Blenheim: Battle for Europe

Louis’s policy of deliberate terror won him Leiden, whose citizens forced their mayor to greet the invaders outside the walls, bearing the city’s keys in cowed surrender. But the atrocities were ultimately counter-productive, inspiring lasting hatred of France. Saint Simon recognised French savagery to be counter-productive, since it ‘caused such fear to all Europe that France never recovered from it.’[fn6] The de Witt brothers, key Dutch apologists of Louis’s before the war, had refused to heed warnings that invasion was imminent. They were seized by the mob, shot, and then torn into pieces: their ripped-out hearts were placed on public display. In the de Witts’ place emerged William of Orange, the leading member of what had been the Dutch ruling family before the advent of the republic.

By blood a prince, William was now created Stadholder, the generalissimo of the republic’s forces. In their desperation the States-General were prepared to proclaim this living vestige of their nation’s royal past Captain- and Admiral-General for life; this despite William’s being, in Voltaire’s estimation, merely ‘a young Prince in poor health, who had seen neither siege nor combat’.[fn7]

William was aware of his shortcomings. To compensate for his military inexperience, he appointed the redoubtable Count von Waldeck as his second-in-command. The contrast of the charismatic, if sickly, young prince and the ill-humoured, but able, Prussian general gave the Dutch focus and hope. Waldeck inspired the troops, while William’s diplomatic skills brought allies to the aid of his people. Spain and the Holy Roman Empire joined the fight against France, forcing Louis to quit the United Provinces. After 1673 the Dutch War was mainly fought in the Spanish Netherlands.

The strong Dutch navy, under the brilliant admirals van Tromp and de Ruyter, stopped the English and French from landing invasion forces. By now William was being hailed as the ‘Redeemer of the Fatherland’: a young and dogged Protestant champion had emerged, who would stand against Louis for the remainder of the century.

William’s life’s work was a resolute refusal to bow to Louis’s military strength. It is a tale of brave resistance that takes us from the ravaged Lowlands of the 1670s to the brink of the war that produced the Battle of Blenheim. The influence of William — as Holland’s prince, England’s king, and France’s enemy — is a backdrop to our tale.

*

William’s hatred of Louis predated the rape of the United Provinces. His family inheritance included small, autonomous Orange, ‘which country and principality’, John Evelyn noted, ‘had no dependence on France these 500 years,’[fn8] despite being surrounded by French territory. To Louis, Orange’s independence was an accident that needed correction. The principality’s Protestantism was a further affront to Louis’s Catholic zeal. In 1660, Louis overran Orange, and made a triumphal entrance to establish his lordship of the new acquisition. His progress concluded at Orange’s fortifications, which he climbed. Reaching the top, he pulled a fragment of stone from the battlements, and tossed it over the walls to the ground below. The king’s retinue were quick to interpret this gesture, demolishing the fortress soon afterwards. Louis sent word to the ten-year-old William that he would oversee Orange as its protector, until the boy attained his majority. In the meantime, Louis explained, France would enjoy the principality’s revenues. William never forgave the confiscation of his patrimony.

The Dutch War ended in victory for Louis, recognised in a series of treaties from 1678-80. The Dutch had assembled a potent coalition to oppose him, but the combined forces of the United Provinces, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and several German states failed to defeat France. Franche-Comté and a dozen key cities were ceded to France, shortly followed by Alsace and Lorraine. In France, Louis was referred to as Louis le Grand, a sobriquet that he wholeheartedly embraced.

To cover his territorial ambitions with a veneer of legality, Louis established offices, Chambres de Réunion. There his lawyers sifted through ancient treaties and agreements, in search of long-forgotten clauses which might justify French territorial claims abroad. The 1680s saw the relentless combination of Louis, his court lawyers and his soldiers continue to identify and then seize cities and lands to which often only tenuous pretensions could be made. In 1681 the Chambres de Réunion identified Louis’s claim to the county of Chiny, in Spanish-owned Luxembourg. Three years of strong resistance followed, leading to the brief but bloody War of the Reunions. In 1684, however, blockaded Luxembourg was plucked from Spain, to become a French possession. Weeks later, Strasbourg was similarly added to France’s dominions. The same year, Louis ordered the bombardment of Genoa without declaration of war, because of the city’s pro-Habsburg leanings. No longer was Louis’s pretext simply to add francophone areas to his French dominions: German and Italian lands were also in his sights.

