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Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 27
Still going! :D
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felis already knows this one, but check out Alec Guinness as Heinrich Mann (and Jeremy Irons as Ödön von Horvath, and Sian Cusack as Nelly Mann, Heinrich's wife), in a tv version of Christopher Hampton's play "Tales from Hollywood". The premise of the play is "what if?", in this case "What if Ödön von Horvath hadn't died in 1938 but had emigrated with the rest of the German language exile writers from France to Los Angeles?", and the play is narrated fro his perspective. Some Alex Guinness fan excerpted several of his scenes for this vid here. Oh, I forgot to remark on this:
Gossip: *is dead wrong, but fits the climate of the times. When Charles' marriage with Catherine of Braganza won't produce any living offspring, while Charles has illegitimate children galore, Anne's father will be accused by gossip of having matched Charles knowingly to an infertile woman, which is absolutely insane*
Ummmmm, wow! Because... it's so easy to tell that virgins are infertile *headdesk*
Meanwhile, James: I don't want to marry a girl I got pregnant ahead of marriage anyway. She's not worthy of me.
FACEPALM FOREVER
"So 'Est-il possible' is gone too", James supposedly remarked.
heeeeee!
However, since he had only one female mistress in his life (while Uncle Charles and Uncle James were merrily screwing around), rumors started (mostly by his Jacobite enemies) that maybe his preferences ran to the male form anyway.
William tersely dismissed these suggestions, however, saying, "It seems to me very extraordinary that it should be impossible to have esteem and regard for a young man without it being criminal."
Yep, I hear you too, WIlliam. One of the fascinating things I think about all this history is that all the trash talking I thought was of modern invention... totally isn't. (Only even more so!) I mean, regardless of whether it was true about William in particular.
Gossip: *is dead wrong, but fits the climate of the times. When Charles' marriage with Catherine of Braganza won't produce any living offspring, while Charles has illegitimate children galore, Anne's father will be accused by gossip of having matched Charles knowingly to an infertile woman, which is absolutely insane*
Ummmmm, wow! Because... it's so easy to tell that virgins are infertile *headdesk*
Meanwhile, James: I don't want to marry a girl I got pregnant ahead of marriage anyway. She's not worthy of me.
FACEPALM FOREVER
"So 'Est-il possible' is gone too", James supposedly remarked.
heeeeee!
However, since he had only one female mistress in his life (while Uncle Charles and Uncle James were merrily screwing around), rumors started (mostly by his Jacobite enemies) that maybe his preferences ran to the male form anyway.
William tersely dismissed these suggestions, however, saying, "It seems to me very extraordinary that it should be impossible to have esteem and regard for a young man without it being criminal."
Yep, I hear you too, WIlliam. One of the fascinating things I think about all this history is that all the trash talking I thought was of modern invention... totally isn't. (Only even more so!) I mean, regardless of whether it was true about William in particular.
lol, this is totally an awesome soap opera.
Mary *writes secret letter*: Dear former potential husband Archduke Max, if you show up here right away, we're back on!
Maximilian: *to the rescue*
okay, this is AWESOME. I mean, fine, you make it clear there are other considerations. But it's also a super cute story :P Well, besides the part where she dies super early :(
and more that after his own death decades later, he'll order his heart to be buried with Mary in far away Burgundy, not in Vienna.
Me: ...what is up with these Habsburgs and their obsession with burying their body parts separately??
On Juana: WAIT, I did know about her and that she was reputed to have gone mad because she shows up as a very minor plot point in an AU SF novel I once read, only I had remembered it slightly differently, and in fact the line there was that her husband dying early caused her to go mad. OMG. At least a) it got it right that it was the fact she had a fortune (at least partially from Columbus' voyages!) that caused the marriage to Philip le Bel, and b) the minor plot point was that the AU was a fix-it where Juana married someone else entirely and didn't either go insane or have her husband declare her insane, so there's that :)
Mary *writes secret letter*: Dear former potential husband Archduke Max, if you show up here right away, we're back on!
Maximilian: *to the rescue*
okay, this is AWESOME. I mean, fine, you make it clear there are other considerations. But it's also a super cute story :P Well, besides the part where she dies super early :(
and more that after his own death decades later, he'll order his heart to be buried with Mary in far away Burgundy, not in Vienna.
Me: ...what is up with these Habsburgs and their obsession with burying their body parts separately??
On Juana: WAIT, I did know about her and that she was reputed to have gone mad because she shows up as a very minor plot point in an AU SF novel I once read, only I had remembered it slightly differently, and in fact the line there was that her husband dying early caused her to go mad. OMG. At least a) it got it right that it was the fact she had a fortune (at least partially from Columbus' voyages!) that caused the marriage to Philip le Bel, and b) the minor plot point was that the AU was a fix-it where Juana married someone else entirely and didn't either go insane or have her husband declare her insane, so there's that :)
Horowski also points out they were the military international bromance of the 18th Century, despite being very different men. Re: what was more the norm - remember how the 7 Years War, the first Miracle of the House of Brandenburg happened because after soundly defeating Fritz at Kunersdorf, the anti-Fritz-Alliance didn't march onto Berlin? One explanation for this were hierarchical arguments in the international leadership. On the other side, G2's son Bill the Butcher before failing ignomiously early in the 7 Years War also kept arguing with both his Hannover and his Prussian allies. Marborough and Eugene forming a dream team really was the absolute exception to the rule when it came to big name generals from different realms working together.
This is rather fascinating and I love it (...okay fine I am all about military international bromances between very different men). Also every time someone mentions Horowski he's saying something really interesting, argh I need to learn German. (I'm finally back at doing Duolingo, at least, thanks to my child wanting to do Habitica and Duolingo being a habit on my Habitica list.) Or, more realistically, bribe mildred at some point when I have more time (argh, I have proposals due in a month and then RMSE after that) to show me how to use her translation interface...
This is rather fascinating and I love it (...okay fine I am all about military international bromances between very different men). Also every time someone mentions Horowski he's saying something really interesting, argh I need to learn German. (I'm finally back at doing Duolingo, at least, thanks to my child wanting to do Habitica and Duolingo being a habit on my Habitica list.) Or, more realistically, bribe mildred at some point when I have more time (argh, I have proposals due in a month and then RMSE after that) to show me how to use her translation interface...
If one would hate all those who love young men, one couldn't love six people here.
LOLOLOL I remember you citing this before, but of course I'd forgotten it until you mentioned it again <3 Liselotte! <33
In conclusion, I wish whoever wrote those passages in the English wiki would meet Johannes Kunisch, who is the German Fritz biographer who made my AP argue for a while that maybe Fritz was just pretending to be gay because Eugene and Turenne had made it fashionable.
That is amazing. I am grinning so hard right now. Eugene was that cool and gay! (I mean, maybe he wasn't gay, I also don't want to fall into that trap and you point out that gayness isn't always the answer. But still!)
LOLOLOL I remember you citing this before, but of course I'd forgotten it until you mentioned it again <3 Liselotte! <33
In conclusion, I wish whoever wrote those passages in the English wiki would meet Johannes Kunisch, who is the German Fritz biographer who made my AP argue for a while that maybe Fritz was just pretending to be gay because Eugene and Turenne had made it fashionable.
That is amazing. I am grinning so hard right now. Eugene was that cool and gay! (I mean, maybe he wasn't gay, I also don't want to fall into that trap and you point out that gayness isn't always the answer. But still!)
okay, this is AWESOME. I mean, fine, you make it clear there are other considerations. But it's also a super cute story :P Well, besides the part where she dies super early :(
It is an absurdly romantic tale, and I like it a lot. Also, given the alternative princes available at the time, it must be said Mary got herself the best of the lot (not just theoretical position wise). Here's a darkly humorous fun bit about some of the alternatives.
In England, ruling: Edward IV., brother to Mary's stepmother Margaret. Has two other brothers: the youngest, Richard, future Richard III, who, no matter whether you're a traditionalist (= he killed the princes in the Tower) or a Ricardian (did not!), had been and would be completely loyal to Big Brother throughout Edward's entire life, which included going into exile with him when Edward temporarily lost the crown courtesy of their cousin Richard Neville aka "The Kingmaker", with whom Edward had fallen out, and their middle brother George of Clarence. That would be the other brother. Clarence is famous in history for two things: constantly changing sides in the wars of the Roses, and eventually ending up dead by order of brother Edward, supposedly drowned in wine, which may or may not be a legend, but he did end up dead on his brother's command, and not in secret but after a public accusation and trial.
Now, back when Edward and Richard had to go into exile, they spend those two years with sister Margaret in Burgundy. George, Margaret and Richard were the youngest York siblings and had been raised together. So let's assume Margaret, who hadn't seen George since she got married and thus heard of the constant betrayals only via mail, had a soft spot for him, for:
Margaret: Dear Edward and Richard (in a historical novel she'd write Ned and Dickon), I think I have the solution to the problem with George. Clearly, he won't scheme and change sides anymore if he has a realm of his own! My stepdaughter Mary urgently needs a husband, and I was thinking...
