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In our last video on the War of the Spanish
Succession, we covered the opening moves of the
conflict in 1701 between France and Austria,
including Prince Eugene of Savoy’s brilliant
campaign in Northern Italy that summer. Now,
the war will turn global as the Grand Alliance
re-assembles its armies under the command
of its new Captain-General, John Churchill,
1st Duke of Marlborough. From 1702 to 1703, the
armies of the Grand Alliance and the Bourbons
battled one another in campaigns and sieges
across theatres of war spanning from the Low
Countries in the north to as far south as Northern
Italy. With the Bourbon armies poised to strike
at Vienna in the summer of 1704, Marlborough
devises an ingenious military campaign to bring
the fight directly to the French and Bavarians.
In this episode, we’ll be covering Marlborough’s
famous March to the Danube and his campaign in
Bavaria, culminating in the Battle of Blenheim.
[Ascendancy of Queen Anne]
Following the revival of the
Grand Alliance between England, the Dutch
Republic, and Austria on September 7th,
1701, William III, King of England, Scotland, and
Ireland and Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic,
began making preparations for his countries
to make war with France and Spain. However,
William would not live to see the completion of
this work. Six months after reviving the Grand
Alliance, the King suffered a serious fall from
his horse after it stumbled on a mole’s burrow,
breaking his collar bone in the accident. On March
8th, 1702, William died from pneumonia brought on
by complications of his injury. While the Dutch
Republic would revert to a stadtholderless period,
the task of leading the Three British Kingdoms
in the war to come would fall to William’s
sister-in-law and designated Stuart heir, Anne.
The return of a Stuart monarch to the throne of
the British Kingdoms immediately made
Queen Anne popular with her subjects,
and she would serve as one of the primary faces
of the Grand Alliance’s war against the Bourbons.
During Queen Anne’s reign, much of England’s
foreign and domestic policy-making was directed
by her Privy Council and the English Parliament,
signalling a major shift in the control of
England’s government from the monarchy towards
a more modern and familiar parliamentary system.
While the Queen’s Privy Council and Parliament
directed the country at home, command of the
British armies in Europe would fall upon Anne’s
favourite, John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough.
[Background to Marlborough]
John Churchill was born on May 26th,
1650, the second surviving son of Royalists who
had been impoverished following the devastating
English Civil Wars. When his family’s estates were
restored following the Restoration of the monarchy
in 1660, Churchill became associated with the Duke
of York, the future King James II. By the 1670s,
Churchill had entered into military life, serving
as an officer in the English contingent of Louis
XIV’s armies during the Franco-Dutch War. Around
1675, he met Sarah Jennings, who hailed from a
similar Royalist gentry background. The two soon
fell in love and married in the winter of 1677.
Sarah Churchill was a close friend of the young
Princess Anne and would become one of the Queen’s
closest and most influential favourites after
her ascendancy to the English Throne in 1702.
In 1685, shortly after the accession of James II,
John Churchill led a Royalist army in suppressing
a revolt led by the Duke of Monmouth at the
Battle of Sedgemoor. However, three years later,
Churchill’s allegiances shifted to William of
Orange, and his defection to William’s cause was
one of the decisive factors in the success of the
Glorious Revolution. During the Nine Years’ War,
Churchill, now elevated to Earl of Marlborough
and known by his gentry title of Marlborough,
participated in the Battle of Walcourt in
1689. In 1690, he led a campaign to seize the
Irish Jacobite strongholds of Cork and Kinsale.
Despite their support for the Williamite cause,
the Churchills were held in low regard
by William’s wife, Queen Mary II,
who mistrusted them for Marlborough’s reported
Jacobite leanings and communications with the
exiled King James. This mistrust eventually led
to Marlborough’s fall from office in 1692 and
even brief imprisonment in the Tower of London.
After his release from the Tower, Marlborough
remained out of office during the
rest of William and Mary’s reign.
Still, by 1701, as tensions between the
Great Powers made war seem inevitable,
William reconciled with Marlborough
and appointed him commander of English
Army forces in preparation for a possible
conflict with France. With William’s death,
Marlborough’s close association with Queen Anne
secured his appointment as Captain-General of
Her Majesty’s Forces in Europe. When England
and the Dutch Republic formally declared war
on France on May 4th, 1702, Marlborough
was further elevated to Captain-General
of the Grand Alliance armies in Europe despite
his inexperience commanding large armies. He
would now become the de facto military leader of
the Grand Alliance in its war against Louis XIV.
[1702 Campaign in the Low Countries]
During the winter of 1701 - 1702,
the French began actively preparing for war
with the English and Dutch. On April 18th,
1702, the campaign in the Low Countries
Theater began when a Dutch and German army
of 16,000 men led by field marshal
Walrad, Prince of Nassau-Usingen,
besieged the fortress town of Kaiserswerth
on the Lower Rhine. A second Dutch army,
commanded by Godert de Ginkel, Earl of Athlone,
served as a covering force for the besiegers.
By capturing this key fortress, the Allies
could open the Rhine as far south as Cologne.
It would also encourage the still-neutral
German states of the Holy Roman Empire to
support the Allied cause. After two months,
on June 15th, the Siege of Kaiserswerth ended
with the fortress’s capitulation to the Allies.
On July 2nd, Marlborough departed The Hague to
join the Allied army at Nijmegen and to make
final preparations for his planned offensive
against the enemy fortresses on the Meuse.
His armies finally moved out in late July and,
over the next three months, proceeded to besiege
and capture the fortresses of Venlo, Ruremonde,
and Liège. The fall of Liège marked the conclusion
of the 1702 campaign in the Low Countries,
and Marlborough returned to England that
November. Marlborough’s successes on the
Meuse undid many of the French gains in the
region over the past ten years, and as a show
of thanks for his string of victories, Queen
Anne elevated him from the rank of Earl to Duke.
[Other Campaigns in 1702 - 1703]
While Marlborough’s forces were
making gains in the Low Countries that year,
campaigns were also being undertaken on other
fronts and in theatres of the war. In Northern
Italy on February 1st, Prince Eugene of Savoy’s
Imperialist army commenced its 1702 campaign by
storming the fortified village of Cremona and
capturing the French Army of Italy’s commander,
marshal François de Neufville, Duke of Villeroi.
Villeroi’s replacement, marshal Louis Joseph, Duke
of Vendôme, would prove more of Eugene’s equal,
and the 1702 Italian Campaign would devolve into
a state of guerilla warfare. Later in the year,
Eugene was recalled to Vienna, and he left
command of his army to General Count Guido
von Starhemberg. A year later, in October,
1703, Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy,
would defect to the Grand Alliance, betraying
the Bourbons and shifting the primary focus of
the Italian Theater to the Piedmont and Lombardy
regions. The Allies also saw success in Spain,
where at the Battle of Vigo Bay on October 23rd,
1702, an Anglo-Dutch fleet commanded by Admiral
George Rooke caught and destroyed a Franco-Spanish
treasure fleet anchored in Vigo Bay. The victory
here persuaded the Kingdom of Portugal to
switch its allegiances to the Allied cause.
Although the Grand Alliance had seen a string
of victories in 1702, the next year would see
a reversal of their fortunes. For the 1703
campaign season, King Louis ordered the focal
point of the French war effort for that year
to be concentrated in the Upper Rhine Theater.
That spring, French marshal Claude Louis Hector
de Villars, Duke of Villars, advanced through
the Black Forest with the intent of capturing
Vienna. Villars successfully maneuvered through
the Danube Valley and, with the support of
his Bavarian allies, prevented the Margrave of
Baden’s Imperialist army from linking up with
the forces of Herman Otto von Limburg-Styrum,
defeating them at the Battle of Munderkingen on
July 31st and then at Höchstädt on September 20th.
The Battle of Höchstädt had been a great victory
for the Bourbons, who inflicted 4,500 casualties
on the Imperialists at the cost of just around
1,000 Franco-Bavarian troops. Villars urged for
continued aggression and to drive on to
Vienna and capture the Austrian capital
before the onset of winter. Still, his timid and
overcautious Bavarian ally, Elector Maximilian II,
refused to comply. Villars resigned his command
in disgust. The end of campaigning in 1703 put
the Allies in a precarious situation: the Bourbons
were poised to capture Vienna in a grand offensive
during the 1704 campaign season if something
wasn’t done to prevent this move. The loss of
Vienna would knock the Austrians out of the war,
dealing a great blow to the Allied war effort.
For the French offensive against Austria in
1704, Louis ordered the French army in Flanders,
commanded by the repatriated marshal
Villeroi, to remain on the defensive
while an army under marshal Camille d'Hostun, Duke
of Tallard, advanced across the Rhine. marshal
Ferdinand de Marsin and the Bavarian Elector would
move through the Danube Valley while the French
Army of Italy attacked Tyrol. In April 1704,
French forces invaded southern Germany with the
support of Hungarian rebels. The fortress cities
of Augsburg, Regensburg, and Landau fell to the
advancing Bourbon forces, and Emperor Leopold
appealed to Queen Anne to send forces to his
country’s aid. The Queen, in turn, looked to the
Duke of Marlborough to devise a plan of action.
[Marlborough’s March to the Danube]
Marlborough had initially devised an offensive
into the Moselle River valley, but the dire threat
to Vienna caused him to switch up his plans. He
would now take his Anglo-Dutch army out of the Low
Countries and move it into Germany and the Danube
Valley. The plan was bold, daring, and risky.
It presented formidable logistical challenges,
and the fact that he would be marching his army
480 kilometres in the face of the enemy made
prospects of success all the more daunting. But
Marlborough knew that something had to be done,
and soon, or Vienna would certainly fall to
the Bourbons. The Dutch States General, for
their part, opposed any large movement that would
leave their country vulnerable to invasion. So
Marlborough instead presented his plan as simply
an offensive thrust towards the Moselle to draw
away Bavarian pressure from Holland’s doorstep.
He omitted the fact that he had no intention of
stopping before reaching the Danube.
Marlborough and his political ally,
Sidney Godolphin, Lord High Treasurer of England,
spent the early winter of 1704 making vigorous
preparations for the ambitious campaign scheduled
to begin that spring. Logistical depots were set
up in advance along the planned route of the
march, and supplies were carefully prepared all
the way down to the replacement shoes the troops
would wear during the arduous march. His route
was also pathed out to mislead the French into
pursuing him rather than reinforcing Maximilian.
On May 20th, 1704, Marlborough’s army of 21,000
men, of which 16,000 were British troops,
started their march across the Meuse via a
hastily constructed pontoon bridge at Roremonde.
His army comprised 51 foot battalions and 92 horse
squadrons, with 34 field artillery pieces and four
howitzers, more of which would be picked up along
the way. Five days after setting out, the army
arrived at their first supply depot at Koblenz.
In order to deceive the French, Marlborough
followed an unorthodox marching routine. The men
were awoken between 1:00 to 2:00 AM and marched
at full speed to the next arranged depot.
There, they would draw rations, pitch tents,
and rest for the remainder of the day. Despite the
meticulous planning and the stop-and-go nature of
the march to keep the men fresh, troops would
still fall out of formation in droves from the
gruelling march. On June 3rd, the army crossed
the Main River near Kassel and proceeded to the
Neckar River. They then advanced into the Danube
Valley, reaching Ulm. On June 10th, Marlborough
met for the first time with Prince Eugene of Savoy
at the village of Mondelsheim, halfway between the
Danube and the Rhine. The two immediately took a
liking to one another, and it would prove to be
the beginning of a great military partnership.
Three days later, the Margrave of Baden joined
them at Fross Heppach. On June 22nd, Marlborough’s
army reached Elchingen, having marched over 480
kilometres in five weeks of marching. The next
day, the armies of Marlborough, Eugene, and
Baden affected a junction on the Danube, bringing
their combined army strength up to 110,000 men.
The three generals decided that Prince Eugene
would take 28,000 men to the defensive Lines of
Stolhoffen on the Rhine in order to watch Villeroi
and Tallard and prevent their two armies from
linking up with the Bavarians. Meanwhile,
Marlborough and Baden, with 80,000 men,
would combine forces for a decisive march to
the Danube, where they would seek battle with
Maximilian and marshal Marsin before they could
be reinforced. The French marshals in the theatre
began devising a plan to save Maximilian’s
army. Tallard would reinforce Marsin and
Maximilian on the Danube by moving through
the Black Forest with 40 foot battalions and
50 horse squadrons. Villeroi would pin down
Eugene’s forces at the Lines of Stolhoffen,
and if the Allies continued moving to the
Danube, he would effect a junction with
Tallard and General Francois de Coigny in order
to protect Alsace. On July 1st, Tallard’s army of
35,000 recrossed the Rhine and started its march.
Meanwhile, Maximilian and Marsin had gathered
a force of 55,000 men at Ulm, which would be
reinforced by Tallard’s columns for the invasion.
[Battle of the Schellenberg
and the Burning of Bavaria]
The Allies now needed a base for supplies
and to safely cross the Danube. On July 2nd,
Marlborough’s and Baden’s forces stormed the
Bavarian stronghold of Schellenberg, situated
on the heights above the fortified village of
Donauworth. Pressed for time, Marlborough had
ordered an all-out tactical assault on the
Bavarian position. Following a ferocious and
bloody day-long battle, Schellenberg fell to
the Allied armies. The Allies had lost 5,374
men in the assault, while the Franco-Bavarians
had suffered even higher casualties. After their
victory at the Battle of Schellenberg, the Allied
armies advanced into Bavaria. Marlborough had
sensed that Maximilian’s loyalties to Louis were
wavering, and so throughout July, the Duke ordered
his troops to conduct a scorched earth campaign
to force the Bavarians out of the war. Crops
and farms were burned by the Allied troops in a
brutal type of warfare not experienced in these
lands since the Thirty Years’ War. The Allies took
special care to burn the Elector’s personal lands
and possessions. The terrified Bavarians in the
countryside fled for safety in the cities, taking
all their belongings with them. Just as expected,
Maximilian began to waver in his allegiance to
Louis. However, Tallard sent a dispatch to the
Elector informing him that he was en route through
the Black Forest to link up and take the fight
to the Allied invaders. Marlborough’s hopes of
negotiating with the Elector would prove wasteful,
as the arrival of Tallard’s forces in the region
fortified Maxmilian’s resolve. Marlborough
thus intensified the burning of Bavarian lands,
with some 372 towns, villages, and farmhouses
demolished in the harsh campaign of destruction.
Marlborough soon received word that Prince Eugene
had left 12,000 men on the Lines of Stolhoffen and
was en route to rendezvous with the Allied army
in Bavaria. Both Marlborough and Eugene hoped to
bring the enemy armies to battle. On August
12th, the armies united at the village of
Höchstädt. Marlborough dispatched Baden, who had
proven to be troublesome, to besiege Ingolsdtadt
with 15,000 men, reducing the Allied army to about
56,000. The Franco-Bavarian army under the command
of Tallard and Maximilian would outnumber them
slightly, and took up positions on the south
bank of the Nebel River. They did not expect
the Allies to make an attack on their position,
and Tallard confidently sent a letter to King
Louis stating he believed the Allies would
retire to Nordlingen. This would prove a grave
miscalculation on the French marshal’s part.
[Battle at Blenheim]
Marlborough and Prince Eugene
spent the morning of August 13th meticulously
preparing their forces to do battle on the
north bank of the Nebel. The Franco-Bavarian
army was protected to the south by the Danube,
and wooded hills on their left guarded from
any outflanking movement in that direction. The
marshy Nebel provided a formidable barrier to any
frontal assault, and the heavily fortified village
of Blindheim, known to the British as “Blenheim,”
anchored the Franco-Bavarian right flank. Tallard
deployed his army on a wide floodplain between
Blindheim on his right and Lutzingen to his left,
roughly 35 kilometres apart. In their center was
another fortified village, Oberglau. On the Allied
right, Eugene faced Maximilian’s army between
Lutzingen and Oberglau, while Marlborough’s forces
opposed Tallard’s army at Oberglau and Blindheim.
At 2:00 AM on the morning of August 13th, 1704, a
vanguard of forty horse squadrons was sent forward
toward the enemy lines. An hour later, the main
Allied force, arranged into nine columns, followed
up and pushed towards the Nebel. Mist obscured the
Allies’ march, giving them an enormous advantage.
Eugene and Marlborough met at the former’s tent at
6:00 AM to finalize preparations before separating
their armies into two wings. Marlborough, with
36,000 men, would attack Tallard’s equal-sized
force on the left flank, while Prince Eugene, with
16,000 men, would battle Maximilian and Marsin’s
combined army of 24,000 on the right wing.
At 7:00 AM, the morning fog lifted, revealing
the massed Allied battle lines to the astonished
Franco-Bavarian commanders. The French and
Bavarians proceeded to deploy with infantry
in the center and cavalry on the wings, with the
two cavalry wings meeting at Oberglau. The Battle
of Blenheim, known to the French as the Second
Battle of Höchstädt, commenced with an Allied
artillery bombardment of the Franco-Bavarian
lines at seven o’clock that morning. Actual
fighting began at 12:30 PM when Lord John Cutts
attacked the village of Blindheim with his British
and German battalions. The fortified village was
a formidable obstacle for Marlborough’s forces,
but Lord Cutts’ battalions executed a solid
attack on Blindheim. Four brigades of infantry,
two English, one Hessian, and one Hanoverian,
assaulted the village under a hail of musketry
to reach the barricaded walls and streets. The
English Redcoats of Howe’s Regiment of Foot led
the way, stabbing holes through the overturned
wagons, furniture, and other impromptu barricades.
They fired over the parapets and even attempted
to tear down the barricades with their hands.
French reserves, including an elite unit of
heavy cavalry gendarmes, arrived and managed to
push the Allied battalions back from their first
assault. The battalion of Scots Fusiliers lost its
colours in the fighting, but a volley by their
Hessian allies killed many of the gendarmes and
allowed the Scots to reclaim their lost standard.
After Lord Cutts began his attack on Blindheim,
Marlborough and Eugene commenced their
general advance all along the line.
Marlborough had arranged his army in an unusual
tactical formation. He ordered his brother,
Charles Churchill, to arrange the infantry
in two lines, with the first of 17 battalions
to lead the attack across the Nebel. The second
line of 11 battalions would follow close behind.
In between the infantry rode 71 squadrons
of cavalry, also divided into two lines,
with the total force numbering 23,000 men.
Marlborough’s pioneers repaired the damaged
footbridge over the Nebel at Unterglau on the
Allied left-center, while another five mobile
pontoon bridges were laid between Unterglau
and Blindheim. The Franco-Bavarians repulsed
individual Allied probing attacks on Blindheim,
Oberglau, and Lutzingen. Still, the Bourbon forces
were pinned enough to allow Marlborough to launch
cavalry contingents across the stream and attack
the enemy units caught in the open ground between
Blindheim and Lutzingen. In Marlborough’s center,
the Allies began crossing the stream, first with
the foot battalions and then the horse squadrons.
Caught by surprise, Tallard belatedly ordered
a cavalry charge by the same gendarmes units
bloodied from the action at Blindheim. The French
cavalry attacked vigorously, but the English and
Dutch horsetroopers stood firm, deploying into
three groups and falling upon the French flanks
and rear. Tallard watched with dismay as the
Redcoats cut down his vaunted cavalry units.
Once across the Nebel, Marlborough deployed his
men with two lines of infantry behind two lines of
cavalry, permitting them to repel repeated French
cavalry charges. The Allies were still taking
heavy cannon fire from the French and Bavarian
guns, and at one point, Marlborough was almost
hit by a cannonball while leading his men from the
front of the action. As Marlborough was leading
his men across the Nebel, Prince Eugene launched
an assault from the Allied right flank. However,
the rough ground in this sector prevented
him from making much headway. At 3:00 PM,
the French launched a bloody counterattack
at Oberglau, spearheaded by the “Wild Geese,”
regiments of expatriated Irish soldiers
serving in the French ranks who hated the
English. Marlborough wrote a dispatch to Eugene
calling for reinforcements. While Eugene was
having his own troubles, he immediately ordered
his Austrian cuirassiers to charge into the French
flank and repel the breakthrough. The French
counterattack soon fizzled out with heavy losses.
By 5:30 PM, after firing a concentrated artillery
barrage with 40 cannons, Marlborough effected a
breakthrough in Tallard’s center. Reinforcements
were soon pouring through the breach in the French
line, while in Prince Eugene’s sector, Maximilian
and Marsin kept their side of the line stabilized.
However, Eugene’s concentrated attacks on
the Franco-Bavarians prevented them from
reinforcing Tallard’s sector. With Tallard’s line
broken, Marsin and Maximilian began to fall back
towards Oberglau, leaving Tallard’s forces cut
off in the face of another heavy cavalry charge
by Marlborough’s squadrons. Marlborough’s
troops swept around the rear of Blindheim,
threatening to cut off the French garrison inside.
Finally, 24 battalions of French infantry and four
regiments of dragoons surrendered to Marlborough’s
forces. Among the surrendered French forces was
marshal Tallard himself, who had been wounded and
captured in the confusion. Marsin and Maximilian,
meanwhile, set fire to Oberglau and Lutzingen
and retreated to the northwest. The Battle of
Blenheim was over, and the defeat of the
Franco-Bavarians was complete. Marlborough
hastily scribbled a dispatch to his wife, Sarah,
which began with: “I have not time to say more,
but to beg you will give my duty to the Queen and
let her know her Army has had a glorious victory.”
The Battle of Blenheim was a decisive Allied
victory, and it was followed by the conquest
of territory in Bavaria and southern Germany.
After the battle and its subsequent retreat to
the Rhine, the Franco-Bavarian army was largely
ineffective. When he finally received word of
the defeat, King Louis became quite depressed.
The Battle of Blenheim had shattered the myth of
the French Army’s invincibility that had been
shaped over the past fifty years. The threat
against Austria had been eliminated, the tide
of the war had turned in the Allies’ favour,
and Marlborough would use the momentum gained at
Blenheim to seize the initiative from the French.
In the next video in our series on the War of
Spanish Succession, we will cover just how the
1st Duke of Marlborough would capitalize off
that initiative. To ensure you don’t miss it,
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