Marlborough (41 page)

There was actually another layer of inter-Allied complexity. The Dutch feared that if Ostend was taken it would finish up in English hands, and would form a bastion of future English trade. On 17 June Marlborough tried to persuade Heinsius that this was not in fact the case. ‘I do assure you that [we] are very desirous it should be taken from the French,’ he wrote, ‘but they would not be masters of it … so that you need not apprehend any dispute that might arise upon the taking of this place.’
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Soon afterwards he warned Heinsius that Coehoorn might be ‘disobliged’ by one of the generals in Opdam’s force, quite possibly Lieutenant General Frederik Johan Baer, Heer van Slangenburg, with whom he was shortly to have a blazing row. He would be happy to meet Opdam’s generals at any central spot, but warned that time was being wasted: ‘I think the common interest does require that no more time should be lost, but that we either attack Antwerp or Ostend, or else put ourselves on the defensive and send the rest into Germany.’
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As late as 25 June NS Marlborough still hoped to persuade Coehoorn to besiege Ostend, and sent the baron de Trogne, governor of Liège, to press his case again.

By this time, though, Coehoorn was concerned that his own attack would run into forces released by Villeroi. Marlborough agreed to send some extra troops, repeatedly assured him that Villeroi had not yet moved a detachment westwards, and undertook to keep the French under pressure. It was not until the very end of the month that the Allied right wing at last advanced. Coehoorn and Spaar each pierced the Lines of Brabant to enter the Pays de Waes, the coastal area just west of Antwerp, and Opdam, on the other side of the Scheldt, headed towards Antwerp itself. However, Coehoorn’s attack was not serious enough to
persuade Bedmar to divide his forces, and on 28 June Marlborough, who had always argued that the project would work only if Bedmar was distracted from Antwerp, told both Coehoorn and Opdam that he would make best speed to join them. On the same day he warned Godolphin that, although he was confident that he had stolen a march on Villeroi, ‘we are now got into so enclosed a country’ that the French would probably move faster. Worse still, he thought that Villeroi would probably now be able to send a detachment to support Bedmar.

That is precisely what happened. Villeroi had already ordered his central force to join Bedmar, and now he ordered Boufflers to take thirty squadrons of cavalry and thirty companies of grenadiers (five battalions’ worth) to make forced marches to the west: Marlborough’s spies reported that a foot soldier was mounted behind each horseman to make better time. On 28 June Marlborough warned Opdam that the French were on the move in open country ‘where it will be very easy for them, without running any risk, to make detachments’. Villeroi, moving within his own lines, had no shortage of forage, whereas Marlborough, ‘our march being upon the heaths’, was less well supplied. He assured Opdam that he would be in a position to help him just as soon as he could.
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The next day he wrote again, begging Opdam to keep him apprised of his movements, and on the thirtieth he admitted that he was a little vexed not to have heard from him for days. On 2 July he assured Heinsius that he was only two days away from Opdam, and urged him to convene a meeting of Allied generals and members of his own government at some suitable place. With the letter signed but not sealed, he added a desperate postscript: ‘This minute I am told the postmaster of Breda has written to the postmaster here that Opdam is beaten. I hope it is not true.’
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He also dashed off a postscript to a letter to Godolphin when he heard the news, saying: ‘We have a report come from Breda that Opdam is beat. I pray God it be not so, for he is very capable of having it happen to him.’
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Jacob Hop, the Dutch treasurer general, had joined Opdam at the end of June, and told the Estates General that Marlborough had warned them that the French were on the move south of the Lines. A council of war had accordingly decided that Opdam’s camp at Eckeren, containing only thirteen battalions and twenty-six squadrons, was dangerously exposed. Opdam’s generals got their heavy baggage away towards Bergen op Zoom, and on 30 June, with the French now in sight, they resolved to fall back on Lillo on the Scheldt. ‘But that could not be done
so soon but that the enemy appeared both before and behind, and on both sides of us,’ wrote Hop to the Estates-General.

