphic account of how his wounds were treated by the surgeons makes grim reading, but he survived. He subsequently took service in the Duke’s army, and wrote with bitter feeling of the suffering of the troops in the seemingly interminable siege operations, which often attended the latter campaigns in the war.

Colonel Jean-Martin De La Colonie, born a younger son of the minor French nobility, was, like so many of his kind, to try and make his fortune as a soldier. His memoirs were first published in 1737, but were edited, sympathetically translated and republished in 1904 by Walter Horsley, under the title The Chronicles of An Old Campaigner. De La Colonie had learned his trade in the Cadet Company at Charlemont, and, despite a terrible inclination to take easy offence and fight duels with his brother officers, he was in action at both Landen and Namur in the Williamite wars. He survived these, and the duels, to be able to tell of an adventurous life as an officer of dragoons, before being seconded to the Bavarian army shortly after the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession. De La Colonie was given the command of the Grenadiers Rouge, a rather mixed bag of French, Italian and Savoyard deserters who sought to avoid the noose or the firing squad by offering to serve on, in what might at a later date be termed a penal battalion: ‘This kind of regiment was not always a success, owing to the difficulty of keeping the men in hand.’ Despite such unpromising material – De La Colonie was occasionally at his wits’ end to how to keep them in good order; he repeatedly comments on their lack of discipline, and their inclination to maraud and plunder whenever the chance arose – time, firm handling and good training had their effect, and the grenadiers eventually proved to be sturdy fighters, highly regarded, and as good as any that the French could put in the line of battle.

De La Colonie was present at the Schellenberg fight in 1704, and his account of the fighting, and the panic that gripped the defenders on the hill as Baden’s Imperial troops swept in from an unprotected flank, is among the best and most graphic to be found. The Colonel missed the battle of Blenheim, his reconstituted regiment being in garrison at the time. As a participant he was able to describe the scrambled fighting for the small village of Taviers, the loss of which unhinged the right flank of Marshal Villeroi’s army at Ramillies in May 1706: ‘I shouted every epithet I could think of to my grenadiers, I seized the colonel’s colour; planted it by me … I gradually rallied my French grenadiers and several companies of the Cologne Regiment … very much shaken.’ His comment on the closing hours of the dramatic encounter battle at Oudenarde, two years later, are particularly interesting, as his regiment evidently held their position well into the early hours of the following morning, indicating that the French army did not flee away from the field of battle that night in quite the indecent haste that is so often reported. De La Colonie’s account of the desperate fighting in the woods at Malplaquet in 1709 also illustrates the danger that Marshal Villars ran, and at which the Colonel protested in vain, when stripping his infantry away from the centre of the French army to bolster his left flank, as Henry Wither’s surprise attack came pounding in across the cornfields at La Folie farm. The closing chapters of the memoirs give an account of De La Colonie’s later career when, once again in the Bavarian service, he took part in the victorious campaign against the Turks at Belgrade in 1717. He then returned to France, where his apparently numerous and impecunious relatives lost no time in looking to him for support and assistance.

Eugene-Jean-Philippe, the Comte de Merode-Westerloo, was a Walloon nobleman who valiantly served his sovereign lord, the King of Spain, in whatever guise, Habsburg or Bourbon, that the monarch should appear. So, his earlier memoirs of the war find him in the service of Philip V, taking an active part with Tallard’s cavalry in the Blenheim campaign. However, after the victory at Ramillies, when virtually the whole of the Spanish Netherlands thought it timely to declare for Archduke Charles, Merode-Westerloo changed his own allegiance. This was perfectly legitimate, and the Comte had, in fact, resigned his commission under Philip V before the battle took place. Misunderstandings did occasionally occur over such transfers of allegiance, as when the Comte had to rescue some of his missing troopers from the noose; a French officer, who had captured the men, mistakenly thought they had not been legally remustered into the service of the Austrian claimant. The Comte’s memoirs make very entertaining reading; the keen sense of his own worth, and his acid tongue, contrast nicely with the perfectly frank accounts of his adventures when he, at times, cuts a rather ridiculous figure – as when he was trampled into the mud by his own soldiers at the battle of Eckeren in 1703, or on the famous occasion when he was raised from his slumbers on the morning of 13 August 1704, to see from his own camp bed that the Allied cavalry were pouring out onto the plain of Höchstädt.

