Authors: Iain Gale
The Blenheim campaign was one of greatest feats of arms in British military history. Acting entirely on his own initiative, Marlborough marched his entire army 250 miles, down from Flanders and into Bavaria. It was an astonishing
tour de force
and a masterpiece of logistical planning, particularly given the international nature of his force. Of sixty-five battalions of infantry and one hundred and sixty squadrons of cavalry, only fourteen and nineteen, respectively were British.
Marlborough today tends to be overshadowed by Wellington, but properly considered his true importance becomes clear. Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim delivered a body blow to Louis XIV whose army had reigned effectively unbeaten in any major battle for fifty years. At a single stroke Marlborough save the Austrian Empire and drove the French onto the defensive. In real terms the allies killed or captured 40,000 French and Bavarian troops along with 1,150 officers, 60 cannon and 128 infantry colours. The allied losses ran to 6,000 killed and 8,000 wounded. The news reached London on 21 August and the city bells rang out to salute the victory.
Blenheim was the end of an era. In a single day of battle,
Marlborough had elevated his queen to the unquestioned status of European monarch, demonstrated that a British-led army was fully capable of defeating the French and given Britain the confidence which would result in the forging of her Empire. In personal terms, despite the inevitable attempts to use Blenheim as a vehicle for party politics, Marlborough’s political enemies were confounded and the balance of power in Parliament moved dramatically away from the High Tories in favour of the Whigs. The Duke’s future prosperity was also assured with Queen Anne’s reward of the manor of Woodstock in Oxfordshire where he and his wife, Sarah, set about the construction of a magnificent palace which would bear the name of his victory.
The British element of the polyglot force that Marlborough commanded in 1704 was largely the army created by King William, who had moulded the diverse regiments which had come out of the wars of the Glorious Revolution into the basic form we might recognize today. But it was Marlborough who truly made the army his own. He concentrated on the ordinary soldier’s welfare: his uniform, shoes, food and supplies. And in so doing he formed an army that was better equipped, supplied and led than any other in Europe. Part of Marlborough’s effect on the army was to greatly increase its size. In 1697, following the Peace of Ryswick, the British army was truncated from 50,000 to barely 23,000. With the renewed outbreak of war with France, new regiments were hastily formed. By 1702 the strength had climbed to almost 32,000 men and four years later to 50,000. In 1709 there were almost 70,000 British troops in the field. It is to this new army, whose like would not be seen again until Kitcheners’ ‘new army’ of 1915, that Sir James Farquharson’s Regiment of Foot belongs.
* * *
Although its officers and men came from backgrounds as diverese geographically as they were socially, Farquharson’s was a Scottish regiment. At the time of Blenheim the treaty of union and with it the notion of a ‘British’ army, was still three years away and Queen Anne had not one but two armies: one English and one Scots. Similarly, there was as yet no Union flag (Union Jack) and thus Farquharson’s Regiment fights under the Saltire of Scotland. Although the background to the book and the detail is closely factual, the regiment itself is an invention, taking its inspiration from the new line regiments and its traditions and style largely from the First Regiment of Foot Guards, with whom both Marlborough and Steel had served. I trust that today’s Grenadier Guards will take any resemblance only as a compliment.
From the 1670s one company of the thirteen which made up the ‘on paper’ strength of every regiment, of English or Scottish Foot Guards was designated ‘Grenadiers’. They were shock troops: the precursors of the German
sturmtruppen
of the First World War, the tallest men in the regiment, they were instantly recognizable by their headgear: a tall, mitre cap, like a bishop’s headdress, designed to allow them to hurl the small grenades they carried in their packs. Such a hat was more suited to crowd-pleasing on the parade ground of Whitehall than the chaos and filth of a battlefield but the men wore it with pride.
Despite Marlborough’s advance preparations, the supply of bread and flour was a serious problem for the advancing allies and such foraging parties as that commanded by Steel were of vital importance.
Marlborough did burn Bavaria, although, according to Sir Winston Churchill and on the evidence of the Duke’s own correspondence to do so went very much against his own
feelings. It was one of his few failures and, as in the book, did not have the desired effect of coercing the Elector into abandoning the French. It certainly enraged the populace and we know that bands of peasants roamed the countryside intent on taking revenge. It has, understandably, gone down in Bavarian history as an episode of infamy.
