We must if possible retain the Netherlands in the House of Austria, as the only secure Barrier to the [Dutch] United Provinces against the Power and ambition of France.
Henry Dundas
Though the enemy are so near us, we have no certain account … of their strength or situation … it is madness, in the present state of things, to think of advancing toward Paris.
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Crauford
I learnt more by seeing our own faults and the defects of our system.
Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Wellesley
The fate of the Low Countries, which included the Austrian Netherlands and the Dutch Netherlands or United Provinces, was crucial to British security.1 Although England and Holland had fought three wars against each other in the mid-seventeenth century, the Royal Navy’s triumph and the decline of Dutch national power transformed a natural foe into a natural friend. French invasions of the Low Countries in the late-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries were among the most important reasons provoking Britain to war against France. In July 1793, Secretary at War Henry Dundas succinctly explained this policy: ‘We must if possible retain the Netherlands in the House of Austria, as the only secure Barrier to the [Dutch] United Provinces against the Power and ambition of France.’2
A French army led by General Charles François Dumouriez overran the Austrian Netherlands in the fall of 1792 and invaded the Dutch Netherlands on February 16, 1793. Facing the 100,000 troops of Dumouriez and auxiliary French forces were two allied armies. Frederick, Prince of Orange and Dutch Stadtholder Wilhelm V’s son, commanded the Dutch army of around 30,000 troops. General Josiah von Coburg-Saalfield commanded an army of 54,000 Austrian, 11,400 Prussians, and 4,200 imperial troops with the mission to retake the Austrian Netherlands.3 Stadtholder Wilhelm sent a desperate plea for Britain to send a renowned general and troops to help bolster his nation’s defense.
Pitt and his ministers agreed on February 20, to dispatch 1,500 troops of the Royal Guard regiments as the first contingent of an expeditionary army. King George III pressured the Cabinet into accepting his son, Frederick Augustus, Duke of York, to lead the expedition.4 The choice of York was questionable even in an age of nepotism. He was then only 28 years old and had never experienced combat. Yet he was not a complete neophyte to the profession of arms. He had spent seven years as a liaison officer with the Prussian army, and spoke German and French. Most importantly, two much older and experienced men advised him, Adjutant General James Murray (later lord Pulteney) as his chief of staff, and General Ralph Abercromby as his field commander.
The immediate threat to the Dutch Netherlands disappeared by the time York and his expedition’s spearhead reached Antwerp in early April.5 After invading, Dumouriez’s troops routed the Dutch at Breda on February 24, but then suffered a series of defeats that drove them back into the Austrian Netherlands. An Austrian and Dutch army led by Coburg defeated Dumouriez at Aldenhoven on March 1, at Neerwinden on March 18, and at Pellenberg on March 23. Dumouriez withdrew nearly to Brussels. Meanwhile, on March 3, the French broke off their siege of Maastricht defended by Dutch and Austrian troops. The French distracted the allies from continuing their offensive by capturing the fortresses of Gertruidenberg and Klundert on March 4. The fighting then ended on this front for nearly two months as each side gathered more troops and supplies.
Whitehall intended for York’s army to operate separately but coordinated with the armies of Orange and Coburg. York’s mission was to capture Dunkirk, whose port could supply a British advance toward Paris, ideally in harness with other allied armies advancing into northeastern and eastern France. However, for now, the needs of Orange and Coburg for support against the French armies before them overrode the Dunkirk plan. Thus did York’s army become an auxiliary to the allied strategy, something Whitehall had wanted to avoid.
