It took the hard-riding Dan Parke eight days to reach London, and Sarah immediately sent him on, hot-hoofed, to Windsor. When he arrived the queen and Prince George were playing chequers on the terrace. Anne told Sarah that ‘this glorious victory … next to God is wholly owing to dear Mr Freeman’.1 It is, though, noticeable that her letter to Marlborough himself was rather warmer than that to Sarah. The duchess had, over the past year, devoted herself to dislodging the remaining High Tories from government just as surely as her husband had concentrated on beating the French and Bavarians. The Duke of Buckingham, lord privy seal, was, for the moment, her own Schellenberg, though she did not defeat him till the following year. She justified her intransigence by telling Anne that she was simply telling her the truth, but although she seems to have been blissfully unaware of the fact, she was doing serious long-term damage to her relationship with the queen.
Blenheim was almost as much of a shock to the Tories as it was to Louis. They at once did their best to belittle it by equating it to Sir George Rooke’s capture of Gibraltar, enabling Sarah, at her vituperative best, to snap that Blenheim was apparently ‘an unfortunate accident, and by the visible dissatisfaction of some people on the news of it one would imagine that, instead of beating the French, he had beat the Church’.2 Marlborough, always nervous about his wife’s political views, at first tried to avoid getting involved in her assault on Buckingham, but eventually he fell into step, and told Godolphin that Buckingham should go and be replaced by the Whig Duke of Newcastle. There is, however, good reason to doubt his personal inclination in the matter, for on 20 October 1704 he had told Sarah: ‘I am very little concerned what any party thinks of me … I will endeavour to leave a good name behind me, in countries that have hardly any blessing but that of not knowing the detested names of Whig and Tory.’3
That autumn the political scene was enlivened by an attempt by the Tories to tack an Occasional Conformity Bill onto a Bill modifying the land tax. This was a piece of constitutional sharp practice, for the Lords could not, by well-established precedent, throw out a financial Bill, and the Tories hoped to bring in their favourite measure through the back door.4 Salamander Cutts, as an Irish peer able to sit in the Commons and, as governor of the Isle of Wight, every bit as able (despite frequent absences to smell gunpowder and deal with perennial money worries) to secure his return for the borough of Newport with its twenty-four electors, regarded the decision as ‘of the utmost importance’, for the success of this sort of tacking would have produced irreconcilable enmity between the two Houses, forcing the queen to dissolve Parliament and imperilling ‘the common cause against France’.
The queen, who attended several sessions of the Lords, sitting ‘at first on the throne and after (it being cold) on a bench by the fire’, was annoyed by the Tack, as it was known, and her support helped Marlborough and Godolphin come through the session safely. However, with the struggle over the Tack at its height, Sarah had again, in her unyielding way, warned Anne that all Tories were closet Jacobites, and just as characteristically declined to back off when the queen warned her that there was a national unity which went beyond party. Anne warned Godolphin that her relationship with Sarah had now changed fundamentally: ‘I can’t hope as you do, that she will ever be easy with me again. I quite despair of it now, which is no small mortification to me.’5
Publicly the queen could not have been more affable, and it was the apotheosis of the Cockpit circle, now on the verge of breaking up for ever. Marlborough returned home on 14 December, and the following day Parliament recorded its thanks to him for his stunning victory. He brought with him thirty-six senior French officers and the colours and standards captured by his wing of the army, which led to the unlucky Lieutenant General Hompesch being reprimanded by the Estates-General for not retaining those taken by the Dutch. On 3 January 1705 the trophies were marched from the Tower to Westminster Hall, in a display that, as Winston S. Churchill so correctly emphasised, underlined the break with France, ‘whom men in middle age could remember as England’s disdainful paymaster’. On 17 February the queen told the Commons that she proposed to give Marlborough the royal manor of Woodstock, some 15,000 acres, worth £6,000 a year, and asked the House to vote him sufficient money to build a palace of a scale commensurate with his triumph. Sir John Vanbrugh was appointed the architect, and soon had a scale model to show the queen.
At the beginning of the project Marlborough was passionately enthusiastic about Blenheim Palace, as he named his yet-unbuilt new home, and looked forward to retiring there. In July 1705 he thanked Godolphin for his ‘friendship and care’ in helping make a start on Blenheim, ‘in which place I flatter myself to enjoy your company and some quiet days before I die’.6 His letters to Sarah are full of detailed instructions, like those in a missive written from the little town of Loos, which would mean something to British soldiers in September 1915:
When you are most at leisure let me know some particular of what you directed when you were last at Woodstock … The two suites of hangings that were made at Brussels at Vanbrugh’s measure cost me above eight hundred pounds, so that if possible they should serve for the rooms they were intended for, being sure in England there can be none so good or fine. If Lord Treasurer [Godolphin] and Vanbrugh approve of it, you may keep one of the marble blocks, so that the room where you intend your buffet, may be well done; I remember you were desirous of having one, but if you have taken other measures, or altered your mind, you will say nothing, but take it as I mean it, kindly, as I shall do in the whole course of my life, everything that I think shall be a satisfaction to you.7
The exiled Earl of Ailesbury, who sometimes dined with Marlborough in camp, recalled that they once ate ‘at his little table, which he loved much, and, being post-day, the meal was not long’. Ailesbury much hoped to be allowed to return to England, but eventually came to realise that he would only receive ‘fair obliging words and no performance’ from the duke, for Ailesbury’s steadfast record of support for James II made him unacceptable to most English politicians. However, Marlborough, with his ‘excellent and even temper of mind’, encouraged him to believe that he would eventually return home, and showed him a plan of Blenheim, even pointing out a room and saying, ‘This is for you when you come to see me there.’8
At its beginning, Sarah was dismayed by the Blenheim project, complaining of ‘the madness of the whole design [and] I opposed it all that was possible for me to do’.9 Given Marlborough’s evident commitment to the scheme, she did her best to see it through, though she was not in the least temperamentally suited to dealing with folk with egos of their own. Blenheim was designed to be ‘monument, castle, citadel and private house, in that order’, intended to rival Versailles in the sheer opulence and scale of its Baroque glory.10 Vanbrugh, its original architect, affirmed that it ‘stares us in the face with a pretty impudent countenance’, and it was certainly meant to.
The extraordinary expense of the build, which eventually cost around £300,000 (the wonderful Castle Howard, built at the same time, was a mere £40,000), made it every bit as much of a visible symbol of hatred for the Marlboroughs’ enemies. Sarah fell out with Vanbrugh as she fell out with so many others. He called her ‘the B. B. B. B. the B Duchess of Marlborough’, but she had the last laugh, personally banning him from the grounds so that he never saw the finished building. There were endless squabbles with architects and craftsmen. She agreed to pay Sir James Thornhill twenty-five shillings a square yard for his huge allegorical painting on the ceiling of the hall, but when the total bill came to £978 objected that this was ‘a higher price than anything of that bigness was ever given for Rubens or Titian’. Payment was made with the worst possible grace, and Thornhill was never asked back.
As Sarah expended her political capital, so building faltered as government money dried up. In October 1710 an Oxford clergyman told Robert Harley that:
The debt to the workmen at Blenheim that is known is above £60,000. They owe to Strong the mason for his share £10,500. It will go hard with many in this town and the country who have contracted with them. The creditors begin to call on them and can get no money at Blenheim. One poor fellow, who has £600 owing to him for lime and brick, came on Saturday to Tom Rowney [an Oxford MP] to ask for a little money he owes him. Tom paid him immediately. The fellow thanked him with tears, and said that the money for the present would save him from gaol.11
Sarah’s final break with the queen in 1711 would see her vacate her apartments at St James’s, taking all the fixtures and fittings with her, down to fireplaces and doorknobs. In return the queen stopped paying for work at Blenheim, saying that ‘She would not build the Duke a house when the Duchess was pulling hers to pieces.’12 Sarah was undaunted. ‘As the building will never be finished at Blenheim,’ she wrote, ‘it will never be any advantage or pleasure to My Lord Marlborough or his family, but will remain now as a monument of ingratitude instead of what was once intended.’13
By 1712 the place was like a huge builders’ yard, daubed with anti-Marlborough graffiti, ‘a chaos which nobody but God Almighty could finish’. After Marlborough returned from voluntary exile with the accession of George I the Blenheim debt was formally acknowledged, but no more public money was forthcoming, and he resolved to finish the place at his own expense. However, he refused to pay crown rates for the work, and many master-craftsmen, Grinling Gibbons among them, never returned. Marlborough stayed there briefly in 1719 and 1720–21, but the house he so longed for never delighted him as he had hoped: he attended the first party there, in 1719, incapacitated by a stroke, and there is a poignant description of him being helped around the half-completed grounds by Sarah, like a blasted oak in a blighted landscape. All this unhappiness, though, was yet to come, and for the moment there was abundant cause for celebration.
On 15 June 1704, with the battle of Blenheim still unfought, Wratislaw had told Marlborough that the emperor proposed to make him a sovereign prince, with a seat in the Imperial Diet. Marlborough, as we saw in the last chapter, wished to accept the title; not simply because it would be an honour to the queen and himself, but also because it would increase his authority amongst the foreign noblemen who served under his command. He felt, though, that it might actually be easier to take it ‘when the business of the war is over’. Sarah, once uneasy about a dukedom, was no more enthusiastic about a principality, and evidently advised against it, though the letter in which she did so is now lost. On 25 August Marlborough told her that ‘I shall do what I can to have it delayed since you think that is best.’14 Anne’s consent to the grant was required, for English monarchs were touchy about their subjects’ acceptance of foreign honours. Queen Elizabeth I, less than impressed by a young gentleman who swaggered back from the Turkish wars as an Imperial count, immediately locked him up, sharply observing that: ‘My dogs shall wear no collars but my own.’
Anne, more generously disposed than her royal predecessor, consented to Marlborough’s elevation. On 28 August he heard from the emperor that he had been created a prince of the Empire, but at once wrote to Godolphin to point out that the business had not been done properly: notice should have been given to other princes, and the fief from which his title would derive should have been named. This may, as his opponents were to suggest, have been designed to ensure that there was an estate which would generate some income, or it may simply reflect Marlborough’s intention, agreed with Sarah only a few days before, to delay the matter if he could. It was not easy for the emperor, warned by Wratislaw of the new prince’s sensitivities on the matter, to find a suitable principality, but eventually a fief ‘about fifteen miles square’ was carved out of Imperial lands in Swabia to create the principality of Mindelheim: it brought in a welcome £2,000 a year. Marlborough visited it once, in the spring of 1713. ‘Stayed but four days at Mindelheim,’ he wrote, ‘which place I liked much better than expected but not so, as to think of living there.’15
It was a remarkable achievement for a man born plain Jack Churchill to become an Imperial prince. It made no difference to his style or title in Britain, and, contrary to the allegations of his opponents, he never expected British officers to call him ‘Your Highness’, and we may doubt whether men like Orkney and Cutts, who faced down the Régiment de Navarre at Blenheim, would have put up with such fripperies. The Dutch and other allies, however, promptly acknowledged the title, though it was not until 1706 that Heinsius amended his abbreviated honorific from VE (for Votre Excellence) to VA (for Votre Altesse). When the Allied candidate for the throne of Spain wrote to tell him of the disaster to Stanhope’s army at Brihuega, which was in fact to prove fatal to his interests in the Peninsula, it was to ‘My Lord Duke and Prince’ that the letter was addressed.16 The happy prince continued to sign himself ‘Marlborough’ (often, in practice, simply ‘M’), but when dealing with foreign dignitaries about important matters he was ‘Le Pr et Duc de M’, though such formality was rare, and often designed to lend weight to a missive or to show reciprocal respect.
In May 1703 the enormously rich Ralph, Earl of Montagu, who enjoyed what Edward Gregg penetratingly calls ‘a singular reputation for profitable dishonour’, had suggested that his heir Viscount Monthermer should marry Lady Mary Churchill. Marlborough had objected on the grounds (rather less reasonable then, when child marriages were not uncommon, than they would be now) that both parties were only fourteen, but in 1705 he agreed to the union, and the marriage took place in the Marlboroughs’ apartments in St James’s Palace on 20 March. The queen not only gave a dowry of £10,000, but on the day of the marriage she created Montagu a duke, and declared that the post of master of the great wardrobe, which he had purchased for life, would revert to his son on Montagu’s death. It was indeed the full zenith of royal favour.17
The general election that spring was something of a personal triumph for the queen, now committed to maintaining balance between the two parties, for neither gained an absolute majority. She had, however, already made clear her support for Marlborough and Godolphin: on the eve of the election Marlborough personally called on Buckingham to demand the privy seal, like a commander receiving the keys of a captured fortress, and it was duly given to Newcastle. There were significant gains for the Whigs, although they were not able to dispose of all the ‘Tackers’, and eventually the balance of power was held by the moderate Tories, ‘sneakers’ to their Tacking friends.
What seemed to offer so much hope for the future, essentially a coalition government under the eye of a queen firmly disposed to rise above faction, was not destined to last, and the ingredients of lethal dissension grew steadily. That spring Godolphin had to threaten to resign to get Lord Sunderland, the Marlboroughs’ Whig son-in-law, appointed extraordinary envoy to Vienna, and he repeated the same ploy to get prominent Whig divines made bishops. Tellingly, it took him a week to inform Harley, his closest ministerial colleague, of Sunderland’s appointment. These signs of future breakdown would have been invisible to all but the most prescient contemporaries, and we must not give this post-Blenheim election more significance than it warrants. But, like Marlborough’s principality and the victory parade through London, it did mark a turning point.
