France at Bay
‘I think everything goes very wrong.’1
The Duc de Vendôme was a tough and capable opponent, descended from an illegitimate son of Henry IV of France. With such a lineage his rather boorish manners were, in consequence, tolerated at the fastidious court of Versailles. He was, however, a difficult man to be with on campaign, disinclined to listen to the opinions and advice of others, and obstinate to the point of being perverse once his mind was made up. This was unfortunate, as most of the Marshals of France found him impossible to work with, and only Marshal Matignon was prepared to try and do so. Things were complicated further by the presence with the army in the Low Countries of the Duc de Bourgogne, Louis XIV’s eldest grandson and eventual heir to the throne. As in the early years of the war, the king was anxious that the young man should gain experience in the field, and to become better known to his soldiers. All very admirable, but Bourgogne had little taste for military life and no more skill as a field commander, but he did have strong opinions. Not only that, the presence of a royal prince with the army naturally attracted to him the deference and attention that his rank deserved, while he and Vendôme heartily disliked each other and often had very differing ideas on how to proceed. This fracture in the command structure of the army was perilous, and the French king was aware of this and wrote rather prophetically to his grandson with a word of advice: ‘It is not possible to succeed if you do not in the future act in concert with the Duke of Vendôme.’2
The catastrophe that would overtake Vendôme and his soldiers, and put large areas of northern France into the hands of the allies, had yet to happen. The outlook for the Grand Alliance, in the meantime, was not that promising. The failure at Toulon in 1707 had denied the allies of the chance to secure the fine port for their own use, or to deny its use permanently to their opponents. A proposal was made that Prince Eugene should go to Catalonia to take charge of the operations there, and even talk of a grand strategic plan with the Duke of Marlborough advancing with an army from Portugal to meet that led by Eugene marching westwards from Catalonia. None of this was realistic: the Dutch would not countenance the captain-general being so far away, and Eugene was reluctant to go to the peninsula anyway, and the emperor declared that he could not be spared at that time as President of the Imperial War Council, so the whole fantastic idea was not taken forward. Instead, Field-Marshal Count Guido von Starhemberg, an energetic Austrian officer, capable and dangerous in the field, was sent as commander-in-chief, arriving in Barcelona at the end of April 1708. The archduke’s favourite general, Count Noyelles, had recently died, so there was no unhelpful rivalry or resentment at this appointment. In May the Earl of Galway, a victim now of ill-health and numerous wounds, stood down and returned to Portugal, where his influence, although less than it had been, was generally beneficial. The new king, John V, married the eldest sister of Archduke Charles, Maria Anna, who was brought to Lisbon on board a British warship sailing from southern England. It was expected that this happy event would help cement the two widely separated parts of the alliance in the peninsula more firmly together, but despite such hopes, there was little appetite in Portugal for active campaigning throughout much of 1708, the bitter lessons of the previous year with the humiliation of defeat at Almanza, having their inevitable effect.
In May, Earl Stanhope, after visiting London and consulting Marlborough in Flanders, was appointed in Galway’s place to command the British troops in Catalonia. Von Starhemberg had been accompanied by 3,300 imperial, Palatine and Italian troops to boost the allied effort, fewer than hoped for, but in July Sir John Leake carried another very welcome 3,000 cavalry and infantry across from Italy. Paying these troops regularly was more difficult than bringing them to Catalonia, however, and their discipline was not always the best as a result. When the allied garrison in Tortosa was attacked, the Palatines did not distinguish themselves in its defence, and the garrison had to submit without putting up a prolonged or determined resistance. With Valencia lost the previous year, supplies were still hard to come by, but the British and Dutch naval squadrons dominated the seas, raiding the coastline at will, and there was flexibility in how the allies operated between the eastern seaboard of Spain, Gibraltar, the Balearic islands and Italy. While the ships came to and fro without much opposition, Archduke Charles and his army would not starve, but whether a fresh offensive beyond the bounds of Catalonia could be mounted, with any real prospect of success, was far from clear.
