Marlborough (37 page)

The wars of the period were divided into distinct annual campaigns, although on occasion a commander might mount a surprise attack in the winter if he thought the reason good enough. In the winter of 1703–04 Colonel de la Colonie, troubled by the raids of Imperial hussars (‘a sort bandit on horseback’), led three hundred of his Bavarian grenadiers and two squadrons of cavalry to the village where they were quartered and took them by surprise in the darkness. The hussars turned out in their shirts, but could offer no effective resistance to men who were not over-anxious to take prisoners. De la Colonie killed four hundred and captured another 140 without the loss of a man. This was, however, exceptional, and generals usually preferred to wait until there was hay for their horses to eat and the roads were firm enough to bear the weight of guns and wagons.

Some Allied contingents simply marched home when the season ended, and the remainder went into garrison in the United Provinces or captured territory of the Spanish Netherlands following plans developed by Cadogan and his staff. British officers tried to get home on leave, to see to family business, sit in Parliament or hunt the fox, for the fox-hunting and campaigning seasons were closely aligned, or simply to recruit. Each March the
London Gazette
gave its call to arms.

It is Her Majesty’s Royal Will and Pleasure, that the General Officers, Field Officers, and all others whatever, belonging to the Army in Flanders, do repair forthwith to their respective commands, and not omit the opportunity of the present Embarkation, which is appointed the 15th Instant, upon pain of Her Majesty’s highest Displeasure.
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Drafts were recruited during the winter to bring regiments up to strength. In November 1711 the
Gazette
told its readers that:

The Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain, having issued into the hands of the Paymaster-General of Her Majesty’s Forces a sufficient sum of money for recruiting the army in Flanders, notice is hereby given to the several agents of the regiments concerned that they do apply for their proportion of what they are to receive thereof, which they are to distribute to the officers of the respective regiments to enable them immediately to proceed upon their service. And the General Officers of the army having allotted what counties each Regiment shall recruit in.
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In January 1712 the
Gazette
announced that just a few ‘able-bodied men are wanting to supply Her Majesty’s Royal Artillery in Flanders’, and men wishing to join ‘may repair to Colonel Pendlebury, at his house in the Tower, any morning, and shall enter into perfect pay, and have further encouragement’.
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Elsewhere regimental recruiting parties followed the process so beautifully described in George Farquhar’s play
The Recruiting Officer
(1706), with the likes of Captain Plume and Sergeant Kite encouraging men to leave nagging wives, pushy parents or harsh employers and go off to pull down the French tyrant. Kite urges them to meet him ‘at the sign of the Spread Eagle, in this good town of Shrewsbury’, where they will immediately receive suitable ‘relief and entertainment’. He does rather well to recruit five men in a single week, ‘the strong man of Kent, the King of the Gypsies, a Scotch pedlar, a Scoundrel Attorney and a Welsh parson’. Plume forces him to release the attorney, for he cannot abide literate men, who are sure to get up petitions.

Desertion was a constant plague, and the
London Gazette
regularly contained descriptions of men who had run from their colours. In October 1704 it announced:

Deserted out of the Rt Hon the Lord Paston’s Regiment in his own company, Rob. Weston, a well-set man, about 5 foot 5 inches high, a fresh complexion, round visaged, aged about 24 years, supposed to be gone to Sheffield in Yorkshire; Rich. Brown, about 5 foot 6 inches high, thin visaged, swarthy complexioned, aged about 22 years, a locksmith; Benj. Lowe and John Tawits, both shoemakers by trade; Rich. Dewberry, aged about 44 years, 5 foot 6 inches high, light brown hair,
bald on his crown, a miller; Steph. Burrel, about 5 foot 5 inches high, aged about 26 years, wears a wig, hath lately had the small-pox, and born at Diss in Norfolk … If they will return to the company in 14 days they shall be kindly received; or, whoever apprehends them, so as they may be brought to justice, they shall receive for each man two guineas, to be paid by Mr Rob. Perryman, agent to the said regiment, at his house in Leicester Fields.
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The fact that Tilbury was the rendezvous suggests that Paston’s men were about to embark for Flanders, though it was late in the year to move a regiment.