York and Coburg first met at Antwerp to discuss strategy on April 7, and Orange soon arrived to join the planning. They agreed to stay on the defensive until they massed enough supplies and reinforcements to resume the offensive. French General Auguste Dampierre launched his 30,000 troops against the advanced Austrian guard at Saint Armand on May 1. After routing them, he marched on to attack the 60,000-man allied army at Raimes on May 8. Despite being outgunned, the French initially repelled the Austrians and Dutch. Coburg and Orange rallied their men and counterattacked, supported by York’s Royal Guards. The allies drove the French from the field, inflicting 1,500 casualties at the cost of about 600 men. The allies then marched on to rout General Jean Lamarque’s 27,000 troops at Famars on May 23; the French lost 3,000 dead, wounded, and captured, and 17 cannons to allied losses of 1,100 troops. Finally, the allied army headed to Valenciennes which they besieged on May 25.
A two-month lull settled over Flanders as each side replenished its ranks and depots, and debated what to do next. Reinforcements swelled York’s token force into an army that numbered 40,500 troops, including 4,200 British infantry, 2,300 British cavalry, 13,000 Hanoverians, 8,000 Hessians, and 13,000 Dutch.6 In mid-summer the allies strengthened their grip on the Low Countries by capturing two key fortresses. The 4,300-man French garrison at Conde surrendered on July 12, after an Austrian siege that opened on April 8. At Valenciennes on July 27, York let French General Jean Louis Ferrand march away with his 9,000 surviving troops in return for pledging not to fight again for an entire year.
With these fortresses in their hands, the allies launched a three-pronged offensive, with York’s army advancing on the left. Against overwhelming odds, General Charles Kilmaine, the front’s latest French commander, hastily withdrew his 25,000 men toward France. The allies caught up and mauled his rear guard at Cesar Camp on August 7; York’s men played a crucial role as they marched around the French right flank and the enemy hurried away to avoid being cut off. Orange attacked General Jean Baptiste Jourdan’s 5,000 men at Lincelles on August 18, drove them out, and captured 10 cannons. Jourdan counter-attacked and retook Lincelles. Orange asked York for help. York dispatched General Gerard Lake with 1,100 troops who routed the French and seized Lincelles.
With the front apparently secure, York split off from the allies to march to Dunkirk. After detaching forces to garrison fortresses and guard supply trains, York’s hodge-podge army numbered 29,700 infantry and 5,400 cavalry when, on August 24, it invested Dunkirk whose 10,000-man garrison was commanded by General Joseph Souham. After encamping most of his men around Dunkirk, York dispatched columns of troops 10 miles or so south on roads along which the 42,000-man French relief force led by General Jean Houchard might approach. Fearing that Dunkirk would surrender before he brought up his entire army, Houchard ordered his advanced guard to attack any enemy forces in their way. An Austrian and Dutch force repelled an attack by 2,200 French at Rexpoede and Oost-Cappel on August 21. At Rosendael, 8,000 Austrian and British troops defeated 5,000 French on August 24. An Austrian garrison in Cysoing drove off a French assault on August 28. With a mixed army of Austrian, Hessian, and Dutch troops, General Jean Daniel Freytag blocked Houchard’s main army at Hondschoete, and his troops shattered a series of French assaults on September 6. Over the next two days, Houchard harassed the allied lines with swarms of skirmishers before finally ordering a grand attack on September 8 that routed the allies and inflicted 2,200 killed, wounded, and captured, while suffering 3,000 casualties.
The French victory at Hondschoete forced York hastily to abandon his siege of Dunkirk on September 8. York’s army had suffered 2,000 casualties during the two-week operation, and abandoned 32 heavy cannons in the rush to evade being crushed by Houchard. York halted his retreat at Ypres and Furnes.
Houchard shadowed York but refrained from attacking his well-prepared positions. Observing that Orange’s 13,000 Dutch infantry and 1,800 cavalry at nearby Menin were fewer and more vulnerable, Houchard attacked there on September 13. The French routed the Dutch, captured the town, inflicted 3,000 casualties, and took 40 cannons. This same day, Austrian General Charles Clerfait captured Quesnoy with its 5,000-man garrison, after opening a siege on August 28. With Quesnoy in enemy hands, Houchard’s supply and communications line was vulnerable so he withdrew to Lille in northern France. Houchard paid the ultimate price for his failure to defeat the allied forces before him. France’s Committee of Public Safety ordered him arrested and executed. His replacement was General Jean Baptiste Jourdan, who massed troops and supplies for an offensive.