It was not yet known that Louis XIV would not reinstate his Mediterranean fleet as a viable fighting force – time and money would not be available to permit this, but that was in the future and not to be foreseen. The ability to be able to winter their fleet in the Mediterranean had long been an aspiration of the Maritime Powers, and the Duke of Marlborough had written to Stanhope: ‘I am so entirely convinced that nothing can be done effectually without the Fleet, that I conjure you if possible to take Port Mahon.’3 This entailed gaining the possession of the island of Minorca, and Archduke Charles added his weight to the instructions given to Leake and Stanhope to seize the place ‘that the fleet may be more secure in those seas and better security of my person; and likewise to guard the transports for the subsistence of my army.’4 As a preliminary move, Leake’s squadron arrived off Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, on 11 August and summoned the governor of the island, the Marquis de Jamaica, to submit, but he declined to do so until forced. Allied troops and armed seamen were landed the next day, after a short bombardment, and the governor duly submitted, his garrison troops being granted, rather spuriously given that they had made virtually no effort to defend the place, the honours of war.
In the meantime Stanhope, who was always full of energy and ambition, had assembled a force of 1,700 British, Catalan and Portuguese troops, together with a siege train of ten large guns in addition to mortars, to go and take the island of Minorca. The expedition embarked at Barcelona in commendable secrecy, and despite a reluctance amongst some naval officers to participate in the enterprise at all, set sail on 3 September escorted by HMS Milford and HMS York, arriving off the coast of Majorca three days’ later. Having conferred with the governor of the island, and gathering 300 more men from the garrison there, Stanhope persuaded Leake to detach 600 marines from service aboard ship to join in the operations against Minorca. The admiral, however, having gained Sardinia, felt that he had done all that was required of him, and was anxious to return to England with part of his fleet, and took no further part in the expedition.
The French and Spanish troops on Minorca were concentrated at Port Mahon, the valuable deep-water anchorage on the eastern side of the island. Well sited and with ample provisions, the 1,000-strong garrison were commanded by the Marquis de la Jonquière, a very able veteran soldier who could be relied on to do his best to hold on to the port.5 On the evening of 14 September 1708, Stanhope began landing his troops, and over the next three days brought ashore his whole force, and their heavy guns, without interference. Attempts to subvert the loyalty of the Spanish troops in the defences failed, but despite being under fire from the outer wall of the defences, by 28 September Stanhope had his siege batteries in place opposite Fort St Phillipe covering the entrance to the deep harbour. After only a few hours’ bombardment, the wall of the fort was seen to be collapsing, with breaches beginning to appear. A call to the defenders to submit was refused, so Stanhope ordered a general assault, with himself gallantly leading the troops from the front. ‘The General led the men on to a tower under the castle, being all this time on horseback, exposed to the enemies’ cannon, small shots and bombs, which they gave us as fast as they possibly could.’6
The attack was brought to a halt, and Stanhope renewed his offer of good terms to the defenders if they would surrender without further bloodshed. The Spanish troops had their families with them suffering under the bombardment – distracted by the ‘loud lamentations and cries of near 1,000 women and children’7 – so the soldiers wanted to capitulate immediately, and on 30 September, the governor submitted. Stanhope had gained control of the harbour of Port Mahon, and immediately sent troops to occupy the fort covering the anchorage at Fornells in the north of the island. Those Spanish troops who did not wish to switch their support to Archduke Charles were sent to Murcia under parole, and the French soldiers shipped back to Toulon. Success was tinged with sadness for Stanhope, as his younger brother Philip, a Royal Navy officer, had been killed in the assault. Just as with Gibraltar, four years earlier, Minorca had been secured by an allied force acting in the name of Archduke Charles – Great Britain, however, with eyes on the advancement of trade from the Levant, had no intention of lightly relinquishing control of the island. ‘England ought never to part with this island,’ Stanhope wrote, ‘which will give the law to the Mediterranean both in time of war and peace.’8 At the end of the year, formal instructions arrived from London confirming Stanhope’s chief engineer, Colonel Petit, as the governor of Port Mahon with the firm understanding that only British troops were to garrison the fortress of St Philippe and adjacent defences.
Stanhope was under instructions to persuade the archduke to formally confirm British possession of Minorca ‘as some sort of security for all our expenses in the peninsula’.9 Charles, despite having taken an oath on being proclaimed as king not to divide the empire, had little choice but to do so. Once again the Dutch were resentful of British encroachment and gains in which they had no part, but their own demands for a much enlarged Barrier had earned them no friends, and Stanhope was dismissive of their complaints at British possession of Minorca. He wrote: ‘I hope the Dutch will always be our friends but if they should ever be otherwise, they will never be able to carry on their trade with the Levant without our leave.’10 Possession was nine points of the law, and as far as Minorca was concerned that, so it seemed, was that.
The French army under Vendôme still had to be engaged and defeated in the Low Countries. The Duke of Marlborough had prepared a plan with Prince Eugene for their armies to combine in Flanders, and to engage and defeat Vendôme before he in turn could be reinforced from elsewhere. George, Elector of Hanover, would remain in command on the Rhine to try and fix those French troops there and prevent their being sent north. Marlborough wrote: ‘The Elector has consented to the project for three armies.’11 Internal tensions were evident, for Marlborough and Eugene did not feel able to share the whole plan with George, the Duke adding in his letter ‘as for the joining of the two armies [his and those of Eugene] we thought it best not to acquaint the Elector with it’. Hanoverian support for the Grand Alliance was firm, and so too were the large numbers of excellent troops hired out to the allied cause, and this was a clear snub, implying that the elector could not be entrusted with the details, and something that would neither be forgotten or forgiven.
The allied plan was sound, but had little subtlety, and Vendôme and Marshal Berwick, who now commanded the French troops in the Moselle valley, were alert to any move by Eugene to take his army northwards to combine with Marlborough. In any case, the preparations that Eugene made for the campaign were impeded by internal tensions in the empire, and his march northwards was delayed as a result. The opposing armies in Flanders could do little more in the meantime but to manoeuvre and try and catch each other off guard. In this endeavour Vendôme proved to be the more successful, and after threatening Brussels and Louvain, in July he seized the strategically important towns of Ghent and Bruges with the enthusiastic assistance of many of the citizenry. In this way he neatly cut Marlborough’s lines of supply and communication with England and Holland, and interrupted his use of the valuable waterways of the region. It seemed that all the remarkable gains for the Grand Alliance of the glorious but distant summer of 1706, were now in jeopardy. An attempt was also intended to be made to seize Oudenarde, but the allied governor, Denis-François de Chanclos, firmly put the magistrates in no doubt that he would burn the place to the ground before allowing that to happen.
Although clearly caught off guard, Marlborough recovered his composure with the assistance of Prince Eugene who had ridden ahead of his own troops on the long march from the Moselle. He had paid a fleeting visit to his aged mother, a resident of Brussels – a meeting remembered as ‘after a separation of twenty-five years, very tender, but very short’.12 With the encouragement of Eugene, Marlborough manoeuvrd the French away from the line of the river Dender at Lessines, and went on overtake them as they crossed the Scheldt just below Oudenarde on 11 July. In a rapidly escalating infantry battle they inflicted a serious defeat on Vendôme and the Duc de Bourgogne there. ‘The spectacle was magnificent, it was one sheet of fire.’13 The divided nature of the command of the French forces was fatal to any chance of success that day, as was Vendôme losing his composure as army commander and becoming involved in the hand-to-hand fighting. Eugene saw him in the smoke-filled water-meadows with his embattled and weary soldiers: ‘I found Vendôme on foot, with a pike in his hand, encouraging the troops.’14 Overkirk accomplished a great turning movement with his Dutch and Danish corps around the right flank of the French army, and only the onset of night prevented it becoming a complete victory for the allies. ‘If we had been so happy as to have but two more hours of daylight,’ Marlborough wrote, ‘I believe we should have made an end of this war.’15 After such a humiliating defeat, Vendôme could do little more than draw his battered army back behind the shelter of the Ghent-Bruges canal, where he could cover earlier conquests while his dispirited troops regained their poise. From there he could also continue to interdict the supply lines for the allied army leading from Ostend and southern Holland. ‘Do not lose courage,’ Louis XIV wrote to the Duc de Bourgogne, ‘we must re-assure our officers and troops … without the junction of Prince Eugene [with Marlborough] we would have had nothing to fear.’16
