The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714)
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Allied cavalry were now raiding the border region of northern France, and even the suburbs of Arras were harried, causing Louis XIV to protest at ‘the harshness with which the enemy execute their demands for contributions’.19 Marlborough and Eugene also seized as many horses and draft animals as they could, to assist in the dragging forward of the huge quantities of warlike materiel necessary to further the siege of Lille. In any case, such comments by the king sat badly coming as they did from a monarch whose generals had for decades happily lived off the land of his neighbours whenever it suited them, and who had adopted without hesitation a policy of ‘eating up a country’ to prevent anyone, civil or military, from subsisting there, but it now was France that suffered and that was the real difference.
An outer-work at the Marquette Abbey, on the northern side of the French defences of Lille, was stormed by British and Dutch troops on 11 August, but the scale of the task in hand had plainly been underestimated by both Marlborough and Eugene. The siege operations proceeded more slowly than anticipated, while the French field army, reinforced by troops drawn from garrisons elsewhere, attempted without much success to hamper the allied progress. Marlborough commanded the covering army, while the prince oversaw the actual siege operations in the trenches and gun batteries. As the French manoeuvred against him from the southwards in early September, the duke took up a strong defensive position between the river Marque at Peronne and the Deule (Dyle) at Noyelles. Once established there Marlborough defied the French commanders to attack him in position, and drew some of Eugene’s troops out from the entrenchments before Lille to bolster his covering army. Daunted by the strength of the allied defences, the French hesitated and even referred the question of whether to make an attack back to Versailles. At length the decision was that Marlborough was too well entrenched to risk an assault, with Berwick writing to the Minister for War that ‘it would not be possible to attack an enemy at least as strong as we, well posted, entrenched, whose flanks are covered and who cannot be dislodged’.20 The truth of this simple fact was not lost on the king, although he still urged his grandson that Lille be saved, so long as no unnecessary risks were run. ‘Nothing could be more advantageous to the good of the state. I pray to God that He will assist you and conserve you in what you are doing.’21
A rather premature allied attack on Lille was made on the night of 7 September to try and storm the gates of St Andrew and St Magdalene, but this was bloodily repulsed by the French defenders. A sharp counter-attack was made the following morning which caused some confusion in the besiegers’ trenches, but a French attempt to intercept the latest supply convoy coming forward from Brussels was foiled by cavalry under command of the Earl of Albemarle, and the convoy came safely into the allied camp on 11 September. This was fortunate, for the Duc de Vendôme, having failed to engage Marlborough’s covering army, or delay the admittedly rather slow progress of the siege of Lille, now turned his full attention to cutting off the allied army from its bases around Brussels, Ostend and in southern Holland. In the meantime a second assault on the Lille defences was thrown back with heavy loss, including Prince Eugene who was wounded in the attempt. Marlborough had to take a closer hand in the siege operations while he recovered, and managed in so doing to inject a greater sense of urgency into the whole project. The duke wrote to Sidney Godolphin in London on 20 September:
It is impossible for me to express the uneasiness I suffer for the ill-conduct of our engineers, at the siege, where I think everything goes very wrong. It would be a cruel thing, if after all we have obliged the enemy to quit all thoughts of relieving the place, by force, which they have done, by re-passing the Scheldt, we should fail to take it, by the ignorance of our engineers, and the want of stores.22
The lines of supply and communication for the allied army, both to Brussels and to Ostend, were always vulnerable while the French held on to Ghent and Bruges, and a particularly vicious battle was fought at Wynendael late in September 1708 when Comte de la Motte, the French commander in Bruges, tried to intercept a convoy of wagons taking much-needed supplies to the besieging army before Lille. Marshal Boufflers had given up the town once a breach had been made in the defences by the allied batteries, and withdrew his surviving troops into the massive citadel on 25 October. Meanwhile, Vendôme seized the crossing places on the river Scheldt (except at allied-held Oudenarde), to cut Marlborough’s army off from Antwerp and southern Holland.
