Authors: Richard Holmes
We being then encamped … at Gravenbock, the English [artillery] train according to the ancient custom of war, fired the tattoo gun. Upon which all the drums in the army according to order beat off the tattoo and the French garrison in Gravenbock beat their tattoo at the same time, notwithstanding they were within the heart of our camp. Of which my Lord Marlborough being informed, replied with a smile, ‘If they beat a tattoo tonight, I’ll beat the reveille in the morning.’
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Marlborough was not noted for his sense of humour, and he followed this rather crisp quip by immediately constituting a small attacking force, including cannon, an assault party and an unarmed working party under Brigadier Henry Withers, and by dawn the next day the French garrison was encircled by trenches. After a brief exchange of artillery fire the governor offered to surrender with the honours of war.
But the Brigadier sent them word that they must content to be prisoners at discretion or he would enter the fort sword in hand and neither he nor any of them need expect quarter. Which the governor considered and submitted to be prisoners at discretion. Upon which the command under arms and also the workmen entered the fort and pillaged and made booty of all they could find therein and then demolished the same.
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There were several opportunities for a battle on favourable terms for the Allies, but all of them were vetoed by the field deputies, who argued, perhaps rather more reasonably than British historians sometimes suggest, that there was no point in running the risk of a battle unless its outcome was absolutely certain now that the object of the campaign had `been achieved and the French had ‘been drawn away from their borders.
On the first of these occasions Boufflers tried to slip away by using the risky expedient of a night march, having first mounted a grand foraging
expedition so that it looked as if he proposed to stay where he was for some time. Marlborough, however, was not taken in, and ordered his men ‘to lie on their arms all night’. ‘By the time it was day,’ recalled Robert Parker,
their front had entered the heath, and my Lord Marlborough had his men under arms, and just ready to march, when the Field-Deputies came to him, and prayed him to desist. This greatly surprised him, as they had agreed to his scheme the night before: but being a man of great temper and prudence, and being determined not to do anything this first campaign without their approbation, at their earnest entreaty he desisted.
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In fact Marlborough was quite content not to fight. He had told Godolphin that his real objective was to ‘oblige them to quit the Meuse, by which we shall be able to besiege Venlo’, and that is precisely what he now did.
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Marlborough began the siege of Venlo, bringing the now redundant garrisons of Nijmegen and Grave, as well as a Prussian detachment from the lower Rhine, down to help. While the besiegers commenced their stately choreography, Marlborough kept a powerful covering force under his hand, and when Boufflers, on orders from Paris, tried to intercept the Allied siege train on its way in from Bois-le-Duc, Marlborough pounced, slipping in between Boufflers and his base, but missing the opportunity of a battle on favourable terms because the Dutch General Opdam did not move as quickly as he had hoped. It was this inaction that gave rise to Marlborough’s exasperated letter of 16 August to Godolphin.
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He was no better pleased with the early stages of the siege, and wrote to Heinsius:
I think if you had been so lucky as to have left the command of the siege to [the Prussian commander] Baron de Heyden, we should now have been masters not only of this town but of all the Meuse, but as things now are I am apprehensive you may not have the town and may have your army beaten … The troops have been before Venlo these eight days, and they now talk of opening trenches two days hence. If this be zeal, God preserve me from being so served as you are, my friend. I take a liberty of writing freely to you … I write this by candle light, so that I know not if you will be able to read it.
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He reported himself ‘very impatient to hear of the cannon being arrived at Venlo’, but soon told Godolphin that trenches were open and the batteries installed: the siege had begun in earnest, and he would soon be able to tell him when the campaign would end.
Boufflers made no effort to raise the siege of Venlo. Fort St Michael, described by Robert Parker as ‘a regular fortification of five bastions’, covered the northern approaches. The attackers pushed their trenches on to the foot of its glacis, and, with a rather suppressed tow row row, the combined grenadiers of Hamilton’s brigade were preparing to assault the covered way when that stormy petrel Lord Cutts gleefully informed their officers that if there was any opportunity of continuing beyond their objective they should press right on. ‘We all thought these were very rash orders,’ grumbled Parker, ‘contrary to both the rules of war, and the design of the thing.’
At four in the afternoon the signal for the assault was given. The attackers rushed the covered way, and ‘the enemy gave us one scattering fire only, and then ran away’. The grenadiers crossed the ditch and entered a ravelin protecting the curtain wall of the fort itself. The captain and sixty men guarding the ravelin were mostly killed, and the attackers then found a second, smaller ditch between themselves and the curtain. ‘They that fled before us,’ writes Parker,
climbed up by the long grass, that grew out of the fort, so we climbed after them. Here we were hard put to it, to pull out the palisades, which pointed down upon us from the parapet; and was it not for the great surprise and consternation of those within we could never have surmounted this very point. But as soon as they saw us at this work, they quitted the rampart, and retired down to the parade [ground] in the body of the fort, where they lied down their arms, and cried for quarter, which was readily granted them.
Parker felt that the whole business had been unaccountably lucky. The retreating French had failed to throw the loose planks of the wooden bridge over the first ditch, 120 feet wide, into the water, and the governor was culpable in not keeping the grass ‘close mown, as he ought to have done’. ‘In the end,’ Parker admitted, ‘his Lordship had the glory of the whole action, though he never stirred out of the trenches till it was over.’
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Richard Kane took much the same view, but added generously that ‘the young Earl of Huntingdon’, who had come along with Cutts as a volunteer, pluckily kept up with the foremost of the stormers the
whole way. The episode did much to establish the reputation of the British troops, ‘so that no one there could with modesty express, nor no one that was not believe’, the valour of the attackers.
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The garrison of Venlo capitulated on 25 September, and marched out a few days later. As soon as he heard the news, Marlborough sent a detachment to snap up the little fortress of Stevensweert, and then moved the Venlo force straight up the Maas to besiege and capture Roermond too. Thus, as he told Godolphin, ‘I hope before the end of this month we shall have cleared the Meuse from home to [the Dutchheld fortress of] Maastricht, after which I hope we may have time to force Marshal Boufflers to quit his post at Tongres.’
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He did rather better than that. Liège lay on the Maas south of Maastricht, and its commanding geographical position, between the hilly country of the Ardennes and the Eifel to the south and the ‘Maastricht appendix’ of Dutch territory to the north, made it just as important in 1702 as it was to prove in 1914. As long as the French held it they could move troops freely between Brabant and Flanders on their western flank to their lower Rhine garrisons at Cologne, Bonn and Düsseldorf. From his position at Tongres, the western apex of a triangle whose base was formed by Liège and Maastricht, Boufflers was well-placed to threaten the flank of an Allied advance down the Maas. He probably doubted that Marlborough would try for Liège so late in the season, and when the Allies moved south he botched his attempt to parry them and then, as a delighted Marlborough told Heinsius, ‘abandoned Tongres after spending a whole month to fortify it’. The city of Liège had only medieval fortifications, and the city elders wisely opened their gates as soon as the Allies appeared before them.
The citadel, a powerful five-bastioned work on the high ground west of the Maas, staunchly held by Brigadier de Violaine with seven and a half battalions of infantry, was another matter. On 12 October NS it was besieged, and a practicable breach had been made by the twenty-second. Marlborough summoned the governor to surrender on terms, but ‘he answered, it would be time enough a month hence, to talk of a surrender’. On 23 October the Allies mounted a general assault and stormed the place after only an hour’s fighting. ‘Our men gave no quarter for some time,’ admitted Parker, ‘so that the greater part of the garrison was cut to pieces.’
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The official bulletin was more circumspect, the attackers ‘having after the first fury been very merciful to the enemy’. Marlborough had already written to Lord Nottingham that day, but added a triumphant postscript.