A close observer of the court might have gone further, discerning one of those proverbial clouds, no bigger than a man’s hand, which herald a coming tempest. Abigail Hill, appointed bedchamber woman to the queen through Sarah’s abundant influence, had begun her slow, self-effacing rise. Over the next three years, as Sarah ranted against the Tories and found new opportunities to exercise her waspish temper, those powerful bonds which had linked her to Anne were gradually dissolved. The quiet, unobtrusive Abigail could never offer her employer a relationship of anything approaching the same intensity, but Anne had grown tired of being hectored. It was not until Abigail married Samuel Masham, a gentleman of the queen’s household, in 1707, that Sarah realised that she had been outflanked, and it was by then too late for her to react effectively. After Harley’s dismissal from office in 1708 Abigail Masham used her growing influence to drip-feed the queen with Harley’s own views, giving the opposition covert access to the monarch. Thus, in the kernel of Marlborough’s continuing triumph wriggled the worm of his eventual defeat.
The campaign of 1705 began under strategic circumstances transformed not only by Blenheim but by Marlborough’s brilliant exploitation of his victory. The Elector and Marsin took their survivors back via Ulm to join Villeroi on the Rhine. Marlborough and Eugène, for their part, marched through Württemberg in four large columns to reunite on 5 September at Philipsburg, where they crossed the Rhine, camping on the field of Speyerbach, where Tallard had beaten Prince Louis the year before. It was an inauspicious spot. Marlborough recalled Louis of Baden from Ingolstadt, and the margrave, so Richard Kane tells us, ‘could never forgive them for robbing him of a share of the glory in the late victory’.18 The garrison of the Lines of Stollhofen was brought in to join the army, which now numbered around 130,000 men, and Villeroi had no wish to offer battle, lamely falling back to allow the Allies to besiege Landau.
The siege was entrusted to Prince Louis, anxious for some visible triumph, with Marlborough and Eugène forward on the line of the little River Lauter to cover the operation. The fall of Ulm on 11 September released heavy guns and other siege equipment, strengthening Prince Louis, but Landau still held out till 8 November. It is evident that Marlborough was not happy with the conduct of the operation. On 20 October he warned Godolphin that the business was ‘very little advanced’, and Louis had just lost five hundred men in a failed attempt to wrest a handhold on the covered way. As late as 7 November Adam de Cardonnel told Ellis that ‘Everybody of all sides are dissatisfied with the management and cry out against Prince Louis, if the weather was not favourable, tho’ extreme cold, I know not what would become of us.’19
With the siege still labouring on, Marlborough himself planned to send a detachment under Colonel Blood to take Trier, and then proposed to go on to besiege Trarbach. Both these attacks succeeded, although the march was through what Marlborough called ‘the terriblest country for an army with cannon’. Trier was evacuated as Marlborough approached, and Trarbach fell in mid-December. The campaign ended with the Moselle cleared and the Allies in winter quarters there, ‘which I think will give France as much uneasiness as anything that has been done this summer’.20
Before returning to England, Marlborough visited Berlin. The King of Prussia was concerned at ‘commotions in the north’, where those martial titans Charles XII of Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia were in the throes of the Great Northern War, which lurched on, with interruptions, from 1700 till 1720, and ended with the destruction of Sweden as a major power. Marlborough was still able to persuade the king to send a force of 8,000 infantry to join the Allies in north Italy, in return for 200,000 écus from England and 100,000 from Holland, with the Empire providing the bread.21
Marlborough was well aware how much the events of that wonderful year owed to the soldiers under his command. After the Schellenberg he ordered the wounded ‘to be dressed with all possible care, and sent forthwith to the hospital’, and as Eric Gruber von Arni puts it, ‘personally supervised many of the talks associated with the work of organising casualty care that would normally have been delegated to a quartermaster or other subordinate officer’.22 He paid careful attention to the repatriation of wounded soldiers who had fought at the Schellenberg and Blenheim and to dependants of those who had fallen, for at this stage in the army’s history many women and children followed their menfolk on campaign. The lyrics of that touching folk song ‘High Germany’ make the point well.
O Polly, love, O Polly, the rout has now begun,
And we must be a-marching to the beating of the drum.
Go dress yourself all in your best and come along with me,
I’ll take you to the wars, my love, in High Germany.
O Harry love, O Harry, come list what I do say,
My feet they are so tender, I cannot march away.
Besides my dearest Harry, I am with child by thee,
Not fit to go to wars, my love, in High Germany.23
Immediately after the storming of the Schellenberg widows were ordered to report to the hospital at Heidenheim, where they were to help as nurses before being given passes and passage money for their journey home. After the campaign the hospital was closed, though not before some 1,710 sick and wounded had passed through it on their way to Flanders, where arrangements were made to hospitalise some men at Ghent and to repatriate others. On 20 March 1705 the commissioners of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea were ordered to give priority to
such of the invalids as being wounded in the last campaign in Germany are in the worst condition and want more than ordinary care to be taken of them. For the remainder of those invalids who, having likewise served in Germany, are entitled to the benefit of the hospital, His Grace does think fit that you appoint a person upon the most reasonable terms to take care of quartering them. And of the due payment of their quarters until vacancies shall happen. If any are found willing to return home and quit their pretensions to the hospital … for their encouragement £3 a man is to be paid to them.24
A bounty fund of £4,000 was to furnish this money, and also to provide payment for sick and injured NCOs and men on a scale determined by rank and unit, with a corporal of horse receiving one shilling and sixpence per day and a private in the infantry just five pence. Further money was put into the bounty fund so that widows could be paid, and Marlborough personally contributed £600. He also initiated the first ever scheme to give pensions to officers’ widows, with part of the capital coming from money paid in by officers on first commissioning or subsequent promotion. Modern research demonstrates conclusively that the historian R.E. Scouller’s assertion that Marlborough’s medical care was ‘remarkable for mismanagement, brutality, inhumanity, and, possibly corruption’ is at variance with the facts.25 Indeed, in his personal recognition that responsibility for the long-term care of his wounded was an inseparable part of the function of command, we see a quality that our own times might envy.
Examples of the battle injuries received by candidates for admission to Chelsea over the course the war make sobering reading. A trooper of Mapper’s Horse had been shot in the right arm at Blenheim and in the back at Ramillies, then cut over the head at Oudenarde: he lacked only a wound at Malplaquet to hold every suit. A soldier in Howard’s Foot had been shot in the right knee at Blenheim, had his left leg fractured by a mortar bomb and his left arm injured by a halberd. French sergeants, like their British counterparts, carried the halberd, a staff weapon with axe-edge and point: Peter Drake called his fellow sergeants ‘the brethren of the halberd’. Halberds could be used to help sergeants dress the ranks, or sometimes, laid across men’s shoulders, to hold a wilting rear rank in place by main force. When men came to hand-strokes, shoving with their bayonets or reversing their muskets to lay on with the butt, neither the halberd nor the spontoon, a similar but slimmer weapon carried by infantry officers, was to be despised.26 A private soldier of Wade’s Regiment managed to get shot in the left thigh at Schellenberg and the right knee at Blenheim, while a sergeant of Harrison’s had been wounded in the right groin when he became impaled on a palisade (either while trying to scale it, or having been blown onto it by grenade or mortar bomb). He had also had part of his abdominal lining removed by an operation, and was a fortunate man to get as far as the gates of Chelsea Hospital.27
There is no doubt that Marlborough intended to open the campaign of 1705 by advancing up the Moselle while the Imperial army threatened Alsace. He travelled to the Continent to prepare for operations in early April, telling Sarah that a difficult voyage caused him to be ‘so very sick at sea, that my blood is as hot as if I were in a fever, which makes my head ache extremely, so that I beg you will make my excuse to my Lord Treasurer, for I can write to nobody but my dear soul, whom I love above my own life’.28
These repeated headaches, which were so much a feature of Marlborough’s life, deserve further consideration, and all the evidence points to migraine. Full-blown ‘classical’ migraine starts with an aura, sometimes a visual disturbance, and sometimes with a more severe neurological disturbance such as one-sided tingling or even weakness. This is shortly followed by a severe one-sided headache, accompanied by vomiting, and lasting from six to forty-eight hours. Less severe forms of migraine are common, and the headache may have no preceding aura, may not be unilateral and may not be accompanied by vomiting. These forms are often less incapacitating.
Migraines are not daily events, but tend to come every few weeks or months, sometimes occurring in clusters of great frequency followed by longer periods of freedom. They may be precipitated by substances such as chocolate, cheese and red wine, and often occur after a period of stress rather than during the stressful event itself: typically they often arrive at weekends. Marlborough’s symptoms strongly support a diagnosis of migraine. He sometimes distinguishes a ‘disorder’ in his head, possibly evidence of some kind of aura, from the headaches themselves, and regularly reports headaches after stressful events like difficult voyages, conferences or battles. The headaches did not progress or lead to other problems over the years, so we can safely rule out some serious underlying pathology. However, migraine, especially ‘hemiplegic’ migraine, is a risk factor for stroke in later life, and Marlborough was to be disabled by strokes.
It is believed that migraines result from the constriction of the cerebral arteries, causing the neurological symptoms, followed by the dilation of the arteries, causing the headache. Marlborough once reported that he felt better after being bled. Theoretically blood-letting should relieve the headache by reducing the pressure in the dilated arteries, but there seems little evidence of this in practice. Marlborough’s relief might thus simply have been a placebo effect. These headaches were sometimes totally disabling, although in cases of real emergency, as in the pursuit after Ramillies, Marlborough was able to carry out some of his duties, suggesting a form of migraine that fell short of the most severe. However, these attacks were certainly frequent and damaging, and it is remarkable that he coped as well as he did with the crushing burden of responsibilities and his migraine too.29
No sooner had he shaken off this latest headache than Marlborough was confronted with sufficient problems to restore it. The Dutch had not furnished the magazine at Trier, upon which operations in the Moselle depended. German princes, relieved by the disappearance of the direct French threat, were slow in putting their contingents into the field, and even the King of Prussia, far from dispatching his troops to Italy as had been agreed, had still not sent enough to join the Allies in Germany. Eugène was away commanding in Italy, and Marlborough missed his wholehearted collaboration. Prince Louis, suffering from the physical effects of the wound he had received at the Schellenberg (which modern antibiotics would probably have cured in a fortnight) and the chagrin of having missed Blenheim, was not at his best.
There was the usual fast footwork required at the beginning of a campaign. The home front had to be propped up: the Ordnance Board was assured that funds were on their way from Godolphin to meet the ‘extraordinary demands’ now placed upon it. There was a light gilding of letters to princes along the Moselle. The Elector of Trier was told that Cadogan had already headed south to meet Prince Louis, and was accompanied by a Hamburg merchant who would be responsible for paying the troops on the Moselle. Prince Louis was warned to expect Cadogan, now a brigadier after Blenheim: ‘He is briefed on everything, and I beg Your Highness to listen favourably to him, and to send him on as quickly as you can, so that he can join me before I leave Maastricht.’30 No good evidently came of the visit, for Marlborough himself had to go down to see Prince Louis at Rastatt. He had hoped for a meeting at Creuznach, but the prince was ‘incommoded with a swelling in his leg’, probably the result of the previous year’s wound.
Marlborough soon recognised that without Eugène and with limited German cooperation the original two-army campaign plan would not work. On 27 May he wrote to Secretary Harley from Trier.
I was in good hopes the Prince of Baden would have been enabled to have seconded me in these parts so that we might have acted with two separate armies, but you will be surprised to hear that all he can bring at present does not exceed eleven or twelve battalions and twenty-eight squadrons. These troops were to begin their march about this time, and will be here in ten or twelve days. The Prussians and several others cannot be here sooner, so it will be about the 10th of next month before we are able to move.31
Cardonnel radiated similar gloom, telling Ellis that ‘the dilatoriness of our friends in joining us is a very great disappointment’.32 Although Marlborough did manage to move off towards Villars’ position at Sierck on 2 June, his army was much smaller than he had hoped, and Villars cunningly declined to offer battle in anything save the most formidable of positions.
While he was lamenting the impossibility of making real progress, Marlborough suddenly learnt the reason for his opponent’s clever wagging of the matador’s cloak. Up in Brabant, Villeroi was on the move. He snatched the fortress of Huy, and on 16 June opened his trenches before the citadel of Liège. Overkirk, outnumbered two to one, had to fall back on Maastricht. Heinsius had already warned Marlborough that the French planned to take Liège and Limburg, advancing into the bishopric of Cologne so as to block Dutch communications with the Moselle, and Marlborough told Godolphin of the inevitable result of all this.