Marlborough sometimes spent part of the winter on the Continent, but he normally returned home before the campaign season started, and then left England in March or April, often crossing by yacht from Harwich to Helvoetsluis. Sarah sometimes accompanied him to the port, and Marlborough always felt the separation keenly. ‘It is impossible for me to express with what a heavy heart I parted with you,’ he told her when he set off for the 1702 campaign.

I would have given my life to come back but I know my own weakness so much that I darest not for I know I should have exposed myself [revealed his feelings] to the company: I did for a great while with a perspective glass look upon the cliffs in hopes I might have had the sight of you, we are now out of sight of Margate, and I have neither soul nor spirits, but I do at this minute suffer so much that nothing but being with you again can recompense it. If you could be sensible of what I now feel you would endeavour ever to be easy to me, and then I should be most happy, for it is you only that can give me some content …
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Marlborough normally visited The Hague to see Heinsius and other important officials before setting off south to join the army. Although he sometimes undertook long journeys by coach, on campaign he generally rode, with fresh mounts being provided from a string of horses under the care of his ‘gentleman of the horse’, Colonel Bringfield, who was killed at Ramillies. On 11 July 1703 he closed a letter to Sarah, written the day before, saying: ‘I am just come off my horse where I have been near 14 hours, so that I own to you that I am so weary that I have not spirits to write any more, especially when I know I must be on horseback by three o’clock tomorrow morning.’
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At that time European capitals were connected by regular posts, leaving perhaps twice a week, and national authorities then distributed mail internally. London now had a general post office with some forty sorters, and it had recently become possible for ‘cross posts’ to go between major towns without passing through the capital. On average a postboy would take six days to ride from London to Edinburgh. Posts from London to The Hague and vice versa usually took three days, but bad weather in the Channel could leave a backlog at the ports, and sometimes a packet boat went down in a storm or was snatched by Dunkirk privateers, rather interrupting the mail. An express, the equivalent of modern special delivery, ran outside the times of the normal post, but it too ran the risk of being stopped by bad weather. Really important documents, like first reports of battles, would be sent by hand of an officer, and Marlborough assured Sarah that he would always send her a letter if he had an official courier on the way. Although her fierce temper did not always make her a comfortable spouse, when she wished to be loving she could certainly charm. ‘Wherever you are, whilst I have life my soul shall follow you my ever dear Lord Marlborough,’ she wrote in 1701–02, ‘and wherever I am I shall only kill the time,
with the night that I may sleep
& hope the next day to hear from you.’
⁵⁵

The post was notoriously insecure, and many correspondents used simple codes to screen their meaning. Marlborough and his circle replaced names and places by numbers, which changed from time to time. In August 1710, for instance, he gave Sarah instructions about the Woodstock election.

39 [Marlborough] shall expect more assistance in 87 [Parliament] from 197 [Cadogan] and 202 [Sir Thomas Wheate, the other MP for Woodstock] than any numbers … I do earnestly desire that these two men may be chosen preferable to all others which I desire you will lose no time in acquainting 38 [Godolphin] and that I beg it of him as a particular favour, and that he would take care of securing an election for 202, for 39 does not think it absolutely necessary to have him early in 108 [England] this winter, of which he will take care.
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Despite the quality of his staff, his own acumen and growing experience, there were moments when Marlborough found his burden almost intolerable. Sarah’s occasional sulks, apparently worsened by the approaching menopause, meant that she was not always as reliable a source of comfort as that other lodestar of Marlborough’s existence,
Sidney Godolphin. In the depth of gloom after a battle which failed to materialise because of Allied disobedience, with Sarah ill and no word from her, he told Godolphin: ‘I am in so ill humour, that I will not trouble you, nor dare I trust myself to write more. But believe this truth; that I honour, and love you, my Lady Marlborough, and would die for the Queen.’
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In 1701 the War of Spanish Succession had opened well for the Allies in Italy, where the Imperialist general Prince Eugène of Savoy had first thrashed Marshal Catinat and gone on to capture his successor, Marshal Villeroi, in a midwinter attack on Cremona. There had been no fighting in the Low Countries, although the initial French incursion into the barrier fortresses had placed them in an advantageous position before a shot had been fired. For the 1702 campaign the French, like their opponents, had to find troops for other theatres of war, and the size of their field armies was reduced by the constant need to garrison fortresses. However, for the first few months of the campaign in the Low Countries the weight of numbers told in their favour.