The places in the book are all taken from a period map and they still exist today, if sometimes with different names. Some specific topographical details, however, I have taken the liberty to invent or adapt, according to the requirements of the story.
Colonel James Hawkins, like the men of Steel’s regiment, is an invention. The other officers of Marlborough’s staff however and most of the Field Officers are based upon real characters. Of the French characters, only Clerambault is genuine, although the Grenadiers Rouge did exist and were made up from just the sort of dubious social mix described in the book. They did not, however, commit the atrocity at Sattelberg. That said, the French had, in the not too distant past, meted out similar treatment, as Hawkins observes, to the people of the Palatinate and their own countrymen.
While Marlborough was greatly admired by Queen Anne, he was not universally popular. While he was on campaign, Tory politicians in England, notably Lord Nottingham, Lord Rochester and Sir Edward Seymour who, keen to replace him with the Duke of Ormonde, constantly attempted to engineer his downfall. Steel’s mission to secure the vital letters is an invention, but it is typical of these intrigues and inspired by a genuine episode involving a plot against William III contrived by Sir John Fenwick in the winter of 1696. Although his Jacobite sympathies were always denied by his biographer, Winston Churchill, other historians have suggested that
Marlborough, attempting to hedge his bets, did appeal to the exiled King James for a pardon for his having gone over to William. Whatever the truth of this, he was implicated in the trial. Interestingly one of those who sought to have Fenwick denounce Marlborough as a traitor was Charles Mordaunt, the future Earl of Peterborough and the father of John Mordaunt of the Foot Guards, future hero of the Schellenberg. Bizarrely, Charles Mordaunt went on to become a close friend of the Marlboroughs, although a few years later he was again an enemy. Fenwick was executed in January 1697 and Marlborough was lucky not to suffer a similar fate. It is also possible that Marlborough was intriguing with the Jacobite court as late as April 1704, although again, Winston Churchill dismisses this apparent contact as anti-Jacobite espionage.
The military account of the campaign and the battle of Blenheim are as close to fact as I have been able to make them. A regimental colour was taken by the Gens d’ Armes in their attack on Rowe’s Brigade and recaptured by Hessians. It was not, of course, the colour of Farquharson’s, but that of Rowe’s own regiment, subsequently the Royal Scots Fusiliers and the Royal Highland Fusiliers and today sadly, incorporated into the Royal Regiment of Scotland. For this licence I beg that distinguished regiment’s forgiveness.
The Margrave of Baden’s relationship with Marlborough is testified to by many writers. However, I have taken a similar licence in suggesting that Baden might have leaked information to the Tories.
For the detail in the book I looked to any first-hand accounts which I was able to find. I also relied heavily on the extensive research and published works on Marlborough’s wars of the late David Chandler, with whom I was fortunate to enjoy a friendship when, as an army-obsessed schoolboy,
I spent many weekends among the experts at Sandhurst, where he was then Head of War Studies. Astonishingly perhaps, the best straightforward accounts of the campaign remain those written in 1930 and 1933 by GM Trevelyan and Sir Winston Churchill, while for detail Charles S Grant’s meticulous research into the armies of the period is also invaluable.
Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim did not win the War of the Spanish Succession. Ahead lay eight more years of war in Flanders, Portugal, Spain, Italy and the Americas and the bloody battles of Ramillies, Malplaquet and Oudenarde. Steel, Slaughter and all their comrades still have much work to do if Europe can ever be freed from the scourge of the Sun King. Blenheim was not the end, nor, to paraphrase Marlborough’s illustrious biographer, was it even ‘the beginning of the end’. But it was a truly glorious victory.
Iain Gale
Keep reading for the first chapter of
R
ULES OF
W
AR
the next Jack Steel adventure.
Rules of War
is available now in hardback.