Edward: Yeah, no. Handing over one of the richest provinces on the continent to the brother who still thinks he'd make a better King than me? NO WAY.
Richard: Hate to say this, Meg, but he's right
Edward: However, how about my brother-in-law, Anthony Woodville?
Margaret: ....SERIOUSLY?
(This would have been a serious mesalliance, because Edward's wife, Elizabeth Woodville, had been the daughter of a simple knight, his marriage with her had been one of the primary reasons for his fallout with cousin Neville the Kingmaker, and because Edward kept favoring the Woodvilles (possibly to build them up as an alternate power base to the Nevilles, in a divide and rule sense), they were cordially despised by much of the English nobility.)
Margaret:...I think Mary is right: she should go for the young Habsburg.
Juana: how much or little insane she was is still debated. The traditional story is that she was jealous of every woman Philip as much as looked at so he had to restrain her even in his life time, and then when he died she went completely mad. The problem is that this explanation came from three men who really profited from Juana being declared mad and unable to rule: her husband, her father and her son. (Her father because Spain had only gotten united through the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the ensuing conquest of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom of Spain. However, Ferdinand did not rule Castile, only his own realm of Aragon, while Isabella lived. And Castile then went to Isabel's children, not to Ferdinand as her husband, which meant Juana.)
Now, there are certainly independent testimonies as to Juana's temper. She and Philip le Bel fell for each other at sight and were so eager to have sex that Philip ordered his Chaplain to marry them immediately instead of waiting for the big ceremony. She was openly jealous of most women around him (with or wihout reason, who can say). But this behavior isn't classified as mad by a great many other people. When Philip and Juana spent three months in England, she certainly didn't apppear to be mad to the people she interacted with there, which included Henry VII, who years later, after the death of his wife Elizabeth of York, indeed proposed to marry her. And when asked whether she wasn't supposed to be mad said no, he saw no sign of madness. Unfortunately, by then Ferdinand was in charge of Juana, see above, and had a vested interest in having her considered as mad. Not to mention that Ferdinand already regreted having married his youngest daughter, Katherine of Aragon, to Henry's son Arthur, only for Arthur to die and Henry keeping Katherine's dowry anyway but refusing to send her back. (This was before future Henry VIII. would marry his sister-in-law.) There's no way he would have handed over Juana and Castile to Henry VII. Still, it's an AU to think about, especially if Henry VII had managed to sire another son before his own death. What Henry VIII. would have done with a baby half brother with a claim to Castile is anyone's guess, of course.
Anyway, back to the question of Juana's sanity: the biggest proof held up for her being insane is that after Philip le Bel's death, she supposedly refused to let him be buried and travelled with his coffin everywhere. Even this is contested, though, with people pointing out that since Philip had wanted to be buried in Granada, and Ferdinand for eons refused to let him be buried there (they had waged war against each other for who got to rule Castile in Juana's name before Philip's death), Juana had no choice but to keep the coffin with her until her father gave in. (One more thing: Ferdinand at this point still hoped to have a son from his second wife, so neither Castile nor Aragon would fall to the Habsburgs. This eventually did not happen, as the only male baby died the day it was born. But that was what he was aiming for at this point.)
Certainly in her later years, after decades of isolated imprisonment and separation from her children (except for the youngest one, Catherine, who had been born after Philip's death and who was allowed to grow up with her mother before getting married), Juana seems to have been severely depressed. But when the representatives of the Castilian diet met her after her father's death, she came across as compos mentis and reasonable to them, and they would have been willing to support her against her son, but Juana wasn't willing to go to war against her son, so that was that. He did at least visit her a lot in the ensuing decades, but her de facto imprisonment and being declared insane never ended. (When the Castilian diet representatives did swear the loyalty oath to Charles eventually, they did so only under the condition that he promised that if Juana ever regained her sanity, he would step back from power and be her subordinate in everything. You don't have to be a cynic to conclude what the chances were of that ever happening.)
Only in the 19th century, historians started to doubt whether she'd been clinically insane, and the first "Juana wasn't insane, she was the victim of three men wanting her heritage" historian, one Gustav Bergenroth, published. The debate has been ongoing ever since.
It is an absurdly romantic tale, and I like it a lot. Also, given the alternative princes available at the time, it must be said Mary got herself the best of the lot (not just theoretical position wise). Here's a darkly humorous fun bit about some of the alternatives.
In England, ruling: Edward IV., brother to Mary's stepmother Margaret. Has two other brothers: the youngest, Richard, future Richard III, who, no matter whether you're a traditionalist (= he killed the princes in the Tower) or a Ricardian (did not!), had been and would be completely loyal to Big Brother throughout Edward's entire life, which included going into exile with him when Edward temporarily lost the crown courtesy of their cousin Richard Neville aka "The Kingmaker", with whom Edward had fallen out, and their middle brother George of Clarence. That would be the other brother. Clarence is famous in history for two things: constantly changing sides in the wars of the Roses, and eventually ending up dead by order of brother Edward, supposedly drowned in wine, which may or may not be a legend, but he did end up dead on his brother's command, and not in secret but after a public accusation and trial.
Now, back when Edward and Richard had to go into exile, they spend those two years with sister Margaret in Burgundy. George, Margaret and Richard were the youngest York siblings and had been raised together. So let's assume Margaret, who hadn't seen George since she got married and thus heard of the constant betrayals only via mail, had a soft spot for him, for:
Margaret: Dear Edward and Richard (in a historical novel she'd write Ned and Dickon), I think I have the solution to the problem with George. Clearly, he won't scheme and change sides anymore if he has a realm of his own! My stepdaughter Mary urgently needs a husband, and I was thinking...
Edward: Yeah, no. Handing over one of the richest provinces on the continent to the brother who still thinks he'd make a better King than me? NO WAY.
Richard: Hate to say this, Meg, but he's right
Edward: However, how about my brother-in-law, Anthony Woodville?
Margaret: ....SERIOUSLY?
(This would have been a serious mesalliance, because Edward's wife, Elizabeth Woodville, had been the daughter of a simple knight, his marriage with her had been one of the primary reasons for his fallout with cousin Neville the Kingmaker, and because Edward kept favoring the Woodvilles (possibly to build them up as an alternate power base to the Nevilles, in a divide and rule sense), they were cordially despised by much of the English nobility.)
Margaret:...I think Mary is right: she should go for the young Habsburg.
Juana: how much or little insane she was is still debated. The traditional story is that she was jealous of every woman Philip as much as looked at so he had to restrain her even in his life time, and then when he died she went completely mad. The problem is that this explanation came from three men who really profited from Juana being declared mad and unable to rule: her husband, her father and her son. (Her father because Spain had only gotten united through the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the ensuing conquest of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom of Spain. However, Ferdinand did not rule Castile, only his own realm of Aragon, while Isabella lived. And Castile then went to Isabel's children, not to Ferdinand as her husband, which meant Juana.)
Now, there are certainly independent testimonies as to Juana's temper. She and Philip le Bel fell for each other at sight and were so eager to have sex that Philip ordered his Chaplain to marry them immediately instead of waiting for the big ceremony. She was openly jealous of most women around him (with or wihout reason, who can say). But this behavior isn't classified as mad by a great many other people. When Philip and Juana spent three months in England, she certainly didn't apppear to be mad to the people she interacted with there, which included Henry VII, who years later, after the death of his wife Elizabeth of York, indeed proposed to marry her. And when asked whether she wasn't supposed to be mad said no, he saw no sign of madness. Unfortunately, by then Ferdinand was in charge of Juana, see above, and had a vested interest in having her considered as mad. Not to mention that Ferdinand already regreted having married his youngest daughter, Katherine of Aragon, to Henry's son Arthur, only for Arthur to die and Henry keeping Katherine's dowry anyway but refusing to send her back. (This was before future Henry VIII. would marry his sister-in-law.) There's no way he would have handed over Juana and Castile to Henry VII. Still, it's an AU to think about, especially if Henry VII had managed to sire another son before his own death. What Henry VIII. would have done with a baby half brother with a claim to Castile is anyone's guess, of course.
Anyway, back to the question of Juana's sanity: the biggest proof held up for her being insane is that after Philip le Bel's death, she supposedly refused to let him be buried and travelled with his coffin everywhere. Even this is contested, though, with people pointing out that since Philip had wanted to be buried in Granada, and Ferdinand for eons refused to let him be buried there (they had waged war against each other for who got to rule Castile in Juana's name before Philip's death), Juana had no choice but to keep the coffin with her until her father gave in. (One more thing: Ferdinand at this point still hoped to have a son from his second wife, so neither Castile nor Aragon would fall to the Habsburgs. This eventually did not happen, as the only male baby died the day it was born. But that was what he was aiming for at this point.)