As an officer of some rank and standing, Merode-Westerloo was familiar with many of the senior commanders in the armies, and we get a useful picture from him of the higher direction of the war, although the Comte is always at pains to stress his own valuable contribution to events. His advice was not always appreciated, as can be seen from the scant regard given by Marlborough to his perfectly valid warning that Ghent and Bruges were to be surprised by the Duc de Vendôme in the summer of 1708. Merode-Westerloo was careful, also, to stress the acute personal cost of the service he provided, as after Blenheim, when he bemoaned that ‘Since the battle I had lost more than sixty horses, all my baggage had been burned; my personal expenditure during the campaign had been frightful.’ Eventually he was made a Field-Marshal of the Empire and a member of the Supreme War Council, but he seems to have done little active campaigning in the later years of the war. His unfinished Memoires de Feld-Maréchal Comte de Merode-Westerloo (the Comte dropped dead in mid-sentence in 1732) were first published by his great-grandson in Brussels in 1840. These were translated and edited by David Chandler, and republished in The Marlborough Wars in 1968, as a companion to the Captain Robert Parker memoirs.

Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de St Simon, was born in 1675, and became a keen observer of the goings on at the court of Louis XIV, whether at Fontainebleau or Versailles. His diaries were translated and edited in 1876 by Bayle St John as The Memoirs of the Duke of St Simon. In 1958 an abbreviated version was published by Lucy Norton, but she omitted much of the military content. St Simon was a witty writer with a sharp and very often sarcastic tongue, and his temper was not improved by being denied the command of a regiment, without explanation from the King, at the commencement of the war. The Duc had fought well in the Williamite wars towards the end of the seventeenth century, so his exclusion from command by the King was, and always remained, a mystery. He had written of the fighting near Neerwinden in 1693: ‘We attacked at dawn the Prince of Orange (William III), and after twelve hours, entirely routed him. I was of the 3rd squadron of the Royal Rousillion Régiment, and made five charges.’ St Simon was well acquainted with the senior officers in the French army – Tallard, Marsin, Catinat, Boufflers, Villeroi, Villars – while having a particular dislike for the boorish Duc de Vendôme. His favourites received his unstinting support, and these preferences do shine through his otherwise erudite accounts of those days.

Rather unkindly described by a later commentator as a drone at the French court, St Simon was in fact a keen and talented observer of the glittering scene around him. His sharp tongue, and perfect inability to keep it under control, brought St Simon into repeated disfavour with Louis XIV, who did not appreciate his barbed comments. The King tolerated him though, as he had a fondness for the rather skittish Duchess, and the reminiscences of St Simon are an interesting, topical and remarkably frank resource from the French Court, in many ways the heart of the French war effort. As an experienced soldier, his comments on the progress of the campaigns were well-informed, as with his critical description of the tactical disadvantage that the French infantry laboured under, in the opening exchanges of the fighting in the lanes and orchards in front of Oudenarde in the summer of 1708. Coming on in column, the French soldiers were confronted by Prussian infantry already in line of battle, and the time it took to sort out the resulting confusion may, in part at least, explain the inability of the French commanders to properly grip the situation at this crucial stage in the action. St Simon’s later career, during the regency of Louis XV’s minority (he was the great-grandson of Louis XIV), is of interest, as he was influential in securing the exclusion of the illegitimate offspring of the Sun King from the succession to the French throne.