Captain Jack Steel, his right hand clenched tightly around the grip of his sword, stared fiercely into the morning mist. He paused, listening closely to the emptiness. Then, relaxing his hold on the sword hilt yet keeping it, still sheathed, close by his side, he took up the pace and walked on and waited for death. If it came to him it would be from the front. But the only noises Steel could hear as yet were close behind him. He could sense the presence of his men there although he could not see them, knew that they carried their muskets primed and their bayonets fixed. His men; a company of the finest infantry in all of Queen Anne’s army. The finest infantry in all the world: British Grenadiers.
Yet at this moment, not even the knowledge of their presence was of any real comfort to Steel. Such mists as this he knew could often be the soldier’s friend, shrouding whole armies from unwanted eyes as they advanced to spring a surprise attack. But, he knew too, from bitter experience, that this watery grey haze could also be a deadly foe. With every step now he felt the growing presence of the enemy; imagined the tall horsemen who would appear like ghosts
from the enfolding shroud of grey, heard in his imagination the cruel hiss of their sabres as they slashed down towards him. Steel hoped to God that his mind was only chasing phantoms. His commanders had assured him that the French were still far away to their front and he was realistic enough to know that, whether or not this proved to be the case, at this precise moment the only people in whom he could place his faith were those very commanders, and the men who followed him to battle. Ignoring the knot of fear that gnawed at his stomach, Steel brushed away the horrors in his mind and pressed on.
It was approaching six-thirty on a cool May morning – Whitsunday – on a barren patch of high ground which straddled the border between the Spanish Netherlands and Dutch Brabant. This should have been by tradition a day of rest and godliness, but Jack Steel knew that this day would not see God’s work. They were moving west in the vanguard of the army and his orders left him in no doubt as to their purpose. ‘Halt before the village to your front and take positions for assault.’
The trouble was that Steel had no earthly idea of where that village might be. Nor, for that matter, where he might find the enemy. And now he was starting to wish that the spectres in the mist would prove real. As far as Steel was concerned, battle could not come soon enough. He cussed to himself and spat out the wad of tobacco on which he had been chewing and eased the worn leather strap of the short-barrelled fusil which it was his unique privilege as an officer of Grenadiers to carry on his shoulder. The soft ground was caking his boots with mud and particularly to someone of Steel’s tall frame and muscular build, every step seemed heavier than the last.
The sound of raised voices made him look to his left.
Instinctively, his right hand went across to the sword hilt and began to ease the newly greased blade from its scabbard. The red-coated figures of two of his men appeared through the swirling mist, apparently oblivious to their officer, one goading the other in some private joke. Steel relaxed and let the sword slide back. He was about to address them when from behind him another voice, its thick Geordie accent reassuringly familiar, muttered an order whose anger and purpose, though muted, were bitingly clear.
‘Quiet there, you two men. You’re both on sarn’t’s orders now. And don’t go thinking that I don’t know who you are.’
Steel turned to the rear and saw the large frame of his sergeant, the Geordie, Jacob Slaughter, his face boiling with rage. ‘God’s blood, Jacob! Wasn’t this meant to be a surprise attack? Advance to contact with the enemy were my orders, without a word spoken. What price now surprise? The French’ll have us for breakfast. Who the hell were those men? Are they ours? Do I know them?’
Slaughter shook his head. ‘New intake, sir. But they’ll give you no more trouble. On my word.’
‘I’m sure they won’t, Jacob. Not once you’ve finished with them. But it’s too late now for all that. They’ll learn soon enough from the French. Keep talking like that and they won’t see another dawn. It’s no fault of yours. This army’s not what it was.’
Steel knew himself to be right. This was not the same army that had carried its colours at bayonet-point deep into the French lines at Blenheim two years ago and sent the combined armies of France and Bavaria limping back to Alsace. The casualties it had incurred in that bloody campaign had been high and Steel’s unit, Colonel Sir James Farquharson’s Regiment of Foot, had been no exception. There had been other battles too since then and now, of the men with whom he
had started this war four years ago, barely half remained, their fallen comrades replaced with green recruits, some of them fresh from Britain. The two garrulous soldiers were only too typical of that lack of experience. Steel shook his head as he paused for a moment and more men advanced past them. He watched one slip on the boggy ground and grope to retrieve his musket and the tall embroidered mitre cap which marked out the Grenadiers, however inexperienced, as a class of their own. And he knew that, for all the losses, the men he had about him now in the company, those who had managed to stay alive these past two years, were as good as he would ever find. Marlborough might have made the army, but this company belonged, heart and soul, to Jack Steel.
Steel wiped a weary hand over his eyes, ‘I tell you, Jacob, what this army needs is another victory. Another Blenheim. And Marlborough knows that as well as we do. That’s why we’re here, in this bloody fog.’
Two tall shapes approached them out of the mist. Two of Steel’s fellow officers, clad in the distinctive blue-trimmed scarlet coats of Farquharson’s regiment, a lieutenant in his late twenties, the other an ensign of no more than nineteen. Unlike Steel, who chose to tie back his long brown hair with a black silk ribbon, both wore fashionable, full-bottomed brown wigs, falling to their shoulders.
The older of them spoke, breathlessly, ‘Jack, thank God! Impossible to make out a thing in this damned soup. Have you any idea at all where we are?’
‘Henry, for once I will admit that I’m almost as confounded as you. Although, I presume, as we have been travelling due west, that we must by now be approaching our allotted positions in the line.’
Lieutenant Henry Hansam reached into his coat pocket and, producing an engraved silver snuff box, took a pinch before continuing, ‘Pray remind me, Jack, what exactly it is we are supposed to be doing in this infernal bog.’
Steel, raising an eyebrow, turned to Slaughter and winked. ‘Would you oblige the lieutenant, Sarn’t?’
Sergeant Slaughter smiled. He knew what Steel intended. They had survived together through the horrors of four years of war and enjoyed a friendship unique between an officer and his sergeant. Though frowned upon by the more orthodox elements among the officers, it was this which had earned their company its enviable reputation within the rank and file of the army and which ensured that fighting on the field of battle, Steel and his sergeant were the equal of anything the enemy might send against them. Slaughter knew that Steel enjoyed teasing the good-natured Hansam and relishing this chance to help him, he adopted the persona of a respectful corporal.
‘Well, if you remember, Mister Hansam, sir, the order came from the duke hisself. And we had it direct from Lord Orkney. Press the right flank, says he. You may as likely find the ground just a bit soft there. That’s what he says, sir.’
‘A bit soft? Soft? Christ almighty, Jack. We’re advancing through a damned marsh. The men are coated in mud. Heaven knows how many have lost their weapons. It’s madness.’
Steel smiled. He turned to the younger officer. ‘Williams. you heard Lieutenant Hansam. Run along and tell My Lord Orkney that he has committed us to, um … to madness. There’s a good fellow.’
The ensign smiled, but did not move.
Hansam frowned. ‘Damn it Jack. You know what I mean by it. No general in his right mind would have an army advance across a bog like this.’
Steel laughed and patted his friend on the back. ‘Of course, Henry, you’re quite right. You and I know that our commander-in-chief, His Grace the Duke of Marlborough, is the most brilliant general of our age. Tell me truly that you would not follow him to the death. Tell me that there’s not a man of this army who would not do the same. Of course it is not logic to send infantry into battle through a marsh. But since when did Marlborough ever fight by the rules? Was that how we won at Blenheim? Or on the Schellenberg? Now where the devil is our company?’
Looking about him he tried to make out more men of their company of Grenadiers through the mist. They were the tallest men in the regiment and it was not hard to spot them. He was aware of two men to his right and left, their scarlet coats discernible even in this gloom. But beyond them there were only shapes and voices. Somewhere off to the left lay the remaining nine companies of the regiment, and beyond them the bulk of the allied army under Marlborough. As was the custom, it was the honour of the Grenadiers to advance on the extreme right of the battalion, and as Farquharson’s was posted on the far right of the line, Steel’s company now found themselves at the outer limit of the army. But at this moment Steel felt as if they might as well be on another continent.
As the snuff began to irritate his nasal passages, Hansam sneezed and spoke through his handkerchief. ‘You’re right of course, Jack. But we’ve been advancing now for close on two hours through this damned fog. For all we know the entire French army could be no more than a few yards directly in front of us.’
Slaughter coughed, respectfully. ‘Oh no, sir. We had his lordship’s word that the French was well to our front. Other side of that village, sir.’