Certainly in her later years, after decades of isolated imprisonment and separation from her children (except for the youngest one, Catherine, who had been born after Philip's death and who was allowed to grow up with her mother before getting married), Juana seems to have been severely depressed. But when the representatives of the Castilian diet met her after her father's death, she came across as compos mentis and reasonable to them, and they would have been willing to support her against her son, but Juana wasn't willing to go to war against her son, so that was that. He did at least visit her a lot in the ensuing decades, but her de facto imprisonment and being declared insane never ended. (When the Castilian diet representatives did swear the loyalty oath to Charles eventually, they did so only under the condition that he promised that if Juana ever regained her sanity, he would step back from power and be her subordinate in everything. You don't have to be a cynic to conclude what the chances were of that ever happening.)
Only in the 19th century, historians started to doubt whether she'd been clinically insane, and the first "Juana wasn't insane, she was the victim of three men wanting her heritage" historian, one Gustav Bergenroth, published. The debate has been ongoing ever since.
I remember you citing this before, but of course I'd forgotten it until you mentioned it again <3 Liselotte! <33
Same here. Now of course she could have been wrong in her guesses as to how many completely straight men existed in Versailles in 1704, but honestly, I'm trusting her more than English wikipedia on this, what with her actually living there! Morever: English wiki brings up Eugene's memoirs (in a different context, for a quote about hating Louis XIV' guts). I hadn't known Eugene wrote any memoirs, so I googled, and lo, he had not, but, see see here, there were several fake memoirs making the rounds in the 18th and early 19th century. Remember, this was a thing. There were also fake memoirs of Madame de Maintenon, for example, which Lehndorff reads at some point in his early diaries. Writing "memoirs" for a dead celebrity was a very profitale enterprise, and in the 18th century, it wasn't like they could sue you for it. (Which is why it wasn't completely irrational when people upon eventual publication of Wilhelmine's memoirs first said it had be be an anti-Prussian forgery until being presented with the manuscript in her handwriting.) However, 21st century dictionaries are supposed to be better versed about which sources are fakes!
Re: Eugene's coolness: Eugene fandom was such a thing in the 18th century that, may I remind you, Fritz' idea of coding his requests for more cash from sugar daddies in his letters was asking for copies of "The Life of Prince Eugene".
Same here. Now of course she could have been wrong in her guesses as to how many completely straight men existed in Versailles in 1704, but honestly, I'm trusting her more than English wikipedia on this, what with her actually living there! Morever: English wiki brings up Eugene's memoirs (in a different context, for a quote about hating Louis XIV' guts). I hadn't known Eugene wrote any memoirs, so I googled, and lo, he had not, but, see see here, there were several fake memoirs making the rounds in the 18th and early 19th century. Remember, this was a thing. There were also fake memoirs of Madame de Maintenon, for example, which Lehndorff reads at some point in his early diaries. Writing "memoirs" for a dead celebrity was a very profitale enterprise, and in the 18th century, it wasn't like they could sue you for it. (Which is why it wasn't completely irrational when people upon eventual publication of Wilhelmine's memoirs first said it had be be an anti-Prussian forgery until being presented with the manuscript in her handwriting.) However, 21st century dictionaries are supposed to be better versed about which sources are fakes!
Re: Eugene's coolness: Eugene fandom was such a thing in the 18th century that, may I remind you, Fritz' idea of coding his requests for more cash from sugar daddies in his letters was asking for copies of "The Life of Prince Eugene".
Johannes Kunisch, who is the German Fritz biographer who made my AP argue for a while that maybe Fritz was just pretending to be gay because Eugene and Turenne had made it fashionable
On the other hand, if Kunisch had been Eugene's biographer, I'm sure he would have found some Zimmermann analogue to argue that Eugene didn't marry because STD/disfigured genitals/etc and that he totally wasn't gay, lies and slander. :P (Salty, me? Totally. I sure turned off a random Fritz documentary because their expert was Kunisch, who was telling the nation at length that there's no way to say that Fritz was gay and see, there's this contemporary source, a guy called Zimmermann.)
Very pleased to learn about the Eugene/Marlborough military bromance, too.
On the other hand, if Kunisch had been Eugene's biographer, I'm sure he would have found some Zimmermann analogue to argue that Eugene didn't marry because STD/disfigured genitals/etc and that he totally wasn't gay, lies and slander. :P (Salty, me? Totally. I sure turned off a random Fritz documentary because their expert was Kunisch, who was telling the nation at length that there's no way to say that Fritz was gay and see, there's this contemporary source, a guy called Zimmermann.)
Very pleased to learn about the Eugene/Marlborough military bromance, too.
Re: the military bromance, I see Eugene and Marlborough have their military history issue, but I'm not sure it's worth ordering considering the blurb already makes a massive mistake, for it says:
Marlborough and Eugene were very different characters. The former was a largely self-made man who had risen through merit and court favour, whereas the latter was a man born to aristocratic privilege. While Marlborough was vain, avaricious, and concerned with his own advancement, Eugene took wealth and power for granted.
No, he didn't, because ever since Mom hightailed it out of France, he was a kid without either, and he had to run away from France and work hard to get it. Also, re: Marlborough rising through merit and court favour, here I have to bring up not Shaw's version but Charles II.'s actual quip re: young Jack Churchill/Barbara, and future Marlborough trying to apologize once he realised Charles knew: "I forgive you, young man, for I know you earn your bread this way."
The Encyplopedia Britannica's description of the Battle of Blenheim isn't as cool as Mildred's, but it does provide an example of how exactly the Marlborough-and-Eugene team work went:
Prince Eugene mounted a strong diversionary assault on his flank while Marlborough’s general Lord John Cutts mounted two unsuccessful assaults upon Blenheim. Cutts’s attacks forced Tallard to commit more reserves to defend Blenheim than he had intended, and thus served to further weaken the French centre. Since Eugene kept Marsin fully occupied, Marlborough then launched the main attack across the Nebel River against the French centre. Marlborough’s advance was hotly contested by French cavalry attacks, and only his personal direction and Eugene’s selfless loan of one of his own cavalry corps enabled Marlborough to maintain the momentum of his attack. Once successfully launched, however, the attack proved irresistible. The Allied cavalry broke through the French centre, dividing Marsin’s army from that of Tallard, and then wheeled left, sweeping Tallard’s forces into the Danube River.
Have some more quotes:
Eugene about his multinationality: "I have three hearts, a passionate Italian heart with which to confront my enemies, and obedient French heart for my monarch and a loyal German heart for my friends."
(Eugene: lived long before the French Revolution. Seriously though, you can tell he spent his youth in the France of Louis XIV by that remark, which indeed prized obedience to the (absolute) monarch.)
Eugene about Marlborough, when they first joined up: “a man of high quality, courageous, extremely well-disposed, and with a keen desire to achieve something; with all these qualities he understands thoroughly that one cannot become a general in a day, and he is diffident about himself.”
From a doctoral thesis, about which more in a moment:
In spite of historians’ different takes on the generalships of Eugene and Marlborough, Marlborough would later write that “Prince Eugene and I shall never differ about our share of laurels.”216 Both generals, however, “exposed their person repeatedly,” reported one officer. “Eugen went so far that it is almost a miracle that he escaped with his life.”
You can see why Fritz was a fan (though feeling let down when meeting old Eugene in person, which changed somewhat in his recollection once he himself had gotten old).
The doctoral thesis is about the fake memoirs, which in actually were written by Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, whom we've met before; he was, among other things, part of Joseph's entourage at Neisse when Joseph met Fritz and is responsible for both the "Fritz & Co. wear white uniforms to "spare Austrian feelings" anecdote and the story about Fritz visiting the Antinous statue (which btw used to belong to Eugene, remember? Then Lichtenstein, then Fritz). Now I wronged him in that he didn't write the fake Eugene memoirs for cash; in fact, they were not published within his life time, but only after his death, when they were found among his papers. The doctoral thesis, which compares to the memoirs to their 18th century source, Mauvillon's biography "Life of Prince Eugene", which they are far too close to for, the thesis writer argues, contemporaries not to notice, or they should have, i.e. Ligne didn't expect them to be taken in. He mainly wrote them because he hero-worshipped Eugene and had literary ambitions, plus he wanted to vent about the French (post Diplomatic Revolution Austria's allies, about which de Ligne was not happy). Basically, it's fannish first person RPF. However, whatever his expectations, there were enough people taking the memoirs for the genuine article in the 19th century that they kept being used as sources, and some (i.e. English wiki, though not, note, German wiki) do so to this day.
Googling about Eugene and Marlborough, btw, can bring you weird places. Not this doctoral thesis, something else. Here I was, reading what first came across as a solid esay about Eugene, here, and then there's this passage:
In 1716 Austria and Venice went to war with Turkey and at Peterwardein in present day Serbia, Eugene defeated an army twice his army's size. This earned him from the Pope a consecrated had and sword which was the customary Papal award for victories over the infidel. Dare I hope that such a hat and sword be awarded by His Holiness to Eugene's successor victor over the infidels, Secretary Rumsfeld, for his victory at Baghdad over the infidel Saddam?
