Authors: Richard Holmes
I have the honour to enclose to your Grace the memorial I prepared for assembling the army in the middle of April NS [New Style, i.e. according to the Continental calendar] in order to make the siege of Douai. I [have] not entered into any reasons concerning the importance of the design, the facility of the expedition, or the impossibility of the enemy’s being able to provide supplies to subsist a body of troops able either to oppose our forming the siege, or to embarrass us by a diversion … This project is founded on taking the field on the 10th of April NS and success absolutely depends upon it.
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Douai duly fell in June.
Cadogan had prime responsibility for the army’s logistics, dealing with the Dutch contractors who supplied bread to the army when it was not so far from its bases that it was forced to bake its own. Roads and waterways alike were his concern. In August 1710 he wrote from Courtrai, possibly to Marlborough’s private secretary, to say:
I received at Lille the favour of yours by Colonel Alexander. I have endeavoured to execute his Grace’s commands in relation to the bread, and hope such measures as are now taken about that matter, as shall remove all … complaint in the future. I was obliged to go beyond St Eloi to meet the artillery boats. I came on with them all night and they are now passing the sluices at Harleseck. They will get this afternoon to Menin, and I hope tonight or tomorrow morning at the camp. If my Lord Duke should not be at home when this comes into your hands, I beg the enclosed may be sent to him.
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Cadogan was also Marlborough’s intelligence chief. He collated information extracted from prisoners and deserters, and given by officers
who had been taken prisoner but were then exchanged. In August 1702, for instance, Lord Mark Kerr, Marlborough’s aide de camp, was captured and entertained by the Duke of Berwick, then a lieutenant general, who generously, as one nobleman to another, showed him the French army. The youngster kept his wits about him and reported that the French had seventy-two battalions and 109 squadrons, ‘but he says that our battalions are much stronger than theirs’.
In addition to dealing with day-to-day tactical intelligence, Cadogan ran a network of agents in France, especially at the principal seaports. In 1708, for example, his agent at Dunkirk told him that a French fleet was ready to embark fifteen battalions and the Old Pretender in person, and he was informed immediately the fleet sailed northwards. He then sent a sloop, escorted by a fast Dutch privateer, to tell Admiral Sir George Byng what was afoot, and prepared to embark ten British and Dutch battalions for Scotland, the expedition’s probable destination, as soon as a convoy arrived.
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In the event the comte de Forbin, commanding the French squadron, missed his landfall, and by the time he entered the Firth of Forth, his selected objective, Byng was close behind. Forbin did not regard the loss of his little squadron as a price worth paying to get James’s force ashore, and he ran for it, losing one ship, the
Salisbury
, captured in 1703, to her namesake HMS
Salisbury
in the pursuit. Forbin had mishandled the expedition, but even if James had landed the countermeasures initiated by Cadogan would probably have doomed the enterprise.
The collation of information gleaned from agents and the interception of mail over the winter months enabled Cadogan to help Marlborough fix his annual campaign plan. At the opening of the 1710 campaigning season he gave Marlborough a full intelligence brief as soon as he arrived, telling him of
my appointing the several persons I employ, to meet me on Tuesday next at Tournai. As your Grace arrives at Ghent only on Wednesday, I can come from Tournai early on Thursday to met you at Oudenarde and give your Grace an account of all I shall be able to learn of the enemy’s strength in the lines …
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Some of his intelligence was of strategic importance, and went straight to the government. In May 1709, when the French were making discreet overtures for peace, he told Sunderland that three enemy agents with passports from the Dutch had passed through The Hague on their way
to Antwerp. One was ‘the post-master of Paris; and the other a Spanish courier’. He thought that the third was Marshal Boufflers, travelling incognito. Two days later he confirmed that Torcy, the French foreign minister, had passed through Brussels, and a week afterwards he was able to forward to Sunderland the peace terms Torcy had covertly offered to the Dutch. He was later able to tell Sunderland:
The last advices from Paris say the Dauphin with the Marshal Villars is to command here next summer, the Duke of Burgundy with the Marshal d’Harcourt on the Rhine, and the Duke of Burgundy in Dauphiné …
None of the French troops on this frontier have as yet received either money, clothes or recruits, nor is there any appearance of even endeavouring to form such magazines as will be necessary to subsist the troops they must bring into the field to cover their places exposed in Flanders.
