Marshal Villars had arrived in Metz on 2 February 1705, to prepare a defence of the Moselle valley against any allied advance. He quickly established a line of fortified posts from the fortifications of Thionville to those of Saarlouis, and on inspecting the troops available to him found them to be well equipped and in good heart. Bad weather had set in, which prevented the marshal from making an attempt to attack the allied camp at Trier, and a projected advance across the Saar had to be abandoned in the third week of April because of heavy rain. Frustrated in his efforts to take the early initiative, the temperamentally aggressive Villars settled his troops into good defensive positions and waited to see what the allies would do.
The Duke of Marlborough, having gained ground in Alsace in the closing weeks of the previous year, had formed a scheme to thrust into France by way of the Moselle, in conjunction with an advance from Landau by imperial troops commanded by the Margrave of Baden; the new emperor’s assurance that he would co-operate was heartening. Such a combined operation should pin the French in the Moselle valley while simultaneously outflanking their position. The intention to use the Moselle valley as a route by which to enter France could not be concealed, as preparations had to be made well in advance. While Marlborough and Baden did so, Overkirk would hold the borders of Holland secure with his corps of Dutch troops. Nothing went to plan; by the time the duke had assembled his 60,000-strong army at Coblenz, sitting at the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle, it was clear that the margrave would not be ready to march to combine forces for some time. The duke was obliged to go to Rastadt in the third week in May, to confer with Baden on the future of the campaign. The margrave was not well, suffering still from the wound to his foot sustained at the Schellenberg in July the previous year, but he still had the firm instructions from Emperor Joseph to join Marlborough. The difficulty was that the imperial troops were ill-equipped and fewer in numbers than promised when the plan for the campaign was formed, numbering only some 15,000 rather than twice that number as Marlborough had expected. Vienna had diverted forces to campaign in Italy and to combat the lingering rebellion in Hungary, and the effort of the empire was diffused as a result. Despite this it was agreed that the rendezvous for the two commanders at Trier should take place on 12 June, with an advance up the line of the Moselle to take place as soon afterwards as could be done.
Marlborough could not maintain his army in camp at Trier while waiting for Baden to come, especially as the commissary officer appointed to gather the stores for the campaign embezzled the funds supplied and defected to the French to avoid punishment. So, on 3 June the duke advanced past Consarbrück to confront Marshal Villars at Sierck, but the French commander prudently refused to give battle. and Marlborough could not assault his strong defences with much hope of success. Forage was hard to come by, and the allied lines of communication and supply back to Trier and Coblenz were lengthy and lay along poor roads. ‘Send forward all possible grain and forage,’ Marlborough wrote, ‘also with the utmost diligence the biscuit to Treves [Trier], for I shall soon have need of it … for we are in a country where we find nothing.’5 It was also apparent that Villars was being reinforced by troops sent by Marsin on the upper Rhine, having now some 70,000 men under command, and the odds for success for Marlborough were lengthening by the day.
Meanwhile, Marshal Villeroi had unexpectedly taken the offensive in the Low Countries, and seized the allied-held fortress of Huy on the river Meuse on 13 June 1705. Overkirk, finding that he was outnumbered, fell back to the protection of an entrenched camp at Maastricht, and Villeroi was able to enter Liège and threaten the allied garrison in the citadel. The French commander had touched a very raw nerve indeed, as the Dutch could not summon sufficient strength to counter this new and very well-judged offensive. This was a critical moment for the alliance, and their commanders in the north were, in military terms, fixed and forced to react to what their opponents were doing. Whatever Marlborough might achieve in the Moselle valley, and the prospects for success had already dimmed, would be nothing if the Dutch lost the hard-won river lines in the Spanish Netherlands and their own border was threatened yet again; it was even possible that if the threat were not speedily countered, they might have to make a separate peace with France. Such an outcome would be extreme, but was by no means out of the question, and the clear likelihood is that Villeroi was directed to take action to cripple Marlborough’s own operations on the Moselle by adroitly applying pressure at a most sensitive point elsewhere. Messengers hurried from Maastricht to the duke’s headquarters on the Moselle, urging him to return with his army without delay, a plaintive summons that could hardly be ignored.