....What? thought I. Is this sarcasm? Irony? Alas, no. Later on:
But in a brilliant surprise counterattack, in which Eugene had been careful to well-fortify his troops with wine, brandy and beer, the Turks were again annihilated and Belgrade was won for Christendom (let's pray that Mr. Rumsfeld can pull off a similar coup).
...yeah. I checked the date - seems the essay was a lecture given in 2003 by one William B. Warren in New York City. Good lord. Well, Fritz had The Worst Fanboys. Go figure that Eugene has The Terrible Fanboys. Just for the record, William B. Warren, I suspect Eugene might have figured out you can't invade a country under a blatantly forged pretext, piss off nearly all your former allies ahead of this, expect the population to applaud you and then leave behind chaos. Given the importance he put on making and keeping alliances, you might say he'd have done the opposite. Also, if you're actually comparing the war against the Turks (who were doing the invading) with the Iraq Invasion, then you were definitely not a member of the reality based community in 2003 already.
Marlborough and Eugene were very different characters. The former was a largely self-made man who had risen through merit and court favour, whereas the latter was a man born to aristocratic privilege. While Marlborough was vain, avaricious, and concerned with his own advancement, Eugene took wealth and power for granted.
No, he didn't, because ever since Mom hightailed it out of France, he was a kid without either, and he had to run away from France and work hard to get it. Also, re: Marlborough rising through merit and court favour, here I have to bring up not Shaw's version but Charles II.'s actual quip re: young Jack Churchill/Barbara, and future Marlborough trying to apologize once he realised Charles knew: "I forgive you, young man, for I know you earn your bread this way."
The Encyplopedia Britannica's description of the Battle of Blenheim isn't as cool as Mildred's, but it does provide an example of how exactly the Marlborough-and-Eugene team work went:
Prince Eugene mounted a strong diversionary assault on his flank while Marlborough’s general Lord John Cutts mounted two unsuccessful assaults upon Blenheim. Cutts’s attacks forced Tallard to commit more reserves to defend Blenheim than he had intended, and thus served to further weaken the French centre. Since Eugene kept Marsin fully occupied, Marlborough then launched the main attack across the Nebel River against the French centre. Marlborough’s advance was hotly contested by French cavalry attacks, and only his personal direction and Eugene’s selfless loan of one of his own cavalry corps enabled Marlborough to maintain the momentum of his attack. Once successfully launched, however, the attack proved irresistible. The Allied cavalry broke through the French centre, dividing Marsin’s army from that of Tallard, and then wheeled left, sweeping Tallard’s forces into the Danube River.
Have some more quotes:
Eugene about his multinationality: "I have three hearts, a passionate Italian heart with which to confront my enemies, and obedient French heart for my monarch and a loyal German heart for my friends."
(Eugene: lived long before the French Revolution. Seriously though, you can tell he spent his youth in the France of Louis XIV by that remark, which indeed prized obedience to the (absolute) monarch.)
Eugene about Marlborough, when they first joined up: “a man of high quality, courageous, extremely well-disposed, and with a keen desire to achieve something; with all these qualities he understands thoroughly that one cannot become a general in a day, and he is diffident about himself.”
From a doctoral thesis, about which more in a moment:
In spite of historians’ different takes on the generalships of Eugene and Marlborough, Marlborough would later write that “Prince Eugene and I shall never differ about our share of laurels.”216 Both generals, however, “exposed their person repeatedly,” reported one officer. “Eugen went so far that it is almost a miracle that he escaped with his life.”
You can see why Fritz was a fan (though feeling let down when meeting old Eugene in person, which changed somewhat in his recollection once he himself had gotten old).
The doctoral thesis is about the fake memoirs, which in actually were written by Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, whom we've met before; he was, among other things, part of Joseph's entourage at Neisse when Joseph met Fritz and is responsible for both the "Fritz & Co. wear white uniforms to "spare Austrian feelings" anecdote and the story about Fritz visiting the Antinous statue (which btw used to belong to Eugene, remember? Then Lichtenstein, then Fritz). Now I wronged him in that he didn't write the fake Eugene memoirs for cash; in fact, they were not published within his life time, but only after his death, when they were found among his papers. The doctoral thesis, which compares to the memoirs to their 18th century source, Mauvillon's biography "Life of Prince Eugene", which they are far too close to for, the thesis writer argues, contemporaries not to notice, or they should have, i.e. Ligne didn't expect them to be taken in. He mainly wrote them because he hero-worshipped Eugene and had literary ambitions, plus he wanted to vent about the French (post Diplomatic Revolution Austria's allies, about which de Ligne was not happy). Basically, it's fannish first person RPF. However, whatever his expectations, there were enough people taking the memoirs for the genuine article in the 19th century that they kept being used as sources, and some (i.e. English wiki, though not, note, German wiki) do so to this day.
Googling about Eugene and Marlborough, btw, can bring you weird places. Not this doctoral thesis, something else. Here I was, reading what first came across as a solid esay about Eugene, here, and then there's this passage:
In 1716 Austria and Venice went to war with Turkey and at Peterwardein in present day Serbia, Eugene defeated an army twice his army's size. This earned him from the Pope a consecrated had and sword which was the customary Papal award for victories over the infidel. Dare I hope that such a hat and sword be awarded by His Holiness to Eugene's successor victor over the infidels, Secretary Rumsfeld, for his victory at Baghdad over the infidel Saddam?
....What? thought I. Is this sarcasm? Irony? Alas, no. Later on:
But in a brilliant surprise counterattack, in which Eugene had been careful to well-fortify his troops with wine, brandy and beer, the Turks were again annihilated and Belgrade was won for Christendom (let's pray that Mr. Rumsfeld can pull off a similar coup).
...yeah. I checked the date - seems the essay was a lecture given in 2003 by one William B. Warren in New York City. Good lord. Well, Fritz had The Worst Fanboys. Go figure that Eugene has The Terrible Fanboys. Just for the record, William B. Warren, I suspect Eugene might have figured out you can't invade a country under a blatantly forged pretext, piss off nearly all your former allies ahead of this, expect the population to applaud you and then leave behind chaos. Given the importance he put on making and keeping alliances, you might say he'd have done the opposite. Also, if you're actually comparing the war against the Turks (who were doing the invading) with the Iraq Invasion, then you were definitely not a member of the reality based community in 2003 already.
The SPSG has been doing virtual guided tours through some of the Hohenzollern palaces via Instagram Live lately (see here for links to all of them and more) and I've had a great time watching them this past week. They are all in German of course, but it might still be interesting to have a look at - or a speed-walk through - some of the rooms. Funny enough, the one that felt most familiar to me visually was Schönhausen, because a lot of it covered the very same things that Selena included in her pictures. (I mean, it would have been Sanssouci, but they haven't done that yet. Up next, though, on June 3rd.)
The newest one from a couple days ago was a walk through Fritz's apartment at the New Palais, which was lovely. I don't think it was open for visitors when I was there and I loved seeing the walk from the marble gallery through the various official rooms to his private ones, ever smaller and less formal, until you end up in his little reading cabinet (see at minute 27), which is super cosy and small (and certainly warm, what with it being south-facing and having a fireplace of its own). You can also see a modell of the book case he had on the wall - like a lot of the furniture, it is lost, but they have several of these maquettes throughout the castle, based on old photographs, to give you an idea of how it would have looked.
I'd read about the cabinet and the unusual lay-out of his rooms - an intimate dining room behind the bedroom for example, and the hidden doors leading to the waiting room for the secretaries and the library (off limits for everyone else) - before and it was great to see all of it here and get a better idea of the space. (Not that he spent all that much time there, only a few weeks every summer. But still.)
Other things I loved seeing: the route he and his guests would have taken to enter the New Chambers from Sanssouci. As a visitor, you don't get to go that way these days, there's an entrance from the street to the north, so I'd never seen that part. And I'd forgotten that the New Chambers were built long after the Palais, but it's kind of obvious once you get a look at the grand interior.
Then there are the Schönhausen tour and two Charlottenburg ones (baroque F1/SC wing and Luise's apartment, wife of FWIII). One thing I found fascinating there were the different layers of time in one building: As Selena's post already showed, Schönhausen was actively used even during DDR times, as a guest house for guests of state, and so you have a lot of changes that were made and different eras that exist next to each other. (The guide seemed more interested and well versed in the 20th century history, but, since we've talked about this before, he did include the tidbit that EC was very tall indeed - one meter and eighty centimeters according to him, so definitely taller than Fritz.)
Charlottenburg on the other hand was almost completely destroyed in WWII and had to be reconstructed. (The furniture/paintings/etc were in storage and survived, though, so while most of the building/floors/etc are all new, you have more original furniture than in the New Palais, where the building survived but a lot of the mobile parts didn't.) They made a lot of interesting decisions there - to not repaint some of the ceilings for example, or to have a modern interpretation of a ceiling where there was no good reference for the original.