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Some information was paid for in cash, but there was sometimes a hint of payment in kind. ‘You will give me leave to remember my good friend the
Conseiller Intime
,’ Cadogan told Marlborough’s private secretary in 1705. ‘I hope the Tokay and the lady are provided for him as promised.’
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Cadogan’s practical good sense meant that he was never misled by simple theoretical strengths. Precise organisations varied a good deal, and some regiments (like the four-battalion Régiment du Roi) were very much bigger than others, so the armies of the age reckoned their infantry strength in battalions and their cavalry strength in squadrons. A battalion, usually commanded by a lieutenant colonel, consisted of several companies, and was meant to comprise eight hundred officers and men, while a squadron of cavalry contained two to four troops under a major or a senior captain, and had a strength of perhaps 150 officers and men. Unit numbers, often high at the start of a campaign, tended to fall off as the season wore on because of battle casualties, sickness and desertion. It was easy for one army to have more battalions and squadrons than its adversary, but actually to have fewer soldiers. In June 1707 Cadogan told Raby that Marlborough had one hundred battalions of foot and 164 squadrons of horse facing 120 French battalions and 190 squadrons, but the latter were ‘so weak that our troops who are all complete exceed them in number as much as in goodness. I think the King of France does with his troops as his money, makes three hundred
men pass for a battalion, as a Louis d’or for Fifteen Livres, and our folly gives this cheat currency.’
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Cadogan’s officers needed to pay constant attention to the fluctuating strengths of friendly and enemy forces. Amongst the papers of Henry Davenant, English envoy to Frankfurt and Regensburg and one of Cadogan’s correspondents, are numerous orders of battle of troops provided by German states, as well as detailed assessments, apparently from a French source, of enemy strengths. French battalions, each of thirteen companies (themselves of forty-five men and three officers apiece), should comprise 624 soldiers, and squadrons, each of four troops of thirty-five men and three officers, should number 152 soldiers. ‘But,’ added Davenant’s French informant, ‘as the infantry is not usually fully up to strength, we can reckon the battalion at 550 men at the opening of the campaign,’ falling to five hundred or even 450 as it went on.
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Cadogan was even more than chief of staff, master logistician and chief of intelligence. When the army was on the move he often commanded the cavalry of the advance guard, moving about half a day ahead of the main body, likely to meet the enemy first and send a contact report back to Marlborough. At Ramillies he found the French deploying for battle, and informed Marlborough, who then hurtled forward to view the ground and make his plans while the army swung along behind. At Oudenarde, the least planned of Marlborough’s great battles, Cadogan commanded the whole of the advance guard, horse and foot, took the village of Eyne and then held it against the odds as the French counterattack rolled in. He was indeed a general for all seasons.
In so much of what follows it is sometimes hard to see where Marlborough ended and Cadogan began. Lord Strafford, admittedly a boyhood friend of Cadogan’s and a political foe of Marlborough’s, told Robert Harley: ‘I do believe the greatest part of my Lord Marlborough’s victories are owing to him; and even the Pensionary said to me, “Si vous voulez avoir un duc de Marlborough un Cadogan est nécessaire.”’ Yet recognising the part played by Cadogan does not diminish Marlborough’s stature. He could not be everywhere and do everything, and the careful delegation of responsibility, with authority to back it up, enabled him to shine as commander, alliance manager, administrator and diplomat.
Of course Cadogan could not shoulder his burden alone. His own staff, many of them holding appointments as deputy quartermaster generals, plied devolved authority of their own. Captain Richard King of Lord Orrery’s Regiment was authorised in 1707 to draw £100 in his capacity as assistant engineer by the master general of the ordnance,
a good example of Marlborough rewarding in one capacity services done to him in another. As one of Cadogan’s deputies King was responsible for dealing with civilians who found themselves on the army’s line of march. In June 1709 a countess wrote from Malines:
I hear that you are on the march with the Palatine troops and are likely to pass this town. In that case, Sir, I beg you to remember that we are interested in Bonheiden, where we have meadows which may be greatly damaged by the passage of troops. So, Sir, if you can avoid that route we shall be eternally grateful to you.