Marlborough was already at a standstill in front of Villars’ strong positions astride the Moselle, in the midst of a campaign that was languishing and likely to be abandoned before long. The duke was, accordingly, quite prepared to march northwards in response to the urgent summons from Overkirk; he now had a sound reason which brooked no argument for changing the course of his campaign for the year – virtue could be neatly made out of necessity with a healthy dash of prompt action. On 16 June 1705 he wrote:
This moment is come lieutenant-general van Hompesch, from Monsieur d’Overkirk, to let me know, that if I do not immediately help them they are undone, which only serves to shew the great apprehensions they are in; for it is impossible for me to send troops to them sooner than I have already resolved; but since they have so much fear at the army [at Maastricht], I dread the consequences at The Hague.6
In pouring rain, Marlborough’s army began to withdraw the next day down the Moselle, on the long road back to the Low Countries. The duke abandoned the campaign with some regret. ‘It is most certain,’ he wrote, ‘that the Moselle is the place where we might have done the French the most harm.’7 Given the strength of Villars’ position, however, and the skill with which the French commander could be relied upon to act, there was an element of wishful thinking in Marlborough’s judgement of what might have been achieved on the Moselle that year.
Leaving a stout garrison in Trier to guard the line of the river, Marlborough took his army over the rough country of the Eiffel at a good pace despite the unseasonably poor weather, so that by 27 June he reached Maastricht and combined forces with Overkirk five days later. The allied army was now some 60,000 strong, and Villeroi prudently lifted his siege of the Liège citadel and fell back behind his own defensive lines. Marlborough was, however, disappointed to learn that Triers had been abandoned with all its stores, even though the place had been under no French threat, and the allied garrison had withdrawn to Trarbach. So surprised was Marshal Villars at this, that he only occupied Trier four days after the allied rearguard he had left the place. His expectations of the distraction that Villeroi’s moves in the Low Countries would impose on allied intentions in the valley, had clearly been exceeded by their actual effect when put into practice.
With his Moselle campaign abandoned, and the French offensive in the Low Countries checked, Marlborough faced a difficult choice in achieving very much in the remainder of the summer. Huy was soon recovered, but the French field army could only be brought to battle if the 60-mile long Lines of Brabant, constructed with such cost and effort over the previous few years, were first crossed. Despite Dutch doubts at the wisdom of the project, this was achieved on 18 July with the lines breached and a strong French and Bavarian covering detachment severely mauled in battle at Elixheim, not far from Louvain. Marshal Villeroi had been badly wrong-footed, and might have suffered even more severely had the Dutch troops, tired after a long night march and then through the heat of the summer morning, got to the field of battle an hour or two sooner. The Elector of Bavaria, whose troops had taken part, and performed very well in the fighting at Elixheim, wrote with an explanation to Versailles that can have done little to cheer the king:
The enemy surprised the barrier between Wanghen [Wanghe] and Espen [Elixheim], and at four o’clock in the morning broke through. It was not discovered u
ntil five o’clock. When I was alerted, I went with Marshal de Villeroi with all diligence, but too late to remedy the situation, for we found a great number of the enemy army had passed through in spite of the charges that were made without success because the enemy forces were superior to those that we could oppose against the, The army was too spread out to attempt a general engagement.8
The whole French strategic posture in Brabant was now turned, and Villeroi fell back behind the river Dyle. Louis XIV wrote to him to express his concern at what had happened. ‘However much I am convinced of your vigilance and the care that you have taken to be alert to the movements of the enemy, it is nonetheless quite disagreeable to see them past the lines in the centre of the Netherlands, and at several important places.’9 With the marshal intent on covering the approaches to Louvain and Brussels, Marlborough managed to slip past and interpose himself between Villeroi and the border with France. Towns such as Mons and Oudenarde were exposed as a result, but Marlborough’s attempts over the next few weeks to engage Villeroi on the Dyle and then to the south of Brussels came to nothing, Dutch caution once more proved a hindrance, although one of the duke’s projects for an attack at the Yssche stream would have probably incurred heavy losses had it gone ahead; the unproductive campaign for the year stuttered to a close with the onset of the cold weather. Some satisfaction was felt in Versailles, for it seemed that Marlborough had certainly been foiled by his opponents.
