1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Finally, at eleven o’clock came the official sundown, the couchée, which was the levée in reverse, ending with the King doing his affaires again, removing his wig, getting into his nightshirt and going to bed. Though he didn’t always stay there, and often preferred to pad along one of the passages that led to nearby bedrooms where his favourites would be waiting for Jupiter to appear on their horizon, no doubt with the occasional husband hiding under the bed whispering, ‘Don’t forget to ask him about that shipbuilding contract.’

  All in all, during his typical day, Louis would be observed and admired by up to 10,000 people, most of them obliged – if they wanted to retain their status in the country – to spend the vast sums of money necessary for court life. They had to buy new clothes, wigs, jewels and carriages, take part in the obligatory gambling and bribe palace officials for the smallest favours. It was a life of tyranny by politeness, a dictatorship of boredom and butt-licking, a never-ending pantomime designed to keep the potentially troublesome French aristocracy firmly in its place.

  Meanwhile, the lower strata of the population were informed of the King’s continuing godliness with a constant supply of etchings, pamphlets, paintings, tapestries and medals celebrating his every act. The monarchy was so self-assured that opposition was unthinkable.

  Or was it …?

  William of Orange gets his juices flowing

  William of Orange, who would later usurp the throne of James II and become King William III of England, was originally little more than the feudal lord of a tiny independent state in southern France. Orange, consisting of a few square kilometres around the ancient town of the same name, was a sort of mini-Liechtenstein that had been inherited by a Dutch family, the Nassaus, in the mid-sixteenth century.

  Although it was such a tiny fiefdom, its rulers claimed the right to be called Princes of Orange, probably to compensate for the fact that in their native country, Holland, they had the much less glamorous title of stadthouder, or ‘town holder’, the prosaic name given to the hereditary rulers of a large part of Holland.

  William had not even been born when he had this responsibility thrust upon him – his father died of smallpox a week before his birth in 1650 – and at first his Dutch territories were ruled by a regency that included William’s mother, Mary, the sister of King Charles II of England.

  William’s family was stripped of the title of stadthouder in 1650, a reaction to their dictatorial ways, and it looked as though William would grow up, like the young Charles II, as a jobless prince. His prospects looked even gloomier when his mother died – also of smallpox – in 1660 during a trip to England to visit her brother, thus weakening the family’s royal connections. And things could have hit rock bottom in 1672 when Uncle Charles attacked Holland, having made a secret Anglo-French pact with Louis XIV.*

  That year is still known in Holland as the rampjaar, the annus horribilis, but it was a blessing in disguise to William, who rose spectacularly to the occasion. He had his family’s rivals bumped off, took charge of the army, and even came up with Dutch history’s most famous quotation. When threatened by the Anglo-French that his country would be trampled out of existence if he didn’t surrender, William replied, ‘There is one certain means by which I can be sure never to see my country’s ruin. I will die in the last ditch.’ This bit of repartee became so famous that ‘last-ditch’ was adopted into the English language.

  William then ordered his citizens to pull their fingers out of the dykes (Holland’s second most famous quotation), and flooded vast tracts of land, which was not very beneficial to the tulip harvest but stopped the French army’s advance at a stroke.

  Louis XIV was understandably frustrated by his failure to crush a few clog-wearing herring fishermen, and took his revenge by annexing William’s tiny fiefdom of Orange, which was much easier to invade – it was in France, and had no ditches to flood. He gave the territory and title to a noble French namesake, Louis, marquis de Nesle et de Mailly.†

  However, far from being trampled out of existence, by the time peace was restored in early 1674, the 23-year-old formerly unemployed Prince William had regained the stadthoudership of his ancestral lands in Holland, and even been given power over some other small independent Dutch states.

  And more than all of this, he had resolved to devote his life to annoying the main instigator of the war: the arrogant Louis XIV.