She added, ‘if you pass by Malines yourself give us at least the pleasure of making use of our house’. Her husband was away at the moment, but sent his best wishes. Ambassador Stepney’s secretary, Mr Laws, wrote to ask if two villages near Brussels ‘may be entirely spared if possible and left off the routes by which the troops are to return to their winter quarters’. He too was able to hint at some reward, for ‘I am employed in this affair by so fair a person that I persuade myself, when you see her, her thanks will be a sufficient recompense for your trouble, though she granted you no other favour.’ The implication, of course, is that she might just have other favours in mind.
Captain King also dealt with bread-and-butter letters on Cadogan’s behalf. On 13 September 1708 Cadogan asked him to thank an officer ‘for his letter and exact account he gave me of everything’. He could not write a decent letter himself because he had been on the move for two days and ‘I drop asleep as I write.’ King was a colonel in 1711, and squared himself with Marlborough’s enemies before his fall. The Hanoverian succession and Marlborough’s reinstatement ruined him, and he disappears from history in 1716, blind and searching desperately for a cure.
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Most letters from Cadogan are not in his own ‘round, half-formed schoolboy’s hand, not very beautiful to look at but very easy to read’, but are instead the work of clerks or assistants. He generally wrote to Marlborough in his own hand, however, and in February 1716, though a full general and commander-in-chief in Scotland, nonetheless apologised because ‘my arm being extremely bruised and my shoulder bone wounded by a fall I got riding from Aberdeen to Montrose obliges me to make use of another hand to write to your Grace’.
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Similarly, many of Marlborough’s letters were written by secretaries or clerks, and his private secretary, Adam de Cardonnel, not only ran his private office in
the field but led for the headquarters on many matters that were diplomatic rather than strictly military. Incoming packages of mail from the same source might be divided up between Cadogan and Cardonnel. On 26 June 1710 Cadogan told Marlborough: ‘I send Mr Cardonnel by this cover a relating of what was done in the conference here these two days past, by which your Grace will find the present want of the contractors are supplied with an advance of five hundred and fifty thousand guilders …’
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Adam de Cardonnel, the second son of a Huguenot refugee who had got no further than Southampton, and there prospered, had become chief clerk in the secretary at war’s office, and was appointed Marlborough’s private secretary early in 1692. During Marlborough’s ascendancy he was rewarded by a parliamentary seat at Southampton, eventually being designated secretary of war in place of Walpole in 1710, although he did not actually succeed to the office, for George Granville’s Tory friends secured it instead. In February 1712 he was expelled from the House for having accepted an annual sweetener of five hundred gold ducats from Sir Solomon de Medina, the army’s main bread contractor. Many MPs had done far worse, but Cardonnel was, as his
Dictionary of National Biography
entry asserts, ‘a pawn in a larger political game’. His wife died the following year, and Marlborough, then in exile in Frankfurt, wrote him a touching letter.
I would have written to you sooner, dear Cardonnel, if I had believed it possible to say anything to lessen your grief; but I think of all the worldly misfortunes, the losing what one loves is the greatest, and nothing but time can ease you. However, I could not deny myself any longer the satisfaction of writing to assure you that I shall always be very sorry for anything that is a trouble to you, and that I long for the opportunity of assuring you myself that I am your humble servant and faithful friend.
He remained Marlborough’s secretary until his death in 1719, and was buried in Chiswick, not far from Marlborough’s old lover Barbara Castlemaine.
Cardonnel’s correspondence, much of it now in the British Library, gives a penetrating view of attitudes at Marlborough’s headquarters. In July 1703 he told John Ellis, an under-secretary in London, that both Marlborough and the deputies wanted the Dutch engineer Coehoorn to besiege Ostend, ‘but I find ’twill be very difficult to persuade the old
gentleman to do his part, so that in all probability we soon return again towards the Maas’. He added: ‘My Lord Duke has a very hard task indeed to keep our generals in humour and to prevent their falling out among themselves, particularly Lieut General Slangenburg, who is of a very unhappy temper to command an army.’
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Although Cardonnel was not a soldier, he ran many of a soldier’s risks. On the way to Blenheim in 1704 he reported: ‘Our last march was all in fire and smoke. I wish to God it were well over that I might get safe out of this country.’ In May 1706 he told Ambassador Stepney that the pursuit after Ramillies had left him ‘almost dead with the fatigue of marching, fighting (or at least the fright and apprehension of it) and writing for three days together without any rest’.
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