Marlborough

by Richard Holmes

  I am not sure that John Blackader would have approved of Mrs Christian Davies, who had joined the army to look for her husband, who had enlisted when in drink. By ‘having been long conversant in the camp, she had lost that softness which heightens the beauty of the fair, and contracted a masculine air and behaviour’. She made a convincing enough dragoon, though she ‘narrowly escaped being discovered’ when a surgeon investigated a gunshot wound to her hip. She remembered that the army advanced by

  long and tiresome marches, which greatly harassed our foot … I cannot help taking notice in this place, though it breaks in upon my narrative, of the Duke of Marlborough’s great humanity, who seeing some of our foot drop, through the fatigue of the march, took them into his own coach.33

  John Marshall Deane, a ‘private sentinel’ in 1st Foot Guards, and thus close to the bottom of the logistic pile, agreed about the weather.

  One thing observable, it hath rained 32 days together more or less and miserable marches we have had for deep and dirty roads and through tedious woods and wildernesses and over cast high rock and mountains, that it may easily be judged what our little army endured … And to help, everything grew to be at an excessive dear rate that there was scarce a living for a soldier and the nearer came every day to the Grand Army the dearer every thing was.34

  However, the army held up well. Desertion was low, and, despite the bad weather, the army left fewer than 1,000 sick on its line of march.

  The careful work of the medical historian Eric Gruber von Arni shows that Marlborough took a great deal of care over the provision for his sick and wounded. A convoy of boats with medical equipment moved up the Rhine and established a transit hospital at Kassel, and then went on up the River Main via Frankfurt to Wertheim, whence it moved by road to establish another transit hospital at Heidenheim. On 22 June Marlborough, ahead with his cavalry, wrote to Charles Churchill, who was with the infantry on the rutted roads behind him.

  I received yesterday yours of the 20th at Blockingen, and having informed myself of the proper place of sending your sick men, I am assured they will be best at Heidenheim, which is not far from you, and therefore desire you will forthwith send them thither in carts with an able surgeon and a mate or two to look after them, and such commission and non-commission officers as you shall think fit, giving them at the same time money for their subsistence.

  When he closed the letter ‘I long to have you with me, being your loving brother,’ he was writing in as much of a professional as a personal sense, for he was increasingly anxious, with hostile territory ahead, to get the army closed up.35

  On 10 June, at Mundelsheim, sixty miles north-west of Ulm, Marlborough met the Prince Eugène for the first time, and they quickly established that rapport that sometimes unites men who are different in almost all save a driving sense of purpose. Marlborough was tall, handsome and beautifully turned out. He had been a ladies’ man in his youth, and was married to a very powerful woman. Eugène was ugly, plainly dressed and had no apparent interest in women: indeed, in his youth there had been rumours that he charged with the lightest of cavalry. Once the cares of office were off his back he seems to have settled down happily enough in some sort of relationship with Countess Eleanora Bethkány, but he believed that there was no point in talking politics to women, for ‘They do not have the necessary stability as men, easily become careless, allow their friendship to dictate what they say and therefore you cannot depend on their discretion.’36 We cannot be sure what Marlborough would have made of this, except perhaps to smile thinly, change the subject, and offer his guest another glass of tokay.

  Marlborough was famously soft: Lord Ailesbury complained that he was so kind-hearted that he could not bear to chide a servant or a corporal. His courts-martial often recommended to his mercy men who had broken the letter of the law. For instance, a court-martial felt that Private John Muddey of Captain Alexander Ruthven’s company of 1st Foot Guards had not really intended to desert:

  He went from his post without leave, with intent only to visit an acquaintance in Major General Murray’s Regiment, but was stopped in the way, and his officer affirming that he is a weak and silly man, and this his first fault.37

  Muddey was recommended to the duke’s mercy, which was unfailingly exercised in these cases. Eugène, in contrast, believed that such generosity weakened discipline. In one instance Marlborough interceded with him for a soldier who had been condemned to death. ‘If your Grace has not executed more men than I have done,’ said Eugène, ‘I will consent to the pardon of this fellow.’ It transpired that, for all his generosity, Marlborough had actually hanged more men. ‘There, my Lord, you see the benefit of example,’ argued Eugène. ‘You pardon many, and therefore have to execute many; I never pardon one, therefore few dare offend, and of course but few suffer.’38 Nicholas Henderson grasps the essentials of the relationship between Eugène and Marlborough:

  The two men were indispensable to each other … Not that they were rivals. Their collaboration was constant and selfless. Utterly different in personality and temperament though they were, the two men combined so exquisitely that they were described as ‘like two bodies with but a single soul’. On one occasion, at the zenith of their association, a medal was struck likening them to Castor and Pollux.39

  On 11 June Marlborough and Eugène rode out together on the march towards Heppach, and Marlborough had arranged for the British cavalry, nineteen squadrons strong, to be drawn up by their way. As Winston S. Churchill put it, the men and horses were in perfect condition, ‘a little travel stained, rather fine-drawn, but all that soldiers should be’.40 ‘My Lord,’ said Eugène, ‘I never saw better horses, better clothes, finer belts and accoutrements; but money, which you don’t want in England, will buy clothes and fine horses, but it can’t buy this lively air I see in every one of these troopers’ faces.’ ‘Sir,’ said Marlborough, ‘that must be attributed to their heartiness for the public cause and the particular pleasure and satisfaction they have in seeing your Highness.’41 If this could be overheard by a nearby chaplain it must have been intended for public consumption, but it was none the worse for that.

  Three days later Marlborough and Eugène met Prince Louis at the Inn of the Golden Fleece at Gross Heppach, not far from Stuttgart. They agreed that Prince Louis should remain with Marlborough, with the two generals commanding on alternate days, while Eugène made for the Rhine to hold the Lines of Stollhofen. This was not a question, as some have suggested, of Louis being anxious to move a firebrand out of the way, because Marlborough had told the Prince of Hesse, some days before the meeting, that Eugène’s mission had already been fixed in Vienna: ‘He is going to command on the Rhine, where his presence is deemed necessary.’42 It was not an arrangement of Prince Louis’ making. Eugène was senior to him in the Imperialist army; Eugène had already told Marlborough something of ‘the character of the Prince of Baden, by which I find I must be much more on my guard than if I was with Prince Eugène’, and he assured Marlborough that the emperor would not hesitate to replace Louis if the king did not act with vigour in the common cause.

  Marlborough and Louis intended to seek out the Elector, who, Marlborough thought, ‘will either retire over the Danube or march to his strong camp at Dillengen’, and they would act accordingly.43 Marlborough hoped that, just as the Elector had joined the French cause because of self-interest, he might be induced to leave it for the same reason, and felt that if cuffed hard enough, Max Emmanuel would negotiate. He then pushed on, through those roads that Sergeant Wilson found so tedious, to Gingen near Ulm, where on 26 July reinforcements now brought his strength to ninety-six battalions, two hundred squadrons and forty-eight guns, 80,000 men by the lowest of reckonings. He was delighted to have got his foot and guns in at last, but told both Godolphin and Sarah, to whom he wrote separate letters on the twenty-ninth, that there were still some Danish horse and foot to arrive, and he feared he could not do anything serious until he had them. He added that he was hoping that
Charles Hodges, groom of the robes to Queen Anne, would send him the design for a stable for the Ranger’s Lodge in Windsor Great Park. ‘I should be glad all conveniencies were about it,’ he concluded, on one of the last days of relative peace.44

  He could not but be aware that his own future and that of Godolphin’s government teetered in the balance. Thomas Coke wrote to tell him that the squirearchy was pleased to see some stirring in the covert at last: ‘The country gentlemen had long groaned under the weight of four shillings in the pound without hearing of a town taken or any enterprise endeavoured.’ They were now ‘more cheerful in this war’ when expeditions were ‘carried on so secretly that they are in a manner successful even before the French, so famous formerly for good intelligence, can give a guess where the stroke is likely to fall’.45 But failure would be harshly punished: ‘If he fails,’ wrote one critic, ‘we will break him up as hounds upon a hare.’

  Being Strongly Entrenched: The Schellenberg

  The stroke was to fall on Donauwörth, which stands at the confluence of the Danube and the Wörnitz, about midway between Ulm to the west and Ingolstadt to the east. The town itself lay on the low ground on the north bank of the Danube, with a single bridge (and an extra pontoon bridge in 1704) connecting it to Nordheim on the southern bank, and the wooded hills of the Donauwörth Forest rolling off to the north. The town and the river crossing that gave the place its significance were dominated from the east by the Schellenberg, rising over a hundred metres above the height of the river. Near its summit was a three-bastioned earthwork, the Sternschanze, built by the Swedes during the Thirty Years War more than half a century before and testifying to the lasting importance of this spot.

  That old bruiser Colonel de la Colonie, there with his Bavarian red grenadiers, described the hill as ‘oval in plan, with a gentle slope on the southern side, giving very easy communication with Donauwörth; while on the northern side the country is covered with woods and undergrowth, reaching up close to the old entrenchments’.46 His practised eye noted that the slopes to the north and west, from which the attack would come, were convex, so that attackers were out of sight for most of their climb, only coming into view for the last two hundred paces. Although he would still recognise the place today, he could not but be struck by the fact that the B25 autoroute, the Romantische Strasse, hurtles in between the Schellenberg and the town it commands, and the northern suburbs of Donauwörth have spread, on either side of the Kaibach brook, north of the town. The Sternschanze is still there, and the whole feature, despite the passage of time, well deserves the caption ‘a tough nut to crack’.

  On 1 July NS the Allied army marched north-east to Amerdingen, right across the front of the entrenched position at Dillingen, held by the Elector and his French ally Marshal Ferdinand, comte Marsin. Max Emmanuel declined to budge, but, seeing that if the Allies continued to march eastwards they would cross the Danube and be able to manoeuvre on his right and rear, he sent Jean Baptiste, comte d’Arco, to secure Donauwörth with sixteen Bavarian and five French battalions, nine squadrons of French dragoons and eight heavy guns, some 12,000 men. D’Arco was an experienced veteran of Bavarian and Imperial service, who had been made a Bavarian marshal in 1702 and whose support for Max Emmanuel’s pro-French policy was to bring him the baton of a marshal of France. He left four French battalions in the town and marched the rest of his men up into the Schellenberg where, with the help of local peasants, they began clearing fields of fire, constructing earthworks and palisades, and connecting the hill to the town itself with a line of trenches protected by gabions, large wicker baskets filled with earth.

  Historian James Falkner’s soldierly assessment of d’Arco’s quandary is wholly logical. D’Arco had three options. He could take his little all-arms force forward and fight a mobile defence, making the Allies pay dearly for the crossings of the Wörnitz, or fire Donauwörth and its magazines and tear down its bridge, depriving the town of strategic purpose. Holding the Schellenberg made sense only if the Elector sent reinforcements and the Allies formed up in the accepted manner before launching a formal attack. This was the option d’Arco selected, and he was not unreasonable in doing so. With every day that passed the Schellenberg would grow stronger, and the Allies would be unlikely to attack it if Max Emmanuel slipped his army along the Danube behind it.

  Marlborough’s spies and scouts told him what was happening on the Schellenberg, and de la Colonie complained that a corporal in the Electoral Prince of Bavaria’s Regiment deserted with full details of defensive preparations. While we must be careful not to make more of the tension between Prince Louis and Marlborough than the evidence warrants, the two men certainly approached war in different ways. Louis tended to be a formalised and reflective commander, and moreover, he had formerly campaigned alongside Max Emmanuel and, as a fellow German prince, was on good personal terms with him regardless of the present political climate. Marlborough, in contrast, needed a quick decision and had no time for niceties. He explained to Godolphin that the Schellenberg

  is a hill that commands the town of Donauwörth which passage on the Danube would be very advantageous for us, for I would make a magazine for our army there. If we had the cannon ready we could not fail of taking it. Prince Louis assures me that we shall have 20 pieces of battery here in 4 days, which I am afraid is impossible.47

  On 1 July Marlborough sent forward Cadogan and Goor, his quartermaster generals, to look at the ground, and he speedily concluded that that he had neither room nor time for manoeuvre. A finger of high wooded ground, then called the Boshberg, pointed southwards from the larger forest to the north, making it impossible to move round the Schellenberg so as to outflank it from the east, while the Kaibach and Wörnitz, with the old defences of the town, made attack from the west impossible. The place had to be carried quickly, because the Elector’s quartermasters were already laying out camping grounds south of the Danube in preparation for the arrival of the main army, and this reduced Marlborough’s options to the frontal assault which Prince Louis advised most strongly against. He decided to attack on the following day, when it was his turn to command the army, but meanwhile ordered Cadogan to lay out encampments on the Wörnitz west of the town to persuade d’Arco that he proposed to do things by the stately book.

  Marlborough threw away the book. He set off at three o’clock on the morning of 2 July with 6,000 foot, made up, as he tells us of 130 men, including ten grenadiers, selected from each Allied battalion, thirty squadrons of horse and dragoons, and three full battalions of Louis’ Imperial grenadiers, two German and one Austrian. Eighty men of 1st Foot Guards under Lord Peterborough’s eldest boy John, Lord Mordaunt, had volunteered to furnish the ‘forlorn hope’ which would lead the assault. Marching along ‘very difficult’ roads they reached the Wörnitz at Ebermorgen at about 1 p.m., and threw pontoons across to support the single existing bridge, but were not all over till three. Behind the stormers came 12,000 Allied infantry in two echelons, under Major General Henry Withers and Count Horn. The cavalry and dragoons, under Lieutenant Generals Lumley and Hompesch, who had marched early with Marlborough, spent part of their time preparing fascines, big bundles of green wood, which were to be used to help fill in entrenchments. The mounted troops then reassembled to form a fourth echelon after the stormers and their two waves of infantry supports. Whatever the theory of the matter, chaplain Josias Sandby, watching from Berg, distinctly saw six lines in all, ‘four of foot and two of horse’, probably the forlorn hope, the main body of stormers, two lines of infantry supports, dragoons and then horse.

  D’Arco heard of Marlborough’s march as early as 9 a.m., and spent the day working furiously on the defences of the Schellenberg, although he evidently did not expect an assault that day. He wrote to the Elector asking for support, was told that Marlborough had come so close on a personal reconnaissance that he had been fired upon, and then went for dinner with Colonel du Bordet, commanding the troops in the town. His meal was interrupted when he was told that
the Allied advance guard was in the suburb of Berg, which the Bavarian pickets had fired to delay the advance. Telling du Bordet to take special care of the trench and gabion link with the Schellenberg, d’Arco spurred off for the hill.

  The attackers formed up on the line of the Kaibach, in dead ground where d’Arco’s guns could not hit them, while their own artillery, Colonel Holcroft Blood commanding, was dragged into battery on Berg hill. Although it was hard for the Allied gunners to hit the defences on the crest, many of the rounds which just cleared this feature ploughed into the infantry drawn up in support behind it. De la Colonie said that the first salvo killed ‘the Comte de la Bastide and the lieutenant of my company, to whom I was speaking, and twelve grenadiers, knocked over like ninepins; my coat was covered with the blood and brains of these gentlemen … the enemy’s battery … raked us through and through’. He lost eighty men without firing a shot.48 He was able to take his revenge soon enough. Led by Lieutenant General van Goor in person, the Allied infantry stepped off at about six o’clock, and though they had perhaps four hundred yards to cover they were not visible from the hill for the first two hundred, and de la Colonie remembered, in the quirky way that men recall little things at such times, that he saw their colours breasting the rise first. Coming up the same slope, Sergeant Wilson recalled: ‘The front rank had orders for every man to sling his firelock and take a fascine in his arms, in order to break the enemy’s shot in advancing. After which we advanced with all the courage and vigour in life.’49

  The French and Bavarian musketry, delayed so long, was deadly when it came. The defenders had also stockpiled wagonloads of hand grenades, and bowled these underarm downhill, where they burst in the packed ranks of the attackers. As de la Colonie acknowledged, ‘The English infantry attacked with all the fury in the world; they showed a terrible determination right up to our parapet, but they met there, to repulse them, at least as much fury and determination as they themselves brought.’50 The first assault was driven back, and Bavarian grenadiers scampered out of their defences to hurry the broken attackers back down the hill, but were themselves checked by the disciplined fire of the next attacking echelon. The second assault fared no better than the first. This time, as de la Colonie saw, the Allied generals had dismounted and were leading their men forward on foot, but despite hand-to-hand fighting of extraordinary ferocity – de la Colonie witnessed men tearing each other’s eyes out with their fingernails – d’Arco’s line held, leaving Allied dead piled so high that they topped the fascines protecting his trenches.