Louis emerged from the concluding Treaty of Ratisbon with his two major acquisitions, Strasbourg and Luxembourg, intact. Austria and Spain were obliged to recognise France’s new frontiers for twenty years. From The Hague, William of Orange watched Louis’s apparently unstoppable advance with despair: ‘If God does not take upon himself the protection of this poor people and her neighbours, in a short time all will be over.’[fn9] Evelyn, in England, agreed, recognising that Louis was within reach of establishing a ‘Fifth Universal Monarchy’.[fn10]

*

In the autumn of 1685, Louis developed an agonising and persistent toothache, and his doctors decided to extract the offending molar. However, they were ignorant of the importance of postoperative hygiene, and infection set in: the king’s gums, jawbone and sinuses became dangerously inflamed. A committee of nervous physicians concluded that drastic measures were called for. Louis underwent a truly terrible ordeal: they removed all the teeth from the top layer of his mouth, then punctured his palate and broke his jaw. This was all completed without anaesthetic, the king being fully awake throughout the procedure. The most powerful man in Western Europe was helpless before the primitive medical knowledge of his time. At least the wounds were kept clean on this occasion — cauterised with red-hot coals.

The Sun King never fully regained his former dignity. He had to be careful when drinking, in case the contents of his goblet reappeared out of his nose. The English poet Matthew Prior was later to observe that: ‘The monarch as to his health is lusty enough, his upper teeth are out … and he picks and shows his under teeth [with] a good deal of affectation, being the vainest creature alive even as to the least things.’[fn11] Mismanagement of another chronic irritant — France’s Protestant population — led to more than mere embarrassment at the dinner table.

To Louis, the continued tolerance of Huguenots was a betrayal of his deepest beliefs, and triggered his most heart-felt prejudices. The nation’s one million Protestants had been left relatively untroubled since the bloody religious and civil wars that preceded Louis’s personal rule. This was a pragmatic recognition of the material benefits that the Huguenots brought to the economy. They were conspicuously prominent in specialist areas of trade, commerce, and manufacture. Their rights to freedom of worship had been enshrined in the Edict of Nantes.

Now, with some of his key advisers encouraging a policy of intolerance, Louis resolved to rid the country of what he viewed as heresy. Louis’s bigotry, instilled during his scanty childhood education, was stoked by his mistress, Madame de Maintenon, herself a convert to Catholicism. She argued that the acceptance of divergent Christian views was untenable, and would stain her lover’s soul.

Louis had given vent to his religious prejudices in 1679, withdrawing some of the Protestants’ rights to worship. In 1680 he sent a regiment of dragoons to Poitou, ordering its soldiers to be billeted on the richer households. The expense of this was dire; but it was nothing compared with the deprivations meted out to the poorer Protestants in the region. They were raped and brutalised, whilst encouraged to end their torment by embracing Catholicism. Thirty thousand Poitevin conversions were recorded, convincing the king of his policy’s effectiveness. The dragonnades became a valued weapon against the Huguenots.

In the autumn of 1685, the season of his gruesome encounter with his dentists, Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes. Protestant worship was deemed a criminal activity, with imprisonment — even death — the penalty for those who refused to turn to Catholicism. Unless they were protected by noble status, women who rejected the religion du roi were whipped, and their faces branded with the fleur de lis. Men were broken at the wheel: each bone in their body systematically smashed by the executioner. To ensure that there could be no escape, Louis declared it illegal to seek sanctuary from his religious tyranny abroad.

Despite this, over 200,000 Huguenots fled France, many leaving behind all their possessions rather than slow their flight. The fugitives were enthusiastically welcomed in the United Provinces, Denmark, and Prussia. Many came to England, too, although there they were tolerated rather than fêted. Nevertheless, the English listened to the refugees’ tales of horror with deep concern. John Evelyn recorded with disgust: ‘The French persecution … raging with the utmost barbarity, exceeded even what the very heathens us’d … on a sudden demolishing all their churches, banishing, imprisoning and sending to the galleys all the ministers; plundering the common people … taking away their children; forcing people to the Mass, and then executing them as relapsers …’[fn12] Throughout Protestant Europe, such tales were received with horror. Since Louis was clearly intent on expanding France’s frontiers, many wondered if they would be next to experience such brutality.

