The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714)
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So, the fighting went on. The Catalan cause was apparently without hope of success but they remained resolute nonetheless, and de Populi had not enough strength to force the stout defences of the city and nearby Fort Montjuich. Philip V had yet to formally conclude an agreement to cease hostilities with Holland, and Louis XIV was reluctant to commit French troops to assist in the operations against Barcelona until this had been achieved. He wrote to his apparently wilful grandson in exasperation in April 1714:
I tell you that I will not give you any fresh help towards the reduction of Barcelona until you have signed this peace. I am very distressed to be compelled to take this decision, but you can change it whenever you wish; for as soon as you have concluded the treaty with Holland my troops, which I am still concentrating in Roussillon, will be at your disposal; I will also at once send the engineers that I have earmarked for you, and that I am still keeping ready.32
No immediate answer was forthcoming from Madrid and the Catalans took advantage of this pause to strengthen their position. The Duca de Populi made a careful study of the defences of Barcelona, and reported to Madrid that, without French assistance, there was little chance of making a successful assault.
After a three-month delay that could well have been avoided, Philip V acquiesced in his grandfather’s wishes and terms were agreed with the Dutch. The Duke of Berwick accordingly left Versailles on 22 June to take charge of the French troops in the campaign against those Catalans who still refused to acknowledge the king’s authority. Berwick had command of 35,000 French and Spanish infantry and 6,000 cavalry, concentrated around Gerona, with another 12,000 troops near to Tarragona. He was opposed by 16,000 Catalan defenders in Barcelona, who had the support of some 4,000 foreign volunteers, notably those Austrians and Italians who had stayed to fight when von Starhemberg left. Sentiment was hardening on both sides, with instructions to Berwick coming from Madrid that no mercy should be shown unless the Catalans submitted without delay with the promise of only the barest of good terms, while on the other hand the authorities in Barcelona suppressed any show of sympathy or support for Philip V, however tepid, with considerable severity.
On 10 July 1713 the three Estates of Catalonia voted to ignore the offered amnesty and instead opt for war in pursuit of the preservation of their ancient rights and privileges. Barcelona was already blockaded, although a partial replenishment of the city by ships sailing from Majorca and Ibiza had been accomplished earlier in the month. The islands remained loyal to Charles, and the small flotilla of Catalan ships were able to slip in and out of the port with supplies. Philip V asked the newly-appointed British ambassador in Madrid, Lord Lexington, to provide a naval squadron to complete the blockade of the Catalan coastline, but this was refused – Great Britain could be accused of leaving the Catalans to face the consequences, but plainly some things would have been just too dark and disgraceful to contemplate. The ambassador did, though, urge the king to adopt a conciliatory approach in reaching an agreement with the Catalans, but this advice was ignored. Lexington wrote to the Estates in Barcelona: ‘I always desired to help bring about the solution most favourable in the present situation, and accordingly I repeat to you that I cannot give you better advice than to accept the amnesty offered to you.’33
Marshal Berwick had to contend with irregular Catalan forces under the command of the Marquis de Peral manoeuvring against his lines of supply, but he pushed his preparations for a siege along at a good pace. The trenches were opened on 12 July, with a vigorous sally by the garrison having to be beaten off with some difficulty the next day. The bombardment of the bastions of Puerta Nueva, Santa Clara and El Levante began two weeks later, and there was a period of fierce fighting for possession of the Santa Clara feature in particular, with heavy casualties on both sides, but the bastion remained in the hands of the defenders. The work of the big guns went on regardless, and Berwick had to restrain those of his officers who, anxious to demonstrate their valour, wished to make a premature attack on the gradually widening breach;
The vigorous resistance of the enemy determined me to hazard no more attacks of this kind; but at the same time it was very difficult to find out how one could make oneself master of the town by any other method. Our engineers, whose knowledge did not extend beyond the ordinary rules of the art, seeing that the environs were all laid under water, proposed to me as the only resource to give the general assault at a breach which had been made between Puerta Nueva and Santa Clara. It appeared that those who were capable of making such a proposal, must have lost their senses, for the flanks were still entire, the breach undermined, and besides there was behind a very strong entrenchment.34
Berwick was determined to have the defences battered down still further before attempting an assault. ‘I therefore advanced some batteries, and armed myself with patience against all the discourses of the officers of the army, who grew very much tired with the length of the siege.’35 Attempts to negotiate a capitulation of the city on reasonable terms proved unsuccessful, and Berwick became increasingly exasperated at what he saw as a pointless and doomed defence with no realistic hope of relief. ‘The obstinacy of these people was the more surprising as there were seven breaches in the body of the place; no possibility of receiving any succours, and no provisions in the town.’36
At daybreak on 11 September 1714, a grand assault was made, and after heavy hand-to-hand fighting the three main bastions were firmly in Berwick’s hands. Another defensive work, the San Pedro bastion, was also taken, but was enfiladed by heavy fire from Catalan troops in a nearby convent and a sharp counter-attack almost drove the marshal’s troops back into their own entrenchments. He was well forward with his generals, and with his encouragement, the gains of the early morning were held against fierce resistance and made secure by mid-afternoon. The garrison commander, Don Antonio Villaroel, now asked for terms for a capitulation, but Berwick refused the request, not unreasonably as he had been forced to make such a bloody assault which might well have been avoided by an earlier submission. He wrote:
It was now too late; that we were already masters of the city, and had it in our power to put everything to the sword; and I should not therefore listen to any proposals on their part, except of submitting at discretion to His Catholic Majesty, and of imploring his mercy.37
The discussions ended abruptly and the firing of the breaching batteries, and the counter-battery work, went on. Berwick sent a further message to Villaroel that evening, that he expected a capitulation without further delay or he would allow Barcelona to be sacked by his troops. The garrison commander and the authorities in the city, driven to the last extremity in their defence, had no choice but to agree, and Berwick dictated quite reasonable terms, in the circumstances:
I then promised them their lives would be safe, and even that there should be no plunder, which I did in order to preserve, to the King of Spain, a rich and flourishing city … On the morning of the 13th [September] the rebels retired from all their posts; and our troops marched through the streets in such order to the quarters that were assigned to them, that not a single soldier got out of the ranks.38
That there was no attempt to sack or plunder Barcelona says much for the good state of discipline of the troops that Berwick led. This restraint was remarkable for the success was certainly hard won, with some 6,000 French and 3,000 Spanish troops killed and wounded during the siege. The scale of casualties amongst the garrison, which include many armed citizens and irregulars, was uncertain, but must have been equally heavy.
With the conclusion of the peace treaties, the great and outstanding matter to be settled had been that of the Catalans who, having been encouraged to fight against their declared sovereign, Philip V, had then been left to face the consequences once the parties to the Grand Alliance lost interest. These consequences became manifest with the fall of Barcelona; the Catalans were not, in a strict sense, rebels as they had taken up arms to support the allied cause at a moment when the young French prince, although
proclaimed as King of Spain, had not yet made good that claim, while the Austrian archduke, arguably, had just as good a claim to the throne. Not all Catalans by any means had supported the Habsburg claimant, and numbers of those disaffected by the turn of events had left Barcelona when Charles was welcomed there. ‘At no stage was there unanimous or even majority support for the Archduke.’39 The citizens of the town of Tarragona, for example, had only declared their support under considerable duress, when subjected to a bombardment by an allied naval squadron, and the depredations of marauding armies was resented and widely resisted. ‘They marched continually, across the principality, eating and drinking, sacking and burning.’40 With the surrender of Barcelona, all Catalonian rights were in effect suspended and the region remained under martial law for many years. Majorca, last bastion of resistance to Philip V, only submitted to French troops commanded by the Chevalier d’Asfeld in June 1715, but no attempt was made to recover Minorca from the British, this having been agreed of course under the treaty terms.
Chapter 13
A Balance of Power
‘The most destructive and bloody war as ever had been.’1
The seventeenth century in western Europe might well have been regarded, in retrospect, as France’s century, with the achieving of a position of dominance over neighbouring states, under the rule of that most sagacious, and at the same time most ambitious, monarch Louis XIV secure in his wonderful new palace at Versailles. Active opposition to the Sun King and his ministers was fragmentary and weakened. After a period of military success, with Spanish armies within striking distance of the walls of Paris at one early point, Spain had lapsed from being a world power, despite its vast empire, and her ruling classes had sunk into commercial and intellectual indolence induced by the steady flow of treasure, unearned and therefore taken for granted, from the New World. Austria was concerned with the Ottoman threat from the east, added to which unrest in Hungary increasingly caught and held the attention of Vienna. The Holy Roman Empire (neither Holy, Roman or an Empire, as it was waggishly described) was a fragmented and increasingly irrelevant entity, especially as the more dynamic component parts – Bavaria, Hanover, Brandenburg, Saxony – pursued their own very self-centred courses of action, sometimes at the expense of the interests of the emperor in Vienna. Smaller states, weakened by the long and gruelling torment of the Thirty Years War, were prone to be prey to the power and aspirations of others, as with the Duchy of Lorraine which fell into the French sphere of influence many years before it was formally incorporated as a part of France.
Protestant Holland had gained its independence from Spain after a long and bitterly fought war – a war that was won in part thanks to French support and assistance – France always being eager to weaken Spanish influence on its borders when this could be done without too much effort or cost. Aspirations and ambitions then shifted and Louis XIV attacked the small new republic and all but brought about its ruin, but the stout Dutchmen were saved by the intervention of a far older enemy, the salt sea, and the French armies had to withdraw from what had become a watery wasteland. The fortunes of Holland were then closely linked to those of England, which had been alternately an ally or enemy of France depending upon shifting political attitudes at any given moment. This new combination of Protestant powers in northern Europe, under the hand of King William III, to which the weight and effort of Brandenburg and Denmark could be added, brought about a theoretical power bloc capable of challenging previously unchallengeable Catholic France. After nine long years of cruelly unproductive war, a truce borne of exhaustion was agreed in 1697 with the conclusion of the Treaty of Ryswick, and the weary parties looked forward to, and hoped for, a period of peace. That this period of peace might merely be a breathing-space for the contending powers to recruit and recover their energies for fresh efforts triggered by as yet unforeseen circumstances, became evident, but the brief period of relative tranquillity was welcome nonetheless.
