Marlborough (51 page)

No sooner had he shaken off this latest headache than Marlborough was confronted with sufficient problems to restore it. The Dutch had not furnished the magazine at Trier, upon which operations in the Moselle depended. German princes, relieved by the disappearance of the direct French threat, were slow in putting their contingents into the field, and even the King of Prussia, far from dispatching his troops to Italy as had been agreed, had still not sent enough to join the Allies in Germany. Eugène was away commanding in Italy, and Marlborough missed his wholehearted collaboration. Prince Louis, suffering from the physical effects of the wound he had received at the Schellenberg (which modern antibiotics would probably have cured in a fortnight) and the chagrin of having missed Blenheim, was not at his best.

There was the usual fast footwork required at the beginning of a campaign. The home front had to be propped up: the Ordnance Board was assured that funds were on their way from Godolphin to meet the ‘extraordinary demands’ now placed upon it. There was a light gilding of letters to princes along the Moselle. The Elector of Trier was told that Cadogan had already headed south to meet Prince Louis, and was accompanied by a Hamburg merchant who would be responsible for paying the troops on the Moselle. Prince Louis was warned to expect Cadogan, now a brigadier after Blenheim: ‘He is briefed on everything, and I beg Your Highness to listen favourably to him, and to send him on as quickly as you can, so that he can join me before I leave Maastricht.’
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No good evidently came of the visit, for Marlborough himself had to go down to see Prince Louis at Rastatt. He had hoped for a meeting at Creuznach, but the prince was ‘incommoded with a swelling in his leg’, probably the result of the previous year’s wound.

Marlborough soon recognised that without Eugène and with limited German cooperation the original two-army campaign plan would not work. On 27 May he wrote to Secretary Harley from Trier.

I was in good hopes the Prince of Baden would have been enabled to have seconded me in these parts so that we might have acted with two separate armies, but you will be surprised to hear that all he can bring at present does not exceed eleven or twelve battalions and twenty-eight squadrons. These troops were to begin their march about this time, and will be here in ten or twelve days. The Prussians and several others cannot be here sooner, so it will be about the 10th of next month before we are able to move.
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Cardonnel radiated similar gloom, telling Ellis that ‘the dilatoriness of our friends in joining us is a very great disappointment’.
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Although Marlborough did manage to move off towards Villars’ position at Sierck on 2 June, his army was much smaller than he had hoped, and Villars cunningly declined to offer battle in anything save the most formidable of positions.

While he was lamenting the impossibility of making real progress, Marlborough suddenly learnt the reason for his opponent’s clever wagging of the matador’s cloak. Up in Brabant, Villeroi was on the move. He snatched the fortress of Huy, and on 16 June opened his trenches before the citadel of Liège. Overkirk, outnumbered two to one, had to fall back on Maastricht. Heinsius had already warned Marlborough that the French planned to take Liège and Limburg, advancing into the bishopric of Cologne so as to block Dutch communications with the Moselle, and Marlborough told Godolphin of the inevitable result of all this.

The post does not go away till tomorrow, but I would ease my head and my heart by letting you know what is resolved. The deputies of the States’ army on the Meuse have sent an express to me to desire that 30 battalions of them may be immediately sent to them. This joined with the want of forage, and no hopes of having the horses and carts in less than six weeks for the drawing everything to the siege [of Saarlouis] we have taken the resolution for strengthening Prince Louis’ army and leaving a sufficient number of troops at Trier, and to march with the rest to assist them on the Meuse. We shall leave the cannon and all other ammunition at Trarbach and Coblenz, so that if
the German princes will enable us to make a siege, we may return after we have put our friends on the Meuse at their ease … I have for these last ten days been so troubled by the many disappointments I have had, that I think if it were possible to vex me so for a fortnight longer it would make an end of me. In short, I am weary of my life.
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A letter to Sarah, written the same day, told her that he had a thousand things to say to her, but that ‘whenever I sit down to write, the business of the army hinders me’. He complained of ‘the negligence of princes whose interest is to help us with all they have’, and regretted that Hompesch and Overkirk were in such ‘great apprehension’, for they must know that he could not give them instant succour. ‘Adieu, my dearest soul,’ he concluded, ‘pity me and love me.’
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It was normally characteristic of Marlborough to reveal his despair to his wife and his best friend but to nobody else, though now there was a dash of bitters even in a letter to Heinsius sent from Trier on the eighteenth, gently warning that ‘I have been so disappointed in everything that has been promised me that if I should find a backwardness when I come to the Meuse I shall be discouraged from ever serving another campaign.’ Prince Louis, he added, had now decided to go and take the waters.
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By this time, however, Marlborough had already extracted his army from the defiles of Alsace, made provision for leaving the sick and excess baggage in the villages along his route, and pressed on at such speed under a blazing sun that, as Blackader wrote, ‘many fell by weariness and some died’. It was the old story for the infantry, of:

Marching all day. Uneasy with hot weather. A soldier’s life is an unaccountable way of living. One day too much heat, another too cold. Sometimes we want sleep, meat and drink; again, we are surfeited too much. A bad irregular way of living.
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Marlborough reached Maastricht on 27 June, but Villeroi did not care to wait for him, raised the siege as soon as he heard that Marlborough was approaching, and was back behind the Lines of Brabant too fast to be caught.

There was a poignant glint of an old mirror. On 11 July Marshal Villeroi sent him, under a flag of truce, two snuffboxes which had been dispatched to Marlborough by well-wishers in France. One was from the comte de Gramont, and was so elegant, as Marlborough assured its donor, that its equal could scarcely have been found in France or
elsewhere. The other was ‘one of the finest that I have ever seen, and is made inestimable to me by the portrait it bears’. It was from Charles II’s old mistress the Duchess of Portsmouth, now living in France and allegedly in straitened circumstances, but not too poor to send a costly gift to the man who had been the lover of her predecessor in Charles’s affections, and perhaps a little more.

Marlborough had little enough time to enjoy his presents or to muse on the past. In early July he had been exasperated to hear that Lieutenant General Aubach’s force of Palatinate and Westphalian troops left to cover Trier had retired precipitately on the mere appearance of a French detachment. Aubach had at least blown breaches in the city’s defences and destroyed much of the equipment it contained, but his behaviour was so ‘unaccountable’ that Marlborough confessed that it made him ‘almost despair’. He ordered Aubach’s men to join Prince Louis on the Rhine, where the Prussians were already marching, telling Henry St John that this ought to bring Prince Louis’ army up to about 115 squadrons and eighty battalions, making it superior to Villars’ force. Meanwhile, he would set about recovering Huy.
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Huy’s outlying forts were soon taken, and the garrison of 450 men in the citadel surrendered as prisoners of war within two hours of Allied batteries opening fire. Marlborough had already decided that the misfortune at Trier meant that there was no longer any merit in his moving back to the Moselle, and so determined to pierce the Lines of Brabant as soon as the trenches dug before Huy had been filled in and his batteries there levelled. The operation depended on Dutch approval, and Orkney told his brother: ‘You cannot believe how much it was opposed by the Dutch.’
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Sicco van Goslinga, who became a field deputy the following year, acknowledges that all was not well: ‘intrigues amongst the generals and even among the deputies, who instead of using their authority to stifle this fire of dissension at birth, encouraged it by choosing sides’.
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Marlborough established that the portion of the Lines between Neerhespen and Esmael was poorly guarded, and accordingly told Overkirk to make a diversion, crossing the River Mehaigne and feinting towards the lines north-east of Namur, threatening the very spot that the defenders thought most vulnerable. Villeroi marched at once to the spot. ‘As soon as day began to shut in’ on 17 July, Marlborough sent off General the comte de Noyelle, Lieutenant General Richard Ingoldsby and Lieutenant General Lumley with an advance guard of twenty-two
battalions and twenty squadrons.
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He brought the rest of his army along in two huge columns two hours later, heading for the Lines, ‘three great leagues’ from his camp. Overkirk had been sent word, though only that very evening, so as to preserve security, ‘that he might likewise march in order and join us’. The advance guard reached the Lines – made up of a ditch and ramparts, protected by the Little Geete – by dawn on the eighteenth, and, as Lieutenant General Lumley reported: ‘The too great security of the enemy made them negligent enough to possess with some advanced detachments of foot two of their barriers.’
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Sergeant Millner was in a party of combined grenadiers under Colonel Godfrey, drawn together from the six British battalions in the advance guard, which was there when the River Geete was forced.

