THE EARLY WAR
In order to grasp the strategic problem presented to Marlborough and the
allies in the spring of 1704, it is first necessary to understand the
diplomatic position at the outbreak of the war, and the military
disposition of the two years 1702 and 1703, and thus the general position
of the armies which preceded Marlborough's march to the Danube.
Louis XIV. recognised his grandson as king of Spain late in 1700. The
coalition immediately formed against him was at first imperfect. Savoy,
with its command of the passes over the Alps into Austrian territory, was
in Louis' favour. England, whose support of his enemies was (for reasons
to be described) a capital factor in the issue, had not yet joined those
enemies. But, from several causes, among the chief of which was Louis'
recognition of the Pretender as king of England after James the II.'s
death, the opinion of the English aristocracy, and perhaps of the English
people, was fixed, and in the last months of 1701 the weight of England
was thrown into the balance against France.
Why have I called this--the decision of the English Parliament--a capital
factor in the issue of the war?
Excepting for a moment the military genius of Marlborough--whose great
capacity had not yet been tested in so large a field--two prime characters
gave to Great Britain a deciding voice in what was to follow. The first of
these was her wealth, the second that aristocratic constitution of her
polity which was now definitely established, and which, for nearly a
century and a half, was to make her strength unique in its quality among
all the elements of European competition.
As to the first of these--the _Wealth_ of England--it is a matter of such
importance to the comprehension of all the eighteenth century and most of
the nineteenth that it should merit a far longer analysis and affirmation
than can be devoted to it in these few lines. It must be enough for our
purpose to say that Great Britain, from about 1680 onwards, was not only
wealthier (in proportion to her population) than the powers with whom she
had to deal as enemies or allies, but was also proceeding to increase that
wealth at a rate far exceeding that of her rivals. Again, what was
perhaps, for the purposes of war, the chief point of all, England held
that wealth in a mobile, fluid form, which could at once be translated
into munitions, the wages of mercenaries, or the hire of transports,
within the shortest time, and at almost any point in Western and Northern
Europe.
Essentially commercial, already possessed of a solid line of enterprises
beyond the seas, having defeated and passed the Dutch in the race for
mercantile supremacy, England could afford or withhold at her choice the
most valuable and rapid form of support--money.
How true this was, even those in Europe who had not appreciated the
changed conditions of Great Britain immediately perceived when the
determination of Parliament, at the end of 1701, to support the alliance
against Louis XIV., took the form of voting 40,000 men, all of whom would
be immediately supplied and paid with English money.
True, of the 40,000 not half were British; but (save for the excellent
quality of the British troops), the point was more or less indifferent.
The important thing was that England was able to provide and to maintain
this immense accretion to the coalition against France, and to use it
where she would. We shall see later how this power turned the fate of the
war.
If I have insisted so strongly upon the financial factor, it is both
because that factor is misappreciated in most purely military histories,
and also because, in the changed circumstances of our own time, it is not
easy for the reader to take for granted, as did his ancestors, the
overwhelming superiority which England once enjoyed in mobilised wealth,
usable after this kind. It can best be compared to the similar superiority
enjoyed in the Middle Ages by the Republic of Venice, to whose fortunes,
both good and ill, the story of modern England affords so strange a
parallel.
The second factor I have mentioned--the aristocratic constitution of the
country--though almost equally important, is somewhat more elusive, and
might be more properly challenged by a critic.
England had not, in the first years of the eighteenth century, reached
that calm and undisturbed solidity which is the mark of an aristocratic
State at its zenith. Faction was bitter, the opposition between the old
loyalty to the Crown and the new national regime was so determined as to
make civil war possible at any moment. This condition of affairs was to
last for a generation, and it was not until the middle of the eighteenth
century was passed that it disappeared.
Nevertheless, compared with the Continental States, Great Britain already
presented by 1701 that elasticity in substance and tenacity in policy
which accompany aristocratic institutions. Corruption might be rife, but
it was already growing difficult to purchase the services of a member of
the governing class against the national interests. That knowledge of
public affairs, diffused throughout a small and closely combined social
class, which is the mark of an aristocracy, was already apparent. The
power of choosing, from a narrow and well-known field, the best talents
for any particular office (which is another mark of aristocracy), was
already a power apparent in the government of this country. The solidarity
which, in the face of a common enemy, an aristocracy always displays, the
long-livedness, as of a corporate body, which an aristocracy enjoys, and
which permits it to follow with such strict continuity whatever line of
foreign policy it has undertaken, was clearly defining itself at the
moment of which I write.