No tour through the Fritzian parts of Charlottenburg (yet?), but the contrast of Sophie Charlotte's baroque wing vs. the more neoclassical design of Luise's quarters was fascinating and I learned a lot of things I didn't know. Like the fact that Luise's apartment was actually built for/by FWII, who he died before he could use it, so his daughter-in law moved in and loved the place - including the room designed by Wilhelmine von Lichtenau (a.k.a. Enke, i.e. FWII's mistress), whom her husband, FWIII, had arrested. I also didn't know that Luise only slept in her brand-new bedroom - designed by Schinkel in 1810 (minute 21 of the video) - four times before going on a journey to visit her relatives in Mecklenburg, where she died (of a heart tumour), only 34 years old. Also, when FWII had these rooms built, he got a couple of tapestries from Uncle Heinrich to use (still/again there now), who had gotten them from Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as a gift but had no space to hang them.
Finally, Babelsberg, which was built way later than the others, for W1 in the 1830s, gothic style, and one interesting tidbit I learned: it has a Voltaire terrace, named that way because Pückler had the trees from the Marquisat (i.e. Marquis D'Argens place where Voltaire lived for a while) taken and replanted in Babelsberg. Which apparently caused some protests from the local populace, causing Pückler to refer to Potsdam as "Potsdorf" in annoyance. :P
The newest one from a couple days ago was a walk through Fritz's apartment at the New Palais, which was lovely. I don't think it was open for visitors when I was there and I loved seeing the walk from the marble gallery through the various official rooms to his private ones, ever smaller and less formal, until you end up in his little reading cabinet (see at minute 27), which is super cosy and small (and certainly warm, what with it being south-facing and having a fireplace of its own). You can also see a modell of the book case he had on the wall - like a lot of the furniture, it is lost, but they have several of these maquettes throughout the castle, based on old photographs, to give you an idea of how it would have looked.
I'd read about the cabinet and the unusual lay-out of his rooms - an intimate dining room behind the bedroom for example, and the hidden doors leading to the waiting room for the secretaries and the library (off limits for everyone else) - before and it was great to see all of it here and get a better idea of the space. (Not that he spent all that much time there, only a few weeks every summer. But still.)
Other things I loved seeing: the route he and his guests would have taken to enter the New Chambers from Sanssouci. As a visitor, you don't get to go that way these days, there's an entrance from the street to the north, so I'd never seen that part. And I'd forgotten that the New Chambers were built long after the Palais, but it's kind of obvious once you get a look at the grand interior.
Then there are the Schönhausen tour and two Charlottenburg ones (baroque F1/SC wing and Luise's apartment, wife of FWIII). One thing I found fascinating there were the different layers of time in one building: As Selena's post already showed, Schönhausen was actively used even during DDR times, as a guest house for guests of state, and so you have a lot of changes that were made and different eras that exist next to each other. (The guide seemed more interested and well versed in the 20th century history, but, since we've talked about this before, he did include the tidbit that EC was very tall indeed - one meter and eighty centimeters according to him, so definitely taller than Fritz.)
Charlottenburg on the other hand was almost completely destroyed in WWII and had to be reconstructed. (The furniture/paintings/etc were in storage and survived, though, so while most of the building/floors/etc are all new, you have more original furniture than in the New Palais, where the building survived but a lot of the mobile parts didn't.) They made a lot of interesting decisions there - to not repaint some of the ceilings for example, or to have a modern interpretation of a ceiling where there was no good reference for the original.
No tour through the Fritzian parts of Charlottenburg (yet?), but the contrast of Sophie Charlotte's baroque wing vs. the more neoclassical design of Luise's quarters was fascinating and I learned a lot of things I didn't know. Like the fact that Luise's apartment was actually built for/by FWII, who he died before he could use it, so his daughter-in law moved in and loved the place - including the room designed by Wilhelmine von Lichtenau (a.k.a. Enke, i.e. FWII's mistress), whom her husband, FWIII, had arrested. I also didn't know that Luise only slept in her brand-new bedroom - designed by Schinkel in 1810 (minute 21 of the video) - four times before going on a journey to visit her relatives in Mecklenburg, where she died (of a heart tumour), only 34 years old. Also, when FWII had these rooms built, he got a couple of tapestries from Uncle Heinrich to use (still/again there now), who had gotten them from Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as a gift but had no space to hang them.
Finally, Babelsberg, which was built way later than the others, for W1 in the 1830s, gothic style, and one interesting tidbit I learned: it has a Voltaire terrace, named that way because Pückler had the trees from the Marquisat (i.e. Marquis D'Argens place where Voltaire lived for a while) taken and replanted in Babelsberg. Which apparently caused some protests from the local populace, causing Pückler to refer to Potsdam as "Potsdorf" in annoyance. :P
Isn't it just? Shame Loriot never did a sketch about Thomas Mann & Co. On a more serious note, I'm still disgruntled Heinrich Breloer chose to start his tv series Die Manns in the 1920s, thus completely avoiding both the climax of the Thomas/Heinrich drama and the existence of Carla and Lula, instead focusing on Thomas the patriarch and Klaus & Erika, with Heinrich and Nelly occasionally showing up as minor characters. Also the guy who plays Gustav Gründgens has zero charisma, but that's a minor issue. I mean, the series is good for what it is, and he even got the waiter whom Thomas fancied in the 1950s on camera, but seriously, wrong narrative emphasis, Breloer!
Oh, no doubt. I didn't mention Kunisch to applaud him, but to imagine the irresistable force of Kunisch's "no homo" (i.e. "Fritz wasn't gay, he just gave himself some airs because Eugene and Turenne had made it fashionable!") with the immovable object of English wiki's no homo ("there's NO PROOF that Eugene was gay! It was just slander by Liselotte because he made Louis lose face!").
BTW, my Dad, following Kunisch, also said "but what about this Dr. Zimmermann, as his doctor, he must have known" etc., and then I hit him with the truth about Z and with the Fredersdorf letters, and he admitted that writing "please be at the window, I'd like to see you when I ride out today, but don't open it, I don't want you to catch a cold" is not pretending to be gay out of a combination of Eugene fandom and a broken penis.
BTW, my Dad, following Kunisch, also said "but what about this Dr. Zimmermann, as his doctor, he must have known" etc., and then I hit him with the truth about Z and with the Fredersdorf letters, and he admitted that writing "please be at the window, I'd like to see you when I ride out today, but don't open it, I don't want you to catch a cold" is not pretending to be gay out of a combination of Eugene fandom and a broken penis.
Ohhhhh, very neat. When I was in Potsdam last summer, they told us Fritz' private rooms were off limits in the Neues Palais, so I haven't seen them before, either. And Charlottenburg I've only seen from the outside, full stop. I'm looking forward to viewing it all, thank you so much for the links!
ETA: have watched the first one (Neues Palais) now, and it is wonderful! Including the secret doors in the tapestry. :)
ETA: have watched the first one (Neues Palais) now, and it is wonderful! Including the secret doors in the tapestry. :)
Edited 2021-05-23 16:42 (UTC)
Re: War of the Spanish Succession: Bleinheim - Gossipy Sexuality Debate
mildred_of_midgard
2021-05-23 12:32 pm (UTC)(link)
However, 21st century dictionaries are supposed to be better versed about which sources are fakes!
They're not! But now I'm proud of myself, for lo, this happened:
I was finishing a book on the battle of Malplaquet yesterday, published in 2020, and it cited the Ligne memoirs of Eugene. I was very surprised, I turned up the memoirs on Google books, read the first couple pages, and went, "This seems fake."
Ha! Thank you for googling this from a scholarly angle and confirming.
Ever since we got burned by Austrian Trenck's not being by Austrian Trenck (per Stollberg-Rilinger), I've been on the alert.
Re: Eugene's coolness: Eugene fandom was such a thing in the 18th century that, may I remind you, Fritz' idea of coding his requests for more cash from sugar daddies in his letters was asking for copies of "The Life of Prince Eugene".
Re: Eugene's coolness, I was trying to get someone to nominate him for Yuletide in 2019!
They're not! But now I'm proud of myself, for lo, this happened:
I was finishing a book on the battle of Malplaquet yesterday, published in 2020, and it cited the Ligne memoirs of Eugene. I was very surprised, I turned up the memoirs on Google books, read the first couple pages, and went, "This seems fake."
Ha! Thank you for googling this from a scholarly angle and confirming.
Ever since we got burned by Austrian Trenck's not being by Austrian Trenck (per Stollberg-Rilinger), I've been on the alert.
Re: Eugene's coolness: Eugene fandom was such a thing in the 18th century that, may I remind you, Fritz' idea of coding his requests for more cash from sugar daddies in his letters was asking for copies of "The Life of Prince Eugene".
Re: Eugene's coolness, I was trying to get someone to nominate him for Yuletide in 2019!
Aw, man. I just got hit by a nother plot bunny, involving the Not-Antinous statue he and Fritz both owned, which doesn't have to do with the Katte connection. How about it coming to live around gay men of brilliance in their darkest, most lonely hour, and seducing them to cheer them up? Written as a statue pov? Or the statue is an avatar of a Greek deity coming to life only under certain conditions? Some magical realism story?