An attempt by the Elector of Bavaria to seize Brussels failed, and Marlborough was able to force Vendôme’s troops away from the Scheldt crossings, re-opening his lines of supply and communication, and maintained the tempo of the siege operations in the meantime. All efforts to interrupt the siege having failed, and plainly not likely to be renewed before spring, if at all, Boufflers sought permission from Louis XIV to give up the citadel, once a breach began to be opened in the walls. This was granted, and on 9 December the marshal capitulated on good terms. The loss of so important a fortress was greatly regretted, but the valiant defence that Boufflers and his garrison had made had pulled the allied campaign to a standstill for over four months, and Marlborough and Eugene had been unable to make the most of their initial success so daringly grasped at Oudenarde in July. Louis XIV was in no doubt about what had been achieved by the long defence of Lille, and he wrote to Boufflers:
I cannot sufficiently praise your vigour, and the pertinacity of the troops under your command. To the very end they have backed up your courage and zeal. I have given the senior officers special proof of my satisfaction with the manner in which they defended the town. You are to assure them, and the whole of the garrison, that I have every reason to be satisfied with them. You are to report to me as soon as you have made the necessary arrangements for the troops. I hope these will not detain you, and that I shall have the satisfaction of telling you myself that the latest proof you have given of your devotion to my service strengthens the sentiments of respect and friendship which I have for you.23
Meanwhile, Louis XIV had written to Philip V in Madrid with a sombre assessment of the results of the year’s arduous and arid campaigning together with an even more gloomy prediction, alluded to almost in passing:
I have always laboured to maintain you in the rank that it pleased God to place you. You see that up to now I have made the utmost efforts to keep you there and I have not asked whether the good of my kingdom demanded it. I have followed the suggestions of the tender love that I have always had for you, and you can be assured that it will lead me as long as the state of my affairs permits.24
At the close of the year, the weather had turned bitterly cold, and there was excessive taxation and economic chaos in France, with a failed harvest, food shortages in many districts, bread riots and discontent at burdensome taxation. For all the devotion and gallantry of commanders like Marshal Boufflers, justly commended as he was by the king, the continuing cost of the war was stupendous, and the Duc de St Simon wrote of the distress amongst the French at this time:
People never ceased to wonder what had become of all the money of the realm. Nobody could any longer pay, because nobody was paid; the country-people, overwhelmed with exactions and with valueless property, had become insolvent; trade no longer yielded anything – good faith and confidence were at an end … The realm was entirely exhausted; the troops even, were not paid, although no one could imagine what was done with the millions that came into the King’s coffers.25
There was an understandable desire in Versailles to deflect blame from the Duc de Bourgogne, the King’s grandson, for the calamities of the 1708 campaign in the Low Countries, and instead to lay this at the door of the Duc de Vendôme. In this the veteran soldier did not help himself, writing a partial and very misleading account of the activities of the French army that summer and autumn, and in so doing handed Louis XIV a firm reason to dismiss him from the royal service:
He learned that he was not to serve, and that he was to no longer receive a general’s pay. When M. de Vendôme r
eturned from Flanders, he had a short interview with the King in which he made many bitter complaints against Puységur, one of his lieutenant-generals, whose sole offence was that he was much attached to M. De Bourgogne. Puységur was a great favourite of the King … He had, in his turn, come back from Flanders, and had a private audience with the King. At the name of Vendôme, Puységur lost all patience. He described to the King all his faults, the impertinences, the obstinacy, the insolence of M. De Vendôme, with precision and clearness.26
However, Vendôme, for all his boorishness and faults, was too good a general to be left out of things for long, and he was sent the following year to take a firm grip on the faltering campaign in Spain. He arrived in the aftermath of a series of reverses for the French claimant and his supporters, and, as it proved, just in time.
