During the whole of the year which succeeded that in which the glorious
battle of Ramillies had been fought, our army made no movement of
importance, much to the disgust of very many of our officers remaining
inactive in Flanders, who said that his grace the captain-general had had
fighting enough, and was all for money now, and the enjoyment of his five
thousand a year and his splendid palace at Woodstock, which was now being
built. And his grace had sufficient occupation fighting his enemies at
home this year, where it begun to be whispered that his favour was
decreasing, and his duchess losing her hold on the queen, who was
transferring her royal affections to the famous Mrs. Masham, and Mrs.
Masham’s humble servant, Mr. Harley. Against their intrigues, our duke
passed a great part of his time intriguing. Mr. Harley was got out of
office, and his grace, in so far, had a victory. But her Majesty,
convinced against her will, was of that opinion still, of which the poet
says people are when so convinced, and Mr. Harley before long had his
revenge.
Meanwhile the business of fighting did not go on any way to the
satisfaction of Marlborough’s gallant lieutenants. During all 1707, with
the French before us, we had never so much as a battle; our army in Spain
was utterly routed at Almanza by the gallant Duke of Berwick; and we of
Webb’s, which regiment the young duke had commanded before his father’s
abdication, were a little proud to think that it was our colonel who had
achieved this victory. “I think if I had had Galway’s place, and my
Fusiliers,” says our general, “we would not have laid down our arms, even
to our old colonel, as Galway did; and Webb’s officers swore if we had had
Webb, at least we would not have been taken prisoners.” Our dear old
general talked incautiously of himself and of others; a braver or a more
brilliant soldier never lived than he; but he blew his honest trumpet
rather more loudly than became a commander of his station, and, mighty man
of valour as he was, shook his great spear, and blustered before the army
too fiercely.
Mysterious Mr. Holtz went off on a secret expedition in the early part of
1708, with great elation of spirits, and a prophecy to Esmond that a
wonderful something was about to take place. This secret came out on my
friend’s return to the army, whither he brought a most rueful and dejected
countenance, and owned that the great something he had been engaged upon
had failed utterly. He had been indeed with that luckless expedition of
the Chevalier de St. George, who was sent by the French king with ships
and an army from Dunkirk, and was to have invaded and conquered Scotland.
But that ill wind which ever opposed all the projects upon which the
prince ever embarked, prevented the Chevalier’s invasion of Scotland, as
’tis known, and blew poor Monsieur von Holtz back into our camp again, to
scheme and foretell, and to pry about as usual. The Chevalier (the King of
England, as some of us held him) went from Dunkirk to the French army to
make the campaign against us. The Duke of Burgundy had the command this
year, having the Duke of Berry with him, and the famous Mareschal Vendosme
and the Duke of Matignon to aid him in the campaign. Holtz, who knew
everything that was passing in Flanders and France (and the Indies for
what I know), insisted that there would be no more fighting in 1708 than
there had been in the previous year, and that our commander had reasons
for keeping him quiet. Indeed, Esmond’s general, who was known as a
grumbler, and to have a hearty mistrust of the great duke, and hundreds
more officers besides, did not scruple to say that these private reasons
came to the duke in the shape of crown-pieces from the French king, by
whom the generalissimo was bribed to avoid a battle. There were plenty of
men in our lines, quidnuncs, to whom Mr. Webb listened only too willingly,
who could specify the exact sums the duke got, how much fell to Cadogan’s
share, and what was the precise fee given to Doctor Hare.
And the successes with which the French began the campaign of 1708, served
to give strength to these reports of treason, which were in everybody’s
mouth. Our general allowed the enemy to get between us and Ghent, and
declined to attack him, though for eight-and-forty hours the armies were
in presence of each other. Ghent was taken, and on the same day Monsieur
de la Mothe summoned Bruges; and these two great cities fell into the
hands of the French without firing a shot. A few days afterwards La Mothe
seized upon the fort of Plashendall: and it began to be supposed that all
Spanish Flanders, as well as Brabant, would fall into the hands of the
French troops; when the Prince Eugene arrived from the Mozelle, and then
there was no more shilly-shallying.
The Prince of Savoy always signalized his arrival at the army by a great
feast (my lord duke’s entertainments were both seldom and shabby): and I
remember our general returning from this dinner with the two
commanders-in-chief; his honest head a little excited by wine, which was
dealt out much more liberally by the Austrian than by the English
commander:—“Now,” says my general, slapping the table, with an oath, “he
must fight; and when he is forced to it, d—— it, no man in Europe can
stand up against Jack Churchill.” Within a week the battle of Oudenarde
was fought, when, hate each other as they might, Esmond’s general and the
commander-in-chief were forced to admire each other, so splendid was the
gallantry of each upon this day.
The brigade commanded by Major-General Webb gave and received about as
hard knocks as any that were delivered in that action, in which Mr. Esmond
had the fortune to serve at the head of his own company in his regiment,
under the command of their own colonel as major-general; and it was his
good luck to bring the regiment out of action as commander of it, the four
senior officers above him being killed in the prodigious slaughter which
happened on that day. I like to think that Jack Haythorn, who sneered at
me for being a bastard and a parasite of Webb’s, as he chose to call me,
and with whom I had had words, shook hands with me the day before the
battle begun. Three days before, poor Brace, our lieutenant-colonel, had
heard of his elder brother’s death, and was heir to a baronetcy in
Norfolk, and four thousand a year. Fate, that had left him harmless
through a dozen campaigns, seized on him just as the world was worth
living for, and he went into action, knowing, as he said, that the luck
was going to turn against him. The major had just joined us—a creature of
Lord Marlborough, put in much to the dislike of the other officers, and to
be a spy upon us, as it was said. I know not whether the truth was so, nor
who took the tattle of our mess to head quarters, but Webb’s regiment, as
its colonel, was known to be in the commander-in-chief’s black books: “And
if he did not dare to break it up at home,” our gallant old chief used to
say, “he was determined to destroy it before the enemy;” so that poor
Major Proudfoot was put into a post of danger.
Esmond’s dear young viscount, serving as aide de camp to my lord duke,
received a wound, and won an honourable name for himself in the _Gazette_;
and Captain Esmond’s name was sent in for promotion by his general, too,
whose favourite he was. It made his heart beat to think that certain eyes
at home, the brightest in the world, might read the page on which his
humble services were recorded; but his mind was made up steadily to keep
out of their dangerous influence, and to let time and absence conquer that
passion he had still lurking about him. Away from Beatrix, it did not
trouble him; but he knew as certain that if he returned home, his fever
would break out again, and avoided Walcote as a Lincolnshire man avoids
returning to his fens, where he is sure that the ague is lying in wait for
him.
We of the English party in the army, who were inclined to sneer at
everything that came out of Hanover, and to treat as little better than
boors and savages the Elector’s court and family, were yet forced to
confess that, on the day of Oudenarde, the young electoral prince, then
making his first campaign, conducted himself with the spirit and courage
of an approved soldier. On this occasion his electoral highness had better
luck than the King of England, who was with his cousins in the enemy’s
camp, and had to run with them at the ignominious end of the day. With the
most consummate generals in the world before them, and an admirable
commander on their own side, they chose to neglect the councils, and to
rush into a combat with the former, which would have ended in the utter
annihilation of their army but for the great skill and bravery of the Duke
of Vendosme, who remedied, as far as courage and genius might, the
disasters occasioned by the squabbles and follies of his kinsmen, the
legitimate princes of the blood royal.
“If the Duke of Berwick had but been in the army, the fate of the day
would have been very different,” was all that poor Mr. von Holtz could
say; “and you would have seen that the hero of Almanza was fit to measure
swords with the conqueror of Blenheim.”
The business relative to the exchange of prisoners was always going on,
and was at least that ostensible one which kept Mr. Holtz perpetually on
the move between the forces of the French and the Allies. I can answer for
it, that he was once very near hanged as a spy by Major-General Wayne,
when he was released and sent on to head quarters by a special order of
the commander-in-chief. He came and went, always favoured, wherever he
was, by some high though occult protection. He carried messages between
the Duke of Berwick and his uncle, our duke. He seemed to know as well
what was taking place in the prince’s quarter as our own: he brought the
compliments of the King of England to some of our officers, the gentlemen
of Webb’s among the rest, for their behaviour on that great day; and after
Wynendael, when our general was chafing at the neglect of our
commander-in-chief, he said he knew how that action was regarded by the
chiefs of the French army, and that the stand made before Wynendael wood
was the passage by which the Allies entered Lille.
“Ah!” says Holtz (and some folks were very willing to listen to him), “if
the king came by his own, how changed the conduct of affairs would be! His
Majesty’s very exile has this advantage, that he is enabled to read
England impartially, and to judge honestly of all the eminent men. His
sister is always in the hand of one greedy favourite or another, through
whose eyes she sees, and to whose flattery or dependants she gives away
everything. Do you suppose that his Majesty, knowing England so well as he
does, would neglect such a man as General Webb? He ought to be in the
House of Peers as Lord Lydiard. The enemy and all Europe know his merit;
it is that very reputation which certain great people, who hate all
equality and independence, can never pardon.” It was intended that these
conversations should be carried to Mr. Webb. They were welcome to him, for
great as his services were, no man could value them more than John
Richmond Webb did himself, and the differences between him and Marlborough
being notorious, his grace’s enemies in the army and at home began to
court Webb, and set him up against the all-grasping domineering chief. And
soon after the victory of Oudenarde, a glorious opportunity fell into
General Webb’s way, which that gallant warrior did not neglect, and which
gave him the means of immensely increasing his reputation at home.
After Oudenarde, and against the counsels of Marlborough, it was said, the
Prince of Savoy sat down before Lille, the capital of French Flanders, and
commenced that siege, the most celebrated of our time, and almost as
famous as the siege of Troy itself, for the feats of valour performed in
the assault and the defence. The enmity of that Prince of Savoy against
the French king was a furious personal hate, quite unlike the calm
hostility of our great English general, who was no more moved by the game
of war than that of billiards, and pushed forward his squadrons, and drove
his red battalions hither and thither as calmly as he would combine a
stroke or make a cannon with the balls. The game over (and he played it so
as to be pretty sure to win it), not the least animosity against the other
party remained in the breast of this consummate tactician. Whereas between
the Prince of Savoy and the French it was _guerre à mort_. Beaten off in
one quarter, as he had been at Toulon in the last year, he was back again
on another frontier of France, assailing it with his indefatigable fury.
When the prince came to the army, the smouldering fires of war were
lighted up and burst out into a flame. Our phlegmatic Dutch allies were
made to advance at a quick march—our calm duke forced into action. The
prince was an army in himself against the French; the energy of his hatred
prodigious, indefatigable—infectious over hundreds of thousands of men.
The emperor’s general was repaying, and with a vengeance, the slight the
French king had put upon the fiery little Abbé of Savoy. Brilliant and
famous as a leader himself, and beyond all measure daring and intrepid,
and enabled to cope with almost the best of those famous men of war who
commanded the armies of the French king, Eugene had a weapon, the equal of
which could not be found in France, since the cannon-shot of Sasbach laid
low the noble Turenne, and could hurl Marlborough at the heads of the
French host, and crush them as with a rock, under which all the gathered
strength of their strongest captains must go down.
The English duke took little part in that vast siege of Lille, which the
Imperial generalissimo pursued with all his force and vigour, further than
to cover the besieging lines from the Duke of Burgundy’s army, between
which and the Imperialists our duke lay. Once, when Prince Eugene was
wounded, our duke took his highness’s place in the trenches; but the siege
was with the Imperialists, not with us. A division under Webb and Rantzau
was detached into Artois and Picardy upon the most painful and odious
service that Mr. Esmond ever saw in the course of his military life. The
wretched towns of the defenceless provinces, whose young men had been
drafted away into the French armies, which year after year the insatiable
war devoured, were left at our mercy; and our orders were to show them
none. We found places garrisoned by invalids, and children and women: poor
as they were, and as the costs of this miserable war had made them, our
commission was to rob these almost starving wretches—to tear the food out
of their granaries, and strip them of their rags. ’Twas an expedition of
rapine and murder we were sent on: our soldiers did deeds such as an
honest man must blush to remember. We brought back money and provisions in
quantity to the duke’s camp; there had been no one to resist us, and yet
who dares to tell with what murder and violence, with what brutal cruelty,
outrage, insult, that ignoble booty had been ravished from the innocent
and miserable victims of the war?
Meanwhile, gallantly as the operations before Lille had been conducted,
the Allies had made but little progress, and ’twas said when we returned
to the Duke of Marlborough’s camp, that the siege would never be brought
to a satisfactory end, and that the Prince of Savoy would be forced to
raise it. My Lord Marlborough gave this as his opinion openly; those who
mistrusted him, and Mr. Esmond owns himself to be of the number, hinted
that the duke had his reasons why Lille should not be taken, and that he
was paid to that end by the French king. If this was so, and I believe it,
General Webb had now a remarkable opportunity of gratifying his hatred of
the commander-in-chief, of balking that shameful avarice, which was one of
the basest and most notorious qualities of the famous duke, and of showing
his own consummate skill as a commander. And when I consider all the
circumstances preceding the event which will now be related, that my lord
duke was actually offered certain millions of crowns provided that the
siege of Lille should be raised; that the Imperial army before it was
without provisions and ammunition, and must have decamped but for the
supplies that they received; that the march of the convoy destined to
relieve the siege was accurately known to the French; and that the force
covering it was shamefully inadequate to that end, and by six times
inferior to Count de la Mothe’s army, which was sent to intercept the
convoy; when ’tis certain that the Duke of Berwick, de la Mothe’s chief,
was in constant correspondence with his uncle, the English generalissimo:
I believe on my conscience that ’twas my Lord Marlborough’s intention to
prevent those supplies, of which the Prince of Savoy stood in absolute
need, from ever reaching his highness; that he meant to sacrifice the
little army which covered this convoy, and to betray it as he had betrayed
Tollemache at Brest; as he betrayed every friend he had, to further his
own schemes of avarice or ambition. But for the miraculous victory which
Esmond’s general won over an army six or seven times greater than his own,
the siege of Lille must have been raised; and it must be remembered that
our gallant little force was under the command of a general whom
Marlborough hated, that he was furious with the conqueror, and tried by
the most open and shameless injustice afterwards to rob him of the credit
of his victory.