In a word, the new settlement of English life upon the basis of class
government, the exclusion of the mass of the people from public affairs,
the decay (if you will) of a lively public opinion, the presence of that
hopeless disinherited class which now forms the majority of our industrial
population; the organisation of the universities, of justice, of the
legislature, of the executive, as parts of one social class; the close
grasp which that class now had upon the land and capital of the whole
country, which it could utilise immediately for interior development or
for a war--all this marked the youth and vigour of an oligarchic England,
which was for so long to be at once invulnerable and impregnable.
At what expense in morals, and therefore in ultimate strength and
happiness, such experiments are played, is no matter for discussion in a
military history. We must be content to remark what vigour her new
constitution gave to the efforts of England in the field, while yet that
constitution was young.
England, then, having thrown this great weight into the scale of the
Empire, and against France, the campaign of 1702 was entered upon with the
chances in favour of the former, and with the latter in an anxiety very
different from the pride which Louis XIV. had taken for granted in the
early part of his reign.
* * * * *
If the reader will consider the map of Western Europe, the effect of
England's joining the allies will be apparent.
The frontier between the Spanish Netherlands and Holland--that is, between
modern Belgium and Holland--was the frontier between the forces of Louis
XIV. and those of opponents upon the north. Thus Antwerp and Ostend were
in the hands of the Bourbon, for the Spanish Netherlands had passed into
the hands of the French king's grandson, and the French and Spanish forces
were combined. Further east, towards the Upper Rhine, a French force lay
in the district of Cleves, and all the fortresses on the Meuse, running in
a line south of that post, with the exception of Maestricht, were in
French hands.
French armies held or threatened the Middle Rhine. Upon the Upper Rhine
and upon the Danube an element of the highest moment in favour of France
had appeared when the Elector of Bavaria had declared for Louis XIV., and
against Austria.
Had not England intervened with the great weight of gold and that
considerable contingent of men (in all, eighteen of the new forty
thousand), France would have easily held her northern position upon the
frontier of Holland and the Lower Rhine, while the Elector of Bavaria,
joining forces with the French army upon the Upper Rhine, would have
marched upon Vienna.
The Emperor was harried by the rising of the Hungarians behind him; and as
the principal forces of the French king would not have been detained in
the north, the whole weight of France, combined with her new ally the
Elector of Bavaria, would have been thrown upon the Upper Danube.
As it was, this plan was, in its inception at least, partially successful,
but only in its inception, and only partially.
For, with the summer of 1702, Marlborough, though hampered by the fears of
the Dutch with whom he had to act in concert, cleared the French out of
Cleves, caused them to retire southward in the face of the great accession
of strength which he brought with the new troops in English pay and the
English contingents. Following the French retirement, he swept the whole
valley of the Meuse,[1] and took its fastnesses from Liege downwards, all
along the course of the stream.
By the end of the year this northern front of the French armies was
imperilled, and Marlborough and his allies in that part hoped to undertake
with the next season the reduction of the Spanish Netherlands.
It must be remembered, in connection with this plan, that France has
always been nervous with regard to her north-eastern frontier; that the
loss of this frontier leaves a way open to Paris: an advance from Belgium
was to the French monarchy what an advance along the Danube was to
Austria--the prime peril of all. As yet, France was nowhere near grave
peril in this quarter, but pressure there marred her general plans upon
the Danube.
Nevertheless, the march upon Vienna by the Upper Danube had been prepared
with some success. While part of the northern frontier was thus being
pressed and part menaced, while the Meuse was being cleared of French
garrisons, and the French fortresses on it taken by Marlborough and his
allies, the Elector of Bavaria had seized Ulm. The French upon the Upper
Rhine, under Villars, defeated the Prince of Baden at Friedlingen, and
established a road through the New Forest by which Louis XIV.'s forces,
combined with those of the Elector of Bavaria, could advance eastward upon
the Emperor's capital. It was designed that in the next year, 1703, the
troops of Savoy, in alliance with those of France, should march from North
Italy through the passes of the Alps and the Tyrol upon Vienna, while at
the same time the Franco-Bavarian forces should march down the Danube
towards the same objective.
When the campaign of 1703 opened, however, two unexpected events
determined what was to follow.
The first was the failure of Marlborough in the north to take Antwerp, and
in general his inability to press France further at that point; the
second, the defection of Savoy from the French alliance.
As to the first--Marlborough's failure against Antwerp. The Spanish
Netherlands were now solidly held; the forces of the allies were indeed
increasing perpetually in this neighbourhood, but it appeared as though
the attempt to reduce Brabant, Hainault, and Flanders, which are here
the bulwark of France, would be tedious, and perhaps barren. A sort of
"consolation" advance was indeed made upon the Rhine, and Bonn was
captured; but no more was done in this quarter.
[Illustration: The General Situation in 1703.]
As to the second point, the solid occupation of the Upper Danube by the
Franco-Bavarians was indeed fully accomplished. The imperial forces were
defeated upon the bank of that river at Hochstadt, but the advance upon
Vienna failed, for the second half of the plan, the march from Northern
Italy upon Austria, through the Tyrol, had come to nothing, through the
defection of Savoy. The turning of the scale against Louis by the action
of England was beginning to have its effect; Portugal had already joined
the coalition, and now Savoy had refused to continue her help of the
Bourbons.
The year 1704 opened, therefore, with this double situation: to the south
Austria had been saved for the moment, but was open to immediate attack in
the campaign to come; meanwhile, the French had proved so solidly seated
in the Spanish Netherlands (or Belgium) that repeated attacks on them in
this quarter would in all probability prove barren.
It was under these circumstances that Eugene of Savoy came to the great
decision which marked the year of Blenheim. He determined that it was
best--if he could persuade his colleagues--to carry the war into that
territory which was particularly menaced. He conceived the plan of
marching a great force from the Netherlands right down to the field of the
Upper Danube. There could be checked the proposed march upon the heart of
the coalition, which was Vienna. There, if fortune served the allies, they
would by victory make all further chance of marching a Franco-Bavarian
force down the Danube impossible; meanwhile, and at any rate, the new step
would alarm all French effort towards the Upper Rhine, weaken the French
organisation upon its northern frontier, and so permit of a return of the
allies to an attack there at a later time.
Eugene of Savoy was a member of the cadet branch of that royal house. His
grandfather, the younger son of Charles Emmanuel, had founded the family
called Savoy Carignan. His father had been married to one of Mazarin's
nieces. Eugene was her fifth son, and at this moment not quite forty years
of age.
His character, motives, and genius must be clearly seized if we are to
appreciate the campaign and the battle of Blenheim.
It was the Italian blood which formed that character most, but he was
thoroughly French by birth and training. Born in Paris, and desiring a
career in the French army, it was a slight offered to his mother by the
French king that gave his whole life a personal hatred of Louis XIV. for
its motive. From boyhood till his death, between sixty and seventy, this
great captain directed his energies uniquely against the fortunes of the
French king. When, later in life, there was an attempt to acquire his
talents for the French service, he replied that he hoped to re-enter
France, but only as an invader. It has been complained that he lacked
precision in detail, and that as an organiser he was somewhat at fault;
but he had no equal for rapidity of vision, and for seizing the essential
point in a strategic problem. From that day in his twentieth year when he
had assisted at Sobiesky's destruction of the Turks before Vienna, through
his own great victory which crushed that same enemy somewhat later at
Zenta, in all his career this quality of immediate perception had been
supremely apparent.
He was at this moment--the end of the campaign of 1703--the head of the
imperial council of war; and he it was who first grasped the strategic
necessity which 1703 had created. The determination to carry the defence
of the empire into the valley of the Upper Danube was wholly his own. He
wrote to Marlborough suggesting a withdrawal of forces as considerable as
possible from the northern field to the southern.
By a happy accident, the judgment of the Englishman exactly coincided with
his own, and indeed there was so precise a sympathy between these two very
different men that when they met in the course of the ensuing campaign
there sprang up between them not only a lasting friendship, but a mutual
comprehension which made the combination of their talents invincible
during those half dozen years of the war which all but destroyed the
French power.
* * * * *
Such was the origin of Marlborough's advance southward from the
Netherlands in the early summer of 1704, an advance famous in history
under the title of "the march to the Danube."