ETA: also, congratulations on your correct deducement re the Ligne/Eugene book!
ETA: also, congratulations on your correct deducement re the Ligne/Eugene book!
Edited 2021-05-23 13:29 (UTC)
This is awesome, thank you! Do you want to join ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rheinsberg so we can give you access to post things like this? I've been posting a lot of your stuff, but RMSE is happening and I have no tiiiiime. :DD
Also awesome: I can understand about half the spoken German in the Neues Palais one. (She has my eternal thanks for speaking slowly and enunciating. *g*) If I could slow it down a bit, I know I'd understand more. I *will* practice my listening comprehension once my reading comprehension gets a bit faster.
Meant to add: one thing that's been on my endlessly growing to-do list for a while now has been making a video using that 3D Sanssouci tourselenak linked to, in order to show you guys where Fredersdorf's room was, and in particular, where it was in relation to Fritz's. We'll see if the June 3rd one covers it so I don't have to. ;)
rheinsberg so we can give you access to post things like this? I've been posting a lot of your stuff, but RMSE is happening and I have no tiiiiime. :DDAlso awesome: I can understand about half the spoken German in the Neues Palais one. (She has my eternal thanks for speaking slowly and enunciating. *g*) If I could slow it down a bit, I know I'd understand more. I *will* practice my listening comprehension once my reading comprehension gets a bit faster.
Meant to add: one thing that's been on my endlessly growing to-do list for a while now has been making a video using that 3D Sanssouci tour
selenak linked to, in order to show you guys where Fredersdorf's room was, and in particular, where it was in relation to Fritz's. We'll see if the June 3rd one covers it so I don't have to. ;)Edited 2021-05-23 16:41 (UTC)
Re: War of the Spanish Succession: 1709 and Malplaquet
mildred_of_midgard
2021-05-23 05:50 pm (UTC)(link)
The Great Frost
1709 was an interesting year in Europe. It started out as the coldest. Rivers froze, Louis XIV in Versailles was having his wine freeze on the table before he could drink it, Liselotte was barely able to write for shivering, icicles were hanging from the ceilings, and if that's what it was like in the palaces, you can imagine what it was like for the peasants. Death, mostly.
(I ran across the Great Frost while researching the winters in early 18th century Europe for my fix-it fic, because there's going to have to be some winter traveling, and it turns out 1730 was a very mild winter (which is also good to know for real-life people who had to take off their shirt on the morning of November 6), but 1709 was the coldest between about 1500 and the present day. Then I realized Katte would have been just barely old enough to remember: 4-5 years old, and therefore some of his earliest memories may well have been about being freezing cold.)
Even once spring came, there was massive flooding due to the melting snow and ice, which meant poor crops, which meant even more famine.
Peace Talks
So now Louis has an army he can't pay, feed, or clothe, and his ministers are actually at the point of, "Do we feed the peasants, or do we hope they revolt over the price of bread so we can crush them and confiscate their supplies and feed our army again?"
To make matters worse, the French army has been getting its butt kicked for several years now. In part because Louis' gotten overconfident, in part because Eugene and Marlborough are actually really good at what they do, and in part because the selection process for "Who gets to command the French armies" is "Who's from the best families and BFFs with Louis?" not "Who can kick Allied butt?"
So in the spring of 1709, Louis has actually offered peace on pretty demanding terms. He's offered to give up territory and to acknowledge Archduke Charles as the King of Spain. But the Allies are so drunk on success, they refuse his terms.
So he manages to supply his army by dint of letting his generals ravage the countryside and take what food they can find, which has the added benefit (?) of making it more lucrative to be in the army than not to. So the French army gets a lot of "volunteers" consisting of people who don't want to starve.
Meanwhile, by 1709, the French have run through a bunch of fail-generals, and they've actually got a good one now (Villars)! So they've got a fighting chance!
But they've only got the one chance, so they have to use it well. One army, which is not very well supplied even now, and the Allies are prowling up and down the border with the Netherlands capturing fortresses.
Strategery
The Battle of Malplaquet revolves around these very simple strategies:
Allies: Force our way past the French border and march on Paris.
French: Don't let the Allies into France!
So Malplaquet is fought on what is today the French/Belgian border (like, literally, the battlefield straddles the border), and my sources differ on where exactly the border was in 1709 (possibly because it was currently being hotly contested!), but either there or close, anyway.
Here's a map with a marker showing the battle site. The Allies are in present-day Belgium and want to advance on Paris. The French have one army with which to defend France.
The two armies meet near the village of Malplaquet.
Who's There
Eugene and Marlborough, of whom we know. (I have a late 19th century bio of Eugene that's fairly out of date but was the best I could find two years ago. Will read it or find osmething better at some point.)
Grumbkow, busy two-timing as per usual.
FW, still Crown Prince.
Alte Dessauer, learning a lot from watching Marlborough in this war, lessons that he will apply to the restructuring of the Prussian army, and which will therefore have a huge impact on Frederician warfare. (Fritz was not a big innovator when it came to the army. He made some changes, mostly to the cavalry, but kept a great many things the way FW had left them: meaning, Marlborough-style.)
Old Pretender/James III, son of James II. Suffering from a fever but determined, he takes a bunch of quinine and fights like his claim to the throne depends on it.
Hans Heinrich von Katte, widowed about a year and a half ago. Five-yo son currently being raised by Grandpa Wartensleben, apparently.
Maurice de Saxe/Moritz von Sachsen, illegitimate son of August the Strong, future famous general, currently 12 years old.
And some 180,000 other people. Most nationalities in Europe (and since there are more and smaller nations, that means a *long* list) are represented. Except Spain, ironically.
The Battlefield
Rather than walk you through the stages of this battle, because it was complicated and involves many, many actors and phases, I'm going to give you a visual to go with a description of the basic tactics, and then talk about why the battle ended up being the bloodiest of its century.
Here's the battlefield. Black rectangles are the Allies, white are the French. The Allies are coming down from Belgium, the French are trying to block the way to Paris.
What you need to know about the battlefield:
1) There was a forest on each side: the woods of Sars and of Lainieres.
2) There was a gap between the woods, in which the French stretched out their army from one wood to the other.
3) The French built a bunch of earthwork-and-palisade type fortifications.
4) The roads were very important, because the Allies were trying to press into France and the French were trying to stop them.
So the Allies are trying to push toward the lower left of the map, so they can head toward Paris after crushing the French army, while the French are trying to interpose themselves and hopefully crush the Allied army so they can't even think about making a move on Paris.
Why So Bloody?
This was an unusual battle in many respects, and a number of factors combined to make it a very bloody battle. Here are some of those factors.
1) Aggressive generals on both sides: Marlborough, Eugene, and the French commander Villars. Most generals like marching around and attacking supply lines. These are three oddities for their time.
And let's not even get started on the Prince of Orange, who just kept ordering suicidal attacks against a fortified French position despite being badly outnumbered. His troops would attack, be slaughtered, have to fall back, and he'd order another attack. And he kept doing that! He survived, but almost no one else in that spot did. (He's controversial because it's not clear to what extent he was following orders versus being gratuitously suicidally brave.)
Furthermore, Marlborough writes to his wife Sarah shortly before the battle that if he has an army this size and an opportunity this good to end the war, and he doesn't take it, it's all over for the Marlboroughs. They're already starting to slide out of favor.
2) Paradoxically: the hesitation of all three commanders to attack. Both sides had ample opportunity to attack in the 5 days leading up to the battle, but neither side felt confident enough to do so.
You see, when you're marching around, you can more or less control your army and the outcome of events (modulo some desertion). You can keep track of what's going on, and have some assurance that at the end, you'll still have an army. Once you start a battle, you lose almost all control over events, you can't predict what's going to happen, you have very little idea of what's going on except in your immediate vicinity, and you may or may not still have an army at the end.
So, for example, on September 6-7, the marching Allies are strung out and disunited, and the already-in-position French could have attacked and done some serious damage, maybe won a decisive battle...but the French were still barely able to feed their army, it was the last army they had, the stakes (Paris) were high, and they hesitated.
Instead, the French decided to start fortifying their position and fight a defensive battle.
Conversely, on September 8-10, the Allies had an opportunity to attack the French when they were vulnerable, but they hesitated, because much of their army hadn't arrived yet, they particularly didn't have the artillery they were expecting in a couple days, and the French were in a much stronger position. So they held off on the attack.
And then the French realized that with every passing day, their fortifications became stronger, so they bought as much time as they could.
3) The longer everyone waited, the more troops arrived, and so the armies got bigger and bigger. Since 20% casualties in a big army is a much bigger number than 20% casualties in a smaller army, the fact that both sides had somewhere in the 75,000-90,000 range (my sources differ) meant that when this turned out to be a hard-fought battle, the ultimate casualties were high.
4) French fortifications. You don't normally, in the 18th century, have a pitched battle on a plain with this kind of entrenchments. That's siege stuff.