The post does not go away till tomorrow, but I would ease my head and my heart by letting you know what is resolved. The deputies of the States’ army on the Meuse have sent an express to me to desire that 30 battalions of them may be immediately sent to them. This joined with the want of forage, and no hopes of having the horses and carts in less than six weeks for the drawing everything to the siege [of Saarlouis] we have taken the resolution for strengthening Prince Louis’ army and leaving a sufficient number of troops at Trier, and to march with the rest to assist them on the Meuse. We shall leave the cannon and all other ammunition at Trarbach and Coblenz, so that if the German princes will enable us to make a siege, we may return after we have put our friends on the Meuse at their ease … I have for these last ten days been so troubled by the many disappointments I have had, that I think if it were possible to vex me so for a fortnight longer it would make an end of me. In short, I am weary of my life.33
A letter to Sarah, written the same day, told her that he had a thousand things to say to her, but that ‘whenever I sit down to write, the business of the army hinders me’. He complained of ‘the negligence of princes whose interest is to help us with all they have’, and regretted that Hompesch and Overkirk were in such ‘great apprehension’, for they must know that he could not give them instant succour. ‘Adieu, my dearest soul,’ he concluded, ‘pity me and love me.’34
It was normally characteristic of Marlborough to reveal his despair to his wife and his best friend but to nobody else, though now there was a dash of bitters even in a letter to Heinsius sent from Trier on the eighteenth, gently warning that ‘I have been so disappointed in everything that has been promised me that if I should find a backwardness when I come to the Meuse I shall be discouraged from ever serving another campaign.’ Prince Louis, he added, had now decided to go and take the waters.35 By this time, however, Marlborough had already extracted his army from the defiles of Alsace, made provision for leaving the sick and excess baggage in the villages along his route, and pressed on at such speed under a blazing sun that, as Blackader wrote, ‘many fell by weariness and some died’. It was the old story for the infantry, of:
Marching all day. Uneasy with hot weather. A soldier’s life is an unaccountable way of living. One day too much heat, another too cold. Sometimes we want sleep, meat and drink; again, we are surfeited too much. A bad irregular way of living.36
Marlborough reached Maastricht on 27 June, but Villeroi did not care to wait for him, raised the siege as soon as he heard that Marlborough was approaching, and was back behind the Lines of Brabant too fast to be caught.
There was a poignant glint of an old mirror. On 11 July Marshal Villeroi sent him, under a flag of truce, two snuffboxes which had been dispatched to Marlborough by well-wishers in France. One was from the comte de Gramont, and was so elegant, as Marlborough assured its donor, that its equal could scarcely have been found in France or elsewhere. The other was ‘one of the finest that I have ever seen, and is made inestimable to me by the portrait it bears’. It was from Charles II’s old mistress the Duchess of Portsmouth, now living in France and allegedly in straitened circumstances, but not too poor to send a costly gift to the man who had been the lover of her predecessor in Charles’s affections, and perhaps a little more.
Marlborough had little enough time to enjoy his presents or to muse on the past. In early July he had been exasperated to hear that Lieutenant General Aubach’s force of Palatinate and Westphalian troops left to cover Trier had retired precipitately on the mere appearance of a French detachment. Aubach had at least blown breaches in the city’s defences and destroyed much of the equipment it contained, but his behaviour was so ‘unaccountable’ that Marlborough confessed that it made him ‘almost despair’. He ordered Aubach’s men to join Prince Louis on the Rhine, where the Prussians were already marching, telling Henry St John that this ought to bring Prince Louis’ army up to about 115 squadrons and eighty battalions, making it superior to Villars’ force. Meanwhile, he would set about recovering Huy.37
Huy’s outlying forts were soon taken, and the garrison of 450 men in the citadel surrendered as prisoners of war within two hours of Allied batteries opening fire. Marlborough had already decided that the misfortune at Trier meant that there was no longer any merit in his moving back to the Moselle, and so determined to pierce the Lines of Brabant as soon as the trenches dug before Huy had been filled in and his batteries there levelled. The operation depended on Dutch approval, and Orkney told his brother: ‘You cannot believe how much it was opposed by the Dutch.’38 Sicco van Goslinga, who became a field deputy the following year, acknowledges that all was not well: ‘intrigues amongst the generals and even among the deputies, who instead of using their authority to stifle this fire of dissension at birth, encouraged it by choosing sides’.39
Marlborough established that the portion of the Lines between Neerhespen and Esmael was poorly guarded, and accordingly told Overkirk to make a diversion, crossing the River Mehaigne and feinting towards the lines north-east of Namur, threatening the very spot that the defenders thought most vulnerable. Villeroi marched at once to the spot. ‘As soon as day began to shut in’ on 17 July, Marlborough sent off General the comte de Noyelle, Lieutenant General Richard Ingoldsby and Lieutenant General Lumley with an advance guard of twenty-two battalions and twenty squadrons.40 He brought the rest of his army along in two huge columns two hours later, heading for the Lines, ‘three great leagues’ from his camp. Overkirk had been sent word, though only that very evening, so as to preserve security, ‘that he might likewise march in order and join us’. The advance guard reached the Lines – made up of a ditch and ramparts, protected by the Little Geete – by dawn on the eighteenth, and, as Lieutenant General Lumley reported: ‘The too great security of the enemy made them negligent enough to possess with some advanced detachments of foot two of their barriers.’41 Sergeant Millner was in a party of combined grenadiers under Colonel Godfrey, drawn together from the six British battalions in the advance guard, which was there when the River Geete was forced.
Notwithstanding they [the enemy] were just on the other side of the river, yet we posted ourselves under cover of a quick set hedge without so much as one shot being fired. Where we continued the space of a quarter of an hour until such time as the pontoons on the carriages came up along a little causeway which led to the river, in order to lay the bridges. At the noise whereof the enemy took the alarum and began firing very sharply on that place where they judged the bridges would be laid. Which galled our workmen so prodigiously that they were not able to stand it. Which Brigadier Blood perceiving, came to Colonel Godfrey desiring three companies of grenadiers from the right to advance to the riverside in order to fire upon the enemy to divert them during the laying of the pontoon bridges. And as the bridges were finished the grenadiers had orders to march over the same; which we accordingly did and beat the enemy from that ground.42
Colonel Charles Godfrey was another echo of the past. He had married Marlborough’s sister Arabella, very quietly, at some time in the 1680s, and, fecund as ever, she had borne him two daughters and a son. He was ‘a sensible and well-liked fellow’, a Whig MP and a source of regular support for Marlborough in the House. He was also a brave and determined infantry officer with something of the Salamander’s stamp, and Marlborough rewarded him by deploying his interest to see Colonel Godfrey appointed clerk to the Board of Green Cloth and master of the Jewel Office. For all Arabella’s early flightiness her marriage to Charles Godfrey was firm and good, although when she died in 1730, after a distressing period of dementia, she was buried in St Paul’s with her brother George (who died in 1710), naval officer turned Tory politician and something of a thorn in the Marlburian side. ‘I am very sorry that 16 [George Churchill] behaves himself so very ill,’ lamented the duke to Sarah. ‘I do not flatter myself with having much power over him, but if you please I shall speak to him, for I had much rather he should be unkind and disrespectful to me than to you, whose happiness is dearer to me than my own life.’43
Let us return to watch Charles Godfrey at the business he knew best. Neerhespen, on the Allied side of the lines, fell easily, and the château at Wangé, along the river to the south-west, was speedily taken. Three battalions rushed Elixheim, further west still, taking village and bridge; three enemy dragoon regiments encamped nearby did not even try to stem the flood, but fell back on Leau. However, for a time Marlborough’s position was excruciatingly vulnerable. Part of the follow-up force had missed its way in the dark, and was still some way back. Marlborough sent a galloper back to Lord Orkney, its commander, urging him to step out. In the meantime, Marlborough pushed Lumley’s advance guard cavalry over the obstacle ‘without loss of time, though not without difficulty’. Orkney’s men, with that turn of speed which the duke’s infantry always produced when they knew he really needed them, reached the bridges while the last of the cavalry were still crossing. Orkney reported the bridges so poor that ‘hardly above one man could go over abreast though in some places one foot man and a horseman passed over together. However, though the passages were very bad, men scrambled over them strangely.’44
Marlborough himself rode forward to join the cavalry, and saw that forty or fifty enemy squadrons were now coming up, with a number of light guns and infantry behind them. Orkney, some way back, saw ‘two good lines of the enemy, very well formed, a line of foot following them. We were in a very good position to receive them, and we outwinged [outflanked] them, and still more troops coming over the pass. As I got over to the [1st] foot guards, I saw the shock begin.’ Although his infantry was not yet in a position to intervene, many of the enemy cavalry were Bavarian cuirassiers in half-armour, and his own men – British, Hanoverian and Hessian – were ‘a good deal mixed up and not in their proper place’, Marlborough at once ordered his horse to charge. In the cavalry mélêe, separated from his escort and with only a few staff officers to hand, he was, as Lumley reported, in great peril. Orkney recounts how:
My Lord Marlborough in person was everywhere, and escaped very narrowly, for a squadron, which he was at the head of, gave ground a little, but soon came up again; and a fellow came up to him and thought to have sabred him to the ground, and struck him with that force, and, missing his stroke, he fell off his horse. I asked my Lord if it was so; he said it was absolutely so. See what a happy [e.g. fortunate] man he is.45
The battle was really over before the infantry arrived. Blackader wrote that ‘our horse had some action with them, and beat them wherever they encountered them. Our foot had nothing to do, for the enemy fled before they came up.’46 John Marshall Deane of 1st Foot Guards recalled a busier time:
our men were so eager upon the design that they jumped furiously upon the enemy into the trenches, the which they soon quitted, and then our men took the pass it being a pretty big river. Some of our regiments wading through it breast high; and afterwards engaged them with notable valour and broke their army most confusedly, giving the enemy a total rout.47
So far, so good. The Lines were pierced on a wide front and the French counterattack was thoroughly beaten. Overkirk was on his way, though about two hours from Marlborough, who felt it rash to follow the retreating French infantry until he arrived. We now know, though Marlborough did not, that Villeroi did not in fact hear of his defeat till nine that morning, by which time Overkirk’s men had already started to cross the Geete. Marlborough could have taken the risk of pressing the Bavarian infantry, which had fallen back in good order, without any chance of Villeroi intervening. He did push on to Tirlemont, capturing a battalion there; and some dragoons, pursuing the survivors of the morning’s battle, overtook and seized part of Villeroi’s baggage train. When Marlborough wrote to Harley from Tirlemont that evening he reported the day’s events as a significant victory, and concluded that he hoped to advance on Louvain the following day.
Marlborough announced the capture of two lieutenant generals, the marquis d’Allègre and the comte de Hornes, two major generals, two brigadiers, ‘near fourscore other officers, with ten pieces of cannon and a great many standards and colours’, as well as over 2,000 men. On the following day his advanced squadrons caught Villeroi’s rearguard crossing the Dyle, and took another fifteen hundred prisoners.48 The captured guns were of an unusual type, designed to provide close support for horse and foot. Private Deane tells how
each piece having three bores … touching the match to one touch hole they fired out each piece 3 balls at once. These very murdering cannon were made the last year at the city of Brussels for the security of the line, but by the providence of God we secured them so that they did our army but little mischief.49
Marlborough wrote to Sarah on the evening of the eighteenth. Knowing what we do of his headaches, we will not be surprised to hear that ‘my blood is so hot that I can hardly hold my pen, so that you will my dearest life excuse me if I do not say more’. He still paid tribute to the architects of his victory: ‘It is impossible to say too much good of the troops that were with me, for never men fought better.’ The battle was unquestionably a ‘good success’ – not Blenheim, to be sure, but a valuable victory in its own right and an earnest of what might come.50 The ministry, anxious for something to celebrate, proclaimed a day of public thanksgiving for ‘having forced the French lines … [and obtained] a signal and glorious victory within those lines’. The mellifluous Gazette lovingly described the royal procession from St James’s to St Paul’s Cathedral to hear the Dean of Lincoln preach and join a thundering Te Deum.51
It may not have been Blenheim, but there was certainly a palpable feeling of unity of purpose linking Marlborough and his men that day. Lieutenant Colonel Cranstoun of the Cameronians wrote:
Those who know the army and what soldiers are know very well that upon occasions like this where even the common soldier is sensible of the reason of what he has to do, and especially of the joy and success of victory, soldiers with little entreaty will even outdo themselves, and march and fatigue double with cheerfulness what their officers would at other times compel them to do.52
Men shouted, ‘Now, on to Louvain,’ and ‘Over the Dyle,’ and even the Dutch Lieutenant General Slangenburg, when he came up, told Marlborough: ‘This is nothing if we lie here. We should march on Louvain or Parc.’53 Marlborough was touched by the noisy acclamations he received. He confessed to Sarah that ‘the kindness of the troops to me had transported me … to make me very kind expressions, even in the heat of the action, which I own to you gives me very great pleasure, and makes me resolve to endure anything for their sakes’.54
There was widespread recognition that by marching straight for Louvain on the eighteenth the Allies would have intercepted Villeroi, who had to swing through a quarter-circle to cross the river there. But Overkirk, usually so much in Marlborough’s mind, declared (not unreasonably, for they had marched twenty-six miles in thirty-one hours) that his soldiers were exhausted, and camped between Leau and Tirlemont. With the great opportunity missed, a smaller one, of crossing the Dyle to fight Villeroi on the far side, still remained. However, unseasonable rain flooded the water meadows, which the army needed to traverse to reach the river, and then the Dutch Council of War unanimously ‘declared the passage of the river to be of too dangerous a consequence’.55
Marlborough was furious, but told Godolphin that he dared not show his resentment too much for fear of annoying the Dutch and encouraging the French. He did, however, privately acknowledge that he had not let Overkirk know what his plan really was (‘I was forced to cheat them into this action, for they did not believe I would attack the Lines’), which suggests that, for all Marlborough’s annoyance at the Dutch decision, his ally’s irritation was not without cause.56 He told both Heinsius and Godolphin of his fear that the decision now gave the campaign ‘a very melancholy prospect’. Although he urged secrecy on his correspondents, it is clear that his frustrations were widely aired in Britain, probably because it suited the ministry to blame an ally, rather than its chosen commander, for what now looked very much like a missed opportunity: Blenheim had been such a stunning success that public expectations were unreasonably high.
