All the King’s Men, page 6
On a further order, all six platoons of the first firing discharged their weapons simultaneously. Immediately after, these platoons would open order and start to reload, while the second and third firings were brought into play. The third firing was the most destructive, as the fire of the last six platoons was augmented by the two halves of the grenadier company. A well-trained battalion could deliver two shots per man – or six firings – a minute.
The advantages of platoon volleys were twofold: the enemy was exposed to continuous fire against every part of his line; and at any one time a third of a battalion would be reloaded and ready for any eventuality. For the first time in history – thanks to these technological and tactical improvements – the foot soldier became the dominant factor on the battlefield. ‘Firearms and not cold steel now decide battles,’ wrote a noted French military theorist.30
But as firepower increased, so did casualties. At the Battle of Steenkirk in 1692, fought between the Allies and the French, each side suffered 4,000 casualties out of a combined total of 90,000 actually engaged (or just under 9 per cent). Twelve years later at Blenheim, by which time most European armies were equipped with flintlocks,* the vanquished French and Bavarian casualties were 40 per cent of the total engaged, and that did not include prisoners.31
The proportion of infantry to cavalry inevitably grew, most notably in the French Army, where it rose from 1:2 during Turenne’s early campaigns to 3:1 at his death in 1677. Yet horsemen of all European armies – the famed ‘armes blanches’ – retained both their social prestige and their usefulness. They could scout, escort convoys, protect camps, conduct raids, set ambushes, harry a defeated enemy and, of course, charge in battle.
Not that all countries agreed on the best way to employ cavalry in battle. The French thought it valuable chiefly as mobile firepower, rather than as an instrument of shock, and tended to advance their cavalry on a narrow front with each formation discharging its pistols before wheeling to the rear to reload. The English preferred shock-action over a broad front. ‘Probably, they deployed in three ranks,’ writes John Childs, ‘but charged at the trot in two ranks. The cavalry were armed with pistols and sabres whilst the dragoons also carried carbines.’32
In fact, some of the early dragoons did not even carry swords. Hay’s Dragoons (later the Scots Greys), for example, were mounted on sturdy farm ponies and armed with the shorter-barrelled picklock carbine (though twelve per troop used pistols and 7-foot-long halberds, a combination of axe and spear). Their specialities were guard and escort duties, cordon and search operations, and other forms of internal security, though in battle they could more than hold their own: it was a regiment of dragoons that had put Charles I’s Life Guards to flight at Naseby in 1645.33 They would eventually become cavalry proper, and fight chiefly with the sabre, but for much of the Stuart period they retained their tactical flexibility. The Military Dictionary of 1702 described them as:
Musketeers mounted, who sometimes serve a-foot, and sometimes a-horseback, being always ready upon anything that requires expedition, as being able to keep pace with the horse, and do the service of foot. In battle, or attacks, they are commonly the Enfants Perdus, or Forlorn [Hope], being the first that fall on.34
The third major weapon that a commander could use in battle was artillery. There were two basic types: siege artillery – heavy guns (36- to 60-pounders*), howitzers and mortars – to create breaches in fortifications; and field artillery – medium and light guns, varying in size from 1½- to 24-pounders – to support infantry and cavalry. Both types were moved in vast artillery trains that included engineers, pioneers and supply services as well as gunners, and that, because of their slowness, determined the speed at which an army could march. In William III’s Low Countries campaign of 1692, for example, his artillery train was comprised of 38 brass cannon of varying sizes and at least 240 four-horse wagons of munitions and ordnance stores (not to mention the many baggage and supply wagons). Sixteen years later, the Duke of Marlborough’s ‘Great Convoy’ required 16,000 horses to draw 80 heavy guns, 20 siege mortars and 3,000 assorted munitions’ and stores’ wagons, and covered 30 miles of road.35
Even field guns were difficult to move. ‘With guns weighing at least three tons each,’ writes one British expert on the era’s warfare, ‘drawn by long strings of horses harnessed in tandem, and with difficult civilian drivers to contend with, it is amazing that they made any progress at all.’36 Part of the problem was the fact that the Board of Ordnance, which controlled the artillery and engineers, was virtually an independent organ of state and not under army control. Many of its employees, moreover, were civilians and quasi-military, and this inevitably produced friction with the ‘fighting’ officers, who had been drawn from the line-infantry regiments. This anomaly would not be removed until separate permanent corps of gunners and engineers were founded in 1716 and formally incorporated into the British Army (though even then the Board of Ordnance retained its independent status).
Yet Marlborough was able to improve mobility during the War of the Spanish Succession by using a light, two-wheeled cart with springs for much of the train transport. It was drawn by two horses and much speedier than the huge six-wheeled, eight-horse ‘tumbrills’ used by many of his allies and opponents. Marshal Camille Tallard, his opponent at Blenheim, would need eight days to move the 6,000 wagons of his artillery train through the relatively short passes of the Black Forest in July 1704. Marlborough’s ‘Great Convoy’ of 1708, on the other hand, was able to cover 12 miles in a single day.37
On the battlefield, artillery was grouped in batteries of six or eight pieces. Marlborough, in particular, took great care in siting his guns because he knew their effect could be decisive – in both a defensive and an offensive capacity – and that they were virtually impossible to recover if a battle went badly. He was also prepared to move them to gain a tactical advantage during a battle, and made good use of the new English practice (introduced during William’s reign from earlier Swedish examples) of attaching two light 1½- or 3-pounder guns to each battalion for close-fire support. But, given that the effective range of all field guns was between 450–600 yards, even the batteries had to be stationed dangerously close to the firing line.
Of the three main types of artillery ammunition, the most prevalent was a solid cast-iron ball known as round-shot, which could be used either as an all-purpose projectile against men and horses, or in larger calibres for breaching fortifications. Fired from a gun at point-blank range, the shot would fly for a couple of hundred yards at the height of a man before striking the ground and bouncing the same distance again. If directed against massed targets, a single shot could kill ten or more men.
The other ammunition used by field artillery was canister or case-shot, a cylindrical tin packed with lead balls that had the effect of a large shotgun, and was used chiefly as an anti-personnel weapon at short ranges. Lastly there was the common shell, a hollow cast-iron sphere packed with gunpowder and fitted with a fuse, which was fired at higher elevations by stubbier guns known as howitzers. The fuse – little more than a wooden plug containing a train of gunpowder – was ignited by the flash of hot gases from the main charge, and could be adjusted in length so that the shell would explode in mid-air, hurling pieces of its casing into the enemy.
The performance of William III’s English troops in the Grand Alliance’s Nine Years War against France (1688–97) was mixed. They did well under Marlborough at Walcourt, as we have seen, and also fought stubbornly under William himself in an action fought chiefly between the English and French vanguards at Steenkirk in 1692, and again during the defeat at Landen in 1693. Yet the only decisive victory won by the English during the war was fought not on land but at sea in May/June 1692, when a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet defeated a smaller French force off Cap Barfleur in the Cherbourg Peninsula, and then a few days later used fireships to destroy the surviving French ships in the bay of Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue. The victory ensured English and Dutch naval domination of the Channel and effectively ended Louis XIV’s plan to invade England and restore James II.
For much of the war on the Continent, however, the French had the upper hand: securing a number of key fortresses (including Namur and Heidelberg) and winning resounding victories over the Allies at Fleurus in the Spanish Netherlands in 1690, Marsaglia in northern Italy in 1693 and at Torroella in Catalonia in 1694. But none of these successes was decisive and by 1695 – the year the Allies regained Namur and death deprived Louis XIV of his best commander, Marshal François Luxembourg – the balance of military power was turning against the French. A peace was eventually signed at Rijswijk in September 1697, its terms largely confirming the pre-war status quo. Louis XIV was allowed to keep Alsace and the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (modern Haiti); but had to hand back Lorraine and all his recent territorial gains on the right bank of the Rhine. In addition he was forced to withdraw from the Spanish Netherlands and Catalonia, to grant the Dutch a highly favourable commercial treaty, and to recognize William III as King of England and undertake not to support the candidature of James II’s Catholic son, James Stuart (the ‘Old Pretender’).
The war had thus ended satisfactorily for William III. His soldiers had made only a minor contribution to the Allied war effort, however – far less than his sailors, for example – and would have to wait for the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–14), and the extraordinary exploits of arguably the greatest general this island has produced, to establish a reputation as the finest of their era.
4. The War of the Spanish Succession
In 1692 the Earl of Marlborough’s late-flourishing career was brought to a sudden, grinding halt when he was dismissed from all his military and court appointments and imprisoned briefly in the Tower of London. The official reason for Marlborough’s sacking was his outspoken criticism of William’s preference for Dutch rather than English generals. His imprisonment, however, was on a far more serious charge: that he was actively plotting the restoration of James II.
Given the key role that Marlborough had played in James’s downfall, it seems extraordinary that such a charge could even have been levelled; and, as it happened, it took only a month for the documentary evidence to be declared a forgery and Marlborough released on bail. But he was lucky because, unbeknown to William’s agents, he had long hedged his bets by remaining in secret contact with the exiled court of James II, and would continue to do so for the rest of his life, though it is doubtful that he ever provided the Jacobites with any really useful intelligence.
Even so, Marlborough’s conduct was treasonable and, had it become public knowledge, would have cost him his life. Fortunately for him and his country, it never did and just five years after his disgrace he was able to resume his military career. His rehabilitation owed much to four timely deaths: first those of three senior British generals – Mackay, Sir John Lanier and Thomas Tollemache – who were all killed in battle at a time when William III was under political pressure to replace Dutch or ‘foreign’ generals with Britons; and then, at the close of 1694, that of Queen Mary II herself from smallpox, thus restoring her sister Princess Anne to favour as heir apparent. Given the closeness of Anne’s relationship with Marlborough’s wife, Sarah, this was a development that was bound to benefit the earl in the long run.
Though William forgave Marlborough publicly by allowing him to kiss hands in March 1695, a further three years would elapse before he felt able to entrust the earl with the prestigious and lucrative post of governor to Anne’s seven-year-old son, the Duke of Gloucester. Soon after, Marlborough was restored to his army rank and his place in the Privy Council; and when William left for Holland in the summer of 1698, he was one of the lords justice left in charge of the country. He would have to wait another three years before he was given an office of state, yet in the interim William regularly consulted him on military and political matters. It was as if William, unconvinced that Louis XIV would keep the recent peace, was looking ahead to the next inevitable war and, with his health failing, had identified Marlborough as the man to continue the fight against France.
William’s suspicions of Louis XIV were soon justified. Louis had long dreamed of uniting the crowns of France and Spain and, though he had formally renounced any claim to the Spanish throne in 1659 on marrying the infanta Maria Teresa, he later used the pretext that the marriage dowry had not been paid to declare the agreement void. Meanwhile the deformed and half imbecile Charles II (‘the Sufferer’) became King of Spain and Louis put his plans into abeyance. But when Charles died in November 1700, his will named his great-nephew Philip of Anjou, Louis’s grandson, as his sole heir (and only if Anjou and his younger brother, the Duc de Berry, refused the inheritance was it to be offered to the king’s nephew, Archduke Charles, the younger son of the Holy Roman Emperor). The sole condition was that the crowns of Spain and France should never be united.
The will was in direct contravention to a partition treaty, signed in 1699 by England and France, which stated that the Spanish Empire (then the greatest in the world) was to be divided between Archduke Charles, who would receive the lion’s share including Spain, the Spanish Netherlands and the huge Spanish Empire beyond Europe, and Louis, ‘Le Grand Dauphin’ of France (Charles II’s nephew and father of Philip of Anjou), who would rule Naples, Sardinia and Lorraine. All eyes turned to Louis XIV’s magnificent palace at Versailles. It was in the French king’s power to uphold the treaty by forbidding his grandson to accept the proffered crown. But he did the opposite – introducing Philip of Anjou to a room full of waiting courtiers and ambassadors with the words, ‘Gentlemen, here is the king of Spain’1 – and war was inevitable.
It took almost a year for William to bring the English Parliament and people round to the idea of another costly war. But he managed it thanks, once again, to the political ineptitude of Louis XIV, who, on the death of the exiled James II in September 1701, at once proclaimed the now thirteen-year-old Prince James Stuart as the rightful King of England (‘James III’). That same month, in The Hague, the Allies signed a Treaty of Grand Alliance, which bound Austria (in the person of the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I), the Dutch and the English to support the partition of the Spanish Empire with ‘satisfactory compensation’ for the Habsburgs, and gains for the maritime powers in the Caribbean.* The man who conducted these negotiations for William was the Earl of Marlborough, who, earlier that year, had been appointed commander of all English troops in Holland and Ambassador-Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, with the right to ‘conceive treaties without reference, if need be, to King or Parliament’.2 His rehabilitation was complete.
William III would not enjoy this diplomatic coup for long. On 8 March 1702, two weeks after sustaining a broken collarbone in a fall from his horse, he died at Kensington Palace. His successor Queen Anne at once appointed Marlborough, her favourite’s husband, as captain-general of her army and master-general of the Ordnance (with direct control over the infantry, the cavalry and the artillery, an important factor in the campaigns to come). He was also confirmed in his ambassadorial role to the United Provinces, and soon after appointed deputy commander of the Dutch Army. No general since Cromwell had enjoyed such a combination of diplomatic and military authority. His ‘responsibilities’, writes his most recent biographer, ‘immeasurably outweighed those exercised by British commanders-in-chief in the great wars of the twentieth century, for he did not simply execute strategy but helped to determine it. In the context of 1944, for example, he would have been Eisenhower, Montgomery and Brooke rolled into one.’3
It helped, of course, that Marlborough had the unique talents that such wide-ranging responsibility required, and would prove not only a brilliant battlefield tactician and campaign strategist, a superb trainer of men and master of logistics, but also a natural diplomatist as deft at handling the often recalcitrant Dutch politicians as he was other Allied generals. He possessed, moreover, a ‘shamanistic quality’ that, according to Richard Holmes, enables great generals to ‘get straight to the hearts of the soldiers they command’.4
All of these talents might have counted for nothing had a recent revolution in public finances not provided him with the funds to fight a war that would last for more than a decade. In the early 1690s, with the cost of war outstripping revenue and virtually no long-term system of borrowing, the government had introduced the land tax, exchequer bills and the concept of National Debt, and in 1694 Charles Montagu (later Lord Halifax) set up the Bank of England. Two years later Montagu carried out a total recoinage, disposing of clipped and counterfeit coins, and reducing the value of a guinea from 30s. to 21s. Exchequer bills alone – secured by future tax revenues from the national exchequer and paying 10 per cent interest – would allow the government to spend more than £42 million during the Nine Years War (also known as the War of the League of Augsburg). It expanded the army to 90,000 men and the navy from 109 ships in 1690 to 176 ten years later. ‘The modern English state had arrived,’ writes Arthur Herman, ‘with powerful fiscal and military instruments at its disposal. These would be the powerhouse of modern Great Britain.’5
Marlborough, as a result, would not be starved of resources. Yet, at the outset of the war, he would have to contend with the ruthless defence cuts that Parliament had made since 1697, notably the reduction of the army to a peacetime establishment of 7,000 in England and 12,000 in Ireland. For those discharged, the future was bleak. Despite a number of emergency measures, such as opening up all trades to ex-officers and soldiers without the need for an apprenticeship (an expedient that had worked well in 1660), many demobbed soldiers turned to crime, particularly ex-cavalrymen who were allowed to keep their horses and became highwaymen. So bad did it become in London that a line of guardhouses was built on the road from the City to Kensington to protect travellers from ex-soldiers.6 Never popular at the best of times, soldiers were now feared and despised in equal measure.