Normally, in a pitched battle like this, one side gets out of the kitchen when they can't stand the heat: meaning they flee. Meaning the next day, they're still fighting soldiers. But because of the fortifications, both sides at various points in the battle ended up in situations where they had nowhere to retreat, or they had to expose themselves to artillery to do so.
5) Ditto the forests.
Between the forests and the fortifications, you ended up with hand-to-hand combat between soldiers with bayonets, which went against the grain for most of them. Normally, advancing infantry would fire en masse at an opposing line, not aiming at anything in particular, and one side would advance, and when casualties got high, one side would break and run, and the other side would be too relieved and disorganized to pursue.
Honestly, if you were an infantry soldier in the 18th century, there was a decent chance you couldn't even tell if you'd killed anyone. Between muskets having basically no ability to aim and the tactics of firing blindly, and the tendency of nervous and sometimes conscripted soldiers to instinctively or intentionally fire too high, the rate of fired bullets meeting their targets could be 1 in 100 or 1 in 200.
But here, toward the middle of the battle in Malplaquet, once the Allies had advanced on the fortifications and broken past them in some cases, they were trapped in a small space having to stab people while looking them in the eye (and sometimes rescuing each other), which was deeply traumatic in a way that their experience and training had not equipped them to deal with. So casualties are high, and the whole experience is just shocking in a way that even a normal battle--already stressful!--wasn't.
6) And then we come back to our aggressive generals. Most generals, having met with the kinds of reverses that Eugene and Marlborough met with early on in the battle, would have decided this wasn't working, pulled back their troops, and tried marching off in a different direction to attack a fortress or a supply line or something.
Marlborough and Eugene: "The attack isn't working? ATTACK HARDER."
(This seeing eye to eye on not doing things the normal way is one of the reasons they got along so well.)
For an example of how these factors worked together, consider that there were 6 cavalry charges between 1 and 2 pm, in what ended up being the biggest cavalry battle of the age. Normally, you can't get a cavalry to attack 6 times. Never mind the men, the horses won't stand for it! Once there's a bunch of loud noises and blood and dead bodies to trip over, everything dissolves into chaos. You get one charge, and that's it.
The fact that Seydlitz managed to charge twice in Rossbach was a sign of just how one-sided the battle was, and the fact that he held off at Zorndorf under threats from Fritz to have his head, was precisely because he knew he'd get one chance, and he'd better make the most of it. (Fritz later, with the benefit of hindsight, admitted Seydlitz made the right call there.)
But here we are at Malplaquet, and you've got commanders that won't give up, and an army, both infantry and cavalry, that can't effectively retreat because of fortifications.
And the slaughter is immense.
Aftermath
The French end up abandoning their position and marching off, thus giving the Allies a tactical victory (whoever is in possession of the field at the end of the day is the winner). However, the Allies are in absolutely no condition to stop them from doing so in good order, meaning the French still have an army at the end of the day, one that can defend Paris.
Critically, they've even saved their artillery, which is highly unusual for a retreating army (see the tactics post for details).
Furthermore, there is no way that the Allies can even think about marching on Paris now. Their casualties are about 25,000, compared to French casualties of ~12,000 (hard to get accurate numbers, as discussed in the Blenheim post).
Villars writes to Louis that if France loses any more battles like this, the Allies are guaranteed to be destroyed, thus making a play on Pyrrhus' famous quote about defeating the Romans at high cost: "Another such victory and we are lost."
So at the end of the day, it's a tactical Pyrrhic victory for the Allies, who get to end the day on the field of Malplaquet, and a strategic victory for the French, who've managed to save Paris.
The war does not end, there's no way it can end this year, and the British (Anne) are not pleased. September 11 is too close to the end of the campaigning season to start a whole new campaign now. In the 1710 election, there will be a landslide Tory victory, because the Tories campaign on a platform of "No more endless war!" And the heavy losses at Malplaquet didn't immediately lead to Marlborough's 1711 downfall, but they contributed.
Conversely, losing this battle this way was as good for French morale as it was bad for the Allies. The situation went from the French offering humiliating terms and the Allies rejecting them because the terms weren't humiliating enough, to the Allies wanting peace, and the French getting better terms in 1712-1714 than those they had offered in 1709. It's a cautionary tale against overconfidence!
Meanwhile, in Russia...
Speaking of 1709 being an interesting year for Europe, if I manage to study the Great Northern War, I'll be able to tell you more, but for now what I know is that 1708/1709 is the last winter that Charles XII's "travel light and live off the army" spends in Russia. After Russia's scorched earth policy plus the coldest winter on record, Charles XII's army is really hurting by the time it confronts Peter's at Poltava (today in Ukraine) in July 1709. The Swedish defeat at the Battle of Poltava pretty much ends Sweden as a military superpower, and nothing is ever the same for Sweden after that.
Meanwhile, in Prussia...
Wilhelmine was born in interesting times, is all I can say. She was born 5 days before the battle of Poltava and 2 months and 8 days before Malplaquet, which means FW has a 2-month old daughter when he's off fighting at Malplaquet.
Later, FW will celebrate the anniversary of Malplaquet every year (yay battle!) but also decide that maybe battles are to be avoided as much as possible (boo casualties!). Which may in part have to do with imprinting on the bloodiest European battle of the century.
1709 was an interesting year in Europe. It started out as the coldest. Rivers froze, Louis XIV in Versailles was having his wine freeze on the table before he could drink it, Liselotte was barely able to write for shivering, icicles were hanging from the ceilings, and if that's what it was like in the palaces, you can imagine what it was like for the peasants. Death, mostly.
(I ran across the Great Frost while researching the winters in early 18th century Europe for my fix-it fic, because there's going to have to be some winter traveling, and it turns out 1730 was a very mild winter (which is also good to know for real-life people who had to take off their shirt on the morning of November 6), but 1709 was the coldest between about 1500 and the present day. Then I realized Katte would have been just barely old enough to remember: 4-5 years old, and therefore some of his earliest memories may well have been about being freezing cold.)
Even once spring came, there was massive flooding due to the melting snow and ice, which meant poor crops, which meant even more famine.
Peace Talks
So now Louis has an army he can't pay, feed, or clothe, and his ministers are actually at the point of, "Do we feed the peasants, or do we hope they revolt over the price of bread so we can crush them and confiscate their supplies and feed our army again?"
To make matters worse, the French army has been getting its butt kicked for several years now. In part because Louis' gotten overconfident, in part because Eugene and Marlborough are actually really good at what they do, and in part because the selection process for "Who gets to command the French armies" is "Who's from the best families and BFFs with Louis?" not "Who can kick Allied butt?"
So in the spring of 1709, Louis has actually offered peace on pretty demanding terms. He's offered to give up territory and to acknowledge Archduke Charles as the King of Spain. But the Allies are so drunk on success, they refuse his terms.
So he manages to supply his army by dint of letting his generals ravage the countryside and take what food they can find, which has the added benefit (?) of making it more lucrative to be in the army than not to. So the French army gets a lot of "volunteers" consisting of people who don't want to starve.
Meanwhile, by 1709, the French have run through a bunch of fail-generals, and they've actually got a good one now (Villars)! So they've got a fighting chance!
But they've only got the one chance, so they have to use it well. One army, which is not very well supplied even now, and the Allies are prowling up and down the border with the Netherlands capturing fortresses.
Strategery
The Battle of Malplaquet revolves around these very simple strategies:
Allies: Force our way past the French border and march on Paris.
French: Don't let the Allies into France!
So Malplaquet is fought on what is today the French/Belgian border (like, literally, the battlefield straddles the border), and my sources differ on where exactly the border was in 1709 (possibly because it was currently being hotly contested!), but either there or close, anyway.
Here's a map with a marker showing the battle site. The Allies are in present-day Belgium and want to advance on Paris. The French have one army with which to defend France.
The two armies meet near the village of Malplaquet.
Who's There
Eugene and Marlborough, of whom we know. (I have a late 19th century bio of Eugene that's fairly out of date but was the best I could find two years ago. Will read it or find osmething better at some point.)
Grumbkow, busy two-timing as per usual.
FW, still Crown Prince.
Alte Dessauer, learning a lot from watching Marlborough in this war, lessons that he will apply to the restructuring of the Prussian army, and which will therefore have a huge impact on Frederician warfare. (Fritz was not a big innovator when it came to the army. He made some changes, mostly to the cavalry, but kept a great many things the way FW had left them: meaning, Marlborough-style.)
Old Pretender/James III, son of James II. Suffering from a fever but determined, he takes a bunch of quinine and fights like his claim to the throne depends on it.
Hans Heinrich von Katte, widowed about a year and a half ago. Five-yo son currently being raised by Grandpa Wartensleben, apparently.
Maurice de Saxe/Moritz von Sachsen, illegitimate son of August the Strong, future famous general, currently 12 years old.
And some 180,000 other people. Most nationalities in Europe (and since there are more and smaller nations, that means a *long* list) are represented. Except Spain, ironically.