  Louis squeezes the orange

  William decided to strengthen his hand in the European poker game by asking to marry his cousin Mary, the niece of King Charles II of England. The rather glamorous Mary is said to have wept bitterly at this idea, not because she was going to have to eat Edam for the rest of her life and be known as a stadthoudersvrouw, but because William was an ugly man with a reputation for preferring male soldiers.

  Mary’s father, the future King James II, would have liked to marry his daughter into the French royal family, but her Uncle Charles II saw the chance to appease the Protestants in England and gain an ally against Louis XIV, and threw his weight behind the Anglo-Dutch union. It went ahead, and Mary was in a flood of tears throughout the wedding ceremony.

  Piqued by this new anti-French entente, Louis made two fatal mistakes. First, in 1685, he revoked the Edict of Nantes, the law that had protected Protestants in France against persecution, thus causing a flood of refugees – including military men – into Holland. Then, underestimating the belligerent stadthouder, Louis signed a naval pact with James II as soon as he became King of England, and issued an order impounding any Dutch trading ships anchored in French ports. Two French gauntlets had been thrown at the Dutchman’s feet.

  To Louis’s, and especially James’s, astonishment, William didn’t only rise to the challenge, he grabbed it by the balls and made a breathtaking tactical riposte. Instead of sending a few ships out into the Channel to harass the English and French fleets, which was what most Dutch aggression had amounted to in the past, he simply sailed to England and snatched the throne.

  In doing so, he rightly claimed that he had been invited over by some Protestant MPs and the Bishop of London. The pretext for their invitation was that James II’s second wife, an Italian Catholic princess called Mary (at the time, there was an edict whereby all female royals were to be called Mary to confuse future readers of history books), had just given birth to a son. Until then, although James had converted to Catholicism, the next in line for the throne of England had been his Protestant daughters from a first marriage, the eldest of whom was another Mary – William of Orange’s wife.

  At the time, the religious question alone might have been enough to topple an English king – everyone had had enough of the waves of persecution that had swept across the country in recent decades – but James was also a despotic ruler who modelled himself on Louis XIV, and had apparently forgotten what happened when his father, Charles I, had shown similar disdain for his people and their Parliament.

  With a stroke of almost incredible daring (and, one could argue, dictatorial ruthlessness), in November 1688 William gathered an army of Dutchmen, French Protestant refugees and mercenaries from all over Europe, and sailed them along the south coast of England, aiming to land in Torbay in the extreme southwest. Thanks to a piloting error, the fleet of some 250 ships almost missed England and got blown out into the Atlantic, but a so-called ‘Protestant wind’ guided the ships back northeast, and they eventually managed to land.

  Meanwhile, King James’s fleet was trapped by onshore gales in the Thames Estuary, then got becalmed off the coast of Sussex, and finally retreated, with some of its captains already going over to the Protestant cause. Similarly, on land, James led an army out to resist William, but with desertions growing, he had a nervous breakdown and fled to France.

  William’s mixed bag of foreign soldiers marched towards London, surprised to find themselves being welcomed as liberators, and suddenly, without a shot being fired, England had a Dutch king. True, he had an English queen, but no one believed that she wore the p
olitical trousers. The Bloodless or Glorious Revolution of 1688 was complete.

  Louis XIV sponsored an attempt to regain James’s crown via an invasion of Ireland, but it failed when William personally brought an army to defeat him at the Battle of the Boyne near Dublin in July 1690. This was a calamity not only for James but also for Irish Catholics, who had to strap themselves in for about three centuries of Anglo-Protestant domination.

  Louis XIV was still determined to restore James as a puppet ruler in England, however, and planned another campaign on his behalf. On the menu this time was a naval attack to destroy the English fleet, to be followed by a Franco-Irish invasion of England that would sweep James back into power.