The latest lull to descend on the see-saw Flanders front lasted a month. The French broke it when Jourdan threw his 60,000 troops at Coburg’s 30,000 Austrians at Wattignies on October 15 and 16; the Austrians withdrew, having inflicted 5,000 casualties on the French while suffering half their losses. Jourdan’s victory forced the allies to abandon their siege of Maubeuge. A severe allied defeat came on October 22, when a garrison of 8,000 Austrian, British, and Hanoverian troops at Menin surrendered to General Joseph Souham’s 10,000 troops.
General Ralph Abercromby redeemed a bit of national pride when his British and Austrian troops decimated a 5,000-man French force at Lannoy on October 28. Most of the enemy’s losses of 2,000 killed and 1,700 captured took place after Abercromby loosened his cavalry against the fleeing French. The allies captured a 3,000-man French garrison at Marchiennes on October 30. This ended the war for Flanders in 1793.
Neither side had scored a decisive victory. Indeed after half a year of marching, fighting, besieging, or preparing for the next round the front lines were little changed from the spring. War in the Low Countries favors defenders. The terrain is mostly flat or slightly rolling but is cut by canals, deep streams, and rivers, and checker-boarded with fortress cities and towns linked by roads. This forced generals to fight methodical chess-like campaigns of sieges of fortresses and assaults against field armies. Defeated forces simply withdrew into or behind the nearest friendly fortress. These challenges were compounded for York and his colleagues because they had to command a multinational army and coordinate their strategy with Austrian, Dutch, and Prussian generals who naturally favored their own respective national and army interests. Under such trying circumstances York deserves credit not just for avoiding a disaster but for bravely if unimaginatively leading his army.
Although 1794’s first skirmishes flared in Flanders in February, the armies did not stir from their cantonments until the grass thickened for their horses and draught animals in April. The opposing strategies were asymmetrical. The allies massed their forces for a huge assault against the central French army. The French thinned their center to reinforce their flanks for a huge double envelopment of the allies. Victory was most likely for the side that attacked first and blunted the enemy’s counter-strategy.
The allied offensive initially succeeded. York, Orange, and Austrian General Graf von Haddik jointly commanded 60,000 British, Hanoverian, Hessian, Dutch, and Austrian troops that defeated nearly as many French led by General Jean Pichegru at Catillon on April 27. The allies suffered 1,000 casualties but inflicted over 2,000 on the French, captured 24 cannons, and drove them back from the Sambre River. An even bigger allied victory came two days later, when a Dutch-Austrian force captured Landrecies with its 9,000-man garrison, at the cost of 1,000 casualties. The winning streak persisted at Villers en Cauchie, when an Austrian force routed 7,000 French, inflicted nearly 2,000 casualties, and captured 5 cannons. York dispatched a division of British infantry and cavalry to join an Austrian attack against 40,000 French at Le Cateau on April 26; once again the French lost 7,000 killed, wounded, and missing, but even worse, over 40 cannons.
The French armies rallied, blunted the allied offensive, and launched their own that regained some ground lost over the previous weeks. Souham’s army, now 28,000-men strong, routed the allied advanced guard at Mouscron on April 26, while 4 days later General Jean Moreau’s 14,000 troops captured Menin with its 2,500 defenders. Then York’s men scattered a French division at Baisieux on May 10, killing, wounding, or capturing around 2,000 French, while suffering just 325 casualties. Pichegru and his 25,000 troops avenged themselves at Courtrai on May 11, by defeating Clerfait’s Austrian army and inflicting more than 2,000 casualties.