We then engaged with them, and the fight was very furious in several places, lasting from 3 o’clock till it was nearly dark, and frequently with very doubtful success, till at last, by the unwearied bravery (which in truth can never be enough commended) of both your own national troops and those of foreign princes in your service, one of the chief posts by which we must pass to come hither, viz. the village of Oerderen, was forced from the enemy and kept in possession.
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Mérode-Westerloo acknowledged that the Allies fought very hard indeed, and saw for himself that Oerderen, through which they had to pass to escape, was the scene of frenzied fighting. His own leading battalion bolted under heavy close-range artillery fire, and although he rallied about three hundred of his men, all was in ‘desperate confusion, pikemen picking up muskets and musketeers laying hold of pikes’. Major General Hompesch led a handful of Dutch horsemen in a counterattack which drove back superior numbers of French cavalry. The infantry wilted too, and Mérode-Westerloo could not hold the village without support that never came: ‘I never saw a single general officer during the whole affair,’ he complained.

We lost more than 2,000 killed or wounded, although, in fact, we might have made the whole Dutch army prisoners of war for a loss of less than a hundred if only we occupied the line of dykes and pounded them to pieces with cannon … But French foolhardiness and I don’t know what besides made us muff the opportunity.
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Opdam himself had been cut off from his troops, and was first reported missing: Jacob Hop heard that he was a prisoner in Antwerp. It soon transpired, however, that he had made best speed to Breda, whence he gave the Estates-General what Robert Parker called ‘a melancholy account of the affair’. Slangenburg took charge of the initial battle and the running fight that followed it, and although Eckeren was scarcely a victory, its results could have been far worse. One byproduct, welcomed by Parker, was that Opdam never received another active command. Marlborough acidly observed that Baron Hop ‘had the honour of seeing more of it than the general that should have commanded’, and added
that the French, who had certainly not done as well as they ought, ‘will pretend … they had the best of it, and prove it by Opdam’s letters’.
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The battle of Eckeren left the Great Design in ruins, and worse followed. Marlborough heard that Coehoorn had fallen out with Slangenburg and was thinking of quitting the army. He urged them both to put the public interest before private matters, but Coehoorn, ill and with only a year to live, returned to The Hague. It was in evident despair that Marlborough wrote to Heinsius on 21 July.

It is impossible the war can go on with success at this rate, if measures must be taken between two armies, and the quarrels and animosities of private people shall make a delay which hinders the whole … I know not if I shall outlive this campaign, but I am sure I have not the courage to make another.

He added that his own government was pressing him to send troops to Spain, but he had been able to stave them off for the moment, promising only four battalions of newly-arrived foot and Lord Raby’s Dragoons. ‘I own to you that I have the spleen to a great degree,’ confessed Marlborough, ‘which may make me an ill judge of what I write in this letter. I wish it may prove so, and that you may have a glorious campaign.’
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There was something of the same gloom in a letter to Sarah.

I find myself daily delaying, so that if I may not have time of living quietly with you, and meddling less with the business of this world, I can’t hold long. But of this I shall say a great deal more when I have the happiness of seeing you, which time is passionately wished for by him that loves you above all expression.
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A conference at Bergen op Zoom resolved that the Allies would pierce the Lines of Brabant near Antwerp, but Marlborough discovered that neither cannon nor forage was ready, and by the time he reached the Lines, Villeroi and Boufflers were there before him. He still rode forward to see if anything could be done.

On Friday [27 July NS] I went with 4,000 horse to see the lines. They let us come so near that we beat their outguard home to their barrier, which gave us an opportunity of seeing the lines; which has a ditch 27 foot broad before it and the water in it nine foot deep, so that it is resolved that the armies return to the Meuse, and in the first place
take Huy. Upon the whole matter, if we can’t bring the French to a battle, we shall not do anything worth the being commended.
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Huy fell surprisingly quickly, and its garrison, which surrendered as prisoners of war, gave Marlborough the wherewithal to exchange his own two battalions taken at Tongres earlier in the year. Already, shaking off the despair of high summer, he had spotted a new opportunity. The Lines of Brabant were incomplete between the Mehaigne and the Meuse, and he proposed piercing them between Leau and the headwaters of the Mehaigne. As this is precisely where he was to penetrate them in 1706, it is likely that his plan would have succeeded, and that he would have brought the French to battle.

At a council of war, held at Marlborough’s headquarters at Val Notre Dame, not far from Huy, on 24 August, all the Allied generals present supported the plan. The Dutch generals, however, would not agree, and without their consent the operation was impossible. They proposed instead the siege of Limburg, which Marlborough rightly believed was so insignificant an objective that it could be fitted in at the end of a campaign. The senior British, Danish and German generals took the unusual step of signing a formal document declaring that they believed that with an attack on the Lines ‘We could, with the help of the good Lord, hope for a victory so complete, and whose consequences would be so great as not to be predicted.’
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Marlborough sent a copy of the letter to Harley, and told Godolphin what had happened, enclosing a copy of his own letter of well-mannered protest to the Estates-General. He added that ‘I am really tired out of my life,’ but concluded by telling Godolphin that he had, as requested, ‘taken care of’ one of his clients: John Yarborough duly became a captain in Hill’s Regiment of Foot.
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The dispute with the Dutch hit Marlborough hard. He told Godolphin that he would be home soon, for he had no mind to command an army that did nothing but eat forage. He added that the whole business ‘has heated my blood so, that I am almost mad with a headache’, and railed against the Dutch generals, some of whom were by then beginning to say that they would have supported the attack if only they had had more cannon.
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He warned Heinsius that Dutch failure to support offensive action would be used by ‘disaffected people in England … to convince our Parliament men that the war ought to be made in other places and not in this country’.
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It is clear that his complaint was against the Dutch generals, not the field deputies, and on 11 October he reported to Heinsius that ‘the Deputies have promised me that they will tell
their generals very plainly that the army must continue in the field all this month’.
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Even now, dragging on the fag-end of a wasted campaign, he was still corresponding about the regiments due to be sent to Portugal and the allocation of generals to command them; discussing the state of affairs in southern Germany and northern Italy with a bevy of princelings; lamenting the defeat, in late September, of Count Styrum’s Allied army by Villars and Max Emmanuel near a small town called Hochstadt on the Danube; and telling the Duke of Schomberg that he did not think the government would give the generals ordered to Portugal any more than the £10,700 already allocated. There was a little old-world courtliness with his nephew, the Duke of Berwick, whose master of the horse wanted a passport to visit the United Provinces to buy some horses. Indeed, he risked trespassing on this scarred friendship, saying:

I should be glad … if you think it proper, and not otherwise, that you would desire the Maréchal de Villeroi to give me a pass for twenty pieces of burgundy or champagne to come to Huy or Liege, which in that case M. Puech may deliver to Colonel Cadogan when they meet on Thursday at Borchloen.
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Even his return to England did not go smoothly. He was marooned at Briel by contrary winds, and eventually reached London, where he landed at Tower wharf on 30 October, just in time to sit in a Parliament which became almost as firmly enmeshed in the Occasional Conformity Bill as he had been in the Lines of Brabant. 1703 could not, by any reasonable definition, be termed a good year.

The campaign of 1703 in the Low Countries had not been wholly sterile. Bonn had been taken at its beginning, and both Limburg and Guelders fell at its end. Indeed, the grateful Dutch struck a medal with Queen Anne on the obverse and Marlborough on the reverse, with the inscription: ‘Victory without slaughter, by the taking of Bonn, Huy and Limburg.’ There was no irony in this: gaining territory by manoeuvre remained appealing to the Dutch, who rightly dreaded the consequences of a lost battle. Yet in the winter of 1703–04 it seemed to Marlborough that the war would be lost in Germany long before it could be won in Flanders or Brabant, and the defection of Bavaria meant that the balance of strategic geography for once favoured the French.