  But things went very wrong. Ignoring the fact that a combination of bad weather and worse planning had reduced the French fleet to half strength, Louis gave express orders to its unfortunate commander (who was male, despite being called Anne-Hilarion de Tourville) to attack a massive Anglo-Dutch force that had sailed across to Normandy in a pre-emptive strike.

  Over several days of fierce fighting and pursuit in thick fog, the Anglo-Dutch put de Tourville to flight, fired on beached French warships to make sure they were completely destroyed, and sent men ashore to burn vessels that had retreated into port. Between 29 May and 4 June 1692, the threat of a French invasion of England was blown out of the water, largely thanks to Louis XIV’s recklessness in ordering his depleted fleet into attack.

  Among the French losses were ships called Saint-Louis and, most painful no doubt, the magnificent Soleil Royal, which was set alight by a fireship and exploded – a supernova that left only one survivor.

  Louis offered to give James the Polish throne as a consolation prize, but James turned the job down and settled into his French retirement home at the palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye – not at Versailles, where the political action was. And on 20 September 1697, Louis formalized James’s status as a loser by agreeing to the Treaty of Ryswick, in which he recognized William and Mary as rulers of England and promised to give no future aid to supporters of James II.

  As he sat on his commode on that September morning, Louis may have realized that if he had lost all influence over his neighbour across the Channel, scuppered his chances of reigning as a Sun King over the whole of Europe, and vastly increased the power base of his Protestant enemies, it was all his own fault. And if all these reflections did trouble the King’s levée, his doctors no doubt noted some signs of stress in the results of that morning’s affaires.

  But worse indigestion was to come …

  Winston Churchill’s son

  Flashback to 1650: John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, the general who is about smash Louis XIV’s land armies and have the Sun King begging for peace, is born. His father’s name: Sir Winston Churchill.

  No, this is not a feat of time travel. Sir Winston was not a twentienth-century prime minister who had been teleported back to oppose Louis XIV, like a historical Terminator. This Winston was a member of the landed gentry in southwest England who had fought as a Royalist cavalier in the Civil War and was almost bankrupted by the huge fine he was made to pay when the fighting ended. His wife, Elizabeth Drake, was the great-niece of that reckless fop the Duke of Buckingham* – fortunately, though, the idiot gene seems to have mutated into a more calculated bravado as it seeped down the family line.

  After the Civil War, in recognition for the Churchills’ loyalty, Winston and Elizabeth’s eldest son John was given a position as a page boy to Charles II’s brother James (the future James II). The teenager often accompanied his master to military parades, and it is said that one day, when James asked the impressionable John what he was planning to do when he grew up, the lad fell to his knees and begged for a commission in the army.

  John’s wish was granted when he was seventeen, because, as a nineteenth-century biographer called Charles Bucke puts it, James’s wife Anne ‘had indicated more kindness and favour to the young aspirant than her husband thought prudent’. In twenty-first-century terms, James suspected they were shagging. John was therefore sent to serve as an ensign with the Guards in Morocco, where he saw action in skirmishes with the Arabs, who were none too pleased that the English had taken up residence at their seaside.

  John didn’t get castrated with a scimitar, which might have been what James secretly hoped, and on his return the dashing young officer leapt straight back into action – this time with one of King Charles II’s mistresses, Barbara Villiers. She not only granted John her sexual favours but also showered him with cash, a welcome supplement to his meagre army pay. In an amusing parallel, the cash gifts given to John by the royal mistress amounted to almost exactly the sum paid by his father as a fine after the Civil War. A neat and pleasurable way to rebalance the family accounts.

  John and Barbara began a scandalous affair, no doubt made all the more outrageous by the fact that Barbara was also related to the Duke of Buckingham. It must have been this combination of family good looks and recklessness that made the two of them indiscreet, and they were eventually caught in the act by King Charles himself. When young John hid in the wardrobe, Charles pulled him out and laughed, saying that he forgave the youngster ‘because you do it to get your bread’.

