Marlborough (61 page)

The events of 1707 had shown that the Allies would be disadvantaged by having to maintain so many garrisons, and Marlborough advocated running the risk of leaving major towns ungarrisoned and maintaining a larger field army which would give him a chance of beating the French. He could persuade the Dutch that this would work only by transferring troops from Germany, and this in turn required him to persuade George, Elector of Hanover (and Marlborough’s future king), who was now the new Allied commander on the Rhine, that it would be wise to maintain three armies: the Elector’s on the Rhine, Eugène’s on the Moselle, and his own on the Flanders frontier. Marlborough always intended to move Eugène up to join him, and so set off to see George in late April with some trepidation. He pulled off his task of deception, telling Godolphin:

After a very great deal of uneasiness, the Elector has consented to the project for three armies; but we have been obliged to leave on the Rhine two more Imperial regiments than we designed, so that Prince Eugène will have 2000 horse less on the Moselle; and as for the joining the two armies, we thought it best not to acquaint the Elector with it, so that when it is put into execution he will be very angry; but since the good of the campaign depends on it, I know no remedy but patience.
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The French plan was much as Marlborough had predicted. They hoped that the Jacobite excursion to Scotland would weaken the Allies in Flanders, but that scheme, as we have seen, proved the dampest of squibs. Vendôme and Burgundy were to have 130 battalions and 210 squadrons for the Netherlands, with the Elector of Bavaria and the Duke of Berwick
with another seventy-five battalions and 140 squadrons on the Rhine. Despite the failure of the Scottish expedition, the French should have enjoyed a comfortable superiority, and they had another useful card to play.

Marlborough had already warned that the inhabitants of the Spanish Netherlands were not happy under the Anglo-Dutch Condominium. Lord Ailesbury declared that:

I cannot say that their laws were violated, but their purse paid well, and great sums were laid upon pretence of giving safeguards, and contributions were exacted, and for three years the fields were as bare as the high road by continued foraging for to make the armies subsist … And to give them their due they loved the English officers and soldiers, but not the hoarders up of money.
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Marlborough’s plan to replace the indefensible Brussels as the capital of the Spanish Netherlands by the well-fortified Antwerp, while perfectly sensible from the military viewpoint, was not popular with the two Dutch representatives on the Condominium. One of them, van den Bergh, burgomaster of Leiden, warned Heinsius that the abandonment of Brussels would not simply lead to the loss of Brabant, which was actually well disposed to the Allies, but would put Holland itself at risk. Marlborough, however, was determined to go ahead, and told Heinsius ‘to lose no time in sending the necessary orders to your deputies at Brussels for the removing of the archives, it being absolutely necessary for the good success of this campaign’.
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A Dutch historian, writing in 1945, argued that Marlborough ‘intended to leave Brussels and Brabant to the French, after which the waterways of Flanders would have formed his only connection with Holland’. This is history as politics, for it is evident that it was never Marlborough’s intention to relinquish Brabant. He believed that in order to defend it he would do better to manoeuvre in open field with as big an army as possible, and was obliged to thin out his garrisons in order to achieve this.
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Advised by the pro-French comte de Bergeyck, Burgundy and Vendôme struck before the move could be accomplished. In late May, Vendôme assured Louis that a
coup de main
against Antwerp ‘will be put into execution in the first days of the coming month’, but it was detected by the Allies in time.
⁴⁴
An infantry brigade under Major General Murray was posted at Mariekirk, west of Marlborough’s main army, then in the Louvain area, to support any threatened garrison. But on the evening of
3 July a party of 2,000 horse and 2,000 foot under brigadiels de Chémerault and de Ruffey, ostensibly foraging around Tubize, crossed the Dender at Ninove and made for Ghent, hub of the Flanders waterways. Led by F.H. de la Faille, formerly grand bailiff of the city, a group of cavalry rushed one of the gates, while others were opened with the connivance of the citizens: the Allied garrison of three hundred men withdrew to the citadel. The main French army, led by Lieutenant General Grimaldi’s advance guard, marching at good speed in pouring rain, got past Marlborough’s right flank and positioned itself between him and Ghent. The garrison in the citadel agreed to surrender on terms if no help arrived by the eighth. Another small force under the comte de Lamotte, striking up from Comines, went on to take Bruges in much the same way in the early hours of 5 June, again without the Allies being able to intervene.

The French
coups de main
came at a time when both armies had reinforcements on the way. Eugène, as planned, was marching in from the Moselle with thirty-six battalions and seventy squadrons, although he had started later than expected as some of his troops had been slow in joining him, and was not expected at Maastricht till 10 July. As soon as Berwick heard that Eugène was on the move, he sent thirty-four battalions and sixty-five squadrons north, and they were expected to arrive at Namur on the fourteenth. Marlborough’s original hope that the arrival of Eugène’s detachment would have tilted the balance (and with it the minds of the Dutch deputies) in his favour would probably have been dashed by the arrival of Berwick’s men.

There is no doubt that the fall of Ghent and Bruges caught Marlborough badly off-balance, and, probably more than any other single event in his military career, did serious damage to his poise and self-confidence. Goslinga reckoned that it was one of only two occasions when he saw the duke show genuine alarm, and David Chandler, one of his most supportive biographers, acknowledges that ‘he was soon plunged into the deepest depression’.
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Marlborough’s letters and dispatches show only his formal response to events, but they depict a swift parry and early recognition that the fortress of Oudenarde, just south of Ghent, would be vital in preventing the French from exploiting their success. At two in the morning on 5 July, long before French intentions were clear, he dashed off a note to Murray, saying that he had just heard that the French had sent 5,000 men towards Ninove, and expected them to follow with their main army. Murray was to send Sir Thomas Prendergast’s Regiment to Oudenarde immediately.
Another note assured the governor of Oudenarde that Prendergast’s men would march ‘without halting’ to reinforce him: Marlborough was anxious that he should know that help was at hand.

No sooner was the ink dry on these letters than Marlborough broke camp and headed for Brussels; he was at Anderlecht, south-west of the city, that same afternoon, when he wrote to Henry Boyle, who had become a secretary of state when Harley and his followers left the government. Despite the crisis of the moment, he was the soul of politeness, and began by saying that although he was aware that two issues recently raised by Boyle, the pensions to be given to Swedish ministers, and the response to a letter from the Russian ambassador, were very important,

I must defer my answer to these particulars till the next post; but having had advice last night that the enemy were decamped, and that they had made a strong detachment some hours before under M. Grimaldi, we have been upon our march since two o’clock in the morning, and having had notice at noon that the [enemy] detachment was advanced as far as Alost, and had broken down the bridges over the Dender, I immediately detached two thousand horse and dragoons, under Major General Bothmar, to pass at Dendemonde and observe them and protect the Pays de Waes. By what we can learn hitherto, their army is advancing as far as Ninove, and we shall continue our march according to their further motions. I have just now an express from Mr Cadogan, whom I sent as far as Maastricht to wait on Prince Eugène, that H[is] H[ighness] arrived there yesterday, and intended to be this evening at Terbanck, so that I expect him tonight or tomorrow morning early.
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On the surface it is hard to fault Marlborough’s reaction to the crisis. Even before he knew what the French had in mind he had recognised the importance of Oudenarde and taken steps to reinforce it, sent out a strong party to find the French, and established communications with Eugène. However, Goslinga, sketching with an intimacy that sometimes verged on caricature, shows a man who was far less comfortable than his letters suggest. Goslinga arrived at Anderlecht on the evening of the fifth, and

found him ready to mount his horse. He had received an hour earlier a report from the right that they were in touch with the enemy and that there was a chance of striking at their rearguard … It was upon
receiving this message from the generals of the right that the Duke had risen from his bed, pale, worn out and disconsolate, to go and reconnoitre the enemy’s position himself. We had scarcely ridden a couple of miles when he said that there was no use in going further, that it was too late to begin an operation, and thereupon he turned his horse and rode back to his quarters.
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Goslinga tells us that he urged Marlborough to attack the French rearguard, but Marlborough replied that the ground was unfavourable. Later that night more information came in which persuaded him to send reinforcements out to his right. At one o’clock on the morning of the sixth Goslinga was awakened by one of Marlborough’s aides. ‘I dressed in a moment and was at his quarters before two o’clock,’ he writes:

I found him at his prayers, and when they were finished he mounted his coach. M. Dopff [the Dutch quartermaster general] and I followed him. It was at the first gleam of dawn that we arrived at the mill of Tombergh [St-Katherina Lombeek, almost midway between Brussels and Ninove]. We there found Bulow with other generals of the right. All were persuaded, against the opinion of Dopff, that we would find an enemy army drawn up ready to fall on us.
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The Allied army was ‘drawn up in battle; the greater part of the horse and foot having been brought to the right in the night’.
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When dawn came up there was nobody to be seen, and although a dozen squadrons were sent off all they managed to do was to fall in with part of the French baggage train, and take good booty and some three hundred prisoners. The French had indeed given them the slip. Sergeant Millner thought that their rearguard had been very well handled, and had ‘falsified and flourished its colours apace in the scrub in our front as if all their army had there a posting to give our army battle’.
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Chaplain Hare attributed the confusion to Cadogan’s absence. Had he been there, ‘he would have known the difference between their coming to us and marching by us, and would have given his Grace better intelligence’.
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Back at Marlborough’s headquarters, Goslinga pressed him to march south-west towards Menin, and warned him that Oudenarde was very weak, but ‘these reasons, solid as they were, made no impression on the Duke, who persisted in wishing to march on Assche [Asse, midway between Brussels and Alost] to wait for the arrival of Prince Eugène and
his army’.
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Marlborough had good reason for doing so. He was still uncertain of the position of the main French army, and it would be potentially fatal to launch an operation until he was sure of it. When he wrote to Bothmar on the sixth he still did not know that the citadel of Ghent had fallen, and the same day he urged the governor of Dendemonde to reinforce it with 250 to three hundred men if he could. Cadogan was away with Eugène, and therefore the heavy burden of staff work fell on Marlborough’s own shoulders.

It is clear that he was not at all well, and in addition, the events of the past few days had knocked him off-balance. On the ninth, when the picture had cleared, he told Sarah that ‘the perpetual marching I have had, has made me so very uneasy, that I have very little sleep these last three nights, so that I am so hot, that I must beg of you not to answer yours till next post’.
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Goslinga wrote that on the sixth, when the French rearguard might indeed have been caught, ‘instead of pressing the march by his presence’ Marlborough dined and then ‘went straight to his quarters, as if the enemy was twenty leagues away’. In his view this was ‘evident proof that courage and dash without great activity which stands the test of all sorts of fatigue are insufficient to make an accomplished general’.
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Marlborough was more than usually pleased to see Eugène on the eighth. The prince tells us that Cadogan had met him at Maastricht to say that the French had surprised Ghent and Bruges ‘and that my presence was wanted’. Eugène detoured through Brussels, ‘where my interview with my mother, after a separation of twenty-five years, was very tender but very short’, and went on, in a post-chaise escorted by Hungarian hussars, to meet Marlborough at Asse. He was four days ahead of his leading cavalry, and his infantry was even further back.

In his memoirs Eugène writes that he asked Marlborough if he intended to give battle. ‘I think I ought,’ replied the duke, ‘and I find with pleasure, but without astonishment, that we have both made this reflection, but without this our communications with Brussels will be cut off. But I should like to have waited for your troops.’
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Eugène told him not to wait, because the opportunity would not come again. In his private report to the emperor, however, Eugène painted a rather different picture. He admitted that Marlborough was ‘pretty consternated’, and Ritter von Arneth, one of his biographers, went further, telling us that the prince