How so? The easiest route between France and the litter of small states and the few rather bigger ones that constituted the Germany of the early eighteenth century was what Charles de Gaulle was later to call that ‘Fatal Avenue’ in which Marlborough had been campaigning for the past two seasons. It was speckled with fortresses, laced with rivers and canals, and offered limited prospects for war-winning advances by either side. Further south, nature splashed forests and rivers across the landscape to make any advance into or from Germany even more difficult. The Ardennes and the Eifel, the south-eastern pivots of Marlborough’s operations in 1702–03, were inimical to marching armies, and the valley of the Moselle, which creased their eastern edge, was commanded by the fortresses of Trier, Trarbach and Koblenz. Another slab of forested upland rippled southwards from east of Saarbrücken to the borders of Switzerland, pierced by gaps which were to leave bloody thumbprints on the pages of history: Wissembourg, Saverne and Belfort.

The most promising of these, the Saverne gap, led to Strasbourg, a French city since the Treaty of Ryswick, with its bridgehead Kehl, on the
other side of the Rhine, now in French hands too. An advance northwards down the Rhine was blocked by the Lines of Stollhofen, running from the Rhine village of that name to Buhl in the Baden uplands, with the mighty fortress of Landau on the left bank of the Rhine behind them. Easterly routes through the Black Forest were bottlenecks, easily corked by a defender. However, a French army which reached the valley of the Neckar would suddenly find room for manoeuvre, especially into the upper Danube, which then led, by way of Ulm, Donauwörth and Ingolstadt, towards the emperor’s capital of Vienna. A jab straight to the pit of the Austrian stomach might, if events in northern Italy turned to the French advantage, be combined with a hook up from Verona and Trento to the Brenner Pass, a classic two-pronged attack which was to be used by Napoleon a century later.

Bavaria was part of a greater Germany largely in a linguistic sense, and with its Roman Catholicism and almost Latin culture, was quite unlike dour Prussia, away in the north with the Baltic on one flank and Russia on another. Elector Max Emmanuel’s change of allegiance had suddenly provided Louis with the stepping-stone he needed to get into Germany without a fight, and offered the possibility of cracking the Grand Alliance by striking at its point of natural cleavage along the Danube valley. Louis had long sought to encourage Turkey, still a major military power in Europe and last repulsed from the gates of Vienna in 1683, in order to divert Hapsburg power to the east. During the Nine Years War the Emperor Leopold was forced to juggle his forces between Italy and the Empire on the one hand, and the east on the other. He was fortunate in that Eugène of Savoy, arguably his most capable commander, demolished a large Turkish army at Zenta in September 1697, bringing the Turks to the conference table and leading to the signing of the Peace of Carlowitz in 1699.

However, if Louis had lost one ally he soon gained another. The Hapsburgs, trying to establish a permanent settlement of Hungary, so much of it recently liberated from the Turks, succeeded in inflaming the population by unwise taxation, and irritating the prickly local nobility. In 1703 the patriot leaders Francis Rákóczi and Alexander Károlyi were in large-scale rebellion against the Hapsburgs, and received gilded but empty promises of support from Louis. The Hapsburgs could not afford to send substantial forces against the Hungarian rebels until after Blenheim, in August 1704, and fighting went on till 1711, first under the Emperor Joseph, who succeeded in 1705 but died unexpectedly in 1711, and then under Charles III. Ultimately it was Hapsburg successes
in southern Germany and northern Italy that enabled them to move troops eastwards and crush the rebellion. To Marlborough the rebellion was not simply a smoky clash on a distant frontier: it was a major strategic distraction for a crucial ally. There can be no doubting French diplomatic efforts to keep the rebellion alive: when Rákóczi went to Constantinople in 1716, at the request of the Turks, he travelled there from Paris.

The Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm I of Baden, cousin of Eugène of Savoy, was the Allied commander on the upper Rhine. ‘Prince Louis’ to his British contemporaries and to this author, the margrave was a professional soldier in the emperor’s service; his trademark scarlet coat had led the Turks, whom he beat at Slankamen in 1691, to call him the ‘red king’. The Allies had reinforced him with troops from the Low Countries, enabling him to take Landau in 1702, but he was beaten by Marshal Villars in something of a pyrrhic victory at Friedlingen soon afterwards. In 1703 he advanced into northern Bavaria in an effort to deal with the Franco-Bavarian army under Villars and Max Emmanuel, but he was soon forced back: it was his subordinate Styrum who had been defeated at Höchstädt on the Danube in September 1703. By the end of the campaign the Franco-Bavarians had captured both Ratisbon on the Danube and Augsburg on its tributary the Lech. However, despite its failure in Bavaria, Prince Louis’ army successfully prevented Marshal Tallard from forcing the Lines of Stollhofen, persuading Tallard to operate on the river’s left bank and besiege Landau. Louis remained an important strategic asset for the 1704 campaign, essential, as Marlborough assured Heinsius in June that year, for supporting an Allied advance into Germany. ‘Prince Lewis will do nothing without first consulting me,’ wrote Marlborough, ‘and … he approves of what I have proposed to him; which is
that he should act on the Iller, at the same time that I do on the Danube, which must necessitate the enemy to divide their army.
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Marlborough had begun to shift his weight south-eastwards even before the 1703 campaigning season had ended. When the rest of the army went into winter quarters after the fall of Limburg, he sent the Prince of Hesse-Cassel, with twenty-two battalions and thirty squadrons, to recapture Trier and Trarbach on the Moselle. However, Hesse-Cassel tried to make Tallard raise the siege of Landau, and was badly beaten at Speyerbach. Landau duly fell in November, and the Moselle fortresses remained in French hands. In the spring of 1704 Tallard succeeded in getting a substantial convoy of recruits, muskets, cannon and ammunition from Strasbourg to join the Franco-Bavarian army, feinting to
deceive Prince Louis and starting the campaign by putting the French at a notable advantage. This contingent formed part of the Franco-Bavarian army which was to be beaten at the battle of Blenheim.

The only setback to France was the defection of the Duke of Savoy to the Allied cause. Prince Eugène had little time for his kinsman.

Twenty thousand crowns a month from England, twenty thousand more from Holland, four millions for the expenses of the war, a kind of submission amongst all the petty princes of Italy, had more effect than all my eloquence, and converted the Duke of Savoy, for the time being, into the staunchest Austrian in the world. His conduct, which I shall not attempt to justify, reminds me of that formerly pursued by the Dukes of Lorraine, as well as the Dukes of Bavaria. Their geography prevented them from being men of honour.
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This at least meant that the French would be unable to advance from northern Italy into the Empire, but given the way the situation in Bavaria had developed, they would scarcely need to.

In the winter of 1703–04 the emperor’s ambassador in London, Count Wratislaw, repeatedly pressed Marlborough to relieve the pressure on southern Germany. He had already written to Marlborough to that effect in the summer of 1703, and had again proposed an advance southwards at a conference at Düsseldorf in the autumn. We cannot say, therefore, that the strategic concept for 1704 was Marlborough’s, but it was certainly one of the possibilities that he had rolled round his mind before he went to the United Provinces in January that year to discuss strategy. He lamented his departure in a letter to Sarah which juxtaposed the marital and the mundane.

I never go from you my dearest soul, but I am extremely sensible of my own unhappiness, of not having it in my power to live quietly with you, which is the only thing that can contribute to the ending of my days happily.

The tides fell out so that I did not go from Margate roads till 4 o’clock on Sunday in the afternoon. I never in my life saw so fine an evening, so that we had all the hopes imaginable of a good and quiet passage. But by the time we had got 7 or 8 leagues to sea, the wind began to rise so high that … we were forced to take in all our sails, and submit ourselves to be tossed as the wind and sea pleased, which lasted during 7 hours, during which time I was extremely sick …

I should be glad if you would get patterns for 7 or 8 pieces of hangings for my bedchamber, when I am in the field. You know my field bed is blue. If I should not be able to write to the Lord Treasurer this post, you will make my excuse. I am, with all the truth imaginable, heart and soul, yours.
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Before leaving London he had told Wratislaw that:

It is my intention to induce the Estates-General to decide upon a siege of Landau, or a diversion on the Moselle. I should be very glad to march there myself, but as it is difficult to move the Dutch upon an offensive … I should be able to get at the most only 45 battalions and some 60 squadrons for that purpose. Should I take Landau I would supply the Margrave of Baden with as many troops as possible, to enable him to overthrow the Elector of Bavaria.
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No sooner had he reached The Hague than he reported to Godolphin that the deputies were ‘extremely alarmed’ by the news from Germany, and money was so tight that the magazines planned for the coming season had not been filled, and only 60,000 of the 100,000 crowns owed to the Duke of Savoy had been paid. He added that Pierre de Belcastel, a Huguenot in Dutch pay and ‘a good officer and a discreet man’, had proposed sending aid to the Protestant rebels in the Cevennes so as to divert French strength, although in the event the project foundered because neither the Swiss, who would have supplied the mercenaries needed, nor the Duke of Savoy, through whose territory the expedition would pass, would back it.

For the rest of the trip he told Godolphin nothing of real significance, though there was the usual housekeeping: he agreed that it would indeed be hard to give the major’s vacancy in the Blues to anyone but the senior captain. Delayed once again by contrary winds, he told Godolphin that there was no real point in his coming home, as he would have to be on the Continent again so soon, but ‘My desire of being with you and Lady Marlborough is such, that I would come, although I were to stay but one day.’ He was, though, delighted to hear that his daughter Lady Bridgewater had given birth to a son.
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But he was gloomy enough at the possibilities for the coming year to tell Sarah:

For this campaign I see so ill a prospect that I am extremely out of heart. But God’s will be done; and I must for this year be very uneasy,
for in all the other campaigns I had an opinion of being able to do something for the common cause; but in this I have no other hopes than that some lucky accident may enable me to do good.
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This is typical of Marlborough. His was not an abstract military brain, but a concrete one: he was always happier dealing with practical problems than with airy conceptions, more confident on the battlefield than in the camp. However, his background as a courtier ensured that only those closest to him ever knew it. In even the darkest hour he was always smiles and politeness, displaying that most attractive of military virtues, grace under pressure.

By early March, however, the design had hardened. First, Marlborough did his best to wreck negotiations between the Elector of Bavaria and the king of Prussia, sending ambassador Stepney to Vienna and thence to Berlin, where he was to ‘second my Lord Raby [ambassador to Berlin] in the assurances he has given the king of the great satisfaction her Majesty takes in the zeal he shows for the public’.
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Cadogan was also in close but rather more light-hearted communication with his old schoolfellow at Berlin, emphasising that plans for the coming year required undivided command. ‘Nobody can better judge than your Lordship,’ he wrote, ‘of the necessity of putting the command into a single hand and the impossibility of doing anything without it. One should think the misfortune of Speyerbach might convince the herring-sellers of the inconveniency which unavoidably attends a distinct right and left wing which is in effect making a great body of men useless at best.’ Cadogan added that some verses had come into his hands: ‘the ballad is mightily liked’, and though ‘these on the ladies are not very new’ he thought that Raby might be amused by them.
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Happily they have not survived. He had a lucky escape on his way home when his packet boat was attacked by a Dunkirk privateer which knocked it about with cannonfire. The mail was thrown overboard, and Cadogan emptied his pockets of letters given him by Cutts and Greffier Fagel. The captain and crew manfully refused to strike their colours even as the privateer closed to board. Cadogan was sure that they would be taken, but at the last moment a wind sprang up, enabling the packet to slip away.