While these events were taking place across the southern Netherlands, matters were not prospering for the Grand Alliance in Savoy and northern Italy. Vendôme had carried on a generally very successful campaign throughout 1705, and Turin was under constant threat. The reliable imperial field commander, Count Vaudemont, caught a fever and died, and his replacement, Graf Leopold Herberstein, proved less capable of dealing with the bruising tactics of Vendôme. Prince Eugene of Savoy, as President of the Imperial War Council, had Herberstein posted to a less demanding role elsewhere and took over the field command himself in April 1705. Neglect at army headquarters was evident, and his initial report to the emperor Leopold made sober reading:
I should be pressing forward with all speed, but with starving and half-naked soldiers, and without money, tents, bread, transport, or artillery, this is quite impossible … The troops are so starved that they are more like shadows than men, Up till now they have been patient, in the hope that I would bring substantial relief. But as I have been provided with very little I fear that my arrival will merely lead to despair. Desertions are daily increased to a rate of nearly fifty a day.10
Eugene’s arrival had a beneficial effect on the morale of the soldiers: officers and men alike had more reason to be hopeful, while the French immediately began to move with rather more caution and their campaign inevitably lost some of its sparkle. Vendôme intended to keep between the imperial army and Turin, and moved to confront the prince on the river Adda. A bitterly-fought battle at Cassano in mid-August was indecisive, but Eugene was prevented from getting his army across the river, and so Vendôme achieved his immediate objective. Dogged still by shortages of money, munitions and equipment, Eugene wrote that ‘The army still hangs together’.11 Still, there was little choice but to pull back while the cold months of autumn came on, and the spirits of the troops sagged once more.
The disappointing battle at Cassano, however, had halted Vendôme for a time, while giving some relief to imperial Field-Marshal Guido von Starhemberg in Turin, and so was not entirely without benefit. Eugene described his strategic effort as ‘A war of diversion. This diversion already involves a heavy expenditure for the French in men and money. They have to keep 80,000 men in Italy, whereas the Allies only have 40,000 there.’12 Unable for the moment to maintain his army in the field, Eugene withdrew into Venetian territory, ignoring the perfectly natural complaints of that neutral state at the unwanted incursion. The imperial army could rest and recuperate to a certain degree, but the risk however was that if the allied campaign failed to make more progress than it had up to now, Venice, and possibly other Italian states, might make common cause with France if they were pushed too far.
Marlborough went to Vienna late in 1705 to confer with Emperor Joseph, and Eugene wrote to him with a frank account of his concerns at this precarious stage for the fortunes of the Grand Alliance:
My army is ruined, the horses worn out with past fatigues, no sure footing in this country, and the enemy re-assembling their forces in my front. Besides, the Venetians threaten to declare against us, if we do not quit their territory; the princes of Italy join in this declaration, and are inclined to form a league for their common defence … Succours of men and money should be prepared for this army, so that it be enabled to take the field, at the latest, towards the end of March, for which purpose the magazines should be established, the recruits and horses for remounting the cavalry at hand and the fleet ready to co-operate in the spring, either on the coast of Spain, or to invade Naples, which is without troops. I am much concerned that I cannot have the honour of joining your Highness at Vienna.13
Amongst the fruits of the duke’s timely visit to Vienna, where he was incapacitated with gout for a while, was the immediate provision on his own authority of 100,000 crowns for outstanding wages to be paid to the troops, and a further loan of £250,000 to buy supplies for Eugene’s army. The degree to which both men were quite convinced that the war for Spain could be lost or won in Italy, regardless of what happened in the Low Countries, was remarkable and shown in a comment made in a letter Eugene sent from Vienna to Marlborough a few weeks later:
No breach can be made in the Spanish Monarchy except through Italy. This fact is evident from the efforts of the King of France to support this war, and his comparative indifference in other quarters; for this [French] army has never diminished; but on the contrary, this moment is increasing with considerable reinforcements.14
The point was a good one in achieving a division of the empire, the aim as originally envisaged in 1701, but would do little to secure the throne in Madrid. That additional aspiration was still in the growing stage and had not yet transfixed the attention of the allies to the exclusion of almost anything else. The strong desire in Vienna to secure their gains in as much of Italy as possible was clear, but it was hard to dispassionately argue that gains in Italy were of more benefit to the Grand Alliance than those that might be achieved in Spain or in the wealthy Spanish Netherlands. At any rate, the loan arranged by Marlborough was paid directly to Eugene, through bankers in Venice, to avoid the almost inevitable siphoning off of funds that would happened if Vienna had been involved.
Although Catalonia had been taken and held for Archduke Charles, the general lack of progress for the Grand Alliance in 1705 inclined Louis XIV to look forward to the coming campaigns with renewed confidence. In particular, a feeling took hold that the earlier successes of the Duke of Marlborough in the Low Countries and southern Germany had been due to good fortune rather than to skill, and that Marshal Villeroi, having handled operations in the southern Netherlands rather well, should be able to continue to do so. The king’s grandson was in Madrid and securing his position satisfactorily, the treasury was under acute strain, however: tax revenue was insufficient to fund the war, and an end to that vast expense would be very welcome. It seemed in Versailles that the most propitious way to bring the allies to the negotiating table in the meekest frame of mind would be to attack them everywhere, and so demonstrate the continued vitality and strength of the French war effort. Instructions were sent out to French field commanders that they were to take the offensive on all fronts; reinforcements went to Marshal Tessé in Spain, Marshal Villars commanded energetically on the upper Rhine and achieved a success against imperial troops at Hagenau, while Marsin was active in the Moselle valley. Berwick had struck in the south, seizing Nice, while in northern Italy Vendôme achieved a victory over an imperial army on 19 April 1706. ‘He attacked the troops of Prince Eugene upon the heights of Calcinato, drove them before him, kille
d three thousand men, took twenty standards, ten pieces of cannon, and eight thousand prisoners.’15 Savoy, newest and most junior member of the Grand Alliance, was imperilled and isolated, ready to be picked off, so that the Duke of Marlborough, frustrated at the lack of progress in the Low Countries, even considered marching south to once more combine forces with Prince Eugene. ‘It seems to me,’ he wrote to Count Wratislaw, ‘high time to think seriously about this war in Italy. A war which employs so great a number of enemy troops, who would fall upon our backs everywhere.’16
It did not seem likely that the States-General would be at all enthusiastic over a proposal for Marlborough to go and campaign so far away as northern Italy. However, the defeat at Calcinato underlined the gravity of the imperial position in the region, and if the campaign in the Low Countries was to be just a repeat of the sterile events of 1705, and assuming that the Margrave of Baden would not throw off his inertia and move to threaten the French in the Moselle valley, then the far-off project was not so unrealistic as it might have appeared at first glance. The duke put the details to a few trusted confidantes at The Hague, but he wrote to Sidney Godolphin in London, ‘They are very positive, that they dare not consent to letting their own countrymen go.’17 There was no intention that Dutch troops would be expected to go so far away, so Marlborough was actually encouraged that the suggestion made was not immediately condemned out of hand. As it turned out, affairs would quicken dramatically in Brabant before very long and there would be no more talk of going to Italy with or without Eugene.
The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) Page 15
