The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714)
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The Elector-Bishop of Cologne declared his neutrality, but with his domains being in allied hands, he really could little else.
As this sorry tale of reverses unfolded, the Duc de Bourgogne left the army to return to Versailles as did his half-brother, the Duc de Maine, perhaps to avoid the taint of defeat attaching itself to a Prince, or even two Princes, of the Blood. Louis XIV was not impressed: ‘I fear his departure will have a bad effect on my troops and give confidence to the enemies who will be sure that my army is in no condition to attempt anything against them.’9 However, the Duke of Berwick recalled that in fact ‘the King, seeing the ill-turn affairs took in this campaign, recalled the Duke of Burgundy from the army’.10 Boufflers’ efforts were further hampered by Louis XIV’s insistence that he send troops to bolster the French forces on the Rhine and in Alsace. The fortress of Landau had been lost to imperial troops commanded by the Emperor’s eldest son, Joseph, the King of the Romans, in mid-September but this further dividing of French forces was a distinct handicap. ‘The detachment we had sent into Germany,’ Berwick wrote, ‘had so weakened us, that we could not venture to risk an action.’11 The allies were presented with a seemingly valuable chance to corner and defeat the French forces in the Low Countries while they still enjoyed a superiority in numbers. However, Dutch caution, understandable but frustrating, prevented Marlborough from forcing a general engagement in the open on Boufflers, even though he had this advantage. With the loss of Liège on 26 October, the French army had fallen back behind its lines of defence, and Marlborough sent his own troops to their winter quarters, as there was clearly nothing to be gained from keeping them in the field in deteriorating weather.
Although Marlborough was made a duke by Queen Anne in recognition of his successes against the French that summer, the year overall had been one of general disappointment in the Low Countries, with no decisive blow being struck. Philip V, in the meantime, was gradually establishing his position in Madrid and was generally proving to be popular with the Spanish people and agreeable to the grandees at court. His grip on affairs was, understandably, a little loose as he had still to learn to speak Spanish properly, and the machinery of government in Madrid did not come close to matching that which prevailed in France. An astute observer at the French court remarked that he was ‘Old enough to be a king, but not yet old enough to have a will of his own’.12 Still, if the allies were to achieve their declared aims, they would have to do better than they had managed so far.
The campaign of 1703 in the Low Countries opened with an attack by Marlborough on the French garrison in Bonn, which held out for twelve days before being forced to capitulate on 15 May. The newly-created duke then moved to combine with the Dutch troops under command of Veldt-Marshal Overkirk, and this was achieved, near to Maastricht, two days later. The principal aim now was to seize the important ports of Antwerp and Ostend, and a strong detachment of Dutch troops had already been sent forward to Bergen-op-Zoom, but their commander, General Opdam, advanced prematurely to levy ‘contributions’ in the countryside, a form of licensed looting, and as a consequence found himself to be in an exposed position and without close support. Alarmed at this rashness, Marlborough wrote with some asperity on the last day of the month, concerning the true reason for Opdham’s impetuosity: ‘As he is governor of West Flanders, he has the tenth of all the contributions.’13
Marlborough marched from the Meuse to combine forces with the Dutch advanced detachment, and Coehorn and Baron Spaar advanced across the Scheldt on 26 June. Three days later Opdam moved forward to the village of Eckeren just to the north of Antwerp. The French were well aware that their opponents had failed to concentrate their advanced forces in good time, and Marshal Boufflers rapidly marched with 20,000 troops to combine with those local forces commanded by the Marquis de Bedmar. However hard he pushed his marching men, Marlborough could not overtake the French marshal, and on 2 July he wrote: ‘If M. De Opdam be not upon his guard, he may be beat before we can help him, which will always be the consequence when troops are divided, so as that the enemy can post themselves between them.’ He had to add a postscript to the letter already written but not yet sent, ‘Since I sealed my letter, we have a report come from Breda that Opdam is beaten.’14
As had been feared, Boufflers reached Antwerp on 30 June, and he and Bedmar promptly advanced and struck Opdam’s small army in its encampment at Eckeren. A French officer, the Marquis de Langallerie, wrote afterwards that:
The troops marched by diverse roads to the enemy, who did not think of such an unexpected visit. We began to attack them about 4 o’clock in the afternoon between Eckeren and Capelle; we charged them on all sides with the greatest fury, the Marquis de Bedmar with his army in front, and Marshal Boufflers in flank. Never was a sharper combat seen.15
Apart from sending away his baggage, the Dutch commander had done little to prepare the place for defence, and while scouting the approaching French army he managed to get lost and took himself off to Breda to announce that his whole force had been overwhelmed. This was the news that carried to Marlborough, but it was not quite so. Baron Slangenberg had assumed the command in Eckeren as Opdam was nowhere to be found, and after a desperately-fought defence in and around a churchyard in the village he managed to get the staunch Dutch infantry off the field and on the road to Lillo, severely mauled but more or less intact. The Comte de Merode-Westerloo, a Walloon cavalry officer in the service of Philip V, wrote rather dismissively that, ‘All we gained was what the enemy cared to leave on the field of battle.’16
In fact, the Dutch suffered about 4,000 casualties, having to abandon their wounded, who were, however, well cared for by the French on the orders of Boufflers. In addition all their tentage, six field guns, forty-four Coehorn mortars, and 150 wagons laden with the army’s baggage were lost. A severe blow had been struck, and the Dutch would take some time to recover their poise. ‘The success of an action so glorious,’ Louis XIV wrote, ‘which has broken the enemy’s projects, is equally due to the conduct of the generals and bravery of the troops.’17 Despite this setback to his plans, on 5 July Marlborough moved his main army towards the French lines of defence protecting Antwerp. Little could be achieved while operations were delayed and the Dutch commanders quarrelled amongst themselves over who was most to blame, and who could claim most credit, for the defeat and narrow recovery from what so nearly had been a disaster at the battle of Eckeren.
By 23 July 1703 Marlborough had to accept that there was now little prospect of success against Antwerp, and in the second week of August took his army back to the Meuse where he laid siege to Huy; from there he could move on and threaten the key French-held fortress of Namur. If that place could be taken then the whole length of the river would be open to convey supplies for the allied armies, a potentially huge asset for the allied campaign. Louis XIV was concerned for the safety of Huy, understanding clearly that the loss would inevitably expose Namur to attack, and he wrote to Boufflers: ‘You know its importance and the unfortunate effects its loss would entail; but I cannot believe that the enemy will attempt it as long as the army you command is so close to them.’18 Despite this, on 15 August the fortress was invested while Marlborough covered the siege operations from a nearby position on the Mehaigne river. The allied siege train came up the Meuse from Maastricht, and the bombardment of the defences of the citadel of Huy began on 21 August. One of the French magazines blew up during this bombardment, causing inevitable confusion and losses amongst the garrison, and the French commander, the Marquis de Millon, capitulated on 26 August rather than face an assault by the allies. The 900 French troops taken prisoner were eventually exchanged for two allied battalions lost earlier in the campaign when Tongres had been captured. Meanwhile, Marlborough had manoeuvred towards the French field army, now placed under the command of Marshal Villeroi, but had not found a chance to engage them in open battle and turned instead to lay siege to the minor fortress of Limburg, which fell on 27 September. Bad weather forced the arm
ies to move into winter quarters once more, but not before the allies had captured the small town of Guelders lying between Venlo and Rheinberg, where a siege had been proceeding, sometimes with energy and enterprise and sometimes not, since the spring.
Although the duke had not once been able to corner the French field army and force it to stand and fight, his achievement in clearing out French and Spanish garrisons in Brabant and along the lower Rhine was significant. Holland was made secure, and Dutch commanders would in consequence chance more to achieve success, while the Spanish Netherlands, a most important part of the empire of Louis XIV’s grandson in Madrid, was being laid open to attack. In the meantime, however, while Marlborough was enjoying repeated success on the Meuse, French commanders had been gaining a great deal of ground elsewhere.
The imperial field commander on the upper Rhine, Louis Guillaume, Margrave of Baden, had captured the fortress of Landau on the river Queich in September 1702, with the King of the Romans as titular head of the army, but had to leave a garrison in place and withdraw to the east bank of the Rhine when the Elector of Bavaria openly allied himself to Louis XIV. This caused a strategic shift in the war, potentially very promising opportunities for France presented themselves, with Vienna isolated and exposed to attack. Still, the king was obliged to support his new ally in southern Germany with substantial numbers of troops who might have been more usefully deployed to campaign in the Low Countries or northern Italy. A sharp engagement between Bavarian and Imperial forces took place on 4 March 1703 at the village of Heyzempirne, not far from Passau on the Danube. The snow still lay thick on the ground, and the Austrian commander, General von Schlick, advanced to surprise the elector’s army while still in camp. Failing in this, the imperial troops themselves encamped, and were then attacked in a blinding snowstorm by the Bavarians. Colonel Jean-Martin de la Colonie, who fought with the elector’s army that bitterly cold day, recalled that:
Victory hung for a long time in the balance between the opposing cavalry, so stubborn was the fight, for the Elector’s cuirassiers are really among his very best troops. Our infantry did not experience the same resistance; they stood the first effect of the enemy’s fire, charged with bayonets fixed, and crushed all resistance. Soon afterwards the enemy’s cavalry gave way, and their rout became universal.19
The colonel went on to add that ‘Schlick escaped with the debris of his army’. The fighting had been vicious and at close quarters, and de la Colonie certainly felt the benefit of his ‘secret,’ the uncomfortable iron skull cap that cavalrymen often wore under their hats:
I put to the test at this battle a small frame of well-tempered iron, which the cavalry officers, not in the cuirassiers, were in the habit of placing in the crown of their hats. It certainly saved me from the effects of two heavy sabre cuts which I received in the melee.
Having thrown the Austrians back in considerable disorder, the elector went on to take possession of the town of Ratisbon, which submitted without resistance to admitting a Bavarian garrison, and then secured his hold on the line of the Danube by moving on to Neuburg. ‘The enemy, who had no doubt that the town would be attacked after the battle of Heyzempirne, added new works to the old walled enceinte; but they were not of much use, for we took possession of it in five days.’20
The Duc de Vendôme was still active in northern Italy, campaigning against the Imperial commander, Guido von Starhemberg, On the Rhine Marshal Claude-Louis-Hector de Villars, vigorous and dangerously capable, seized Kehl just across the river from Strasburg on 9 May 1703, after a ten-day siege. He then took his army through the tracks of the Black Forest to support the Elector of Bavaria’s operations on the Danube. Louis XIV wrote to Villars, ‘I need not tell you that upon this junction depends the success of the war, which would be more difficult to sustain if I should lose an ally who might secure for me a peace as glorious as it would be advantageous.’21 There was, at the same time, outright rebellion against imperial rule in parts of Hungary, the rebels being subsidised by France to encourage their trouble-making, In simple fact, if the French and their allies could defeat the imperial armies and seize Vienna, even for just a short time, then the shock and moral effect of this would wreck the Grand Alliance just a surely as if the Dutch had been defeated on their borders, and on this account if no other Louis XIV and his grandson in Madrid would have succeeded – opposition to French efforts in northern Italy would fade away, and Louis XIV could concentrate his forces to regain the security of the southern Netherlands. The whole Spanish Empire, undivided, would be in Philip V’s hands, courtesy of his grandfather. For the ambitious Elector of Bavaria, there was always the enticing thought that, once installed in Vienna, he might even replace Leopold as emperor; the thought might have been far-fetched, but the elector was a better soldier than statesman, and he was certainly ambitious. In a certain light, and with such a formidable ally as Louis XIV at his back, it might just be possible.
In June 1703 Villars had wanted to advance boldly on Vienna with the combined Franco-Bavarian army, by then some 70,000 strong. He wrote of the dilapidated defences of the city that ‘We can easily lodge ourselves on the counter-scarp on the first day’.22 However, the elector had decided to advance into the Tyrol instead, hoping to combine with Vendôme as he advanced northwards from Italy. Louis XIV was enthusiastic about the prospects, but the ambitious combined operation soon foundered in the face of fierce local Tyrolese resistance in the north, while Vendôme failed to move to make a passage through the Trentino region in the south. The increasing activities of allied cruising squadrons in the Mediterranean, hardly challenged as they were so far by the French fleet, had been noticed, and the French lack of success in northern Italy had not been lost on Duke Victor-Amadeus II of Savoy. He was already wavering in his support for Louis XIV in the war – in fact the untypical inaction of Vendôme was at least in part because he suspected Victor-Amadeus of being about to turn his coat and imperil his own lines of supply and communication, which he duly did. Vendôme refused to advance with such a threat to his back, and Louis XIV had to write to him in some exasperation:
Do you think that when I give an order as precise as the one that you received, that I do not have reasons stronger than yours for sending it? You allow yourself to be engaged by what is before you, and I see those things that are in the distance which can have effects and which cause me to make resolutions suitable to one who is charged with the weight of government … The conquest of the Tyrol would have been easy.23
Innsbruck had indeed been taken by the elector’s troops, but the French king had clearly disregarded the local resistance they met in what was a rather hesitant advance. His discontent with Vendôme’s conduct was soon tempered when Victor-Amadeus, as feared and expected, chose to throw caution to the winds and abandon his alliance with France.
North of the Alpine barrier, the French and Bavarian effort in the campaign had become riskily divided, and Villars was faced by the Margrave of Baden and an imperial army on the Danube in mid-July. The free city of Augsburg in Bavaria was invested by imperial troops in August, but the elector withdrew his army from the Tyrol and moved to combine forces once more with Villars. ‘We now found ourselves forced to make a precipitous retreat, for a delay of twenty-four hours would have exposed us to the risk a massacre by the Tyrolese who rose in revolt.’24 The imperial forces opposing them had not been fully concentrated, with the Margrave of Baden south of the Danube and Count von Styrum’s 18,000-strong detachment still north of the river. The count moved to combine with Baden, but waited a day at Schwenningen just to the east of the plain of Höchstädt, to allow his artillery train to close up. There, on 20 September 1703, he was caught by Villars and the elector and, after an initial success for the imperial cavalry, was severely defeated. ‘The armies were very unequal, and Count von Styrum saw himself surrounded by the enemy he was obliged to retire.’25 Styrum withdrew in some disarray northwards to Nordlingen in Franconia, losing his guns and much baggage, while the Margrave
of Baden, now threatened from the rear, made good his escape from Bavaria and took his own army back towards the Rhine. The imperial effort to counter the French and Bavarian threat as in clear disarray, and Louis XIV wrote in delight to the elector. ‘I am never surprised about the advantages that my troops win when you are at their head.’26
While all this was taking place, Camille d’Hostun, duc de Tallard, had moved to seize the newly-built fortress of Brisach in Alsace; once more, the Duc de Bourgogne was sent to nominally lead the army in the operations, but Tallard exercised the command employing his customary tact. The potential difficulty of divided influence and command was there once more, with a royal prince, well-meaning but still quite unversed in the ways of war, present at headquarters alongside the army commander. Louis XIV was concerned at the choice of Brisach, as Marshal Vauban had warned against the attempt, and he wrote to Tallard that the gifted military engineer:
Insists that it is not possible to take it until the floods of the Rhine have receded, and that if the Duke of Burgundy attacks it before the end of August or the beginning of September, he will receive an affront … it would be better to attack Freiburg or Landau.27
The king was clearly concerned that his grandson should not participate in a failed operation or even one that stalled, but he would not explicitly order Tallard on the point, adding, ‘You know the confidence with which I give myself to anything that you think proper for the good of my service … I cannot, however, put aside the experience of a man who has served me so long, and so well as the Marshal Vauban.’ To make sure of no mishaps, the King sent the engineer to join the siege operations, writing to Michel de Chamillart, that ‘The Duke of Burgundy can depend in everything upon Marshal Vauban as upon Marshal de Tallard, but of operations beyond the trenches, Marshal de Tallard will be in charge.’28 The siege began on 23 August and was successfully concluded in little more than two weeks, at least in part because the defences were flooded by the rising waters of the river. The road linking the French magazines and depots in Alsace with their troops operating deep in Bavaria, was thus secured, and to make doubly sure Tallard went on to lay siege to Landau on the river Queich.