France, and the French cause in the war, was in distress, and Madame de Maintenon, the morganatic wife of the French king, wrote from Versailles to the Princesse des Ursins in Madrid with a very caustic assessment of the events in Flanders:
You know that the end of our campaign has been pitiful, and that the enemies have the audacity to besiege Ghent because they hope that they will have as much success there as they had in the assault upon Lille. Marshal Boufflers’ defence has made us understand how bold this enterprise was, since he gave our armies four months to raise the siege and during those four months we were able to succeed only in small enterprises; a greater effort would have had the same success.27
The lady missed the key point completely, for Boufflers’ prolonged defence of Lille had, after the astonishing success gained at Oudenarde, dragged the allied campaign to a halt. The siege had only succeeded after immense effort and toil, and Lille had fulfilled the role for which it had been so stoutly fortified by Vauban. The fortress belt, constructed along the north and eastern frontiers of France over the previous thirty years, at enormous expense, was soon to prove its worth. The siege was just the opening act in a prolonged passage of arms that would over the next four years save France from invasion and disaster. In the meantime, Ghent and Bruges were indeed retaken by the allies in the early part of January 1709, and while severe winter weather gripped western Europe, moves to achieve a longed-for peace moved steadily forward.
Chapter 11
Unattainable Peace
‘We wait with impatience for that happy hour.’1
The night of 5 January 1709 saw the onset of bitterly cold weather across most of north-western Europe. The hard frost that set in continued for seventeen days, followed by a twelve-day thaw and then a fall of heavy snow and a biting cold wind which lasted until mid-March. The effect on the French was devastating with even vines as far south as Provence dying of the frost. The river Seine froze, as did the sea surf in Brittany, hard enough for fully-laden wagons to safely pass over the mouths of wide estuaries, while in Versailles wine froze in the decanters before reaching the glass. The impact on livestock was devastating, with thousands of animals freezing to death in their stalls and barns, while marching soldiers, who could at least swing their arms in an effort to keep warm, were seen to suddenly drop dead in their tracks.
France was in desperate straits; her soldiers were threadbare and often unpaid, the northern regions invaded, farmland and crops devastated by war and the bitterly cold winter weather, and her people beaten down with taxation and lack of food. Heavy spring rain in the peninsula, after a poor harvest the previous autumn, made it almost certain that the Spanish people would face food shortages before long, leading Philip V to open all Spanish ports to traders of whatever nationality, so that desperately-needed corn could be imported even if it was carried in British and Dutch ships. French troops in Catalonia were subsisting by seizing what food they could from the local people, with Marshal Noailles expressing the hope that the peasants would revolt, and by thus becoming rebels justify the confiscation already being widely practised by his soldiers. Louis XIV was obliged to seek terms from the Grand Alliance to bring to an end the war for the throne of Spain. ‘This was the frightful state to which we were reduced,’ the Duc de St Simon remembered, ‘when envoys were sent into Holland to try and bring about a peace.’2
Negotiations had of course been going on for some time, making little progress, as the fortunes of war waxed and waned, and hopes and ambitions, and the desire to conclude a peace, shifted accordingly. Now, Louis XIV’s treasury was empty and he needed peace. The French Minister for War, Michel de Chamillart, wrote on 29 March 1709 to Marshal Villars, now commanding the army in Flanders, that ‘the long duration of a war, out of all proportion to the King’s finances, has placed us under the hard necessity of receiving law [demands] from our enemies’.3 The Grand Alliance had achieved all that it had originally sought and more, but the heady successes of the summer of Ramillies and Turin, in particular, had inclined the allies to increase their demands. ‘No Peace without Spain’ was the cry, coined in London at first, but taken up with enthusiasm by the rest of the alliance soon enough. Philip V was to be deposed and Archduke Charles should after all have the throne in Madrid with an undivided empire. The appointed allied negotiators were under instructions to conclude terms to bring the war to an end, but only to the greatest possible advantage of the Grand Alliance.4
While the talking went on in comfortable council chambers and salons, the fighting also continued so that each side could try and ring the last drop of advantage from the weary war. After the capture of the Valencian port of Denia by the Chevalier d’Asfeld in November 1708, the French moved quickly on to attack Alicante. The commander of the allied garrison, Major-General John Richards, had only 700 men from Sybourg’s Regiment and Hotham’s Regiment to face a besieging force of about 14,000 French and Spanish horse and foot together with a powerful siege battery. Finding the citadel too powerful and well-sited to overcome by breaching with artillery, d’Asfeld had a large mine dug and primed with 1,200 barrels of gun-powder; after inviting the allied officers to view the thoroughness of the preparations, he called on Richards to submit. The invitation to do so was rejected several times, and on 3 March 1709 the mine was detonated. Richards and fifty of his men were killed in the explosion, but the survivors, commanded by the Huguenot officer Lieutenant-Colonel d’Albon, continued to resist, and a naval squadron under Admiral Byng put into the bay on 16 April to bombard the besiegers in their trenches. This attempt had to be called off due to bad weather. With no hope of relief, the remnants of the allied garrison submitted after a valiant defence over five months, eating up precious time that d’Asfeld could have more profitably used elsewhere.
The loss of Alicante was just the latest in a list of allied reverses in Spain; the fortunes of the Archduke Charles and his adherents continued to flag, with Philip V firmly established in Madrid and proving increasingly popular with the bulk of the Spanish people. The young king was however, well aware that his grandfather had to shift troops away from the peninsula in order to bolster the northern border of France, Louis XIV writing to his grandson early in June that ‘I am obliged to recall immediately all the troops I now have in Spain’.5 This was no great surprise, for the desperate military situation in the north was well known, but Philip V had little option but to declare a firm intention to fight on no matter what happened. On 17 April he wrote to his grandfather:
My own resolution has long been taken, and nothing in the world can make me change it. God has set the crown of Spain upon my head; I shall keep it there as long as I have a drop of blood in my veins. This much I owe to my conscience, my honour, and my subjects’ love. I am sure that they will not abandon me, whatever happens, and that if I expend my life at their head, as I am determined to do, even to the very last extremity, to remain with them, they will shed their blood with equal cheerfulness, to keep me. Were I capable of such cowardice as to resign my kingdom, you, I am certain, would disown me as your grandson.6
Louis XIV was moved, and admired his grandson’s determination, but not his grasp of political and economic reality, replyi
ng: ‘Knowing that my kingdom cannot hope to sustain much longer the weight of this war it is necessary to end it at whatever price.’7 All the same, as Philip was in such a frame of mind, it was not at all sure that he would now be prepared to be dictated to by his grandfather in Versailles just in order that France could have peace. The letters contained plain implied criticism on each side, but Philip refused to dilute the message. ‘Those are my true feelings.’8 Ignoring protests from his bishops, he expelled the Papal Nuncio, as Clement XI, under Habsburg pressure in Italy, had recognised Archduke Charles as ‘the most Catholic King’.
Meanwhile, the Earl of Galway and the Marquis de Frontiera had advanced from Campo Mayor in Portugal once more, but on 7 May 1709 at the river Caya their 15,000-strong army was badly beaten in battle by a similar number of Spanish troops commanded by the Marquis de Bay. The intention had been to prevent Bay’s troops from devastating the growing spring crops in the region, but Frontiera’s cavalry advanced over the Caya, without adequate infantry support, and been driven off in confusion, and a brigade of British and Catalan infantry under the command of Major-General Sankey in the centre were isolated and forced to surrender. With some 500 men killed or wounded on either side in the action, the allies could also count the loss of 900 prisoners and five guns. They withdrew to Elvas, where on Galway’s advice a good defensive position was adopted that foiled an attempted advance by Bay, who had not unreasonably hoped to make more of his recent success.