Marlborough (59 page)

In the event, alas, Eugène had good reason for his despondency. Victor Amadeus and Eugène crossed the Var on 11 July and, with Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell and a powerful Anglo-Dutch fleet keeping pace with them, marched for Toulon. They took two weeks to accomplish a march that might have been achieved in one, and the British ambassador to Turin later lamented: ‘It was the opinion of every officer that if before coming to Toulon, we had not been so dilatory and cautious, we might have done a great deal.’
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Berwick’s reinforcements from Spain arrived to join Marshal Tessé just before the Allies reached Toulon. There were forty-six ships of between fifty and 110 guns in the harbour, with a number of smaller craft, and Louis was so concerned that they might be burnt that he ordered them to be sunk and refloated later: the three-deckers would lie with their upper decks out of the water. When Shovell went ashore to meet Savoy on 28 July he found the duke gloomy: work had not been progressing well, and he awaited Eugène’s arrival before deciding whether to press on. Eventually it was decided that heavy guns would be landed from the fleet, as Shovell told Vice-Admiral Byng, ‘to make up the whole number between ninety and one hundred’.
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Despite the arrival of the guns, the Allies were never strong enough to mount a formal siege, but they did take the commanding heights of Ste-Catherine, just above the harbour, in early August. However, the French recovered them a week later in a sharp action in which the Prince of Saxe-Gotha, who had commanded the Imperialist right wing at Turin the year before, was killed. On 22 August Eugène and Victor Amadeus decided to fall back, having lost about 10,000 men in the enterprise. Eugène, railing against ‘cabinets, parliaments, states-general and courtiers’, thought that they had simply moved too slowly. ‘We ought, as I proposed, to have marched straightway to Toulon after the expulsion of the French from Lombardy,’ he wrote. ‘Nevertheless, but for the bravery and talents of Tessé, and the unfortunate affair in which my beloved Prince of Gotha fell, we should have been successful.’
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Shovell embarked the sick, wounded and artillery in his transports. He was, though, determined to do as much damage as he could before
leaving. His battleships first took on the batteries covering the harbour, enabling a flotilla of bomb-ketches (small vessels each armed with a single mortar) to approach within range, and to lob their shells over an intervening spit of land. They spent eighteen hours bombarding the fleet and the dockyard, with its stores full of timber, canvas and cordage, before the fire of repositioned French guns forced them to withdraw. Two French warships were burnt, two more badly damaged, and most were not refloated in time to play a useful part in the war.

The destruction of the French fleet not only gave the Allies control of the Mediterranean, but it effectively saw the French abandon any hope of fighting the British and the Dutch in regular fleet actions, and rely on privateering instead. The episode had one mournful footnote. On its way back home Shovell’s squadron missed the entrance to the English Channel (all too easy with the primitive navigation instruments available) and three of his battleships were lost with all their officers and men, including Shovell himself, on the outer rocks of the Scilly Isles. The loss of the popular and competent admiral was a real blow.
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However gratifying the damage to the French Mediterranean squadron was, it was no real compensation for failure to take Toulon. Marlborough’s early confidence had waned, and even before he heard of the reverse he warned Godolphin that he had received letters from Chetwynd ‘and others from the army in Provence, and I am very sorry to tell you that I observe by all of them, that there is not that friendship and reliance between 58 [Savoy] and 48 [Eugène], as should be wished for making such a grand design succeed’.
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Even from a distance it was evident that the loss of Ste-Catherine was very damaging, and once he had definite news that the Allies had given up the siege he recognised that the strategic consequences of failure would be substantial. Godolphin blamed it on ‘the little good understanding between those princes, or rather, in truth, between the Imperial court and the Duke of Savoy’.
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Marlborough’s liaison officer with the expedition, Brigadier Palmes, took an age to return to report: at the end of September he was laid up ‘with a violent fit of the gout in the Westerwald’. However, Marlborough thought that Eugène would not serve with Victor Amadeus again, and felt that it would be best if he was sent to Spain in an effort to revive the Allied cause there. Marlborough spent much of the autumn worrying about the next year’s campaign, for it seemed certain to him that, with the war in Spain all but won, ‘the French will bend their greatest force this way, and I am almost persuaded will offer us battle as soon as they take the field’.
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While Victor Amadeus and Eugène had been involved in the Toulon expedition, Marlborough was engaged in an equally unprofitable campaign against Marshal Vendôme on the borders of Brabant. At first he assured Heinsius that he would not risk battle unless he was superior in strength, but privately he told Godolphin that, though he would take any favourable opportunity that presented itself, he had to be less than open with his Allies.

The true meaning of my letter to the pensioner is to let him see that I am not of the opinion to venture a battle, unless the advantages be on our side. I would have marched yesterday to Nivelle, but the deputies would not consent to it, telling me very plainly, that they feared the consequence of that march might be a battle. So that unless I can convince the pensioner that I am not for hazarding, but when we have an advantage, they will give such orders to the deputies, that I shall not have it in my power of doing good, if an advantage should offer itself … I take care not to let the army know that the Dutch are not willing to venture, since that must have an ill effect, and although it is a very unpleasant thing not to have full power at the head of an army, yet I do please myself that I shall do some considerable service this campaign; for I do believe that we shall find that the Elector [of Bavaria] and M. Vendôme grow insolent, by which they will either attack, or give me occasion of attacking them.

He concluded with a prescient warning that the Spanish Netherlands had not taken comfortably to their new ruler. He thought ‘the greatest part of this country’ was actually more inclined to Philip V than to Charles III, and blamed this on ‘the unreasonable behaviour of the Dutch’ in their administration of the ‘liberated’ area.
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Cadogan was similarly lukewarm about the prospects, warning Lord Raby that ‘The Deputies are relapsed into all their former fears and difficulties; which will be harder for my Lord Duke to overcome than to beat the Elector and Marshal Vendôme. I may venture to aver that if in fifteen days or three weeks at furthest we do nothing, you may reckon the campaign lost.’
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Part of Marlborough’s problem was that he now had to furnish garrisons for the territories conquered after Ramillies, while Vendôme in turn had fewer garrisons to find. Marlborough argued privately that his army was actually better than Vendôme’s, but it was probably rather smaller, a fact not calculated to encourage the Dutch to give battle. It was not until Vendôme had detached twenty battalions and eleven squadrons to help relieve Toulon that the balance of advantage passed
to Marlborough, but there was little he could do with it. The Allies had the best of some marching and countermarching in filthy weather between the Scheldt and the Dender in late August and early September, and Vendôme’s army, outrunning its logistics, lost heavily from desertion, but no telling blows were struck, and by late September Marlborough was thinking about getting into winter quarters, well aware, as we have seen, that Allied failure in Spain and before Toulon would put him at a disadvantage for the 1708 campaign.

It was a difficult winter. Marlborough visited Heinsius twice before he returned to England, but they could not agree on a plan for 1708. After his return Marlborough received a long, unusually formal letter from Heinsius warning him that the war was slipping away from them. Spain, he argued, was lost. No good would come out of Italy or Germany, and the French, by concentrating against the British and Dutch in the north, might beat them there and end the war on favourable terms. Only Britain, far more prosperous than Holland, could change this state of affairs, by sending more troops to Flanders, the vital theatre for 1708, and by arranging a descent on the French coast and encouraging an expedition from Italy so as to prevent the French from concentrating. Marlborough told him that he overestimated British economic strength: if Heinsius knew of ‘the great scarcity of money in the country and the decay of trade in our sea ports you would not think our condition to differ much from that you represent Holland to be in’.

He regretted ‘how little the Emperor and the Empire have done for this war and for their own preservation and how little they seem disposed to exert themselves at present, when all is in a manner at stake’. He hoped that Eugène would be sent to Spain, and urged Heinsius to press Vienna to help ensure this. The emperor should also be reminded that Wratislaw had agreed that 20,000 men should be sent to Italy, for Victor Amadeus might be able to take the offensive if he was properly supported. Finally, a descent on the French coast did indeed have much to recommend it, ‘if the ill success we have hitherto had in those expeditions do not give too great a discouragement’. ‘I am so tormented with a cold in my head,’ concluded Marlborough, ‘that I am forced to make use of Mr Cardonnel’s hand.’
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This was not an implied slight, for Marlborough’s letter was frank and good-natured. His view of the coming year did not differ substantially from Heinsius’s, except for his confidence that Spain
could ultimately be saved, but that December he was too over-stretched on the political front to frame a strategy for a war that now seemed to have developed a giddy momentum of its own.

The government was in real trouble soon after the first Parliament of the United Kingdom met. It was really the English Parliament of 1705 with forty-five Scots MPs and sixteen representative Scots peers, and sat for the first time on 23 October 1707. In December both Houses endorsed the official war aim of ‘No Peace without Spain’. The queen told the Lords that she would remain committed to an all-party government, and the Duumvirs discussed a scheme of Harley’s to get rid of the extreme Whigs and create a centrist ministry – something which the queen applauded. Harley’s own position was imperilled when William Greg, a clerk in his office, was found to be in treasonable communication with the French. Greg, apparently offered some mitigation of the grisly due process of law, resolutely refused to implicate his master. While Greg’s ghastly fate was still in the balance, Harley privately criticised the management of the war in Spain to the queen, and his associate St John subsequently raised the same issue in Parliament. Fewer than half the British troops designated for Spain had actually been at Almanza, he maintained: had the administration simply done what Parliament expected of it, the Allies would certainly have won.

The Duumvirs were incensed at what they saw as Harley’s betrayal. The queen tried hard to broker a compromise, the strain of which gave her ‘gout in her stomach’, and even said that she was prepared to part with Godolphin. On the evening of 8 February 1708 Godolphin and the Marlboroughs visited the queen to affirm that they would all resign if Harley was not dismissed. Godolphin spoke first, and the queen, ‘in respect of his long service’, gave him another day to consider his position. Sarah was told briskly that she could ‘retire as soon as you desire. I shall then advise you to go to your little house at St Albans and stay there till Blenheim House is ready for your Grace.’

Then entered the Duke, prepared with his utmost address. He told her that he had ever served her with obedience and fidelity … that he must lament he ever came in competition with so vile a creature as H[arley]; that his fidelity and duty should continue as long as his breath. That it was his duty to be speedy in resigning his commands, that she might put the sword into some other hand immediately, and it was also his duty to tell her he feared the Dutch would immediately on the news make a peace very injurious for England.

‘And then, my Lord,’ says she, ‘will you resign me your sword?’ ‘Let me tell you,’ says he, ‘your service I have regarded to the utmost of my power.’ ‘And if you do, my Lord, resign your sword, let me tell you, you will run it through my head.’

She went to council, begging him to follow, he refusing …
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Harley had broken cover too soon, for he had too little Tory backing in either House. In contrast there was substantial support for the Duumvirs, and Prince George forcefully – and it seems decisively – took their part. Harley resigned: St John, Harcourt and Mansell departed in sympathy, and all were replaced by moderate Whigs. Although Sarah exaggerates Abigail Masham’s subsequent contact with the dismissed Harley, they agreed a list of cant names for their correspondence as early as May 1708: the queen was ‘Aunt Stephens’. For the moment, though, the connection was of no real political importance. Far more significant was the failure of a French attempt, in early March 1708, to land James II’s son, the twenty-year-old James Francis Edward Stuart, in Scotland. From the French viewpoint the expedition was designed at worst to force troop withdrawals from Flanders, and at best to bring the British to the peace table. There was indeed strong anti-Union feeling in Scotland, and a landing might have capitalised on this, but the expedition miscarried, with the capture of one ex-British vessel, the
Salisbury.