‘Village?’ Steel replied.
‘Aye, a village, which, were it not for this fog, you would see plain as day directly over there.’ Guessing, he pointed. ‘The village of Autre-Eglise. Our objective.’
Hansam strained to peer through the fog. ‘Damned strange name.’
The younger officer, Tom Williams, the company’s ensign, who until now had remained silent, spoke up eagerly. ‘It means “other church” in French, sir.’
Hansam smiled at him, ‘Thank you, Lieutenant. I was aware of that. But thank you all the same.’
Steel spoke, ‘So where d’you suppose the first church might be, Tom?’
Hansam smiled, and seized the opportunity, ‘Why, Jack, in another village, to be sure. Autre, Autre-Village, perhaps.’
‘Very droll, Henry. Now I think we had better follow the men, d’you not. It wouldn’t do for them to find the French before we do, eh?’
As the officers moved away obliquely to their left and front to find their platoon and they all began to advance as fast as the ground permitted, Steel contemplated how life seemed constantly to bring one full circle. He had come through the slaughter of Blenheim two years ago and last year’s bloody adventure in Spain only to find himself back here again on Flanders soil, where his soldiering had begun and where the British army always seemed to be. Flanders – where, at a godforsaken place called Steenkirk, he had first tasted battle, as a seventeen-year-old ensign.
He had been fourteen years with the colours since then and naturally he knew why they were really here now. Of course, Marlborough needed a victory. Blenheim seemed an age ago and their Dutch allies were becoming restless. Last year had seen no northern triumphs, just an endless succession
of marches and counter-marches. True, they had broken the massive French lines of fortification which traversed occupied Belgium. But there had been no opportunity then to exploit that success with a victory in the field. Now, Steel knew, here and in London, Marlborough’s enemies were again intriguing against him. The only answer was a victory. So, they were here to beat the French and if that meant crossing this filthy bog, then that was what they would do. Snapping back to the matter in hand, he grew aware now that, with every step forward they took, their line of battle was becoming increasingly ragged.
He turned to Slaughter. ‘Try to dress the line, Sarn’t – wherever it is. We can’t afford to lose any men before we’ve even found the enemy.’
‘Right you are, Mister Steel.’
Steel sighed. ‘And Jacob, do try to just address me as “sir”. At least allow me the appearance of being a captain.’
Steel, although promoted to captain after Blenheim by Marlborough himself, had not yet had the field promotion ratified by the high command at the Horse Guards. That had been two years ago and now he had almost given up hope. He could only presume that he was out of favour at court and he did not need to guess at the reason. He had a lover in London – if that were the right term for someone with whom you had fallen so surely out of love. Arabella Moore was a jealous mistress, ten years his senior and so dangerously close to the queen as to be able to deny him his captaincy. Doubtless Arabella had heard of the romance that Steel had forged in the days before Blenheim, a liaison with a pretty Bavarian girl who he had hoped might bring him lasting happiness. But now Louisa Weber was beyond his reach. On his return from Spain he had found her married to an officer in the Royals. Well, in truth, he too had not been over-faithful
to her and so it was for the best. But it had not prevented Arabella’s jealousy, nor her continuing spite. Clearly, if she could not have him, then she was determined at least to block his advancement in the army.
What, Steel wondered, would he have to do to achieve on paper the promotion he had earned and now so urgently needed? The bounty from Blenheim and most of that he had gleaned in such danger in the previous year’s campaign had dwindled all too fast. Very soon he would again be in serious debt. Pursued yet again, no doubt for the endless round of an officer’s expenses and mess bills by their assiduous regimental adjutant, Major Frampton. He prayed that this coming fight might yield an opportunity for fortune and glory for, in his experience, one seldom came without the other. And neither could be achieved without that danger to which Steel was now so helplessly addicted. For, despite all his horrors of phantoms in the mist, he knew that it was the thrill of beating fate which made him a soldier; the knowledge that at any moment he could be killed or horribly mutilated and the unparalleled exhilaration which came after a battle, that delirious moment when you knew that you had cheated death, once again. There must now be an opportunity for him to impress again, to bring himself to the attention of Marlborough and even the queen herself. He would be gazetted captain.