In 1686, the United Provinces joined Spain and Prussia to form the League of Augsburg: a defensive alliance against Louis. He remained deaf to the fear and exasperation evoked by the rasping tone of his kingship, thrusting himself into the affairs of Cologne, where the incumbent ruler, Archbishop-Elector Wittelsbach, was seriously ill. Louis wanted to be certain that his successor would be a friend to France, as Wittelsbach had been: for Cologne, situated between France, several Germanic states, and the United Provinces, controlled bridgeheads across the area’s major rivers. The king informed Cologne that he had chosen its new archbishop-elector, who would take office when the current incumbent died. Louis’s choice was Cardinal von Fürstenberg, the Bishop of Strasbourg, who had cravenly served France’s interests for thirty years. However, Pope Innocent ignored Louis, installing Joseph Clement, brother to the Elector of Bavaria, instead.

Louis ordered his troops to invade, and they laid siege to Philippsburg. Hostilities quickly escalated: the French ravaged the Rhineland, provoking the Prussians, Saxons and Hanoverians into action. The Emperor sent a strong force under the Elector of Bavaria to assist them. War was inevitable, Louis knew that; but its form and scale was to surprise all of Europe.

Louis asserted rights over the Palatine from Strasbourg through to Mainz, in the name of his sister-in-law, Liselotte. Once more he anticipated speedy victory. The invading troops surpassed the litany of war crimes associated with the Dutch War of the 1670s, when Turenne had pillaged the electorate. In 1688, the Second Devastation of the Palatinate saw the destruction of a dozen historic cities, including Heidelberg, Worms, Mannheim and Speyer. Hundreds of towns and villages shared treatment of unspeakable savagery: murder, rape, torture and looting.

The French atrocities recalled the worst excesses of the Thirty Years’ War: and this in the so-called Age of Reason. Louis XIV’s state-sanctioned terror ran contrary to every tenet of ‘civilised’ warfare. Across Europe it was generally accepted that civilian losses should be kept to a minimum and that private property should be respected.

*

William of Orange now saw that it was not just his Dutchmen who looked to him for leadership, but also the majority of German princes. Emperor Leopold found common cause with the confederacy, bolstering the standing of the League of Augsburg by joining its ranks. He was uncomfortable about helping Protestant forces against a divinely anointed king, but political considerations overrode religious sensibilities. Besides, Leopold was comforted by the Pope’s encouragement: Innocent was furious that Louis had dismissed the papal claim to infallibility, and denied the Pontiff’s right to excommunicate princes. He, too, joined the anti-French coalition. So it was that by the end of 1688 only one power stood aloof from the forthcoming European war: England.

Chapter Two – An Island No More

‘Yes, mighty Prince, our fear and danger’s fled,

Error and ignorance by thee struck dead,

No more th’old chaos o’er our world shall spread.

Thy words bid there be light, and strait a ray,

All heavenly bright, calls forth a new-born day.

‘A congratulatory poem to his Highness the Prince of Orange on his arrival at London’, 1688

England’s lack of military pretensions in the quarter century following the Restoration was marked. Charles II was a hedonist, not a soldier. His energies were most happily deployed in his pleasures, such as race horses and mistresses — he kept a generous stable of both. Since 1660 British politics had been dominated by domestic considerations. The Civil Wars might be over, but instead of military campaigns, Court, Country, and Parliament engaged in political conflict. In Churchill’s phrase, ‘there had been sides in the Great Rebellion; henceforward there would be parties, less picturesque but no less fierce.’[fn1] Whigs and Tories would trace their family trees back to Charles’s reign: factions that could still clash with lethal force well into the eighteenth century.