Marlborough was now faced with a clear dilemma. Eugene’s troops had arrived in Flanders after their march from the Moselle, but Marshal Berwick had also now come up, and the reinforcements he brought largely made good the French losses suffered at Oudenarde. What could not be as easily put right was the battered morale of the French soldiers after the humiliation of defeat. All the same, there was no simple way to manoeuvre Vendôme out from behind the line of the Ghent-Bruges canal, and any attempt to force a way across the defences would be very expensive in casualties. The plan that the duke put to his generals instead was ambitious in scope and daring, and involved an advance deep into northern France, to oblige Vendôme to follow and give battle in the open in order to save Paris and Versailles. Marlborough’s generals were unconvinced that so ambitious a project would succeed, dependent as the army would be on being re-supplied by ships lying off the coast of Normandy. Marlborough could not insist in the face of their lack of enthusiasm, and accordingly the allied campaign was directed instead at the great French fortress of Lille, the most cherished conquest of Louis XIV’s earlier years.
Lille had been massively fortified under the supervision of Vauban, and the siege in consequence was to be an enormous undertaking. The preparations for such a complex and demanding operation went ahead at a good pace, and a great convoy laden with all the stores and munitions necessary for a major siege left Brussels on 22 July 1708 and safely negotiated the seventy miles of road to reach the allied camp at Menin in just three days, remaining free from French interference. Louis XIV was full of concern for the security of his frontier fortresses and had sent instructions to Marshal Berwick, now operating out of Mons, that he was not to venture too far northwards, while Vendôme was to move out from behind the canal and co-operate with him. The veteran Marshal Boufflers, solid and dependable, was sent by the King to take command of the garrison in Lille, and he arrived in the city in late July. The allied siege train was ready to come from Brussels, and 3,000 wagons and 154 heavy guns and mortars were brought forward on 6 August, a 15-mile long target for the French commanders to intercept and savage. They failed to do so, their inertia a plain indicator of their lowered morale after their recent defeat, and six days later the valuable convoy of guns and munitions came safely through to Menin. The French had twice missed the chance of attacking an inviting target of almost unimaginable value to the allied operations against Lille, and on this a French officer wrote ruefully of the lost opportunity: ‘Posterity will hardly believe this fact, though it is an indisputable truth. Never was a daring enterprise so conducted with more skill or greater circumspection.’17
While this huge endeavour was gradually taking firm shape, Archduke Charles was elated at the news of the success at Oudenarde, and he wrote from Barcelona to Marlborough and repeated the offer that had been made in the heady days after Ramillies, that the duke should be appointed to be the governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands. ‘You will find me always willing to renew the patent for the government of my Low Countries, which I sent you two years ago, and to extend it for your life.’ As before, Marlborough was tempted, the stipend was generous, but aware that the Dutch would take offence at his acceptance of such an appointment in what they regarded as their own sphere of influence, he politely declined, writing to Sidney Godolphin: ‘This must be known to nobody but the Queen, for should it be known before the peace, it would cause great inconveniences in Holland.’18
Allied cavalry were now raiding the border region of northern France, and even the suburbs of Arras were harried, causing Louis XIV to protest at ‘the harshness with which the enemy execute their demands for contributions’.19 Marlborough and Eugene also seized as many horses and draft animals as they could, to assist in the dragging forward of the huge quantities of warlike materiel necessary to further the siege of Lille. In any case, such comments by the king sat badly coming as they did from a monarch whose generals had for decades happily lived off the land of his neighbours whenever it suited them, and who had adopted without hesitation a policy of ‘eating up a country’ to prevent anyone, civil or military, from subsisting there, but it now was France that suffered and that was the real difference.