In the event, when King Carlos II died in Madrid in 1700, and the newly-vacated throne was offered to d’Anjou, Louis XIV proved unable to refuse the chance. Had he done so, of course, then the throne would immediately have gone to Archduke Charles in Vienna, with the likelihood that this increment to the power and influence of Austria would have been just as troublesome and unwelcome as any perceived strengthening of the Sun King and his circle. The throne vacated by Carlos II was in fact a poisoned chalice for all concerned, and almost inevitably it brought about an unwelcome renewal of outright war. Although all the contending parties – France, Spain, Holland, Austria, England, Portugal, Bavaria and Savoy – wanted to avoid war as long as they could have their own way in the process: this could not be achieved and almost thirteen years of conflict was the result.
So what came of it all in the end? Well, the division of the old Spanish empire between the rival claimants to the throne, as sought at the creation of the Grand Alliance in 1702 was achieved. Great Britain gained significantly in terms of trade opportunities and the valuable ports from which her cruising squadrons could operate. A rapidly expanding empire based on pursuit of that trade was the result. The British also got their Protestant succession with George, the Elector of Hanover, peacefully succeeding to the throne on the death of Queen Anne, and avoiding internal strife over any Jacobite claim, the support for which was virtually abandoned by France and thereafter became a hopeless if superficially romantic lost cause. Despite the attention that the new king on the throne in London gave to his Hanoverian interests, the British in effect turned their backs on Europe as far as they could and pursued a world-wide future based on a trading empire underpinned by almost unchallenged maritime power:
The English government more and more steadily, and with conscious purpose, pushed an extension of her sea power. While as an open enemy she struck at France upon the sea, so as an artful friend, many at least believed, she sapped the power of Holland afloat … At the peace Holland received compensation by land, but England obtained, besides commercial privileges in France, Spain and the Spanish West Indies, the important maritime concessions of Gibraltar and Port Mahon [Minorca] in the Mediterranean, of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Hudson’s Bay in North America. The naval power of France and Spain had disappeared; that of Holland thenceforth steadily declined. The eye of England was steadily fixed on the maintenance of her sea power.2
Holland, so sturdy and resolute, was broken by the phenomenal effort that the States-General had put into the war for Spain. ‘The financial position of the Republic was precarious. No receipts at all had come from two of the seven provinces … The bulk of the expenditure could only be met by borrowing under adverse conditions.’3 The armies of Louis XIV had almost overwhelmed the republic on two occasions, in the 1680s when only the drowning of their land saved the Dutch, and then in 1702 when Marshal Boufflers seemed certain to defeat their army before the strength of the Grand Alliance could be fully put forth. No other state had done so much to curb Louis XIV’s ambitions and French aggrandisement in western Europe over a thirty-year period of almost constant conflict, but the effort was too great in financial terms and in the demands on available manpower, the cherished Barrier on which such faith was placed was militarily indefensible in practice, and unable to hold on to any hopes of a wider influence, Holland slipped into gradual but inevitable decline as a world power.
German princes, so active in the cause of the Grand Alliance during the war for Spain, were increasingly prone to assert their right to be taken into account in the affairs of western Europe rather than as just subjects and electors of the Holy Roman Empire. The power and influence of those states, most particularly Prussia, would eventually coalesce to form a dominating power in Europe. A possible counter to this might have been Austria, but Vienna happily took its gains in the southern Netherlands and Italy and otherwise turned away to deal with the latent Ottoman threat, and to intrigue in the affairs of eastern Europe, once more. The greatly increased tax revenues for Vienna from the newly acquired p
ossessions in the Low Countries especially, also helped to fund a significant expansion and re-organisation of the Austrian army to the degree that by the closing decade of the eighteenth century Vienna could field no fewer than 300,000 troops. Good generalship and sound command and control was not always in place, however, and sustained Austrian military success was, at a most generous assessment, uneven. King Charles XII of Sweden, who might have made so much trouble for Vienna and the Grand Alliance, took his fine army off to destruction in Russia, and was never again a serious factor in European history.
Spain, which might have been devastated by long years of any war that had been pushed to the hardest extreme, instead entered a period of relative peace and prosperity. An outwardly united country with a popular young king had been the outcome, for whatever the separatist ambitions of the people of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia had been, these had withered away, and if, contrary to what had been unwisely claimed in 1701, the Pyrenees still existed then the river Ebro as a frontier of any effect did not. It could with perfect truth be said that ‘Philip V was not merely King of Castile and Count of Barcelona; he was also King of Spain’.4 On the wider scene, much of the vast Spanish Empire was intact, particularly in the Americas. Still, Spain as a major power was eclipsed, yearning in vain for the return of Gibraltar and Minorca, and despite the opening of a promising age of naval exploration, still to a degree at the beck and call of her powerful neighbour to the north. The impact on the Spanish people of the long war to decide who should have the throne in Madrid would take time to lessen: