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    Ramillies 1706: Marlborough’s tactical masterpiece
    Ramillies 1706: Marlborough’s tactical masterpiece
    Ramillies 1706: Marlborough’s tactical masterpiece
    Ebook192 pages2 hours

    Ramillies 1706: Marlborough’s tactical masterpiece

    By Michael McNally and Seán Ó’Brógáin

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    A detailed, slim volume on the Duke of Marlborough's masterstroke that saw the capture of the vital cities of Brussels, Bruges, Louvain and Antwerp.

    This is the story of one of the great battles which forged the reputation of the Duke of Marlborough as one of history's greatest captains. His tactical intuition on the field of Ramillies led to perhaps his finest battlefield performance and paved the way for a campaign that would see much of Flanders, including vital cities such as Bruges, Brussels, Antwerp and Louvain, come under Allied control.

    This title, with vivid illustrations and detailed consideration of the disposition, strength and plans of the opposing forces, examines the context and consequences of the battle. It also illuminates the intense fighting at the height of the engagement, including two enormous cavalry melees in which Marlborough was unhorsed and very nearly killed.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateOct 20, 2014
    ISBN9781782008248
    Ramillies 1706: Marlborough’s tactical masterpiece
    Author

    Michael McNally

    Michael McNally was born in London in 1964. An expert on 17th- and 18th-century warfare, his previous titles for Osprey include works on the Cromwellian campaigns in Ireland 1649–52, the battles of the Boyne 1690 and Fontenoy 1745. A highly versatile author, he also has a passionate interest in more modern subjects, as demonstrated by his publications on the naval battles of Coronel and the Falklands in 1914, and a Fortress series study of Colditz. Michael is married with three children and lives in Germany, where he works for a major reinsurance company.

    Read more from Michael Mc Nally

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      Ramillies 1706 - Michael McNally

      THE STRATEGIC SITUATION

      On the morning of 13 August 1704, an Allied army of around 52,000 men under John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, met a slightly larger Franco-Bavarian force led by Camille, Duc d’Hostun – more commonly referred to by his secondary title as the Comte de Tallard – near the Bavarian town of Höchstädt. The previous year, a French army under Marshal Villars had crushed an Imperial army on this same ground and now, Tallard found himself unexpectedly in a position where he was unable to refuse battle, the result being a disaster for French arms that saw him a prisoner of war and his army in tatters. In the English-speaking world, the battle was named after Blindheim, the small village which saw the fiercest fighting and where the largest concentration of French troops was encircled and captured, and by its anglicized form – Blenheim – it is the name most synonymous with Marlborough’s career.

      In his recent account of the battle, the historian Charles Spencer refers to Blenheim as having ‘stopped the French conquest of Europe’, and yet whilst the 1704 campaign shows Marlborough at his best, not only as the possessor of a strategic sense that places him head and shoulders above his contemporaries but also as a battlefield commander of the highest ability, the battle did not stop the French military colossus dead in its tracks nor did it – as has also been argued – shatter the myth of French invincibility. This myth took a severe drubbing during the Italian campaign of 1701 when Prince Eugène of Savoy first overwhelmed a French force at Carpi in July and comprehensibly defeated a numerically superior Franco-Savoyard army under Villeroi at Chiari in September, before capturing this self-same officer at Cremona five months later.

      Throughout his final illness, King Carlos II of Spain was pressed by the various contending factions to alter his will in favour of their nominees. Under pressure from the Church, he bequeathed his kingdom to Philippe of Anjou, grandson of King Louis XIV, in the mistaken belief that all parties would accept his decision and the Spanish monarchy would remain intact. (Author’s collection)

      The main effect of Blenheim was to remove, once and for all, the Bourbon threat to Vienna with the inherent possibility that, by thus knocking Austria-Hungary out of the war, France could militarily enforce the last will and testament of King Carlos II of Spain.

      The king was a product of generations of extreme inbreeding, which had resulted in his developing a series of severe mental and physical disabilities. Both of his marriages had remained childless and, in an attempt to stave off the horrors of a disputed succession, his advisers needed to find an acceptable compromise heir outside the direct line of succession, as the two principal candidates – his cousins, King Louis XIV of France and the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold – were the focal points of the Bourbon–Habsburg enmity that had divided Europe for the better part of the 17th century.

      Naturally neither party could countenance the enrichment of his rival to his own detriment and, anxious to avoid another war, Louis began to open secret negotiations with the Maritime powers, England and the United Dutch Provinces, Austria’s most prominent allies and two nations who already had their eyes on the expansion of their overseas trade at Spain’s expense. After lengthy negotiation, it was agreed that the principal heir would be neither Louis nor Leopold, but Leopold’s six-year-old grandson, Josef Ferdinand of Bavaria, whose claim was drawn through Maria-Antonia, the Emperor’s only child with his late wife, Margaret Theresa, an elder sister of Carlos II, through his father’s second marriage.

      To sweeten the pill, it was agreed that the Bavarian prince would receive metropolitan Spain and the overseas colonies whilst the contentious parts of the European inheritance would be ceded to the nominees of Vienna and Versailles – the Spanish Netherlands would go to the Archduke Charles (Leopold’s younger son through his second marriage) whilst the Italian territories – with the exclusion of the strategically important Duchy of Milan – would go to Louis’s eldest son, and namesake, the Dauphin. Milan would be granted to the Duke of Lorraine, who would in turn cede his possessions of Lorraine and Bar to the Dauphin. On paper the treaty guaranteed European peace, but foundered jointly on Austrian demands that Milan should also go to the Archduke and the fact that Carlos would not countenance the dismemberment of the Spanish monarchy; he would instead acknowledge Josef Ferdinand as Prince of the Asturias, his sole heir.

      Spain was torn between pro-French and pro-Austrian factions but nonetheless negotiations between France and the Maritime Powers continued, with an agreement being reached that would see Josef Ferdinand becoming King of Spain, with the Archduke Charles receiving the Duchy of Milan and the remaining Italian territories going to the Dauphin. Again, it looked as if an agreement had been brokered but, on 3 February 1699, whilst in Brussels to receive the support of the Flemish nobility, the six-year-old prince took ill and died. The succession would now be decided between the Habsburg and Bourbon candidates and, in the final year of his life, Carlos, in an attempt to secure the integrity of the Spanish Inheritance, nominated Louis’s second grandson, Philippe of Anjou, as his sole heir, with the Archduke Charles being relegated to the position of third heir after Philippe’s younger brother, Charles of Berry.

      Still very much an evolutionary form of the more common 18th-century weapon, this French bayonet dating from the early 1700s fits over the muzzle and is affixed to the weapon by a lug, through the socket at the base of the weapon. Unlike later developments, which place the blade to the side of the muzzle, this curved blade fits around the muzzle and is effectively a direct extension of the musket itself. (Copyright and courtesy of Royal Armouries, Leeds)

      For Louis XIV, the legacy was a poisoned chalice which presented him with two options, neither of which were particularly palatable to him: he could accept the will and repudiate the treaty, thus antagonizing Austria and the Maritime Powers, or he could remain bound by it, which would cause both an unnecessary break with Spain and an inevitable break with Vienna. Reasoning that further conflict with the Habsburgs was well-nigh unavoidable and would thus certainly bring the English and the Dutch into the ranks of his enemies, the French king decided to accept the will, proclaiming his grandson to be King Philip V of Spain by announcing: ‘His birth called him to this crown. The Spanish People have willed it and demanded it of me: it was the command of heaven, and I have granted it with joy.’

      Even now, war was not truly unavoidable. In London, the Tory administration was prepared to accept Louis’s assurances that the French and Spanish crowns would never be united, and in any event was prepared to ignore the Partition Treaty on the grounds that it had been negotiated by King William III without reference either to his ministers or to Parliament.

      War, however, did break out when Austria sent an army under Eugène into northern Italy with the intention of seizing the Duchy of Milan and presenting both France and her allies with a fait accompli. Naturally, Louis sent troops into the Duchy of Milan, ostensibly to safeguard the Spanish possessions, whilst still continuing to negotiate with the Maritime Powers. Initially Austria fought alone; however, escalation was inevitable as, upon the death of King James II, Louis openly acknowledged his son, James Francis Edward, as de jure King of England in opposition to both the English Act of Settlement (June 1701) and his own undertaking, in the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick to recognize William III as King of England. In consequence this brought Georg-Ludwig, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg – whose mother, the Dowager Duchess Sophia, was by virtue of the Act now third in succession to the throne of England – into opposition with France, whilst elsewhere in Germany, the Elector of Brandenburg was negotiating with Vienna over the possibility of his support during the current conflict, his price being the elevation of his Prussian possessions to the status of a ‘kingdom’. This is not to say that the German states unilaterally supported the Holy Roman Emperor – the Electors of Bavaria and Liège–Cologne were members of the House of Wittelsbach, whose rivalry with the Habsburgs went back centuries and they saw an affinity with France as being the best way to gain ascendancy within the Empire, legitimizing their actions was the fact that Max II Emanuel of Bavaria was also Governor of the Spanish Netherlands and was thus obliged to uphold the late king’s will; in addition, in order to destabilize the Empire, France agreed to support and subsidize any future Wittelsbach attempts to secure the Imperial throne. A number of other, smaller, German principalities also tended to support the succession of Philippe of Anjou, but these were ringed by Habsburg supporters and thus neutralized.

      ‘The Pyrenees are no more!’ Aware that acceptance of the Spanish Legacy would lead to almost certain warfare but conscious that its refusal would almost certainly lead to a lesser conflict with the bullish Habsburgs, Louis allowed his grandson to accept the Spanish Crown with the proviso that France and Spain would never be united under a single monarch. (Author’s collection)

      ‘The Dynast’. Given that his second son would not – in theory – inherit the Imperial title, the Emperor Leopold constantly pressed the lesser claim of the Archduke Charles to the Spanish throne. The Habsburg designs on northern Italy, and Leopold’s refusal to compromise on what he held to be his son’s rights, would effectively plunge Europe into 13 years of unnecessary warfare. (Author’s collection)

      In May 1702, a joint declaration of war was issued upon France by England, the Holy Roman Empire and the United Dutch Provinces, which brought both the Maritime Powers and the body of the Imperial states into the war in support of Austria, a move which prompted the Wittelsbach brothers to declare openly for France. Accordingly, the Earl of

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