An outer-work at the Marquette Abbey, on the northern side of the French defences of Lille, was stormed by British and Dutch troops on 11 August, but the scale of the task in hand had plainly been underestimated by both Marlborough and Eugene. The siege operations proceeded more slowly than anticipated, while the French field army, reinforced by troops drawn from garrisons elsewhere, attempted without much success to hamper the allied progress. Marlborough commanded the covering army, while the prince oversaw the actual siege operations in the trenches and gun batteries. As the French manoeuvred against him from the southwards in early September, the duke took up a strong defensive position between the river Marque at Peronne and the Deule (Dyle) at Noyelles. Once established there Marlborough defied the French commanders to attack him in position, and drew some of Eugene’s troops out from the entrenchments before Lille to bolster his covering army. Daunted by the strength of the allied defences, the French hesitated and even referred the question of whether to make an attack back to Versailles. At length the decision was that Marlborough was too well entrenched to risk an assault, with Berwick writing to the Minister for War that ‘it would not be possible to attack an enemy at least as strong as we, well posted, entrenched, whose flanks are covered and who cannot be dislodged’.20 The truth of this simple fact was not lost on the king, although he still urged his grandson that Lille be saved, so long as no unnecessary risks were run. ‘Nothing could be more advantageous to the good of the state. I pray to God that He will assist you and conserve you in what you are doing.’21
A rather premature allied attack on Lille was made on the night of 7 September to try and storm the gates of St Andrew and St Magdalene, but this was bloodily repulsed by the French defenders. A sharp counter-attack was made the following morning which caused some confusion in the besiegers’ trenches, but a French attempt to intercept the latest supply convoy coming forward from Brussels was foiled by cavalry under command of the Earl of Albemarle, and the convoy came safely into the allied camp on 11 September. This was fortunate, for the Duc de Vendôme, having failed to engage Marlborough’s covering army, or delay the admittedly rather slow progress of the siege of Lille, now turned his full attention to cutting off the allied army from its bases around Brussels, Ostend and in southern Holland. In the meantime a second assault on the Lille defences was thrown back with heavy loss, including Prince Eugene who was wounded in the attempt. Marlborough had to take a closer hand in the siege operations while he recovered, and managed in so doing to inject a greater sense of urgency into the whole project. The duke wrote to Sidney Godolphin in London on 20 September:
It is impossible for me to express the uneasiness I suffer for the ill-conduct of our engineers, at the siege, where I think everything goes very wrong. It would be a cruel thing, if after all we have obliged the enemy to quit all thoughts of relieving the place, by force, which they have done, by re-passing the Scheldt, we should fail to take it, by the ignorance of our engineers, and the want of stores.22
The lines of supply and communication for the allied army, both to Brussels and to Ostend, were always vulnerable while the French held on to Ghent and Bruges, and a particularly vicious battle was fought at Wynendael late in September 1708 when Comte de la Motte, the French commander in Bruges, tried to intercept a convoy of wagons taking much-needed supplies to the besieging army before Lille. Marshal Boufflers had given up the town once a breach had been made in the defences by the allied batteries, and withdrew his surviving troops into the massive citadel on 25 October. Meanwhile, Vendôme seized the crossing places on the river Scheldt (except at allied-held Oudenarde), to cut Marlborough’s army off from Antwerp and southern Holland.
An attempt by the Elector of Bavaria to seize Brussels failed, and Marlborough was able to force Vendôme’s troops away from the Scheldt crossings, re-opening his lines of supply and communication, and maintained the tempo of the siege operations in the meantime. All efforts to interrupt the siege having failed, and plainly not likely to be renewed before spring, if at all, Boufflers sought permission from Louis XIV to give up the citadel, once a breach began to be opened in the walls. This was granted, and on 9 December the marshal capitulated on good terms. The loss of so important a fortress was greatly regretted, but the valiant defence that Boufflers and his garrison had made had pulled the allied campaign to a standstill for over four months, and Marlborough and Eugene had been unable to make the most of their initial success so daringly grasped at Oudenarde in July. Louis XIV was in no doubt about what had been achieved by the long defence of Lille, and he wrote to Boufflers:
I cannot sufficiently praise your vigour, and the pertinacity of the troops under your command. To the very end they have backed up your courage and zeal. I have given the senior officers special proof of my satisfaction with the manner in which they defended the town. You are to assure them, and the whole of the garrison, that I have every reason to be satisfied with them. You are to report to me as soon as you have made the necessary arrangements for the troops. I hope these will not detain you, and that I shall have the satisfaction of telling you myself that the latest proof you have given of your devotion to my service strengthens the sentiments of respect and friendship which I have for you.23
Meanwhile, Louis XIV had written to Philip V in Madrid with a sombre assessment of the results of the year’s arduous and arid campaigning together with an even more gloomy prediction, alluded to almost in passing:
I have always laboured to maintain you in the rank that it pleased God to place you. You see that up to now I have made the utmost efforts to keep you there and I have not asked whether the good of my kingdom demanded it. I have followed the suggestions of the tender love that I have always had for you, and you can be assured that it will lead me as long as the state of my affairs permits.24
At the close of the year, the weather had turned bitterly cold, and there was excessive taxation and economic chaos in France, with a failed harvest, food shortages in many districts, bread riots and discontent at burdensome taxation. For all the devotion and gallantry of commanders like Marshal Boufflers, justly commended as he was by the king, the continuing cost of the war was stupendous, and the Duc de St Simon wrote of the distress amongst the French at this time:
People never ceased to wonder what had become of all the money of the realm. Nobody could any longer pay, because nobody was paid; the country-people, overwhelmed with exactions and with valueless property, had become insolvent; trade no longer yielded anything – good faith and confidence were at an end … The realm was entirely exhausted; the troops even, were not paid, although no one could imagine what was done with the millions that came into the King’s coffers.25
There was an understandable desire in Versailles to deflect blame from the Duc de Bourgogne, the King’s grandson, for the calamities of the 1708 campaign in the Low Countries, and instead to lay this at the door of the Duc de Vendôme. In this the veteran soldier did not help himself, writing a partial and very misleading account of the activities of the French army that summer and autumn, and in so doing handed Louis XIV a firm reason to dismiss him from the royal service:
He learned that he was not to serve, and that he was to no longer receive a general’s pay. When M. de Vendôme returned from Flanders, he had a short interview with the King in which he made many bitter complaints against Puységur, one of his lieutenant-generals, whose sole offence was that he was much attached to M. De Bourgogne. Puységur was a great favourite of the King … He had, in his turn, come back from Flanders, and had a private audience with the King. At the name of Vendôme, Puységur lost all patience. He described to the King all his faults, the impertinences, the obstinacy, the insolence of M. De Vendôme, with precision and clearness.26
However, Vendôme, for all his boorishness and faults, was too good a general to be left out of things for long, and he was sent the following year to take a firm grip on the faltering campaign in Spain. He arrived in the aftermath of a series of reverses for the French claimant and his supporters, and, as it proved, just in time.
France, and the French cause in the war, was in distress, and Madame de Maintenon, the morganatic wife of the French king, wrote from Versailles to the Princesse des Ursins in Madrid with a very caustic assessment of the events in Flanders:
You know that the end of our campaign has been pitiful, and that the enemies have the audacity to besiege Ghent because they hope that they will have as much success there as they had in the assault upon Lille. Marshal Boufflers’ defence has made us understand how bold this enterprise was, since he gave our armies four months to raise the siege and during those four months we were able to succeed only in small enterprises; a greater effort would have had the same success.27
The lady missed the key point completely, for Boufflers’ prolonged defence of Lille had, after the astonishing success gained at Oudenarde, dragged the allied campaign to a halt. The siege had only succeeded after immense effort and toil, and Lille had fulfilled the role for which it had been so stoutly fortified by Vauban. The fortress belt, constructed along the north and eastern frontiers of France over the previous thirty years, at enormous expense, was soon to prove its worth. The siege was just the opening act in a prolonged passage of arms that would over the next four years save France from invasion and disaster. In the meantime, Ghent and Bruges were indeed retaken by the allies in the early part of January 1709, and while severe winter weather gripped western Europe, moves to achieve a longed-for peace moved steadily forward.