  Despite his laughter, Charles seems to have thought it wise to follow his brother James’s example and send the randy young soldier on another dangerous mission abroad – and this is where Louis XIV comes into the picture.

  Fighting for the French

  John Churchill was one of the 6,000 men sent by Charles II to join the French army that invaded Holland in 1672, under the command of the Duke of Monmouth, one of Charles’s illegitimate sons, who was just a year older than John Churchill. Together, the two young men cut a dash across Holland, earning a name for themselves at numerous battles and sieges. John’s courage so impressed his French comrades-in-arms that at the siege of a small town called Nimeguen, the Marshal of France, vicomte de Turenne, made a wager that John would win the battle for him. French soldiers had just lost control of a vital command post, and Turenne said, ‘I will bet a supper and a dozen bottles of claret that my handsome Englishman will capture the post with half as many men as the officer who lost it.’

  Of course it is possible that young Churchill had been sleeping with Turenne’s mistress and the Frenchman wanted to get rid of him, but the bet was taken and won, with the result that Churchill became a folk hero amongst the troops.

  At the siege of Maastricht, John went one better, offering to be part of the so-called ‘forlorn hope’, the nickname for the suicidal first wave of soldiers sent to attack a fortress. In this battle, he not only saved the Duke of Monmouth’s life but was also the first man to break through the defences, and personally planted the victors’ flag on the ramparts. (The French flag, that is.)

  Louis XIV was so grateful that he congratulated Churchill for his gallantry and made him lieutenant general of the Anglo-French army in Holland. After the war ended, Churchill stayed on to serve with the French alongside Turenne, adding tactical know-how to his bravado, and quickly mutated into that most valuable and inspirational of soldiers: a leader who was idolized by his troops.

  Rather unwise of Louis, then, to unleash the same man against France a few years later.

  Marlborough makes a packet

  Fast-forward to 1701: during the Glorious Revolution, John Churchill had wisely chosen to support William of Orange instead of his old protectors, Charles and James. This was not just because he was a man with a keen nose for winners. He had also become disillusioned during the intervening years – he had served as a diplomat for Charles, and had been led to believe that he was negotiating for England when the King was in fact double-dealing with France. In return for his support, William and Mary made Churchill the Earl of Marlborough.

  It was now that Louis XIV stirred up the hornets’ nest of his own making.

  On James II’s death in Paris in 1701, Louis XIV recognized the exiled King’s young son as James III
of England, a flagrant breach of the peace treaty he had signed with William of Orange four years earlier. Naturally, this enraged the English, who began to prepare for war – preparations that were only briefly postponed after William fell off his horse while hunting at Hampton Court.

  Before dying of his injuries, William told his successor, Queen Anne (one of James II’s Protestant daughters), to adopt Marlborough as her principal adviser in the forthcoming struggle against Louis. This she did, and as Marlborough’s nineteenth-century biographer so excitedly puts it:

  … happy was it for Europe, as well as for England, that Marlborough possessed so great an influence over the new sovereign; for the exigencies of the times fully demanded the public exercise of the best and most fortunate genius. The power of France exceeded all precedent in modern history, and it would have been easy, with such a combination of resources as its king possessed, to have effected the subjugation of Europe, had not this country [England] stood in the breach and won the palm of victory.

  You can almost hear ‘Rule Britannia’ playing in the background.

  And most commentators agree that it was Marlborough’s tactical genius that won this ‘palm of victory’. As an experienced diplomat, he was sent to negotiate with England’s allies – Austria, Holland (part of which had been annexed by Spain), Portugal and most of the independent states in Germany. All of these countries were already at war with France because Louis XIV’s grandson Philip had just inherited the crown of Spain, thereby creating the potential for a frighteningly powerful alliance of the two countries. These days, we are just mildly amused to know that King Juan Carlos of Spain is a descendant of Louis XIV and the Archdukes of Austria, but 300 years ago this royal intermingling caused a whole encyclopedia of wars.