Most historians believe that Marlborough was right to blame the Dutch, but Ivor Burton sounds a note of caution. There were fundamental differences within the alliance. The Dutch, engaged in a life-or-death struggle against France for the past three decades, never saw battle in the same light as Marlborough. Nor did they welcome his methods, which were, by the standards of the age, secretive. Much later in the war, Goslinga saw how, unusually, ‘Milord on his arrival had all the infantry and cavalry generals called to a sort of council of war. I must note that Milord never used these councils: he limited himself to the deputation, or [Dutch] general in chief assisted by the two quartermasters-general, Dopff and Cadogan.’ Marlborough went on to tell him: ‘I must teach you a general maxim; that is if you find yourself in a delicate situation, or need to decide on a battle or some great and hazardous enterprise, if you are resolved to do it, neither consult your generals, nor call a great council.’57
The three centuries since Blenheim emphasise that Marlborough was right to believe that ‘It is absolutely necessary that such a power be lodged with the general as may enable him to act as he thinks proper according to the best of his judgement, without being obliged either to communicate what he intends further than he thinks convenient.’58 Yet it is no less evident that the issue of command goes to the very heart of coalition warfare, and he is a fortunate coalition commander who enjoys the undiluted authority that Marlborough sought.
Of course personal jealousies and ambitions amongst the Dutch generals played their part, just as they had in the squabble between Coehoorn and Slangenburg in 1703. Most of them were petite noblesse, gentlemen of ancient lineage but narrow acres, given to high words and long memories. Opdam, who refused to serve under Overkirk, who in turn blocked his promotion, had a remarkable thirty-two quarterings on his coat of arms, and was made a count by the Elector Palatine in 1711. Sicco van Goslinga declined a similar honour from the emperor: being a gentleman of Friesland was quite enough for him.
There were added layers of complexity in 1705. A French deputation was at The Hague, and although Marlborough assured Godolphin that the Dutch would not make a separate peace, there was always a risk that the French might attain, through a diplomatic master-stroke, what they had so far failed to achieve by battle. In the very same letter in which he warned Heinsius of the need for undivided command, Marlborough added an apparently harmless paragraph saying that the captured Lieutenant General d’Allègre, who ‘has a very good reputation’, had ‘pressed me for a pass for two months’. Marlborough was anxious to do this decent fellow ‘all the civilities I could’, but he just wanted to clear the matter with Heinsius first.
D’Allègre duly received his pass. Then, whether or not with Marlborough’s foreknowledge we cannot say, though the implications are obvious, he went straight to Versailles, where Louis XIV told him:
Until the present moment, the king believed that his honour demanded that he maintain his grandson the King in the possession of all the states which the late King of Spain left him … having defended him for five years, without deriving any advantage … it is now time that the King puts the interests of France above those of Spain.
Louis gave d’Allègre plein pouvoir to negotiate a settlement on his return to Holland, and urged him to get Marlborough firmly on side. The French king could not offer the duke ‘more dignities than he already possessed’, but a gift of two million livres ‘would solidly establish a fortune, always doubtful in England, if it was not supported by great wealth’. D’Allègre was also to pass on to Marlborough ‘sentiments full of respect and veneration’.
Marlborough asked d’Allègre to dinner soon after his return to The Hague on the expiry of his leave, but the marquis reported to Louis that: ‘As for Marlborough, while affecting a sincere inclination for peace, he claimed to defer entirely to the decisions of his sovereign and above all to the Estates-General.’ Nevertheless, they agreed that d’Allègre would ‘put himself in the position of being ill’ so as not to have to accompany Marlborough to England, so giving himself more time to talk to the Dutch. However, negotiations foundered, and eventually ‘nothing was left to d’Allègre but to board the yacht which had been put at his disposal to travel to England’.59
It is clear from subsequent correspondence that Marlborough regarded the offer of two million livres as lasting beyond the immediate failure of the d’Allègre mission. Louis later suggested that the offer should be increased to four million if the peace terms were particularly attractive, proposing a menu of rewards related to specific points in any eventual treaty. However, Torcy, the French foreign minister, met Marlborough at The Hague in the spring of 1706, and ‘when I mentioned his private interests he blanched and seemed desirous of changing the topic of conversation’. In 1708, when the strategic situation was even more encouraging for the Allies, Marlborough told Berwick: ‘You may be sure that I shall be heartily in favour of peace, not doubting that I should find proof of the goodwill which was promised to me two years ago by the Marquis d’Allègre.’60
The extant evidence does no more than identify key features, for it was in the nature of such discussions that little entered the written record. However, it is certain that the French ‘sweetener’ was no mere figment of anti-Marlborough propaganda, and that the duke’s desire to make money was so widely known that Louis XIV thought it worth appealing to his cupidity. It is no less clear that, while Marlborough was prepared to grasp the money if he could, he was not willing to let the prospect of such a substantial reward change his view on the conduct of the war. At the very time that he was considering the French douceur he was inflicting a series of substantial military defeats on his would-be paymaster, which would be puzzling behaviour from a man who had been bought and sold. Conversely, Marlborough was sometimes accused (not least by Berwick and Goslinga) of prolonging the war for his own financial reward. This is not a view supported by his personal correspondence with Sarah and Godolphin, and it would indeed be an odd line to take given what we now know of his financial interest in ending the war.
The campaign of 1705 never really progressed beyond the sharp blow inter-Allied relations received in mid-July. The Allies crossed the Dyle south of Louvain at the end of the month, but Villeroi was there to oppose one of the crossings, and the Dutch demanded that Marlborough should honour an earlier agreement and not force the issue. In August Marlborough outnumbered Villeroi so significantly that Versailles ordered substantial detachments to be sent from the Rhine, where the Imperialists were not fixing the French as Marlborough had hoped, to the Brabant front. But before they could arrive Marlborough carried out a promising manoeuvre round the headwaters of the Dyle, feinting towards Brussels and so persuading Villeroi to move out of Louvain to face him. Marlborough then swung north, advancing upon the outnumbered Villeroi with every prospect of forcing him to fight a major battle on unfavourable terms, near what was to be the 1815 battlefield of Waterloo.
The French position was strong, but Marlborough could see serious flaws in it, and pointed these out to Overkirk, who ‘perfectly coincided in his opinion’. The field deputies, however, demanded time to consult their generals, and when Marlborough formally asked his council of war, at about three on the afternoon of 18 August, to support his decision to attack, Slangenburg exclaimed: ‘Since I have been led to this place without previous communication of the design, I will give no other opinion than that the passage at Over-Ische is impracticable. However, I am ready to obey the orders which I may receive.’ After a lengthy debate the field deputies decided that the suggested attack would not work, but admitted that it might be wise to look elsewhere. ‘This survey,’ writes Coxe, ‘provided a new source of cavils and objections. Every post occupied by the enemy was deemed too strong to be forced; the river was declared not fordable; and the most trifling elevation was declared inaccessible to cavalry.’
Perhaps we should not let a private soldier speak at this council of war, but, interestingly, John Marshall Deane might have voted with the Dutch, for he did not like the look of the French position: ‘It appeared impossible for us to pretend to get at the enemy, for their army lay just beyond the pass where it was thought ten thousand men to be sufficient to prevent an army of 100 thousand men from getting over.’61 Consideration was eventually interrupted by nightfall, and Marlborough observed bitterly: ‘I am at this moment ten years older than I was four days ago.’
Marlborough, angry before, was now positively furious. On 19 August he told Godolphin:
You will see by the enclosed to the States that after four days march I found the enemy encamped as I expected, so that I thought we should have had a very glorious day. But as the deputies would not consent without first consulting their generals, who were all against it except Monsieur Overkirk, so that we have been obliged to retire from the enemy, notwithstanding we were at least one third stronger than they, which I take to be very prejudicial to the common cause, and scandalous for the army …
The last action of the Dutch generals has given me very great mortification, for the enemy will see very plainly that they have nothing to fear on this side. Nor can I serve with them without losing the little reputation [I have], for in most countries they think I have power in this army to do what I please.
I beg you will give my duty to the Queen, and assure her that if I had the same power I had last year I should have had a greater victory than that of Blenheim in my opinion, for the French were so posted that if we had beaten them they could not have got to Brussels.62
A few days later he added that prisoners and deserters all confirmed that Villeroi had been in a hopeless position. It was a missed opportunity of staggering proportions.
Marlborough had been muttering about resigning for much of the year, and now acknowledged that he was finding it almost impossible to put up with the frustration of shackled command. He told Sarah that he had ‘a very great desire to have that work of Woodstock finished, and if I can be so happy as to live some years in quietness there with my dear soul, I shall think myself well recompensed for all the vexations and troubles I am now obliged to undergo’.63 To make matters worse, his eyes were very painful: he thought ‘the heat of my blood’ was to blame, and hoped to visit a spa when the pressure of campaigning eased.
Marlborough made no effort to conceal his annoyance with the Dutch, which was so serious that, even before this incident, old Portland, William of Orange’s favourite and once a symbol of that Dutch influence Marlborough had so detested, wrote to warn him that leaving the army early would send the worst possible signal.64 Eugène wrote from Italy to agree that:
It is extremely cruel that opinions so weak and discordant should have obstructed the progress of your operations, when you had every reason to expect so glorious a result. I speak to you as a sincere friend. You will never be able to perform anything considerable with your army unless you are absolute, and I trust your highness will use your utmost efforts to gain that power in future. I am not less desirous than yourself to be once more united with you in command.65
The queen added her own support in a letter which nobly testifies to her ability to set her damaged relationship with Sarah on one side.
I am very sorry to find, by your letters to the Lord Treasurer, that you are so very much in the spleen. I own all the disagreeable things you have met with this summer are a very just cause for it, and I am very much concerned for the uneasiness you are under; but yet I cannot help hoping, that for the good of your country and the sake of your friends, who cannot support themselves without you, you will be persuaded to banish your melancholy thoughts.66
Marlborough’s official bulletin noted that the army had been ready to attack, ‘but the Deputies of the States, having consulted with their other generals, would not give their assent, and so the proposed attack was countermanded’.67 The States-General refused to print it, but Marlborough wrote letters condemning the Dutch to Wratislaw and Eugène amongst others, and told Heinsius in the bluntest terms that Slangenburg had deprived them all of a lasting peace. ‘I do before God declare to you, that I am persuaded that if Slangenburg had not been in the army, at this day we might have prescribed to France the peace we pleased,’ he wrote. Instead of the peace that they might have had, he now looked to a continuation of the war, because the French would not concede what he saw as each of the Allies’ minimum aims. For Britain, he suggested, this meant a Spain secured for Charles III, the Hapsburg claimant, and for Holland, a secure frontier with garrisons in Antwerp, Namur and Luxembourg. The Duke of Savoy must be kept secure and, with ‘the blessing of God we must do something for the Protestants [in the Cevennes]’.68
Marlborough blamed Slangenburg’s opposition on personal motives, arguing that as a Roman Catholic it was ‘his temper to hinder whatever may be designed’, while Robert Parker thought Slangenburg ‘so intolerably insolent, that there was no bearing him’.69 There had certainly been an ill-mannered confrontation on the unfought field of Waterloo. ‘Speaking forwardly and harshly to the Duke’, says chaplain Hare, he ‘was very noisy and cried out that it was sacrificing the army and an impracticable enterprise’.70 The formal Dutch report suggests that the road to this fatal dissension had been paved by Marlborough’s lack of consultation. Marlborough, argued the field deputies, had been authorised by the Estates-General, ‘without holding a council of war, to make two or three marches, for the execution of some design formed by his grace’. But he had gone well beyond this. The report concluded: ‘We cannot conceal from your high mightinesses that all the generals of our army think it very strange that they should not have the least notice of the said marches.’71
Marlborough, now ruefully convinced that all he could do in the remainder of the campaigning season was to take the fortress of Leau and level the Lines where he had overrun them, ordered Slangenburg to besiege Leau with fifteen battalions and fifteen squadrons. Slangenburg demanded twice the force, so Marlborough at once set Lieutenant General van Dedem, another Dutch officer, on to the task, and the place fell easily.72
The demolition of the Lines also went well once Marlborough was able to put his army to work on it. The London Gazette reported: ‘The peasants that were employed in demolishing the enemy’s Lines proceeding but slowly, 50 men out of every battalion in both armies were on the 8th Instant ordered for this service, in which this detachment soon made a considerable progress, being relieved every 48 hours.’73 Private Deane, who saw things from the business end of a shovel, reported that:
The line was of a most prodigious strength, being 18 foot deep and 16 foot broad. The bastions lying along the middle of it being 8 foot higher than the level or top of the entrenchments, & so thick throughout that 4 men might have walked abreast upon it & fired upon the enemy that should approach it. There were likewise counterscarps one by the side of another to withdraw in if an enemy should have got over. The front of this line being formed triangular, worming and running every way … the passage from one side of the line to the other being all triangle work that a man could not see 6 yards before him, and barriered with trees very strongly.74
While ramparts were being levelled and ditches filled, the English and Dutch governments worked just as hard to repair the damage done to their alliance by the recent dissension. Slangenburg might have been a villain to the British, but he was a hero to some of his own countrymen, and there was a possibility that the peace party in the United Provinces, led by Pensionary Buys of Amsterdam, might gain ground on the back of a disappointing campaign and Slangenburg’s resolute opposition to the high-handed ways of a foreign general. That danger soon passed. The popular mood so turned against Slangenburg that when Shrewsbury passed through The Hague that winter he thought that if Slangenburg had shown himself in the street he would have been murdered like the de Witt brothers in 1672.