In addition to the eyewitnesses already mentioned, I have also quoted on occasions from others, both military and civilian, where it seems that their recollections add to the story of these exciting times. In this way we find contributions from such participants as the taciturn Marshal Marsin and the stalwart Dutch Veldt-Marshal Henry of Nassau, Count Overkirk. Marlborough’s chaplain, Francis Hare, left an account of the battle of Blenheim which is among the most descriptive and detailed to be found (the precise authorship of this account has been subject to some debate, with suggestions that it was, in fact, written by Josias Sandby, chaplain to Charles Churchill, Marlborough’s brother and his General of Infantry). Either way, the value of this contemporary account is not in question. Samuel Noyes, another chaplain (this time with Orkney’s Regiment) had a lengthy correspondence with his family, particularly useful being those accounts relating to the often ill-reported marches of the Allied armies in the earlier campaigns in the Low Countries. Marching soldier Matthew Bishop left an interesting account of his service, as did Marlborough’s private secretary, Adam Cardonnel, although his heart failed him at one point in the Blenheim campaign, when he wrote: ‘God grant that I may get safely out of this country.’ John Millner’s Compendious Journal, published in 1733, is full of interest, and I have also occasionally quoted from the Memoirs of Marlborough’s nephew (by his sister Arabella and James II, when he was Duke of York), James Fitzjames, Duke of Berwick.

Almost certainly uniquely, as an English-born soldier, he rose to become a Marshal of France and was one of Louis XIV’s greatest and most formidable field commanders. The magnificently named Captain Blackader wrote about his service with Fergusson’s Regiment (The Cameronians) and seems to have been a rather grim character, while the private correspondence of the Marquis de Montigny-Langost contains interesting comments on the topography of the plain of Höchstädt, particularly the unexpected (and usually unreported) dryness of the Nebel stream after the hot August weather. The veteran diarist, John Evelyn, no obvious admirer of Marlborough, provides interesting comment on the social and political scene in London. The list of diarists, correspondents and memoirists that can be used is quite lengthy, but I have tried to resist the temptation to quote from too wide a range, for fear of unduly fragmenting the text. Accordingly, the bulk of the book comprises the memories and writings of a relatively few participants, some of high station, some of low, whose brief pen-portraits I have tried to give here.

It is noticeable how many of the concerns and complaints of the soldier of the 1700s are mirrored by those of the servicemen and women of today – it should be remembered that numbers of women served and fought in the ranks in Marlborough’s days too. Mrs Christian Davies, for all the ‘ghost-writing’ of her memoirs and the sifting through her tall tales that is required, is a well-known figure, but she was by no means the only one of her kind. Marie Mouron, a French girl, served as an infantry soldier with Captain Destone’s company in the Régiment de Wallonie, and subsequently absconded only to reenlist with the Régiment de Biez. On leaving that unit too, and being apprehended by the provost-marshal, she escaped execution as a deserter on the legally nice point that she should never have been enlisted in the first place, but was gaoled for fraudulently accepting more than one enlistment bounty. Matthew Bishop, referring to the night before the awful battle at Malplaquet in September 1709, also wrote that ‘A sergeant that belonged to my Lord Hartford’s Regiment had a sister in the French service’. Quite how this came about can only be guessed at. Perhaps she was a sutleress rather than a fantassin standing in the firing line, as Kit Davies had many times done as a dragoon; but there the sister was, enlisted into the French service somehow or other.

The Duke of Marlborough was particularly fortunate to have a well-placed confidential informant in the very heart of the court of Louis XIV. This shadowy and slightly sinister individual, whose identity is not known with any certainty, passed to the Duke some hundreds of written reports during the course of the war, containing information, gossip and informed anecdotes relating to the King and his circle. This was of enormous value to the Duke as he pursued his campaigns, both military and diplomatic. However, Marlborough was as staggered as anyone at the refusal of the French to agree to terms in the appalling aftermath of the fall of Lille late in 1708, so his informant’s news was, quite understandably, both limited in its scope and delayed in transmission. It is not suggested, in any way, that one of the diarists in the service of France, mentioned here, was that informant.