Читать книгу Marlborough and the War of the Spanish Succession - G. W. L. Nicholson - Страница 11

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On May 4, 1702 England, the United Provinces and the Empire simultaneously declared war on France. Marlborough went at once to The Hague as Queen Anne's ambassador. It took a month or more to dispose of the claims of various rival candidates for the chief command of the allied armies, and at the end of June the Dutch named Marlborough Deputy Captain General of the Republic. The appointment placed him in charge of the British, Dutch and German armies, a command which he was to exercise continuously for the next ten years. Although nominally he held no authority over the forces of the Austrian Empire, he was recognized (by his enemies, if not always by his allies) as the leading general of all the forces opposing Louis XIV, and we shall refer to him hereafter as Commander-in-Chief.

But the ten thousand pounds a year which the Dutch paid Marlborough carried with it very definite restrictions on his freedom to wage war as he chose. Following constitutional practice they attached to his staff two parliamentary deputies, whose instructions were to see that the new Captain General exercised extreme caution in all that he undertook and did not allow himself to be drawn into any battle that could possibly be avoided. The Government at The Hague was suffering from the defensive complex which had characterized so much of the campaigning of the latter seventeenth century, and it was quite content to prevent the French from occupying Dutch territory without making any attempt to drive them out of the Spanish Netherlands.

Historical Section, G.S.

To Marlborough the situation in the Low Countries at the beginning of the campaigning season of 1702 seemed one that called for vigorous offensive Allied action. The Grand Monarch held an extremely advantageous position as a result of his seizure of the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Barrier and his occupation of the Archbishopric of Cologne and the Bishopric of Liége, whose rulers had both made common cause with Louis. The French controlled the important waterways of the Scheldt, the Meuse (except for the fortress of Maastricht, still in Dutch hands), and the Lower Rhine from Bonn down almost to Nijmegen. During the summer of 1701 Louis had caused to be constructed, under the direction of his skilled engineer Sébastien Vauban, a seventy-mile defence system stretching from Namur on the Meuse to Antwerp on the Scheldt. These "Lines of Brabant", consisting of extensive field works based on a number of small rivers and supplemented by low-lying areas which had been deliberately flooded, were strongly garrisoned and were designed to bar the way to any opposing army seeking to reach French territory by an advance west of the Meuse.

In disposing his forces for the summer's campaigns, Louis placed in the Netherlands an army of 60,000 men led by one of his most competent generals, Marshal Boufflers. He sent another 60,000 under Marshals Villars and Vendôme to Italy to carry on the fight against Prince Eugene of Savoy, the brilliant commander of the Imperial Army of Austria. A third French army of 20,000 men under Marshal Catinat was put on guard in the region of Alsace, as a check to an Allied army of equal size commanded by Prince Louis of Baden, which was blocking any French move eastward across the Upper Rhine. The Prince was holding the strong "Lines of Stollhofen", an elaborate system of fortifications which he had constructed to close the nine-mile gap between the Rhine at Stollhofen (fifteen miles below Strasbourg) and the heavily timbered slopes of the Black Forest Mountains.

When on July 2 Marlborough, accompanied by his two Dutch Field Deputies, went to Nijmegen, there to assume command of an army of 60,000, fighting had been in progress for ten weeks. In mid-April a combined Dutch-German force of 25,000 had besieged Kaiserswerth, a French-held fortress on the right bank of the Rhine, half a dozen miles below Düsseldorf. Its capture would free the river from the Dutch border up to Cologne. The main French army had pushed up between the Meuse and the Rhine to within twenty miles of Nijmegen, the Dutch stronghold which guarded the Rhine delta and barred entry to Holland. From his headquarters at Xanten Boufflers had sent an army under Marshal Tallard to raise, or at least hamper, the siege of Kaiserswerth, but his efforts from the Rhine's left bank had been unavailing. On June 10 Boufflers suddenly made a two-pronged advance through Gennep and Cleves in an attempt to nip off the Dutch General Ginckel, who was at Kranenburg concentrating the main Allied army and at the same time covering the siege of Kaiserswerth. Ginckel narrowly escaped to the protection of the guns of Nijmegen, and Boufflers took up position at Gennep, with his left flank protected by the River Meuse. Kaiserswerth fell in mid-June, setting free 8000 of the besiegers to join the main Allied force, the others moving up the Rhine to rid the Archbishopric of Cologne of its remaining French garrisons.

Marlborough soon found that any plan to march southward and seek a decisive battle with the French was stubbornly opposed by the authorities at The Hague as well as by the Dutch generals in his army, who in their anxiety to guard Holland closely showed little concern that the initiative in the campaign should remain with the French. "If the fear of Nimeguen and the Rhine had not hindered us from marching into Brabant", he wrote to the Earl of Godolphin, the English Lord Treasurer, on July 13, "they [the French] must then have had the disadvantage of governing themselves by our motions, whereas we are now obliged to mind them."[12] Marlborough won the support however of one of the Dutch Deputies, who urged the Grand Pensionary of Holland, Anton Heinsius, "to be so good as to work unceasingly for a resolve to do something effective; for without action all is lost."[13] Marlborough realized that he must contrive to get the French out of the area between the Lower Rhine and the Meuse before the Dutch would agree to operations against the Spanish Netherlands—and he had to accomplish this without committing his forces to a pitched battle.

On July 15 he moved his army to Grave, on the Meuse eight miles south-west of Nijmegen, and ten days later, having secretly bridged the river in three places, crossed to the left bank. His intention was to advance towards Dutch-held Maastricht, in the hope that this threat to the French communications would force Boufflers to beat a retreat. Before he could start his march, however, to placate the Dutch he was compelled to divide his army and leave a substantial force entrenched in front of Nijmegen. Having covered forty miles in five days Marlborough halted at Lille St. Hubert within the territory of the Bishopric of Liége to see what Boufflers would do. The French commander reacted as expected. Finding his enemy between him and the Lines of Brabant, he recalled Tallard from the Rhine and fell back to the south-west by way of the fortresses of Venlo and Roermond, leaving both strongly garrisoned. On August 1 his path of retreat lay over a wide moorland between Lille St. Hubert and the village of Peer. Although this would take his army right across the Allied front, Boufflers decided to make the attempt under cover of darkness. This was what Marlborough was waiting for, and he ordered his troops to stand to their arms all night. But at the crucial moment the Dutch Deputies prevailed on him to abandon the attack. Next morning at the Commander-in-Chief's insistence they rode out with their generals to watch the passage of the French across the heath and, writes Parker in his Memoirs, "saw them hurrying over it in the greatest confusion and disorder imaginable; upon this they all acknowledged that they had lost a fair opportunity of giving the enemy a fatal blow."

A second opportunity came next day when the tired French army was still ten miles from its destination, encamped in an ill-chosen position that made it particularly vulnerable to attack. But again Marlborough's hands were tied by Dutch timidity, and Boufflers escaped safely behind his defence lines, where he was shortly joined by Tallard. On August 5 the Allied army moved forward to Peer, a score of miles from the River Demer, which formed part of the Brabant position.

Furious at the loss of the whole of the lower Meuse (below Maastricht only the isolated fortresses of Stevensweert, Roermond and Venlo were still in French hands) Louis XIV spurred Boufflers to vigorous action. A profitable course seemed to lie in interrupting Marlborough's supply lines, which because passage up the Meuse was still blocked by the French forts, ran overland from Nijmegen and Bois-le-Duc.[14] Marlborough, who was just as anxious for action as the Grand Monarch, set the stage by arranging that a large convoy of bread wagons from the north should pass within reach of Boufflers. Thus enticed the French left the safety of their lines on August 9, intending to intercept the supply train near Eindhoven. Marlborough's move to cut in behind them was made prematurely, however, and Boufflers escaped the trap. The Duke now moved his main army southward, keeping General Opdam's convoy escort of 6000 men well to the rear as a decoy. With the King's exhortations in mind, Boufflers went in pursuit, and after three days came up with Opdam near Helchteren, where to his consternation he found not only the small force of the Dutch general, but the whole of Marlborough's army drawn up for battle on the open plain. Yet once more Marlborough's skilful manoeuvring was to go for naught. His advantage over the tired and unprepared French was so obvious that the Dutch Deputies assented to an attack. The battle opened with a brisk artillery exchange which caused several hundred casualties to each army, but when Opdam was ordered to make a key assault on the French left, which was badly disarrayed because of marshy ground, he refused to advance because the footing was not firm. The remaining hours of daylight were wasted without an attack being made, and during the night Boufflers was able to complete his deployment. Next day the Deputies, finding the balance between the two sides more even, although still in Marlborough's favour, prohibited further offensive action. That night Boufflers slipped back behind the River Demer. In bitter disappointment Marlborough wrote from Helchteren:[15]

I have but too much reason to complain that the ten thousand men upon our right did not march as soon as I sent the orders, which if they had, I believe we should have had a very easy victory, for their whole left was in disorder ... I am in so ill humour that I will not trouble you, nor dare I trust myself to write more ...

The dispiritedness of the Dutch Deputies or the Dutch generals had now prevented Marlborough on at least four occasions from forcing a decisive action on the French. For the remainder of the campaigning season of 1702 he turned to the reduction of the three Meuse fortresses below Maastricht. Siege warfare being a conventional form of operation to which they were well accustomed the Dutch raised no objections to these undertakings, particularly against Venlo, which besides being the strongest of the three was the closest to Holland. It was invested on August 29, but although preparations had been ordered well in advance there were long delays in bringing the heavy siege batteries up the river and securing the civilian labour to carry out the required entrenchings and mining. To cover the siege Marlborough placed himself with an army of 45,000 at Asch between Helchteren and the Meuse, where he could intercept not only any French attempt to relieve Venlo but also any move against the Dutch garrison in Maastricht, about ten miles to his south. Venlo fell on September 23 after a brilliant assault upon an outlying fort by a British force (which included Captain Parker's Royal Irish Regiment), and Stevensweert and Roermond were taken in quick succession. By October 7 the whole of the Meuse was cleared as far as Maastricht.

It was late in the season for further campaigning, but Marlborough sought once more for a chance to smash the French army. Less than twenty miles up the Meuse from Maastricht was the city of Liége, whose retention by the French was of great importance to their communications with Bonn and their other fortresses on the Rhine. To check a possible Allied move in this direction Boufflers, who was under orders from Louis XIV to save Liége at all costs, moved to Tongres and took up a stand on the Jaar, a small tributary which entered the Meuse above Maastricht. The threat did not deter Marlborough from marching south. On the night of October 13-14 he crossed the Jaar between the French position and the Meuse. As was to be expected his proposal to attack Boufflers was vetoed and he turned to the reduction of Liége. The town opened its gates immediately but there was stern opposition from the citadel, which only fell to a general assault on October 23, and an outlying fort which capitulated six days later. The capture of Liége was Marlborough's crowning success of the 1702 campaign, and a bitter blow to the French, who besides sustaining 10,000 casualties in the siege now found themselves cut off from their positions in the Archbishopric of Cologne.

Early in November Marlborough moved his men into winter quarters and headed for England, narrowly avoiding capture when the boat in which he was descending the Meuse was waylaid by a marauding band of French irregulars. He escaped by using a French passport which had been made out for his brother, General Charles Churchill (for the custom still persisted from the days of chivalry for generals to give their opposite numbers safe-conduct passes). Marlborough was enthusiastically welcomed by the English people and the Parliament; the Queen conferred a dukedom upon him, and he was granted a pension of five thousand pounds a year for life.

The year 1702 had not gone as well for the Allies on other fronts. In Italy Prince Eugene, who by his masterly campaigning in 1701 had established himself in Lombardy, had failed in his efforts to extend his control south of the Po. On the Upper Rhine Prince Louis of Baden's capture of the fortress of Landau had been more than offset by the treacherous defection to the French of Prince Max Emmanuel, who had succeeded the young Joseph Ferdinand (page 6 above) as Elector of Bavaria. While negotiating with the Allies he suddenly seized the city of Ulm on the Danube, thereby threatening the communications of Prince Louis and the other Allied German Princes of the Rhine with Vienna. Fortunately for the Allies the barrier of the Black Forest Mountains separated the Bavarian Elector at Ulm from the French forces west of the Rhine, and although Marshal Villars, replacing Catinat, routed Prince Louis' army at Friedlingen in mid-October, it was too late in the season for a junction. Before campaigning ceased Marshal Tallard's capture of the fortresses of Trèves and Trarbach in the Moselle valley had opened to the French a new passage from the Netherlands to the Upper Rhine.

An Allied amphibious undertaking against Spain, designed as the first step in Marlborough's strategy to gain control of the Mediterranean, had miscarried. At the end of July a British fleet under Admiral Sir George Rooke carrying a force of 8000 soldiers commanded by the Duke of Ormonde sailed for Cadiz, the key port for trade with Spanish America, with orders to seize that important harbour as a base for subsequent operations against Minorca in the Balearic Islands. There was even a hope, if all went well, that help by sea might be brought to Prince Eugene's operations in Northern Italy. The assault on Cadiz failed through the Admiral's apathy and the General's weak leadership, and through lack of co-operation by both; and the fiasco was only partly redeemed on the way home by a well executed raid on a treasure fleet in Vigo Harbour in North-Western Spain, which enriched the British treasury by one million pounds sterling.

Marlborough spent the remaining winter months in preparation for the campaign of 1703, receiving from Parliament a vote of 10,000 additional foreign troops and five new British battalions. He returned to The Hague in mid-March in order to make an early start with operations. The probability of what the French would do played an important part in determining the Allied plans. Louis XIV was anxious to join forces with his new ally, the Elector of Bavaria, to which end he proposed to send Marshal Villars eastward through the Black Forest and bring the French army in Italy back across the Alps into Bavaria. He was content to stay mainly on the defensive in the Netherlands, where Villeroi had 60,000 men behind the Lines of Brabant, covering the area from Namur to Bruges. However, he wanted Liége retaken at the opening of the year's campaign, before the Allies, who were expected to be delayed by the customary tardiness of the Dutch, were ready to begin operations.