Over the next week, reinforcements swelled Pichegru’s army to 82,000 men. On May 18, Pichegru attacked the allied army at Tourcoing. Although York and Coburg together had 72,000 troops, they bickered over strategy and committed only 48,000 troops to battle. As a result, the French steamrolled the allied troops that actually got into the fight, killing or wounding 4,000 and capturing 1,500. York and Coburg withdrew their armies in different directions.
Pichegru led 45,000 troops after Coburg’s 28,000 Austrian, Hanoverian, and British troops, and caught up at Tournai on May 22. Coburg’s well-positioned men and cannons killed or wounded over 5,500 French, and captured 450, while losing about 3,000 men, before Pichegru withdrew. General Franz von Kaunitz-Rietberg’s 24,000 Austrian and Dutch troops defeated General Louis Charbonnier’s 30,000 troops as they tried to cross the Sambre River at Erqeulinnes on May 24, inflicting 3,000 casualties and taking 30 guns, while losing about 450 killed and wounded, and 250 captured. Orange took over Kaunitz’s command and led those men to victory over General Jacques Desjardins’s 27,000 troops at Charleroi on June 3; the French suffered 2,000 casualties to little more than 400 Dutch and Austrian killed and wounded.
The latest shift in the seesaw Flanders war occurred after Souham hurled his 20,000 men against Clerfait’s 20,000 men at Roulers on June 10, and took the field at the cost of 1,000 casualties to 600 for the allies. Three days later, Souham caught up to Clerfait at Hooglede and won again, this time losing 1,300 men while inflicting 900 casualties. Reinforcements prevented Souham’s costly victories from becoming truly Pyrrhic. Pichegru captured Ypres with its 7,000 Austrian and Dutch defenders on June 17, after a two and a half week siege.
Elsewhere, Desjardins led 27,000 troops across the Sambre River and attacked Orange’s 28,000 allied troops defending Charleroi on June 3. The allies suffered only 450 casualties while they repelled the French, who lost 2,000 dead and wounded. Jourdan joined forces with Desjardins, and took command of the 73,000 troops. He then side-stepped Charleroi and marched his men toward Orange’s rear. Orange withdrew his Dutch and Austrian army, swelled with reinforcements to 41,000 troops, to Fleurus. Jourdan caught up and attacked on June 16. The allies drove off the French, inflicting 3,000 casualties and capturing 8 guns, while suffering as many killed and wounded. On June 26, Jourdan attacked and lost again. Although Jourdan’s 75,000 infantry and 2,300 cavalry outgunned the 32,000 infantry and 14,000 cavalry defenders now jointly led by Coburg and Orange by nearly 2 to 1, the allies held the field, killing or wounded 5,000 French while losing 1,600 men.
The French tactical defeats at Fleurus actually turned out to be strategic French victories, although this was not apparent for months. The battles for Fleurus, atop two months of bloody back and forth fighting that preceded it, convinced Vienna that retaining the Austrian Netherlands was simply not worth the swelling mountain of death and debt. Thereafter each week or so, as Francis II and his advisors debated how to extract themselves honorably from the Flanders quagmire, they received word of the latest loss. After a 2-week siege, the 1,900-man Austrian garrison at Valenciennes surrendered on July 16. Two days later, a couple thousand troops including Austrians rendered the fortress of Nieupoort. Quesnoy’s 2,400 Austrian defenders gave up on August 14 after nearly a month-long siege. The 1,700 Dutch and Hanoverians defending Sluis capitulated on August 24, after a five-week siege. On August 29 1,500 Austrians marched into captivity at Conde. These losses culminated when General Barthélemy Schérer’s 35,000 troops crushed a wing of General Victor de Fay, Marquis Latour-Maubourg’s 18,000 troops at Sprimont on September 18; the French killed or wounded 1,500 Austrians and captured 1,000 men, 36 cannons, and, worst of all, 100 ammunition wagons, at a cost of 1,000 casualties. Each time the French routed an allied army, they reaped a harvest of desperately needed provisions and munitions from captured supply trains. After one typical defeat, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Crauford, a liaison officer with the allies, witnessed ‘the road … as far as the eye could reach, covered with baggage – everything announced an army in deroute.’7
Crauford’s reports back to Whitehall were increasingly pessimistic about how the campaign was being fought and the ultimate results. In May 1794, he observed that ‘this campaign will probably not terminate the contest; but it will certainly show, nearly, how it is to be decided.’ The French invasion of:
Flanders has been a most unfortunate circumstance indeed … The allies find themselves arrested by it … it has already occasioned great and severe losses; it will probably be the cause of much effusion of blood; and even though the enemy be ultimately … repulsed, it will retard the great operations of the army for perhaps a month … Though the enemy are so near us, we have no certain account … of their strength or situation … it is madness, in the present state of things, to think of advancing toward Paris, until you are masters of the principal frontier places; but this once effected, every man in France will feel that Paris is at your mercy.
Crauford’s pessimism worsened with his experiences. In August 1794, he lamented that ‘we have seen so many unaccountable things of late, that I shall no longer be surprised at whatever may happen.’8
During this time, York and his men largely sat on the sidelines encamped around Nijmegen. After enjoying a summer-long hiatus, the British briefly got back into the front lines at Boxtel during a battle that raged on September 14 and 15. During the first day, Pichegru’s 12,000 troops pushed 1,115 Hanoverians from the town. The next day, Abercromby’s attack with four redcoat regiments failed to retake Boxtel. York withdrew his army to Nijmegen.
French armies mopped up allied fortresses through the rest of 1794 and into 1795, capturing 1,800 Dutch and Hessians at Hertogenbosch on October 10; 1,600 Dutch and Germans at Venlo on October 27; 8,000 Dutch and Austrians at Maastricht on November 4; 660 Dutch at Zevenbergen on December 27; 5,000 Dutch and Hessian troops at Bommel on December 28; 1,500 Dutch at Grave on December 29; 1,400 Dutch at Heusden on January 14; and 950 Dutch troops at Geertruidenberg on January 19, 1795. The war’s most bizarre battle occurred on January 20, 1795, when French cavalry clattered across the ice-bound Zuyder Zee and captured the Dutch fleet.
Where were the British during this time? York was back in England after Whitehall replaced that lackluster general on November 27 with William, Earl of Harcourt in October. Souham nearly bagged most of the British expeditionary army at Nijmegen on November 7, after a week’s siege, but almost all managed to escape the fate of 1,200 Dutch and several score redcoats who surrendered. In a two-day battle that ended on December 30, General David Dundas redeemed some tarnished honor when his 9,000 British and Hessian troops trounced General Herman Wilhelm Daendels’s 4,000 troops at Geldermalsen, killing, wounding, or capturing 600 French, while suffering only 60 casualties.
This year-end victory did little to assuage Whitehall’s worsening dismay over the campaign. Pitt and his ministers grappled with a cruel dilemma. In two years on the continent the British expedition had suffered 20,000 casualties. Should they commit even more troops, supplies, and money to the campaign in hopes of turning it around, or should they cut their worsening losses and get out as swiftly as possible? The issue was decided after William V, Prince of Orange, and his entourage arrived in London for what would be a two-decade exile. Whitehall authorized Harcourt to retreat with his army’s remnants to Bremen. There they wintered until April 1795, then squeezed aboard a flotilla and sailed to Britain.
Many reasons explain the disastrous allied campaign in the Low Countries, but bad leadership was crucial. The generals, including York and Harcourt, were a mediocre lot at best and inept and timid at worst. They blundered as administrators, logisticians, engineers, tacticians, and strategists. Compounding this was the challenge of coalition warfare, whereby every decision became a tug-of-war among each general’s ego and national interests.
Lieutenant Colonel Crauford noted several critical reasons for the French victory. He scorned the allied commander, Austrian General Coburg, who ‘for more than a month past has been retreating and abandoning some of the best military positions that are anywhere to be found before an army less numerous than his own.’ The result was that Coburg had ‘fallen into such exceeding great contempt, both with the army and the public that it were better to replace him by a corporal than allow him to remain. It not that he is merely a cipher, but he is the tool of every fool and every rogue who may choose to direct him.’9 Then there was the contest for hearts and minds that Crauford feared the French were winning:
Though the people are exceedingly discontented, and even disposed to proceed to violence, yet if the French are allowed to remain there for some months undisturbed, the multitude will be debauched … The most stubborn Fleming and dullest German peasant has conception enough to be pleased with what is held out to him under the words ‘liberty and equality.’10
Finally, he partly attributed French victories to ‘the very alarming discipline … established in their armies. The most implicit obedience is exacted from both officers and men, and almost all officers are punished with death.’ He hoped that ‘this extraordinary degree of severity’ would become a double-edge sword, ‘as likely … to produce desertion and mutiny as order and settled discipline.’11 Yet, so far, the latter prevailed.
The Low Country campaign was the baptism of fire for Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, but then the 33rd regiment’s 25-year-old lieutenant colonel. He and his men arrived among 10,000 reinforcements in August 1794. Much later in his life when he was asked how he learned his profession, he recalled his first campaign: ‘I learnt more by seeing our own faults and the defects of our system … The infantry regiments, taken individually, were as good in proper hands in the campaign of Holland, than anywhere else…. but the system was wretched.’ With York anything but a hands-on general, Wellington ‘was left … to myself with my regiment … thirty miles from headquarters … a scene of jollification … I do not think that I was once visited by the Commander-in-Chief.’12 In sum Wellesley ‘learnt what one ought not to do, and that is always something.’13 Tragically, Wellesley was the only prominent leader who learned any substantive lessons from the Netherlands campaign. Whitehall and its generals would make similar tragic mistakes there and elsewhere in the coming years.
The allied defeat in the Low Countries was total. French armies conquered the Austrian Netherlands and helped transform the Dutch Netherlands. On January 21, 1795, Dutch liberals, backed by French commissars, turned the Dutch Netherlands into the Batavian Republic allied with France. On April 5, 1795, French and Prussian diplomats signed the Treaty of Basel, whereby Prussia withdrew into neutrality; France abandoned its conquests east of the Rhine; the Prussians recognized French conquests west of the Rhine; the French recognized Prussian expansion in northern Germany; Berlin recognized the revolutionary government in Paris and pledged to sever any ties with French royalists and exiled Bourbons. On July 22, 1795, French and Spanish diplomats signed the Treaty of Basel, whereby Spain withdrew into neutrality; France withdrew from Spanish territory, but retained Spain’s colony of Santo Domingo; Madrid recognized the government in Paris and pledged to sever any ties with the royalists and exiled Bourbons.
For the foreseeable future, Britain and Austria were the only two great powers leading a diminishing coalition of smaller states dedicated to crushing the French Revolution. At least Prussia stayed neutral. Spain allied with France with the Treaty of San Ildefonso signed on August 18, 1796. Despair rose as Britain’s allies succumbed, dropped out, or became enemies. Captain Horatio Nelson spoke for countless of his countryman when he wrote: ‘As all the Powers give up the contest, for what has England to fight? I wish most heartily that we had peace, or that all our troops were drawn from the Continent, and only a naval war carried on, the war where England alone can make a figure.’14
Nelson’s latter wish came true. The costly failure and withdrawal of Britain’s Low Countries expedition discredited the ‘continental strategy’ for thirteen years. Dundas’s ‘maritime strategy’ of devastating France’s naval and merchant ships at sea, bottling them up port, and conquering France’s West and East Indian colonies persisted until 1808, when General Wellesley led an army back to the continent. During the years when the maritime strategy prevailed, no one waged it more ruthlessly than Nelson himself.