By European standards, Charles maintained a tiny army; little more than 5,000 strong in 1661. Ten years later it still only numbered 8,000, but supporting this force consumed a quarter of the king’s revenue, a key reason he took the secret bribe from Louis. English attitudes to the army were coloured by the discord and destruction of the Civil War, and by the hated military government of Cromwell’s major-generals in the 1650s. People and Parliament were united in their opposition to a standing army that they feared was as likely to be turned on them as on the country’s enemies.

Charles died in 1685 and the throne passed to his controversial younger brother James, Duke of York. James II faced a rebellion within months, when his illegitimate nephew, the Duke of Monmouth, landed at Lyme Regis but failed to garner sufficient support before he was brought to battle at Sedgemoor. He was beheaded and his followers summarily dealt with at the ‘Bloody Assizes’.

James’s shrill Catholicism soon cost him popularity, since, in stark contrast to Charles’s covert faith, it was construed as a blatant threat to the Anglican Church. The Whigs had shown their intense distrust of James — and their political clout — by forcing Charles to send him into exile. His enforced spells in Scotland and on the Continent had not mellowed James: if anything they stiffened his resolve. Early in the new reign, James tired of hiding his strong beliefs.

At the end of 1686, Lord Chesterfield summed up the sadness of a people who could see its king’s qualities, but regret their misapplication: ‘Though we have now a Prince, whose study is his country’s glory, whose courage would give him lustre without a throne, whose assiduity in business makes him his own chief minister, yet heaven, it seems, hath found a way to make all this more terrible than lovely.’[fn2]

The English knew James’s talents included a gift for military leadership: as Duke of York, he had overseen the overhaul of the Navy and gained it parity with the Dutch fleet. On a personal level, he was also respected as a brave and accomplished fighter. When James began to expand the army, the suspicion spread that he was preparing to impose his own religious faith on England by force of arms. It was unfortunate for James that his efforts coincided with Louis’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The terrifying events unfolding across the Channel stoked fears that James planned to establish a similar absolutist and Catholic monarchy in England. By 1688, James had trebled the size of the army he had inherited to 25,000 men, its ranks swelled by Scottish and Irish soldiers and — most worryingly — by Catholic officers. Was this the precursor to England’s own dragonnades?

One more, diminutive, reinforcement to James’s forces tipped the scale. In 1688 his second, Catholic, queen, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son. To the Protestants, the baby’s gender caused consternation: he supplanted the two Protestant princesses by James’s first marriage, in the line of succession. The king’s opponents in England looked to the husband of James’s eldest daughter, Princess Mary, to intervene. He was William of Orange.

Although he was a foreign prince, whose navy was England’s great rival, William was the obvious candidate to save England from James and his Catholicism. The Dutchman’s links to the English throne were manifold. His mother was a Stuart princess, sister to Charles II and James II. As a boy William had been a great favourite with his uncles, during their exile from Commonwealth England. In 1677, William married his first cousin, Princess Mary. Charles II approved the match, which was an acknowledgement of improved English relations with the United Provinces since the conclusion of the Dutch War. Louis XIV was furious. ‘You have given your daughter to my mortal enemy,’[fn3] he fumed, in a letter to the Duke of York. Louis had correctly guessed that William’s motives for the match were tactical, rather than sentimental. The Prince of Orange was marrying the heir apparent to the Stuart crown because England’s wealth would be welcome in his European wars. Furthermore, Louis could not hope to equal the combined Dutch and English fleets.

William was not a risk-taker, but a man of unyielding practicality. He only agreed to seek the English crown after much thought. If he allowed James’s infant prince to take his wife’s place in the succession, the United Provinces would be denied the support of England’s ships and coffers in the forthcoming war with France. Despite his status as a Protestant saviour, William would not invade in order to save England from a potential Catholic tyrant. His intention was to harness the country’s capabilities against the Papist autocrat who had long possessed the throne of France. Before committing himself, William took soundings from trusted Dutch aides, who were encouraging about his prospects. He also received a letter inviting his immediate intervention, which had been signed by seven English magnates. Comfortingly, they represented the Anglican Church and the two dominant parliamentary factions, the Whigs and the Tories.

William invaded England in November 1688, while Louis’s forces were terrorising the upper Rhine. His polyglot army, which included Dutchmen, Swedes, Prussians, Danes, and French Huguenots, landed to negligible opposition. Senior political and military figures scrambled to join William; even Princess Anne slipped away from London in the night, deserting her Catholic father in favour of her Calvinist brother-in-law. It was an unexpectedly smooth end to James’s reign, and the English congratulated themselves on their ‘Glorious Revolution’.

Louis was surprised and disappointed by the success of William’s gamble. When the possibility of an invasion had first been mooted, earlier in the year, Louis had volunteered to come to James’s aid. He had offered money, 30,000 soldiers, and the French Channel fleet. In return for Louis’s support, James had to agree to align his nation with France in the pending European war. However, James would not consent to this, so the disgruntled Louis left him to fend for himself.

The view at Versailles had been that the invasion of England would bring nothing but ill to the Prince of Orange. It seemed inevitable that William’s army would be embroiled in another English Civil War. The French had failed to foresee a successful invasion without battle on sea or land. Neither had James’s speedy flight to the Continent been predicted: his many royal supporters dared not act when their leader had already deserted them.

William never felt enamoured of his new kingdom, nor did he trust many of those who had aided the toppling of his predecessor. Although he was the prime beneficiary of this treachery, he realised that it could be repeated to his cost. During his reign he remained focused on the war with Louis: England’s involvement could add a new and promising element to the hotchpotch of anti-French nations that he had brought together. Little did he realise that these first faltering steps, made under his gaze, were to take his island kingdom away from isolation, towards Empire.

Chapter Three – John Churchill

No one in this world could possibly have done better than Mr Churchill has done and M. de Turenne is very well pleased with all our nation.

Letter of Lord Duras (Later the Earl of Feversham) to the English Government, 1674

The French enjoyed belittling William of Orange’s generalship. They knew that his personal courage on the field of battle, whilst admirable, had rarely brought him victory. A contemporary joke in Paris suggests widespread disdain for a hapless foe: ‘The Prince of Orange can at least boast’, it was said, ‘that no general of his age had raised so many sieges and lost so many battles.’[fn1] William was bitterly aware of his limitations, blaming them on his lack of training at the side of the great generals of his youth. ‘I would’, he said wistfully, ‘willingly give part of my provinces to have served some campaigns under the Prince of Condé.’[fn2]

At the outbreak of war in 1689, William turned to an apprentice of Turenne — Condé’s brother-in-arms — to make something of his English troops. His name was John Churchill, and he had recently been promoted to lieutenant-general.

John was the son of Sir Winston Churchill, a Royalist cavalry officer during the Civil War. Sir Winston had suffered financially for having supported the king: the Churchill family endured confiscation and impoverishment during Cromwell’s Commonwealth. After the restoration of the Stuarts, however, Sir Winston retrieved some status, even if money continued to elude him. He became a Tory Member of Parliament, and a junior courtier. These posts left him time to write a sycophantic history of the kings of England, further testimony to his pronounced loyalty to the Crown.

Eight of John’s eleven siblings died young. His two surviving brothers followed him into the armed services, with success: George Churchill became an admiral, and younger brother Charles a general. The only surviving sister, Arabella, was also to enjoy prominence in adulthood.

In common with other daughters of impoverished Royalists, Arabella Churchill was despatched to the Restoration Court to become a teenaged maid of honour. Her mistress was the former Anne Hyde, a commoner who had caught the eye of James, Duke of York, whilst in-waiting to his sister Mary, the mother of William of Orange. To the chagrin of James’s family, the couple married. The new duchess quickly discovered that her duties included a tacit acceptance of her husband’s roving eye. The duke’s particular penchant was for her own female retinue, from which he drew fresh conquests at will.

Sir Peter Lely’s luscious portraits tell us that Charles II liked ravishing mistresses, with generous bosom and ringletted hair. James’s tastes were altogether less obvious, veering towards the plain. Bemused by his brother’s series of dowdy lovers, Charles concluded that they must be a penance inflicted on James by Catholic confessors. ‘My brother will lose his kingdom by his bigotry, and his soul for a lot of ugly trollops,’[fn3] was the king’s opinion; and we know that he was right on one count, at least.