Notwithstanding they [the enemy] were just on the other side of the river, yet we posted ourselves under cover of a quick set hedge without so much as one shot being fired. Where we continued the space of a quarter of an hour until such time as the pontoons on the carriages came up along a little causeway which led to the river, in order to lay the bridges. At the noise whereof the enemy took the alarum and began firing very sharply on that place where they judged the bridges would be laid. Which galled our workmen so prodigiously that they were not able to stand it. Which Brigadier Blood perceiving, came to Colonel Godfrey desiring three companies of grenadiers from the right to advance to the riverside in order to fire upon the enemy to divert them during the laying of the pontoon bridges. And as the bridges were finished the grenadiers had orders to march over the same; which we accordingly did and beat the enemy from that ground.
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Colonel Charles Godfrey was another echo of the past. He had married Marlborough’s sister Arabella, very quietly, at some time in the 1680s, and, fecund as ever, she had borne him two daughters and a son. He was ‘a sensible and well-liked fellow’, a Whig MP and a source of regular support for Marlborough in the House. He was also a brave and determined infantry officer with something of the Salamander’s stamp, and Marlborough rewarded him by deploying his interest to see Colonel Godfrey appointed clerk to the Board of Green Cloth and master of the Jewel Office. For all Arabella’s early flightiness her marriage to Charles Godfrey was firm and good, although when she died in 1730, after a
distressing period of dementia, she was buried in St Paul’s with her brother George (who died in 1710), naval officer turned Tory politician and something of a thorn in the Marlburian side. ‘I am very sorry that 16 [George Churchill] behaves himself so very ill,’ lamented the duke to Sarah. ‘I do not flatter myself with having much power over him, but if you please I shall speak to him, for I had much rather he should be unkind and disrespectful to me than to you, whose happiness is dearer to me than my own life.’
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Let us return to watch Charles Godfrey at the business he knew best. Neerhespen, on the Allied side of the lines, fell easily, and the château at Wangé, along the river to the south-west, was speedily taken. Three battalions rushed Elixheim, further west still, taking village and bridge; three enemy dragoon regiments encamped nearby did not even try to stem the flood, but fell back on Leau. However, for a time Marlborough’s position was excruciatingly vulnerable. Part of the follow-up force had missed its way in the dark, and was still some way back. Marlborough sent a galloper back to Lord Orkney, its commander, urging him to step out. In the meantime, Marlborough pushed Lumley’s advance guard cavalry over the obstacle ‘without loss of time, though not without difficulty’. Orkney’s men, with that turn of speed which the duke’s infantry always produced when they knew he really needed them, reached the bridges while the last of the cavalry were still crossing. Orkney reported the bridges so poor that ‘hardly above one man could go over abreast though in some places one foot man and a horseman passed over together. However, though the passages were very bad, men scrambled over them strangely.’
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Marlborough himself rode forward to join the cavalry, and saw that forty or fifty enemy squadrons were now coming up, with a number of light guns and infantry behind them. Orkney, some way back, saw ‘two good lines of the enemy, very well formed, a line of foot following them. We were in a very good position to receive them, and we outwinged [outflanked] them, and still more troops coming over the pass. As I got over to the [1st] foot guards, I saw the shock begin.’ Although his infantry was not yet in a position to intervene, many of the enemy cavalry were Bavarian cuirassiers in half-armour, and his own men – British, Hanoverian and Hessian – were ‘a good deal mixed up and not in their proper place’, Marlborough at once ordered his horse to charge. In the cavalry mélêe, separated from his escort and with only a few staff officers to hand, he was, as Lumley reported, in great peril. Orkney recounts how: