Marlborough (56 page)

Marlborough had seventy-three battalions and 123 squadrons, with a hundred guns and twenty shell-throwing howitzers, in all perhaps 62,000 men. Orkney commanded the bulk of the British foot on the right, with Lumley’s horse behind him. In the centre were most of the Allied infantry under Churchill and Schultz, while Overkirk commanded on the left, where most of the Allied cavalry faced the French on a plain that might have been made for charging horsemen. The Allies filled the plateau of Jandrenouille, their straight front, in contrast to their
opponents’ shallow curve, making them look, to friend and foe alike, more numerous than their enemy. De la Colonie thought that the Allies were in ‘four great lines, closed up like walls: while ours were only in three, of which the third was composed of a few squadrons of dragoons’. George Orkney thought that the French had taken up

a very good post at the head of the Geet, and possessed themselves of several villages on their front, with a marsh ground and a little ruisseau [stream] before them, so that, when we came to attack, it was impossible for us to extend our line, so were drawn up in several lines, one behind another, and indeed even in confusion enough, which I own gave me at first a very ill prospect of things.
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While his horse and foot were deploying, Marlborough personally sited his main battery opposite Ramillies. This included some twenty-four-pounders, very heavy guns for use on the battlefield, hauled laboriously into position by teams of oxen. The first shots of the battle proper came as these guns took on the French battery above the village. De la Colonie knew, from long experience, that it was as well to keep his men’s minds off what was to come:

I got the woodwind that followed at the rear of the regiment to strike up some martial flourishes, to divert my people and keep them in a good frame of mind. But the cannon-shots which began to roll out across the battlefield surprised them so much that they disappeared like lightning, without anyone noticing, and went off to raise melodious sounds from their instruments in places where they would not be competing with cannon.
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The battle began at about 2.30, with Allied attacks on both Villeroi’s flanks. Orkney tells us that his approach was obstructed by

a morass and a ruisseau before us, which they said was impossible to pass over. But however we tried, and, after some difficulty, got over with ten or twelve battalions; and Mr Lumley brought over some squadrons of horse with very great difficulty; and I endeavoured to possess myself of a village [Autreglise] which the French brought down a good part of their line to take possession of, and they were on one side of the village, and I on the other; but they always retired as we advanced.
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Thomas Kitcher, a Hampshire farm labourer serving in Meredith’s Regiment, part of Orkney’s first wave, told his village curate exactly what a general’s ‘some difficulty’ actually meant for a private soldier. The French commander in Offus, the comte de Guiche, had posted some Walloon infantry on his side of the marsh to make the British pay dearly for their crossing. The front rank of Meredith’s was mangled by fire from across the Geete, and Kitcher was tripped by a comrade’s entrails.

They were then commanded to cross the marsh by means of fascines and many were shot and maimed, or killed, which they carried and laid down their foundations. He told me that limbs and bodies, of which it was impossible to ascertain whether or not they were dead, were used to pass the quagmire at some points, and that one redcoat that he knew of raised himself from the supposed dead at the indignity of the treatment and turned upon the pioneers who had thought him one of their bundles of faggots and flayed him with his tongue.
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Once the British were across, the Walloons scampered back up the slope towards Offus, with the redcoats close behind them. ‘The Frenchies seemed surprised,’ recalled Kitcher, ‘and showed no mind to fight much. Some of them I saw turned tail and I spiked one of their officers through the throat and another in the arse.’
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The fighting here was inconclusive, partly because the ground prevented Orkney from bringing his whole force to bear. John Blackader of the Cameronians had been promoted the previous winter. The death of his colonel seemed likely to trigger a general advancement from which he, as the regiment’s senior captain, hoped to profit. He spoke to Marlborough about it, ‘got a good answer (for none ever get ill words from him)’, and was duly promoted on 15 December. At Ramillies, his first action as a major, his regiment was in the second line, and he found the battle

not general, but it was hot to those that were engaged. Our regiment was no further engaged but that we were cannonaded for some hours, and had several men killed and wounded. I was not near the Duke, but upon our wing we had a great want of generals and distinct orders.
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Robert Parker, too, found that his regiment, at the extreme right of Orkney’s first line, had little to do, but ‘stood looking on without firing a shot; and as we were posted on an eminence, we had a fair view of the
whole battle on the plain’.
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This is no bad description of what was, had Parker and Blackader but known it, a diversionary attack, where uncommitted troops helped fix French attention on the indecisive flank.

On the Allied left, however, the attack progressed far more swiftly. Here Villars, like many a general before and since, had been drawn forward by the lure of a useful feature to his front. The five Swiss battalions responsible for the small village of Taviers, which marked the right of his line, were ordered to push on and also to hold the tiny Franquenée, another five hundred yards to their front. De la Colonie thought that the villages were embedded in ground so marshy as to be impracticable to cavalry, but their garrisons would be able to fire, from these bastions, on cavalry operating on the southern flank, so they were certainly worth securing. By trying to retain both villages with an inadequate force Villars left himself open to defeat in detail. On Overkirk’s orders, Colonel Wertmüller’s four battalions of Dutch foot guards, supported by two field guns, manhandled forward by their detachments to breach garden walls and houses, attacked Franquenée first. The Dutch then bundled the Swiss back into Taviers, and took that too after fighting which, so de la Colonie maintained, cost as many lives as the rest of the battle.

The marquis de Guiscard-Magny, commanding Villeroi’s right wing, immediately took what should have been textbook steps to recover the lost ground. He ordered three more Swiss battalions to move southwards against Taviers, while fourteen squadrons of dragoons were to dismount near the tumulus called the Tomb of Ottomont, well behind the French right, and attack on foot. De la Colonie’s brigade, on the right of the first line of infantry, was then ordered south to support the counterattack. As the Red Grenadiers marched in front of the
Maison du Roi
they were applauded by the horsemen – partly, thought de la Colonie, because of the reputation his men had earned at the Schellenberg, but also because the gentlemen troopers hoped that the brigade was moving to shield the cavalry’s right flank from interference from Allied foot soldiers firing from the marsh.

It was a misplaced hope. The French dragoons dismounted, their strength immediately reduced by the need to detail one man in four to hold horses, and then clumped forward on foot, booted and spurred. They were stoutly received by the Dutch foot and guns in Taviers and then unexpectedly charged by six squadrons of Danish horse which had skirted the two villages, and come on quickly across the southern edge of the plain, first breaking the dragoons and then cutting up the
advancing Swiss. De la Colonie’s brigade commander, commendably eager to assist, cantered forward but got stuck in the little Vesoul stream which flowed into the Mehaigne. He would never have got out, thought de la Colonie, had the helpful Dutch not rescued him.

Worse was to follow. As the Red Grenadiers neared the marsh they were swamped by a tidal wave of fugitives, Swiss and dragoons alike. Within seconds de la Colonie found himself left with only his regiment’s colours and a few officers: ‘I yelled in German and French like a madman, I gave all sorts of names to my people, I took the colonel’s colour, planted it a certain distance away, and, making many shouts and wild gestures, I attracted the looks and the attentions of many.’ He was eventually able to rally the equivalent of four small battalions, but his men were now badly shaken, and one grenadier behind him opined noisily that they were being led to butchery.
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Although de la Colonie maintained that by holding a crest-line on his army’s right, thus giving the impression that there were more infantry behind him, he helped prop up the flank of the
Maison du Roi
, there was no denying the fact that the French right had now been kicked off its hinges.

In the centre, though, the fighting was far more evenly balanced, with squadrons charging, wheeling back and then charging again as French and Allied horsemen, perhaps 25,000 in all, hacked at one another across the green wheatfields south of Ramillies in the biggest cavalry battle of the war. Robert Parker thought that:

In this engagement there was great variety of action; sometimes their squadrons and sometimes ours giving way in different places; and as the fate of the day depended entirely on the behaviour of the troops on the plain, so both sides exerted themselves with the utmost vigour for a long time. The Duke was in all places where his presence was requisite; and in the hurry of the action happened to get unhorsed, and in great danger of his life; but was remounted by Captain Molesworth, one of his aides de camp, the only person of his retinue then near him; who seeing him in manifest danger of falling into the hands of the pursuing enemy, suddenly threw himself from his horse, and helped the Duke to mount him. His Grace, by this means, got off between our lines; the captain being immediately surrounded by the enemy; from which danger (as well as that of our fire) he was, at last, providentially delivered. His Grace, about an hour after, had another narrow escape; when in shifting back from Captain
Molesworth’s horse to his own, Colonel Bringfield … holding the stirrup, was killed by a cannon shot from the village of Ramillies. Notwithstanding which, the Duke immediately rode up to the head of his troops; and his presence animated them to that degree, that they pressed home upon the enemy, and made them shrink and give back.
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The Bringfield incident became one of the most commonly recounted aspects of the battle. Lord Orkney tells how ‘My Lord Marlborough was rid over, but got other squadrons, which he led up again. Major Bringfield, holding his stirrup to give him another horse, was shot with a cannon bullet which went through my Lord’s legs; in truth there was no scarcity of ’em.’
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When helping someone to mount, one often puts weight on the offside stirrup just as the rider places his left foot in the nearside stirrup: Orkney’s version suggests that Bringfield was decapitated by a ball which passed under Marlborough’s right foot as he swung it over the horse. Lieutenant Colonel James Bringfield had been commissioned in 1685, was appointed captain in the 1st Troop of Horse Guards nine years later, and was promoted major in 1702. His death made a great impression on Marlborough. ‘Poor Bringfield is killed,’ he told Godolphin, ‘and I am told he leaves his wife and mother in a bad condition.’ He said much the same to Sarah: ‘Poor Bringfield holding my stirrup for me, and helping me on horseback, was killed. I am told that he leaves his wife and mother in a poor condition.’ Sarah visited Mrs Bringfield on 17 May 1706 OS and promised her, on the queen’s behalf, a pension for life.
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The incident featured as the ten of diamonds on a set of contemporary playing cards, with Marlborough firmly in the saddle and Bringfield’s corpse standing upright with blood jetting from its headless trunk.

Marlborough had also been very lucky to escape from the earlier mêlée. Conspicuous in his red coat and garter star he had led blue-and-grey-coated Dutch squadrons against the
Maison du Roi.
Lieutenant Colonel Cranstoun of the Cameronians, not generally one of Marlborough’s admirers, wrote that:

Ten of the Dutch squadrons were repulsed, renversed, and put into great disorder. The Duke, seeing this, and seeing that things went pretty well elsewhere, stuck by the weak part to make it up by his presence, and led up still new squadrons to the charge, till at last
the victory was obtained. It was here when those squadrons were being reversed and in absolute déroute and the French mixed up with them in the pursuit that the Duke, flying with the crowd, in leaping a ditch fell from his horse and some rode over him. Major General Murray, who had his eye there and was so near he could distinguish the Duke in the flight, seeing him fall, marched up in all haste with two Swiss battalions to save him and stop the enemy who were hewing down all in their way. The Duke when he got to his feet again saw Major General Murray coming up and ran directly to get into his battalions. In the meantime Mr Molesworth quitted his horse and got the Duke mounted again, and the French were so hot in the pursuit that some of them before they could stop their horses ran in upon the Swiss bayonets and were killed, but the majority of them, seeing the two battalions, shore off to the right and retired.
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Death was no respecter of persons that day, and the young Prince Louis of Hesse-Cassel was cut down.

Just north of this swirl of cavalry, Lieutenant General Schultz, with some twelve Allied battalions, including Churchill’s and Mordaunt’s, as well as the Duke of Argyll’s Scots brigade in Dutch pay, attacked the village of Ramillies. The place was tenaciously defended, but the French were already beginning to give ground by the time Marlborough played his master-stroke. He knew that the re-entrant behind his right wing would enable him to move Orkney’s men south without the French seeing them. Indeed, he may very well have been surprised at the progress Orkney had made in attacking the supposedly impregnable French left flank, for it was not his intention for his dogged subordinate to take Autreglise, although Orkney himself had other ideas.