The general, pleading ill-health, retired first to Maastricht and then to Aachen. Charles Churchill heard that he had spoken ‘freely and disrespectfully’ of his brother, and sent Colonel Palmes to call upon him to request satisfaction if things were indeed as they had been reported. Slangenburg promptly denied disrespect, survived unchallenged, but never again held a command. Robert Parker was among those delighted to see the last of him, not least because his successor, Lieutenant General Salisch, was a bird of a very different feather.
He was born in Switzerland of a family of note, and upon some disgust he listed himself with a Dutch officer, who brought him a recruit to Breda, in the very regiment he is now colonel of. In this regiment he advanced himself by his personal bravery, without any interest or friends, but such as his merit had gained him: till from a private sentinel, he became colonel of the regiment, Governor of Breda, and General of the Dutch infantry; but it was yet more remarkable, that the officer who enlisted him, still continued a lieutenant when our regiment was quartered at Breda, and it was more than he deserved, for he was an old Geneva sot; however, the general, out of pure compassion to him, kept him constantly confined, where great care was taken of him, as long as he lived.75
The replacement of Slangenburg by Salisch did not end the matter. Cardonnel had drawn up a report for the London Gazette which reflected Marlborough’s view of the missed opportunity. The version that actually appeared was wholly emasculated:
The 18th the army decamped at three in the morning from Fischermont, and having passed several defiles, came through the wood of Soignies into a spacious plain, with only the Ische between us and the enemy, whom we found, according to expectation, in their former camp … In the afternoon the army encamped at Laisne, from when we marched on the 19th to the camp at Basse-Wavre … The 22nd the army under His Grace marched from Basse-Wavre to this camp.76
Not only was there no mention of the dispute, but the implication that he had deliberately avoided battle irritated Marlborough. He complained to Godolphin that he had been ‘used very hardly’, enclosing a copy of Cardonnel’s original dispatch so that Godolphin could see what had been left out, ‘which I think the writer of the Gazette would not have ventured to have done if he had not had orders for it’. He blamed the textual change on a desire not to offend Vryberg, the Dutch ambassador in London, adding that if the Dutch saw the Gazette they would have even less reason for yielding to his demands for greater authority. ‘I am very sure I must be madder than anybody in Bedlam,’ he concluded, ‘if I should be desirous of serving, when I am sure that my enemies seek my destruction, and that my friends sacrifice my honour to their wisdom.’77 Both Hedges and St John maintained that they had had nothing to do with it, blaming the slip on the ‘negligence or venality’ of the Gazette’s editor.
The government decided to send Lord Pembroke to the United Provinces to lodge a complaint, but Marlborough, fearing that the matter was now escalating beyond his control, and confident that Heinsius would achieve the desired result without formal intervention, managed to get the visit cancelled. On 14 September he told Heinsius that ‘whatever your deputies and generals shall propose I shall use my utmost endeavours that it may succeed’, adding, ‘Now that M. Slangenburg is gone if I see anything that I think feasible, I shall make no difficulty of proposing it to them.’78 Ten days later Marlborough assured Godolphin that although the cancellation of Pembroke’s visit might
make some noise in England, I think it is much wiser and honester, to let such as do not mean well to be angry, than to do that which must prejudice the public, as this journey of Lord Pembroke’s would certainly do. For Pensionary Buys has confirmed me in my opinion, that the constitution of the States is such, that they can’t take away the power that the deputies have had at all times in the army. For in the King’s time they had the same authority, but he took care to choose such men as always agreed what he had a mind to. Now this may, if they please, be put again in practice, but that never can be done by a treaty. I have also underhand assurances that they will never employ Slangenburg in the army where I may be.79
The discreet understanding that sympathetic field deputies would be selected henceforth paved the way for a remarkable period of Anglo-Dutch military cooperation. Indeed, almost as if to point the way ahead, the Allies snatched the fortress of Zandvliet, on the Scheldt between Antwerp and Bergen op Zoom, before going into winter quarters.
Throughout the tense summer of 1705 Marlborough had dealt with coalition politics well beyond the borders of Brabant. He ensured that the new emperor, Joseph I, who had just succeeded his father Leopold I, understood the significance of his piercing the Lines, sending a senior aide ‘to inform Your Imperial Majesty of the peculiarities of this affair, which I do not doubt will have very advantageous results for the common cause and for the interests of Your Imperial Majesty, for which I will always have a special attention’.80 He thanked the King of Prussia for his generosity in ensuring that the Prussian contingent destined for the Rhine could now serve in Brabant, though he warned Raby, ambassador in Berlin, that Prince Louis was now in such an awkward mood that he would probably use the non-arrival of these troops as an excuse to do nothing. Yet to read his letters to Prince Louis one would never guess how that gentleman’s slow progress exasperated Marlborough, and when the prince at last succeeded in forcing the Lines of Haguenau, ‘I could not wait for the arrival of the full details to congratulate you, with all my heart, on such a happy event.’81
He commiserated with the Ordnance Board on ‘the ill condition of the stores of ordnance’, and, alerted to the shortage of saltpetre, an essential ingredient of gunpowder, told the board that there was currently plenty in Holland, where five shiploads had recently arrived. There was interest to be dispensed. Lady Oglethorpe was assured that her son could have his promised ensigncy in the Foot Guards, and ‘If you please to send me the young gentleman’s Christian name, his commission shall be dispatched immediately.’82 He was less open-handed to the Earl of Dalhousie, who hoped to succeed a kinsman as colonel of the Scots Guards, saying that he would do his best for him, but gently adding (for he must have guessed that the outcome would not be to the earl’s advantage) that in this case the queen would be advised by ‘her ministers in Scotland’.
Sarah, pressed by the Earl of Essex’s sister, Lady Carlisle, to do something for the cash-strapped earl, asked Marlborough to get him made constable of the Tower of London. Marlborough knew his wife’s temper too well to disappoint her, but it created another problem, for Charles Churchill was lieutenant of the Tower, and would thus become Essex’s nominal subordinate, which would never do.
Would it not be barbarous to put my Lord Essex, that is but a major general, over my brother that is Lieutenant of the Tower and General of the Foot? I write to Lady Marlborough to the same purpose by this post, and if this were said to Lord Essex, he would not expect it …
Essex was eventually appointed, but only after Charles Churchill had been moved on to be governor of Guernsey, an appointment he coveted: Cadogan replaced him as lieutenant of the Tower, a post which brought income but no duties, and everybody was happy.83
There were other family obligations too. When Marlborough heard that Sarah’s sister Frances wished to cross the lines to visit Aix, he obtained a pass from the French, and wrote to tell her: ‘I have likewise ordered eight dragoons to attend on you on your coming to the Bosch; these will wait on you to Maastricht, where the governor will give you another escort on to Aix. I heartily wish you a good journey, and all the success you can desire with the waters.’ He politely recognised her Jacobite title, addressing her as Duchess of Tyrconnell.84
Lastly, despite his lack of ministerial office, Marlborough continued to play a central role in government. The issues of fixing the succession and pursuing a union between England and Scotland were uppermost in the minds of Westminster politicians, and that autumn’s session of Parliament passed both a Regency Act and legislation authorising the appointment of commissioners to negotiate a Union with Scotland. Godolphin was anxious to continue removing Tories from the ministry, a process which Harley rightly feared would lead to his own replacement and which ran contrary to the queen’s desire to have a broadly-based government. She continued to value Marlborough’s advice, but even before the summer’s exhausting wrangling with the Dutch he expressed a wish to retire at the end of the campaign, and clearly felt that his headaches and associated problems with his vision were the harbingers of something fatal.
By the vexation and trouble I undergo, I find a daily decay, which may deprive me of the honour of serving Your Majesty any more, which thought makes me take the liberty to beg of Your Majesty, that for your own sake and for the happiness of both kingdoms, you will never suffer anybody to do the Lord Treasurer an ill office. For besides his integrity for your service, his temper and abilities are such, that he is the only man in England capable of giving such advice as may keep you out of the hands of both parties, which may at last make you happy, if quietness can be had in a country where there is so much faction.85
Edward Gregg, Anne’s distinguished biographer, identifies here ‘a maudlin note which was to be repeated later in his correspondence and which the Queen was to find increasingly grating’.86 Marlborough’s correspondence with Sarah and Godolphin testifies to the fact that there was nothing political in his desire to retire: indeed, he rarely mentioned Blenheim Palace save in the context of a place where he might live out his days in peace. Although he had suffered from headaches for many years, their frequency and severity in 1705, together with the appearance of stomach trouble and gout, left him fearing that, as he told Heinsius that autumn, ‘I am really ill.’
Despite the closeness of his relationship with Godolphin, Marlborough was often a reluctant participant in the lord treasurer’s campaign against the Tories, and was far from sharing his wife’s Whig principles. But there was no more escaping his requirement to support Godolphin than his need to keep propping up the alliance. Welded into his myriad of concerns at the close of a difficult year was the need to dissuade the Elector of Hanover from allowing the dowager Electress Sophia, the Tories’ preferred candidate to succeed Anne, from settling in England, something that the queen told him ‘gives me a great deal of uneasiness’.87
The twenty-first century is too often prepared to diagnose stress as a universal illness, but by any reasonable assessment the pressures bearing down upon Marlborough at the close of 1705 were almost intolerable. It was the cruellest of ironies that he was able to sustain them largely because of his relationship with Sarah, but Sarah’s own views and attitudes were by now contributing to his burden. His occasional attempts to steer her towards a less confrontational relationship with Anne, or to dissuade her from inciting Godolphin into fresh attacks on the Tories in government, could not be pressed too far without the risk of the sort of marital crisis that had disfigured the early months of 1704. In short, Marlborough could not survive without Sarah, but had come to realise that surviving with her was increasingly hard.
One year tumbled into another. Marlborough spent November and December 1705 visiting Allied capitals. The new emperor urgently needed money to sustain the war in Italy, and Marlborough pressed the bankers of Vienna to supply an immediate 100,000 crowns on Dutch and English security. He undertook to arrange a loan of £250,000, on the security of the silver mines in Silesia, and did so as soon as he returned to England, putting up £10,000 himself: the sum was raised in full by early March 1706. In Berlin he was presented with a diamond-encrusted sword, but found the King of Prussia so irritated by the irregular payment of his troops that he would not, at that time, guarantee to keep them under Prince Louis’ command. Finally he went to Hanover, whence he wrote to Godolphin that the Elector ‘has commanded me to assure Her Majesty that he will never have any thoughts but what may be agreeable to hers’. He had just heard that the Lords had passed the Regency Act, and later that month the queen gave her assent to an act naturalising the Electress Sophia and her heirs.88 This bout of diplomacy ended with him prostrate with migraine: ‘My head aches to that degree that I can say no more …’ It was wholly typical of this curmudgeonly year that he did not manage to return to England until late on the evening of Sunday, 29 December.
Marlborough returned to a nation making the greatest military effort of its history so far. In the Iberian Peninsula the Allies had scored significant successes, capturing Gibraltar and Barcelona, overrunning Catalonia, and being poised for an attack on Madrid from Catalonia and Portugal. The threat to the Empire had been blunted at Blenheim, the Duke of Savoy’s defection to the Allies had widened the Italian theatre. Marlborough had seventeen British battalions in 1702, and twenty from 1703; maritime enterprises consumed twelve in 1702, eleven in 1703 and six from 1704. The Peninsula gobbled up ten battalions in 1704, fifteen in 1705 and nineteen in the winter of 1705–06. In 1706 the war in Flanders and Brabant cost £1,255,000, and operations in the Peninsula £829,000 from a military budget of £2,112,000. Even Italy absorbed £334,000 in assorted loans to the emperor, the Duke of Savoy and German princes providing troops.89 Parliament, now narrowly under Whig control, was prepared to vote unprecedented sums of money for a war which the Allies now seemed to be within measurable distance of winning.
Marlborough was in the unusual position of being Allied commander in a particular theatre of war, captain general of all the queen’s land forces, and strategic adviser to a government prosecuting the closest thing to a world war that history had so far seen. Winston S. Churchill maintains that Marlborough merely tolerated the war in the Peninsula as a sop to the Tories, but on the contrary, it is evident that in the winter of 1705–06 he actually recognised that his own theatre of operations was the least important. A drive on Madrid seemed to offer the prospect of winning the war in a single campaign, but conversely failure to reinforce Allied armies in Italy might lead to a crushing French victory there, and reopen the threat to Vienna. And, in just the same way that the French hoped that disaffected Irish or Scots might be used to spearhead an invasion of Britain, so Marlborough believed that Huguenot ‘refugee regiments’ could be used against France. In March 1706, not long before he left for the Continent, he told Heinsius how he saw the war in the round for the coming campaign.
I am very sensible that there are very just objections to this project [of refugee regiments], but I can’t hinder being of opinion that it ought to be attempted though the success should not be a third part of what is promised; for we should attempt everything that is in our power this campaign, for the troops of France were at no time so divided as they now are. When we shall consider that we have an army in Spain, another in Italy, a third in Germany, and a fourth in Flanders, we may conclude that this is the time, that we ought to do something that they do not expect, and we may be sure, that if they are being surprised, they will find it very difficult to oppose us, their armies being at so great a distance from each other.90
This was a wide strategic view from a general capable of lifting his gaze above the Lines of Brabant.
When Marlborough reached The Hague in late April 1706 he first decided on attacks into France, in concert with Prince Louis, by way of the Moselle and Landau. This scheme did not survive early recognition that Prince Louis’ army had been too weakened by detachments for Italy to be able to mount a serious offensive. Marlborough then determined to go to Italy himself, where, working in concert with Eugène, he would attack into south-east France, and the Dutch, to his astonishment, agreed to devote troops to the venture. Marlborough had told Heinsius that the French would find it hard to oppose the Allies effectively if they were surprised. However, what applied to one combatant was no less true for the other, and Marlborough was himself surprised by the fact that the French, straining every nerve over the winter, had created a total of eight armies, three of which – under Villars on the Rhine, Villeroi in Brabant, and Marsin on the Moselle – were to attack in unison before the Allies could begin the campaign. Louis had concluded that he was now unable to fulfil his original war aim after Blenheim, but that by mounting a vigorous offensive he could obtain peace on suitable terms.
Marlborough was making preparations for the march to Italy, with the usual problems in getting Allied contingents in on time, when he heard that Villars had attacked Prince Louis and administered what seemed, even from the first unconfirmed reports, to be a considerable defeat. Writing from The Hague, he told Godolphin that:
we have had news of the Prince of Baden retiring over the Rhine, by which he has not only abandoned his lines, but also Haguenau, and whatever the French shall see fit to attack in lower Alsace. These people here are so very angry with Prince Louis that they will never be brought to let any of their troops be under his command, so that I very much apprehend the campaign on that side.91
He was quite right. The Dutch at once deduced that this would enable Villars to send troops to strengthen Villeroi in Brabant, and would allow only 10,000 of their men to go to Italy, and then only if Marlborough himself remained in the north. Worse was to come. Prince Louis was fixed in the Lines of Stollhofen, demanding urgent support. Marsin paused only long enough to ensure that the Allied forces on the Moselle were being sent down to help Louis, and then took most of his troops to join Villeroi. The latter, now far stronger than he had been the previous year, thinned his forces west of Antwerp to a mere eleven battalions, designated sixteen battalions and eight squadrons for the siege of Leau, which, once Marsin’s men had come in, he would be able to cover with eighty battalions and 140 squadrons. It was a good plan, capitalising on ‘interior lines’ which enabled the French to move more quickly than the Allies. Marlborough would have to let Leau fall, and face subsequent attacks on Huy and Liège, or give battle against a superior force.
There is a hoary old tale of a bear-keeper who, hoping to administer physic to the creature, placed the potion in a piece of rolled-up paper, inserted one end into the bear’s mouth and the other into his own, and prepared to blow. The bear, alas, blew first. This is what happened to the unlucky Villeroi. Marlborough, ground down by headaches and Alliance politics during the previous campaign, and now wrong-footed by a development he had not expected, rose at once to the top of his game. His intelligence service, which had given him no warning of Villars’ attack on Prince Louis, now focused on the immediate threat, enabling him to track the arrival of reinforcements to Villeroi’s army, and making it clear that Villeroi would venture into the field confident in support which might not arrive in time. The editors of the French official account admit that Villeroi was ‘determined, by the orders he had received, to act offensively, and by the superiority which he thought he had over the enemy, not to await attack, but to force them to come to an action’.92
Although his army was still not ready to march in the first week of May, Marlborough rightly judged that the prospect of Marsin’s arrival would tempt the French to take risks, and would ‘give them such a superiority as would tempt them to march out of their lines; which, if they do, I will most certainly attack them, not doubting with the blessing of God to beat them’. They could only concentrate to face him by weakening themselves elsewhere, and this was all the more reason why a seaborne ‘descent’ should be attempted against a suitable spot. He would, come what may, make six regiments of foot and one of dragoons available for it.93 In short, he was prepared to take a short-term tactical risk to advance towards a wider strategic goal.
By 9 May Marlborough was confident that the balance of forces favoured him, for Marsin’s infantry were still some way off.
The English will join the army this day, and the Danes two days hence. We will then be 122 squadrons and 74 battalions. They pretend to be stronger in horse and foot, but with the blessing of God I hope for success, being resolved to venture for as yet they have but 20 squadrons of the Marshal de Marsin’s detachment. With my humble duty, assure Her Majesty, that with all my heart and soul I pray to God that I may be able to send her good news, so that her reign may be happy and glorious, and that your faithful friend and servant might have some quiet before he dies.94
He was similarly bullish in a letter to Harley, written on 20 May with the army almost complete.
The enemy having drained all their garrisons, and, depending on their superiority, passed the Dyle yesterday and came and posted themselves at Tirlemont, with the Geet before them, whereupon I have sent orders to the Danish troops … to hasten their march. I hope they may be with us on Saturday, and then I design to advance towards the enemy, to oblige them to retire or, with the blessing of God, to bring them to a battle.95
At three o’clock on the morning of 23 May, Whit Sunday, the Allies decamped from Corswarem and set off south-westwards, probably in four columns, heading, as Marlborough was to tell Eugène, ‘for the gap between the Mehaigne and the Great Geet’, passing through a section of the demolished Lines of Brabant near Merdorp. It had been raining heavily for the past few days, but the day dawned dry. As was the normal practice, Cadogan had left camp before the main body with an escort of six squadrons of dragoons, including some of the recently-arrived Danes, ready to mark out that evening’s campsite. But as he rode forward through the fog across the plateau of Jandrenouille he met French hussar vedettes, static patrols posted to provide security for the main army. There was a spattering of shots. The hussars fell back westwards, and as the mist lifted Cadogan could see that the broad-shouldered ridge marking his westerly horizon was white with the tents of Villeroi’s army.
Villeroi was probably not expecting a battle that day, although he was certainly prepared to fight soon afterwards. Marlborough told Eugène that French prisoners had said that ‘their design was not to fight us before Monday, not believing that we would dare to go to them’. The devout Elector of Bavaria, commanding Villeroi’s cavalry, was away attending a Pentecost service in Brussels. Both Louis and Chamillart had made it clear to Villeroi that he should fight if a favourable opportunity presented itself, and the gossipy duc de Saint-Simon went further, saying that ‘Villeroi had the feeling that the king doubted his courage … He resolved to put all at stake to satisfy him, and to prove that he did not deserve such harsh suspicions.’96 Louis, always given to using a long screwdriver to tinker with his commanders’ plans from a distance, warned Villeroi ‘to pay special attention to that part of the line which will endure the first shock of the English troops’, a process which was to work to Marlborough’s advantage.
Although some historians suggest that the French were already drawn up for battle when Cadogan first saw them, this is evidently not the case. John Marshall Deane reckoned that when his regiment arrived the French were ‘getting onto the old camping ground on Mount St Andrews’.97 De la Colonie, whose Bavarian grenadiers were brigaded with the Cologne Regiment on the French right, recalled that when his army finished deploying it was parallel to the Allies, then drawing up in battle array, and already within cannon-shot. There was, however, time for the French to scratch together some field fortifications. Captain Robert Parker recalled that on their right, towards the Mehaigne, they ‘had … thrown up such an entrenchment as time would permit of’, and they had also ‘thrown up a trench’ on the crest-line just east of Ramillies, with, so Private Deane thought, ‘a battery of twelve pieces of treble cannon’ in it.98
The French had, however, begun to stir before those first shots out on the plateau. The general call to arms was beaten at dawn, and Villeroi’s army went through the martial ritual of rising, soldiers tugging on breeches, waistcoats and coats, for men normally slept in their shirts, and falling in with their weapons. Peter Drake, who assures us that he was a cadet (in ‘a regimental suit, like those worn by the officers’) in an Irish regiment in French service, recalled:
On Whitsun eve we were all furnished with sixteen charges of powder and ball a man: orders were given out at night for the general to beat at dawn of day; the chaplains to say mass at the head of their prospective regiments; the tents to be struck, the baggage loaded, all sure token there was work cut out for the fighting day.99
The French deployed in the simplest way, by forming up in two massive columns, with the artillery between them, and stepping out till the heads of the columns were close to the Mehaigne near Taviers. Successive regiments then wheeled left into line to take up a strong natural position on the western side of the Geete, running from the village of Autreglise, through Offus and Ramillies, down to Taviers, stretching, in a very gentle crescent, for over three miles, and held by about 60,000 men: there were seventy-four battalions, 132 squadrons and seventy guns.
It was big, open country, with more than an echo of Salisbury Plain, and as self-confident as the white-coated infantry who now stood in rank and file upon it. The prosperous, tightly-nucleated villages were marked out from a distance by their church spires. There were few hedges on the plain itself, but the going was more difficult in the trappy terrain of the valleys and amongst the cottage gardens and orchards of the villages. The recent rainy weather and primitive land-drainage system meant that both rivers were far more significant than they seem today. The valley of the Mehaigne was boggy enough to splash a southern edge to the battlefield, and the headwaters of the Geete, which rise just north of Ramillies and are singularly unimpressive today, were then an obstacle to horse and foot, and a very serious barrier to guns. The ground grew more boxy the further north one went, effectively giving Villeroi a secure left flank beyond Autreglise.
A key feature of the terrain, certainly visible to Marlborough when he arrived on the plateau late in the morning, was a long, shallow and undramatic valley running south – north on the eastern side of the Geete, more or less parallel with that river, with its head just east of Ramillies, where the village cemetery now stands. This was to enable him to shift troops from his right to his centre, thus changing the balance of the battle without the transfer being apparent to Villeroi. It was never Marlborough’s way to let anyone, except perhaps Cadogan, into his mind, but knowing what we do about his preferences, it is reasonable to assume that he quickly decided on his favourite tactical ploy, persuading his opponent to strengthen one part of his array by drawing troops from another part of the line, thus leaving a weak spot which would then be ripe for attack.
Marlborough turned over the possibilities in his mind when he looked at the French position opposite Ramillies at about eleven o’clock, accompanied only by Overkirk, Daniel Dopff, the Dutch quartermaster general, Cadogan, Goslinga, on his first campaign as field deputy, and a handful of officers. Two of the Dutch officers present had served under the Spaniards in that area, and warned Marlborough that ‘The enemy left could not be attacked with any appearance of success: for the hedges, ditches and marshes were a complete barrier to both sides.’ This, they thought, would induce the French to mass towards their right, where the ground was better. Marlborough listened politely, but then, to Goslinga’s surprise, proceeded to order an equal amount of cavalry to both flanks, giving no hint of his plan. The Dutchman was further dismayed to see how long it took the Allies to get into line, splitting from the four advancing columns into eight for the last phase of the deployment. He thought it ‘a very great fault’ on the part of the French not to have attacked before the Allies were ready, a criticism which overlooks the fact that Villeroi, having taken up a good position and begun to dig in, could scarcely be expected to leave it and risk a battle in the open.100
De la Colonie’s description of the French approach march deserves quoting at length, for it gives an insider’s view of Villeroi’s army and the ground it was to fight on.
The extent of this plain of Ramillies gave us the liberty of marching our army towards the enemy on as broad a front as we desired, and the appearance of our march was as fine a spectacle as one could wish for. The army began to move at about 6 o’clock in the morning. It was composed of two large columns, each marching on the front of a battalion. The artillery formed a third column, marching between the two infantry columns. The cavalry squadrons in battle order occupied an amount of ground equal to the columns, and, on this fine plain, where nothing could hide things, the whole force was seen in such splendid array that one could never hope to view such a striking and brilliant sight as the army made at the beginning of the campaign, before weather and fatigue had dulled its lustre, and nothing inspired as much courage as to see this force in all its splendour. The late M le Marquis de Gondrin, whose company I had the honour to keep during this march, told me that it seemed that France had excelled herself to find such a fine army, and that it was not possible in the coming action for the enemy to break us, and if we were beaten now, we could never dare to present ourselves before them again.
When the heads of the columns had arrived near the marsh which supported our right flank, the first regiments began a quarter-turn to the left, the remaining units in the columns did the same, and in an instant the army was in battle order in two lines facing the enemy, who was now within range of our cannon, and was busy making his dispositions … we saw movements to their right and left without being able to guess their intentions … 101
This was just as Marlborough intended, for an obvious massing would have warned Villeroi of his plans. Robert Parker, in contrast, quickly deduced what Marlborough must do.
We drew up in two lines opposite them, having a rising ground on our right, whereon a great part of our British troops were drawn up. From hence the Duke had a fair view of the enemy, and saw evidently that the stress of the battle must be in the plain, where they were drawn up
in a formidable manner: he saw also, that things must go hard with him, unless he could oblige them to break the disposition they had made on the plain. On this occasion his Grace showed a genius vastly superior to the French generals; for though he knew the ground along the Geet was not passable, yet he ordered our right wing to march down in great order, with pontoons to lay bridges, as if he designed to attack them on their weak part. The Elector and Villeroi perceiving this, immediately ordered off from the plain a complete line, both of horse and foot, to reinforce those on the Geet.102
De la Colonie soon saw that something was amiss on his flank.
I noticed, when passing in front of the Maison du Roi, that there were wide gaps between the squadrons, and that the long sector of front it occupied was not held as strongly as the rest of the line. This made me think that the principal attack was not to be made here; that there was some other more dangerous part that the enemy threatened and which had to be supported by a greater number of troops.103
Mérode-Westerloo, now an Imperialist officer, having changed sides after Blenheim, gives a thin and partial account of Ramillies, but he too agrees that the Maison du Roi was dangerously exposed, arguing that this reflected French overconfidence in its social status, ‘believing this formation to be more valiant than Alexander the Great’s phalanx’.104 Villeroi was following Louis’ orders and strengthening the left of his line, which seemed to be the target of the nineteen English, Irish and Scots battalions of Marlborough’s right under Lord Orkney. It was wholly logical, therefore, for Villeroi to position himself, with Max Emmanuel, who had just galloped in from Brussels, near the village of Offus, to monitor the battle at what seemed certain to be its crucial spot, and to station the powerful four-battalion Régiment du Roi on the left of his line.
Marlborough had seventy-three battalions and 123 squadrons, with a hundred guns and twenty shell-throwing howitzers, in all perhaps 62,000 men. Orkney commanded the bulk of the British foot on the right, with Lumley’s horse behind him. In the centre were most of the Allied infantry under Churchill and Schultz, while Overkirk commanded on the left, where most of the Allied cavalry faced the French on a plain that might have been made for charging horsemen. The Allies filled the plateau of Jandrenouille, their straight front, in contrast to their opponents’ shallow curve, making them look, to friend and foe alike, more numerous than their enemy. De la Colonie thought that the Allies were in ‘four great lines, closed up like walls: while ours were only in three, of which the third was composed of a few squadrons of dragoons’. George Orkney thought that the French had taken up
a very good post at the head of the Geet, and possessed themselves of several villages on their front, with a marsh ground and a little ruisseau [stream] before them, so that, when we came to attack, it was impossible for us to extend our line, so were drawn up in several lines, one behind another, and indeed even in confusion enough, which I own gave me at first a very ill prospect of things.105
While his horse and foot were deploying, Marlborough personally sited his main battery opposite Ramillies. This included some twenty-four-pounders, very heavy guns for use on the battlefield, hauled laboriously into position by teams of oxen. The first shots of the battle proper came as these guns took on the French battery above the village. De la Colonie knew, from long experience, that it was as well to keep his men’s minds off what was to come:
I got the woodwind that followed at the rear of the regiment to strike up some martial flourishes, to divert my people and keep them in a good frame of mind. But the cannon-shots which began to roll out across the battlefield surprised them so much that they disappeared like lightning, without anyone noticing, and went off to raise melodious sounds from their instruments in places where they would not be competing with cannon.106
The battle began at about 2.30, with Allied attacks on both Villeroi’s flanks. Orkney tells us that his approach was obstructed by
a morass and a ruisseau before us, which they said was impossible to pass over. But however we tried, and, after some difficulty, got over with ten or twelve battalions; and Mr Lumley brought over some squadrons of horse with very great difficulty; and I endeavoured to possess myself of a village [Autreglise] which the French brought down a good part of their line to take possession of, and they were on one side of the village, and I on the other; but they always retired as we advanced.107
Thomas Kitcher, a Hampshire farm labourer serving in Meredith’s Regiment, part of Orkney’s first wave, told his village curate exactly what a general’s ‘some difficulty’ actually meant for a private soldier. The French commander in Offus, the comte de Guiche, had posted some Walloon infantry on his side of the marsh to make the British pay dearly for their crossing. The front rank of Meredith’s was mangled by fire from across the Geete, and Kitcher was tripped by a comrade’s entrails.
They were then commanded to cross the marsh by means of fascines and many were shot and maimed, or killed, which they carried and laid down their foundations. He told me that limbs and bodies, of which it was impossible to ascertain whether or not they were dead, were used to pass the quagmire at some points, and that one redcoat that he knew of raised himself from the supposed dead at the indignity of the treatment and turned upon the pioneers who had thought him one of their bundles of faggots and flayed him with his tongue.108
Once the British were across, the Walloons scampered back up the slope towards Offus, with the redcoats close behind them. ‘The Frenchies seemed surprised,’ recalled Kitcher, ‘and showed no mind to fight much. Some of them I saw turned tail and I spiked one of their officers through the throat and another in the arse.’109
The fighting here was inconclusive, partly because the ground prevented Orkney from bringing his whole force to bear. John Blackader of the Cameronians had been promoted the previous winter. The death of his colonel seemed likely to trigger a general advancement from which he, as the regiment’s senior captain, hoped to profit. He spoke to Marlborough about it, ‘got a good answer (for none ever get ill words from him)’, and was duly promoted on 15 December. At Ramillies, his first action as a major, his regiment was in the second line, and he found the battle
not general, but it was hot to those that were engaged. Our regiment was no further engaged but that we were cannonaded for some hours, and had several men killed and wounded. I was not near the Duke, but upon our wing we had a great want of generals and distinct orders.110
Robert Parker, too, found that his regiment, at the extreme right of Orkney’s first line, had little to do, but ‘stood looking on without firing a shot; and as we were posted on an eminence, we had a fair view of the whole battle on the plain’.111 This is no bad description of what was, had Parker and Blackader but known it, a diversionary attack, where uncommitted troops helped fix French attention on the indecisive flank.
On the Allied left, however, the attack progressed far more swiftly. Here Villars, like many a general before and since, had been drawn forward by the lure of a useful feature to his front. The five Swiss battalions responsible for the small village of Taviers, which marked the right of his line, were ordered to push on and also to hold the tiny Franquenée, another five hundred yards to their front. De la Colonie thought that the villages were embedded in ground so marshy as to be impracticable to cavalry, but their garrisons would be able to fire, from these bastions, on cavalry operating on the southern flank, so they were certainly worth securing. By trying to retain both villages with an inadequate force Villars left himself open to defeat in detail. On Overkirk’s orders, Colonel Wertmüller’s four battalions of Dutch foot guards, supported by two field guns, manhandled forward by their detachments to breach garden walls and houses, attacked Franquenée first. The Dutch then bundled the Swiss back into Taviers, and took that too after fighting which, so de la Colonie maintained, cost as many lives as the rest of the battle.
The marquis de Guiscard-Magny, commanding Villeroi’s right wing, immediately took what should have been textbook steps to recover the lost ground. He ordered three more Swiss battalions to move southwards against Taviers, while fourteen squadrons of dragoons were to dismount near the tumulus called the Tomb of Ottomont, well behind the French right, and attack on foot. De la Colonie’s brigade, on the right of the first line of infantry, was then ordered south to support the counterattack. As the Red Grenadiers marched in front of the Maison du Roi they were applauded by the horsemen – partly, thought de la Colonie, because of the reputation his men had earned at the Schellenberg, but also because the gentlemen troopers hoped that the brigade was moving to shield the cavalry’s right flank from interference from Allied foot soldiers firing from the marsh.
It was a misplaced hope. The French dragoons dismounted, their strength immediately reduced by the need to detail one man in four to hold horses, and then clumped forward on foot, booted and spurred. They were stoutly received by the Dutch foot and guns in Taviers and then unexpectedly charged by six squadrons of Danish horse which had skirted the two villages, and come on quickly across the southern edge of the plain, first breaking the dragoons and then cutting up the advancing Swiss. De la Colonie’s brigade commander, commendably eager to assist, cantered forward but got stuck in the little Vesoul stream which flowed into the Mehaigne. He would never have got out, thought de la Colonie, had the helpful Dutch not rescued him.
Worse was to follow. As the Red Grenadiers neared the marsh they were swamped by a tidal wave of fugitives, Swiss and dragoons alike. Within seconds de la Colonie found himself left with only his regiment’s colours and a few officers: ‘I yelled in German and French like a madman, I gave all sorts of names to my people, I took the colonel’s colour, planted it a certain distance away, and, making many shouts and wild gestures, I attracted the looks and the attentions of many.’ He was eventually able to rally the equivalent of four small battalions, but his men were now badly shaken, and one grenadier behind him opined noisily that they were being led to butchery.112 Although de la Colonie maintained that by holding a crest-line on his army’s right, thus giving the impression that there were more infantry behind him, he helped prop up the flank of the Maison du Roi, there was no denying the fact that the French right had now been kicked off its hinges.
In the centre, though, the fighting was far more evenly balanced, with squadrons charging, wheeling back and then charging again as French and Allied horsemen, perhaps 25,000 in all, hacked at one another across the green wheatfields south of Ramillies in the biggest cavalry battle of the war. Robert Parker thought that:
In this engagement there was great variety of action; sometimes their squadrons and sometimes ours giving way in different places; and as the fate of the day depended entirely on the behaviour of the troops on the plain, so both sides exerted themselves with the utmost vigour for a long time. The Duke was in all places where his presence was requisite; and in the hurry of the action happened to get unhorsed, and in great danger of his life; but was remounted by Captain Molesworth, one of his aides de camp, the only person of his retinue then near him; who seeing him in manifest danger of falling into the hands of the pursuing enemy, suddenly threw himself from his horse, and helped the Duke to mount him. His Grace, by this means, got off between our lines; the captain being immediately surrounded by the enemy; from which danger (as well as that of our fire) he was, at last, providentially delivered. His Grace, about an hour after, had another narrow escape; when in shifting back from Captain Molesworth’s horse to his own, Colonel Bringfield … holding the stirrup, was killed by a cannon shot from the village of Ramillies. Notwithstanding which, the Duke immediately rode up to the head of his troops; and his presence animated them to that degree, that they pressed home upon the enemy, and made them shrink and give back.113
The Bringfield incident became one of the most commonly recounted aspects of the battle. Lord Orkney tells how ‘My Lord Marlborough was rid over, but got other squadrons, which he led up again. Major Bringfield, holding his stirrup to give him another horse, was shot with a cannon bullet which went through my Lord’s legs; in truth there was no scarcity of ’em.’114 When helping someone to mount, one often puts weight on the offside stirrup just as the rider places his left foot in the nearside stirrup: Orkney’s version suggests that Bringfield was decapitated by a ball which passed under Marlborough’s right foot as he swung it over the horse. Lieutenant Colonel James Bringfield had been commissioned in 1685, was appointed captain in the 1st Troop of Horse Guards nine years later, and was promoted major in 1702. His death made a great impression on Marlborough. ‘Poor Bringfield is killed,’ he told Godolphin, ‘and I am told he leaves his wife and mother in a bad condition.’ He said much the same to Sarah: ‘Poor Bringfield holding my stirrup for me, and helping me on horseback, was killed. I am told that he leaves his wife and mother in a poor condition.’ Sarah visited Mrs Bringfield on 17 May 1706 OS and promised her, on the queen’s behalf, a pension for life.115 The incident featured as the ten of diamonds on a set of contemporary playing cards, with Marlborough firmly in the saddle and Bringfield’s corpse standing upright with blood jetting from its headless trunk.
Marlborough had also been very lucky to escape from the earlier mêlée. Conspicuous in his red coat and garter star he had led blue-and-grey-coated Dutch squadrons against the Maison du Roi. Lieutenant Colonel Cranstoun of the Cameronians, not generally one of Marlborough’s admirers, wrote that:
Ten of the Dutch squadrons were repulsed, renversed, and put into great disorder. The Duke, seeing this, and seeing that things went pretty well elsewhere, stuck by the weak part to make it up by his presence, and led up still new squadrons to the charge, till at last the victory was obtained. It was here when those squadrons were being reversed and in absolute déroute and the French mixed up with them in the pursuit that the Duke, flying with the crowd, in leaping a ditch fell from his horse and some rode over him. Major General Murray, who had his eye there and was so near he could distinguish the Duke in the flight, seeing him fall, marched up in all haste with two Swiss battalions to save him and stop the enemy who were hewing down all in their way. The Duke when he got to his feet again saw Major General Murray coming up and ran directly to get into his battalions. In the meantime Mr Molesworth quitted his horse and got the Duke mounted again, and the French were so hot in the pursuit that some of them before they could stop their horses ran in upon the Swiss bayonets and were killed, but the majority of them, seeing the two battalions, shore off to the right and retired.116
Death was no respecter of persons that day, and the young Prince Louis of Hesse-Cassel was cut down.
Just north of this swirl of cavalry, Lieutenant General Schultz, with some twelve Allied battalions, including Churchill’s and Mordaunt’s, as well as the Duke of Argyll’s Scots brigade in Dutch pay, attacked the village of Ramillies. The place was tenaciously defended, but the French were already beginning to give ground by the time Marlborough played his master-stroke. He knew that the re-entrant behind his right wing would enable him to move Orkney’s men south without the French seeing them. Indeed, he may very well have been surprised at the progress Orkney had made in attacking the supposedly impregnable French left flank, for it was not his intention for his dogged subordinate to take Autreglise, although Orkney himself had other ideas.
As I was going to take possession [of the village] I had ten aides de camp to tell me to come off, for the horse could not sustain me. We had a good deal of fire at this, both musketry and cannon, and indeed I think I never had more shot about my ears; and I confess it vexed me to retire. However we did it very well and in good order, and whenever the French pressed upon us, with the battalion of Guards and my own, I was able to make them stand and retire. Cadogan came and told me it was impossible I could be sustained by the horse if we went on then, and, since my Lord could not attack everywhere, he would make the grand attack in the centre and try to pierce there.117
Robert Parker says that they fell back
until our rear line had got on the back of the rising ground, out of sight of the enemy. But the front line halted on the summit of the hill, in full view of them … As soon as our rear line had retired out of sight of the enemy, they immediately faced to the left, and both horse and foot, with a good many squadrons, that slunk out of the front line, marched down to the plain, as fast as they could.118
This was not a popular move with men like Tom Kitcher, who could see no reason for it.