The post being not gone, I could not but open this letter to let you know that, by the extraordinary bravery of the officers and soldiers, the citadel has been carried by storm, and, for the honour of her Majesty’s subjects, the English were the first that got upon the breach, and the governor was taken by a lieutenant of Stewart’s regiment.
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The four-battalion garrison of the nearby Chartreuse, a fortified monastery, were so dismayed by what had happened to the citadel that they surrendered on the twenty-sixth. ‘They had liberty to march out with their hands in their pockets,’ says Parker, ‘and every man was to go where he pleased, by which means the officers carried very few of them home.’
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The formal surrender terms are actually a good deal more generous. The garrison was allowed to march out ‘with arms and baggage, drums beating and matches lit, to be conducted by a sufficient escort to Namur by the shortest route’.
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Marlborough still half-hoped to go on and take Huy, but realised that he had done enough, even if unusually he left a small force to take the fortress of Rheinberg in a winter campaign. Although Winston S. Churchill complains that Dutch interference had prevented his distinguished ancestor from striking one of those ‘crashing blows in the field’ which became his hallmark, it is difficult to see what battle could have given Marlborough that deft manoeuvre did not. He had ended the risk of direct French attack on the United Provinces and cleared the whole line of the Maas to Liège, a feat so remarkable that it calls to mind Abraham Lincoln’s comment about the Father of Waters flowing unvexed to the sea. He had wholly imposed his will on Marshal Boufflers, as the Duke of Berwick acknowledged. Boufflers, Berwick said, was ‘in a dreadful embarrassment; though a man of great personal bravery, he stood in fear of the enemy, and on the other hand he knew in what manner he was spoken of both at court and in the army’.
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Although the siege of Rheinberg still went on, the army dispersed into winter quarters in the first week of November, and Marlborough set off for England. On 2 November he boarded a large yacht at Maastricht with General Opdam, the two Dutch field deputies and an escort of twenty soldiers. At Roermond they joined Coehoorn, who had a larger boat and a sixty-man escort. After dinner with the Prince of Holstein-Beck, the governor, they continued downstream, with fifty horsemen keeping pace with the boats and closing in to provide security at night. The cavalry escort changed at Venlo, and when the little party was about ten miles below the town it was attacked by a partisan band based on the
French garrison of Guelders, off to the east of the Meuse and not yet reduced.
The attackers were led by Lieutenant Farewell, an Irish deserter from Dutch service who had escaped from Maastricht under accusation of planning to set fire to the magazines. Arson in an artillery park was, by the old laws of war, punishable by being burnt alive, on the cruel logic of the punishment fitting the crime. Indeed, later in the war a French arsonist was ‘burnt to death between two fires with every refinement of cruelty’. There is a case for assuming that Farewell, unlike his countryman Peter Drake, was ideologically committed to his cause, but the real story may be more complex. Farewell, who knew the ground well, chose a point where the cavalry escort had to leave the river, pounced on Marlborough’s yacht and dragged it to the bank with the rope being used to haul the vessel along the river, fired a volley ‘and then threw in several grenades’.
At the time senior officers regularly granted passports to enemy officers and officials, giving them safe conduct through territory in which they might be detained. The system did not simply accord with the age’s notion of gentlemanly behaviour, but worked to the advantage of both sides by giving some freedom of movement to senior folk beyond the confines of the battlefield. Although the raiders knew the deputies by sight, and Farewell recognised Opdam, having ‘stood sentry a hundred times over his tent’, all three had valid passports signed by the Duke of Burgundy. Marlborough had no passport, but one of his clerks, Stephen Gell, quickly slipped him one made out for his brother, Lieutenant General Charles Churchill. The pass was in fact out of date and did not cover transit by water, but after a long discussion Farewell agreed to let Marlborough through, apparently either because of Charles Churchill’s pass or by counting him as one of the two secretaries allowed to Field Deputy Gueldermalsen. The raiders took all the money and plate out of the vessel and carried off the escort as prisoners of war, but allowed Marlborough and the Dutchmen to continue.