When Marlborough arrived to take command in July, Marshal Boufflers had just jabbed hard at the main Allied army under the Earl of Athlone (Godert de Ginkel, commanding by virtue of his Dutch commission), which had fallen back on the fortress of Nijmegen. Boufflers was now close to invading the republic’s own territory, but Marlborough at once saw that there was nothing to be gained by mere frontal defence. Instead, an Allied crossing of the Meuse below Grave would threaten Boufflers’ communications, especially if some simultaneous pressure could be put on the French right on the lower Rhine. Before the Allies could reach a decision on this plan Louis ordered Boufflers to divert a strong detachment to the upper Rhine, giving Marlborough a clear numerical edge. Yet the Dutch were still not confident, and, as Marlborough told Godolphin, ‘the fears the Dutch have of Nijmegen and the Rhine, creates such difficulties when we come to take a resolution we were forced to send to the Hague’.
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He pressed Heinsius hard, telling him:

It is a shameful thing our lying idle and letting Marshal Boufflers make his detachments for the upper Rhine, that I have no patience … Will not Prince Louis of Baden [Allied commander on the upper Rhine]
have great reason to be angry when a superior army does not hinder the enemy from sending detachments nor send none themselves? Till we act offensively, all things must go ill.
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The Dutch did not approve the plan till 22 July, and Sergeant John Wilson tells us what happened as soon as Marlborough heard that he could move.

We continued in this ground without any motion till … there was orders to the pontoons to march to the right to lay two bridges over the Maas, as also for the [artillery] train and wheel baggage to march that afternoon by way of … Grave. At night there was orders for the quartermaster general, the vanguard and the camp colour men to parade on the right of the front line by four o’clock in the morning and the General to beat at 5.00. Which orders were all punctually obeyed and the army decamped accordingly and that day passed the Maas and advances about two and a half leagues and there encamped. Whereupon the enemy decamped also …
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This is a classic description of an early-eighteenth-century army at its business. Although the Maas at Grave is a wide and stately river, it was the stock in trade of engineers to bridge it with pontoons, boats carried to the river on carts, floated, anchored and roped together before being turned into bridges by the addition of wooden trackway. Wheeled vehicles and heavy baggage were wisely sent over the fixed bridge in the town. Soldiers, roused from their slumbers by the drag and paradiddle of the general call to arms, drew up in line when the assembly was beaten perhaps half an hour later. Normally the troops to march first were on the right of the line, and included Cadogan with a small cavalry escort, and then the army’s vanguard. The camp colourmen were guides from each battalion who carried ‘camp colours’, small identifying flags which would enable their commanding officers to identify their allocated campsite at the end of the day’s march. It was as well to start the whole process as soon as it was light enough to strike camp, to ensure that there was plenty of daylight left when the army reached its next campsite. A river crossing and a march of two and a half leagues (seven and a half miles) was a good day’s work.

As soon as the Allies moved, Boufflers behaved just as Marlborough had expected and moved south as quickly as he could, crossing the Meuse at Roermond, now having to march very close to the Allied army
and, as Richard Kane saw, ‘in great perplexity to get by us’. The little garrison of Gravenbock found itself in the middle of the Allied army, and both sides could hear the other’s daily routine. The evening drumbeat of the tattoo, its name derived from the Dutch
doe ten tap toe
, was an instruction for camp settlers to ‘turn off the tap’ of the wine or beer barrel and for soldiers to turn in. Accurate timekeeping was never easy, and usually a gun was fired from the artillery park to tell regimental drummers to set about their noisy business, as Sergeant Wilson remembered.