We had the order to give ground and make our way back to the river. ‘Pray, what’s this?’ said my Lord Orkney, so his servant told me after. He had no mind to give ground when we were giving no quarter, nor we hadn’t neither, being up to our necks in deadliness and noise. But so it was ordered and we went back and back across the river, and there we stayed awhile, with the cannon peppering us but not getting no success, our cover being good.119
Kitcher’s comment about cover suggests that even the element of Orkney’s wing that remained behind took some advantage of the reverse slope on the western edge of the re-entrant, where colour parties and mounted officers on the crest continued to fix Villeroi’s attention. Although it is almost two miles from Orkney’s original position to Ramillies, his six battalions arrived there, as John Marshall Deane put it, in ‘time enough to beat the enemy quite out of the village & at the same time charged the rest of their foot that was posted behind the Gheet. And my Lord Duke ordered the English horse to sustain them.’120
It was now approaching six in the evening, and the French cavalry, weakened by the casualties of the past two hours’ fighting, were closing up to the north, leaving a growing gap between their right wing and the valley of the Mehaigne. This was first exploited by the Dutch foot guards who had taken Taviers and Franquenée earlier in the day, and who now
pressed home upon the enemy, and made them shrink and give back. And this very instant the Duke of Württemberg came up with the Danish horse and pressing an opening between the village of Franquenay and their main body, fell upon the right flank of their horse, and with such courage and resolution, that he drove them in upon their centre. This put them into great disorder; and our troops taking this advantage, pressed so close upon them, that they could never recover their order.121
Württemberg had in fact taken his squadrons, who had only been in action once that day, right round the southern flank of the French army, brushing aside some of the dragoons who had failed to retake Taviers earlier on, and formed them up in close order near the Tomb of Ottomont. Marlborough and Overkirk both cantered across to join him, and accompanied what was to prove the day’s decisive charge. Although Villeroi and the Elector could now see well enough what was coming, they could not deploy their reserve in time to meet it, and in any case the baggage and some unstruck tents, left near Offus when the French deployed that morning, restricted room for manoeuvre.
The Danish charge swept forward at about 6.30, supported from the east by another valiant effort by the sorely tried Dutch horse, now reinforced by fresher cavalry from the right flank. Their combined impact was too much for the bulk of Villeroi’s army. ‘They indeed behaved themselves shamefully,’ complained Peter Drake, probably thinking more of his English-speaking audience than his French-speaking comrades,
and fled with great precipitation, like frightened sheep … I saw one of their best, called the King’s Regiment, composed of four battalions, lay down their arms like poltroons and surrender themselves prisoners of war. In short they all left the field with infinite disorder, except Lord Clare’s which was engaged with a Scotch regiment in Dutch service, between whom there was a great slaughter.
His own regiment, part of Villeroi’s reserve, had so far not been engaged, but when it was ordered to turn about and retire,
we had not got fifty yards in our retreat, when, by some means I know not, the usual (sauve qui peut) fly that can went through the great part, if not the whole army, and put all in confusion. There might be seen whole brigades running in disorder, the enemy pursuing almost close at our heels, and with regularity.122
Not all Villeroi’s army disintegrated. Count Maffei, whom we last met on the Schellenberg, did his best to keep two steady German battalions together in the road leading out from Ramillies to the plateau of Mont St André, recognising that the village was now the hinge between the static French left wing and the new position of the right, bent back by the impact of the Danish attack. His men were holding up well when he rode over to order some nearby cavalry to join him, but he had failed to spot that they were wearing green sprigs rather than white cockades in their hats. He was duly captured by the Dutch, and his men joined the general flight. Maffei was lucky that his captors were not Danish, for the Danes, infuriated by hearing that their countrymen had been butchered by the French after the Allied defeat at Calcinato in Italy, were not inclined to give quarter. Some of Villeroi’s men, indeed, were in no mood to ask for it. Charles O’Brien, Viscount Clare, was mortally wounded at the head of his Wild Geese in Ramillies, and the Régiment de Picardie, proudly the oldest in the French line, fought to a finish in the streets and gardens of the village.123
Orkney took his men back across the Geete without Marlborough’s orders, for he could read the battle well enough. They were charged by the Bavarian Electoral Guards and the Walloon Horse Grenadiers, but checked them with measured volleys before British cavalry swept the enemy horse from the field. Ross’s Irish Dragoons and Lord Stair’s Scots Dragoons had been on the extreme right of the Allied right wing, and they charged the Régiment du Roi as it fell back, catching its men just as they were recovering their packs, which they had dropped at the rear of their position earlier in the day. ‘Lord John Hay’s dragoons and others got in upon the Regiment de Roi,’ wrote Orkney with satisfaction, ‘which they beat entirely.’
The pursuit was hampered by exhaustion and the onset of darkness, with the added difficulty, for Allied officers unfamiliar with the area, of picking their way over a strange landscape in the dark, through the debris of a broken army. Marlborough was forced to stop for the night near Meldert, over twelve miles beyond the battlefield, having been nineteen hours in the saddle, and then only when his guide admitted that they were lost. Although, as he reported to Sarah the following morning, ‘My head aches to that degree that it is very uneasy to me to write,’ he was still courtier enough to invite Goslinga to share his cloak, spread out on the ground.
Most first reports underestimated the damage done to Villeroi’s army: Orkney, indeed, warned his correspondent that it was not like Blenheim. ‘I own it vexed me to see a great body of ’em going off,’ he lamented, ‘and not many horse with them; but, for my heart, I could not get up our foot in time; and they dispersed and got into strong ground where it was impossible to follow them.’124 In fact perhaps as many as 18,000 of Villeroi’s men were killed in the battle or captured after it, with 120 colours and standards and fifty-four cannon. Not only were there many desertions in the weeks that followed, but the States-General of Brabant immediately acknowledged the Hapsburg Charles III as king of Spain, which persuaded many Walloon soldiers to change their allegiance. Marlborough had lost 3,600 officers and men killed and wounded, making the balance of casualties even more favourable to the Allies than Blenheim had been.
Amongst the casualties of Ramillies was Mrs Davies, who had sustained a fractured skull near Autreglise.
Though I suffered great torture by this wound, yet the discovery it caused of my sex, in the fixing of my dressing, by which the surgeons saw my breasts, and by the largeness of my nipples, concluded that I had given suck, was a greater grief to me … my Lord [Colonel] John Hay called … for my comrade, who had long been my bedfellow, and examined him closely. The fellow protested, as it was the truth, that he never knew I was a woman, or even suspected it … My lord seemed very well entertained with my history, and ordered that I should want for nothing, and that my pay should continue while under care.125
Ramillies signalled the wholesale collapse of French fortunes across the whole of Brabant, for Villeroi had bled his garrisons white to raise such a large field army, and many fortress governors felt unable to offer more than a token resistance. As G.M. Trevelyan was to put it, ‘The next fortnight witnesses the revolution that secured the sovereignty of Belgium to the House of Austria for three generations.’ Charles Churchill entered Brussels unopposed on 28 May, and welcomed his brother into the city the following day. Villars abandoned the Dyle at once, destroying a mountain of stores at Louvain as he did so, and then scrabbled to clutch the line of the Scheldt, but Marlborough was too quick for him and lunged towards Oudenarde and Gavre, threatening his communications with France and forcing him to fall back yet again.
The great cities of Brabant – Louvain, Ghent and Bruges – all opened their gates. Fortresses like Antwerp, Ath, Dendemonde and Ostend, which might normally have delayed Marlborough for months, were swallowed in weeks. John Marshall Deane shared the air of general disbelief. At Antwerp the city fathers formally presented Marlborough with the ‘the keys of the town and withall telling him that they had never been delivered to any person since the great Duke of Parma and it was then after a siege of six months’. The siege of Ostend was pressed with such vigour ‘that the town surrendered in 3 days time and some odd hours after our batteries began to play upon them; which seems almost incredible if we look back into former relations concerning the siege of the same town having held out and continued many months before it was reduced by a greater army than ours’.126
Marlborough was genuinely delighted. On 27 May he complained to Sarah that ‘I can’t get rid of my headache,’ but nonetheless declared that ‘we have done in four days, what we should have thought ourselves happy, if we could have been sure of it, in four years’. He foresaw that ‘the consequence of this battle is likely to be of greater consequence than that of Blenheim, for I have now the whole summer before me’.127 At the end of the month he told her: ‘So many towns have submitted since the battle, that it really looks more like a dream than truth.’ He thought they were likely to achieve more in a single campaign than in the whole of the previous war, ‘which is a great pleasure, since it is the likeliest way to bring me to my happiness of ending my days with my dearest soul’.128 In early October, looking forward to his imminent return to England, he told Godolphin that if only the Dutch could be persuaded ‘to go on with the war this next year, we have reason to expect an honourable, safe and lasting peace’.129
It is easy to see why he was confident, for the effects of Ramillies were seismic. Louis XIV was so concerned by the direct threat to northern France that his armies on the Rhine and in Italy were immediately hamstrung by being ordered to send men north to help shore up the Flanders frontier. Villeroi wrote a dignified letter to his king, rebutting many of the charges against him but observing glumly that good reasons for being defeated were still no excuse, and concluding that he only expected one more happy day in his life – that of his death. ‘I might impute it as a crime, with regard to Your Majesty,’ he wrote sadly, ‘to be as unlucky as I am.’130 He was replaced by Vendôme, snatched back from what might have been a winning position in Italy. His successors first botched their siege of Turin, and were roundly beaten by Eugène’s relieving army: Marsin was mortally wounded. Eventually the French concluded a convention with the emperor which allowed them to withdraw their garrisons from Lombardy and Milan: Italy was lost to Louis.
In the Peninsula things looked at first no less promising for the Allies. Galway advanced from Portugal to capture Madrid at the end of June 1706, Peterborough reduced Valencia, and Charles III himself was successful in Aragon. Marlborough, watching from afar with other things on his mind, was probably over-sanguine when he regretted that Charles had not formally entered Madrid as soon as it was taken, for ‘His timely appearance there would in all probability put a happy end to the war on that side.’131 The Allies failed to convert the numerous Iberian successes of 1706 into a wholesale victory which would have secured Spain for Charles III. Matters were not helped by bitter quarrels, for which Peterborough was most culpable, and as winter came on the Allies found themselves, in a manner which foreshadowed French misfortunes in Spain a century later, trying to extract food and fodder from an increasingly hostile population. Although Galway was to take overall command after Peterborough’s departure, by the year’s close the balance of power in the Peninsula now favoured his opponent, Marlborough’s nephew the Duke of Berwick.
With hindsight we can now see that if 1706 was the year that secured Brabant for the Allies, it was also the year that the war in Spain slid quietly from their grasp. Nor was there much comfort from the amphibious ‘descent’ on the French coast in which Marlborough invested so much confidence. After Ramillies he was busy arranging for the dispatch of British troops, and in June he successfully negotiated with the Dutch for ‘three battalions and ten troops of dragoons mounted’. However, in August a first attempt was driven back into Torbay by severe storms, and a second attempt, after as severe a battering, refitted in Lisbon, whence its commander, Lord Rivers, beset by contradictory instructions, was eventually persuaded to join Galway in Seville. Thus a descent which was meant to complicate French decision-making and probably compel the withdrawal of troops from Flanders became the simple reinforcement of what was beginning to look like Allied failure.
The arrival of Lord Rivers complicated the question of command in the Peninsula, an issue which went to the heart of Marlborough’s responsibilities as captain general. He warned Godolphin that it was not healthy to have Galway, Peterborough and Rivers all enjoying the status of independent commanders in the same theatre of war. Galway, he feared, was now definitely past his best, and ‘continues so very pressing to retire and come home, that I really think it would be too great a barbarity to refuse him’. However, Galway had recommended Peterborough as his successor, a suggestion that Marlborough found amazing.132 The matter was eventually resolved by persuading Galway to soldier on. In April 1707 Godolphin reported him ‘in good heart at the letters he had received from his friends in England, and resolved to stay in the chief command’.133
As the campaigning year wound to its breathless close, Marlborough looked forward to returning home. Godolphin told him that the work at Woodstock was coming along well.
The garden is already very fine and in perfect shape, the turf all laid, and the first coat of the gravel, the greens high and thriving, and all the hedges pretty well grown.
The building is so advanced, as that one may see perfectly how it will be when it is done. The side where you intend to live is the most forward part. My Lady Marlborough is most prying into it, and has really not only found a great many errors, but very well mended such of them, as could not stay for your decision. I am apt to think she has made Mr Vanbrugh a little annoyed.134
However, it soon transpired that Godolphin had been at Woodstock with Sarah because the duchess had withdrawn there in a huff after a row with Anne over the queen’s determination to govern with an all-party ministry and Sarah’s equally strong convictions that Tories were a menace to the public safety and that her son-in-law Sunderland should be appointed to a high office of state. With an unusual flash of diplomacy Sarah begged leave ‘to revive the names of Mrs Morley and your faithful Freeman’, but the old spells no longer wove their charm.
Marlborough was hauled unwillingly into the dispute, like some great gun required to breach a fortress wall, peppered by a volley of sharp letters from Sarah (‘I find when you writ most of them you had very much the spleen …’) warning him that he was not taking a sufficiently firm line with the queen. While Marlborough genuinely believed that the queen’s government could not go on without Godolphin, he was less worried than his great ally about the presence in it of Tories like Harley, and was drawn into the battle with a heavy heart. At the end of this remarkable campaign he found himself mired deep in politics and accused, once more, of weakness by his wife. He wrote glumly that he would never live to see Blenheim Palace finished,
for I had flattered myself that if the war should happily have ended this next year, that I might the next after have lived in it, for I am resolved on being neither minister nor courtier, not doubting the Queen will allow of it; but these are idle dreams, for while the war lasts I must serve and will do it with all my heart; and if I am at last rewarded with your love and esteem, I shall end my days happily … 135
These were poignant words from a commander at the very height of his powers.