The Battlefield
Rather than walk you through the stages of this battle, because it was complicated and involves many, many actors and phases, I'm going to give you a visual to go with a description of the basic tactics, and then talk about why the battle ended up being the bloodiest of its century.
Here's the battlefield. Black rectangles are the Allies, white are the French. The Allies are coming down from Belgium, the French are trying to block the way to Paris.
What you need to know about the battlefield:
1) There was a forest on each side: the woods of Sars and of Lainieres.
2) There was a gap between the woods, in which the French stretched out their army from one wood to the other.
3) The French built a bunch of earthwork-and-palisade type fortifications.
4) The roads were very important, because the Allies were trying to press into France and the French were trying to stop them.
So the Allies are trying to push toward the lower left of the map, so they can head toward Paris after crushing the French army, while the French are trying to interpose themselves and hopefully crush the Allied army so they can't even think about making a move on Paris.
Why So Bloody?
This was an unusual battle in many respects, and a number of factors combined to make it a very bloody battle. Here are some of those factors.
1) Aggressive generals on both sides: Marlborough, Eugene, and the French commander Villars. Most generals like marching around and attacking supply lines. These are three oddities for their time.
And let's not even get started on the Prince of Orange, who just kept ordering suicidal attacks against a fortified French position despite being badly outnumbered. His troops would attack, be slaughtered, have to fall back, and he'd order another attack. And he kept doing that! He survived, but almost no one else in that spot did. (He's controversial because it's not clear to what extent he was following orders versus being gratuitously suicidally brave.)
Furthermore, Marlborough writes to his wife Sarah shortly before the battle that if he has an army this size and an opportunity this good to end the war, and he doesn't take it, it's all over for the Marlboroughs. They're already starting to slide out of favor.
2) Paradoxically: the hesitation of all three commanders to attack. Both sides had ample opportunity to attack in the 5 days leading up to the battle, but neither side felt confident enough to do so.
You see, when you're marching around, you can more or less control your army and the outcome of events (modulo some desertion). You can keep track of what's going on, and have some assurance that at the end, you'll still have an army. Once you start a battle, you lose almost all control over events, you can't predict what's going to happen, you have very little idea of what's going on except in your immediate vicinity, and you may or may not still have an army at the end.
So, for example, on September 6-7, the marching Allies are strung out and disunited, and the already-in-position French could have attacked and done some serious damage, maybe won a decisive battle...but the French were still barely able to feed their army, it was the last army they had, the stakes (Paris) were high, and they hesitated.
Instead, the French decided to start fortifying their position and fight a defensive battle.
Conversely, on September 8-10, the Allies had an opportunity to attack the French when they were vulnerable, but they hesitated, because much of their army hadn't arrived yet, they particularly didn't have the artillery they were expecting in a couple days, and the French were in a much stronger position. So they held off on the attack.
And then the French realized that with every passing day, their fortifications became stronger, so they bought as much time as they could.
3) The longer everyone waited, the more troops arrived, and so the armies got bigger and bigger. Since 20% casualties in a big army is a much bigger number than 20% casualties in a smaller army, the fact that both sides had somewhere in the 75,000-90,000 range (my sources differ) meant that when this turned out to be a hard-fought battle, the ultimate casualties were high.
4) French fortifications. You don't normally, in the 18th century, have a pitched battle on a plain with this kind of entrenchments. That's siege stuff.
Normally, in a pitched battle like this, one side gets out of the kitchen when they can't stand the heat: meaning they flee. Meaning the next day, they're still fighting soldiers. But because of the fortifications, both sides at various points in the battle ended up in situations where they had nowhere to retreat, or they had to expose themselves to artillery to do so.
5) Ditto the forests.
Between the forests and the fortifications, you ended up with hand-to-hand combat between soldiers with bayonets, which went against the grain for most of them. Normally, advancing infantry would fire en masse at an opposing line, not aiming at anything in particular, and one side would advance, and when casualties got high, one side would break and run, and the other side would be too relieved and disorganized to pursue.
Honestly, if you were an infantry soldier in the 18th century, there was a decent chance you couldn't even tell if you'd killed anyone. Between muskets having basically no ability to aim and the tactics of firing blindly, and the tendency of nervous and sometimes conscripted soldiers to instinctively or intentionally fire too high, the rate of fired bullets meeting their targets could be 1 in 100 or 1 in 200.
But here, toward the middle of the battle in Malplaquet, once the Allies had advanced on the fortifications and broken past them in some cases, they were trapped in a small space having to stab people while looking them in the eye (and sometimes rescuing each other), which was deeply traumatic in a way that their experience and training had not equipped them to deal with. So casualties are high, and the whole experience is just shocking in a way that even a normal battle--already stressful!--wasn't.
6) And then we come back to our aggressive generals. Most generals, having met with the kinds of reverses that Eugene and Marlborough met with early on in the battle, would have decided this wasn't working, pulled back their troops, and tried marching off in a different direction to attack a fortress or a supply line or something.
Marlborough and Eugene: "The attack isn't working? ATTACK HARDER."
(This seeing eye to eye on not doing things the normal way is one of the reasons they got along so well.)
For an example of how these factors worked together, consider that there were 6 cavalry charges between 1 and 2 pm, in what ended up being the biggest cavalry battle of the age. Normally, you can't get a cavalry to attack 6 times. Never mind the men, the horses won't stand for it! Once there's a bunch of loud noises and blood and dead bodies to trip over, everything dissolves into chaos. You get one charge, and that's it.
The fact that Seydlitz managed to charge twice in Rossbach was a sign of just how one-sided the battle was, and the fact that he held off at Zorndorf under threats from Fritz to have his head, was precisely because he knew he'd get one chance, and he'd better make the most of it. (Fritz later, with the benefit of hindsight, admitted Seydlitz made the right call there.)
But here we are at Malplaquet, and you've got commanders that won't give up, and an army, both infantry and cavalry, that can't effectively retreat because of fortifications.
And the slaughter is immense.
Aftermath
The French end up abandoning their position and marching off, thus giving the Allies a tactical victory (whoever is in possession of the field at the end of the day is the winner). However, the Allies are in absolutely no condition to stop them from doing so in good order, meaning the French still have an army at the end of the day, one that can defend Paris.
Critically, they've even saved their artillery, which is highly unusual for a retreating army (see the tactics post for details).
Furthermore, there is no way that the Allies can even think about marching on Paris now. Their casualties are about 25,000, compared to French casualties of ~12,000 (hard to get accurate numbers, as discussed in the Blenheim post).
Villars writes to Louis that if France loses any more battles like this, the Allies are guaranteed to be destroyed, thus making a play on Pyrrhus' famous quote about defeating the Romans at high cost: "Another such victory and we are lost."
So at the end of the day, it's a tactical Pyrrhic victory for the Allies, who get to end the day on the field of Malplaquet, and a strategic victory for the French, who've managed to save Paris.
The war does not end, there's no way it can end this year, and the British (Anne) are not pleased. September 11 is too close to the end of the campaigning season to start a whole new campaign now. In the 1710 election, there will be a landslide Tory victory, because the Tories campaign on a platform of "No more endless war!" And the heavy losses at Malplaquet didn't immediately lead to Marlborough's 1711 downfall, but they contributed.
Conversely, losing this battle this way was as good for French morale as it was bad for the Allies. The situation went from the French offering humiliating terms and the Allies rejecting them because the terms weren't humiliating enough, to the Allies wanting peace, and the French getting better terms in 1712-1714 than those they had offered in 1709. It's a cautionary tale against overconfidence!
Meanwhile, in Russia...
Speaking of 1709 being an interesting year for Europe, if I manage to study the Great Northern War, I'll be able to tell you more, but for now what I know is that 1708/1709 is the last winter that Charles XII's "travel light and live off the army" spends in Russia. After Russia's scorched earth policy plus the coldest winter on record, Charles XII's army is really hurting by the time it confronts Peter's at Poltava (today in Ukraine) in July 1709. The Swedish defeat at the Battle of Poltava pretty much ends Sweden as a military superpower, and nothing is ever the same for Sweden after that.
Meanwhile, in Prussia...
Wilhelmine was born in interesting times, is all I can say. She was born 5 days before the battle of Poltava and 2 months and 8 days before Malplaquet, which means FW has a 2-month old daughter when he's off fighting at Malplaquet.
Later, FW will celebrate the anniversary of Malplaquet every year (yay battle!) but also decide that maybe battles are to be avoided as much as possible (boo casualties!). Which may in part have to do with imprinting on the bloodiest European battle of the century.
Edited 2021-05-23 18:04 (UTC)
Re: War of the Spanish Succession - Malplaquet tactics
mildred_of_midgard
2021-05-23 06:00 pm (UTC)(link)
Okay, I wasn't going to, but I can't resist some tactical notes for myself. I worked hard for this, and if I don't write it down and put it in rheinsberg for future reference, I'm going to lose it all within a month.
The map again:
The French line stretched from a forest to a forest because you wanted a natural defense on your flanks, to prevent a flanking attack. This limited the number of available battlefields in Europe, because there aren't that many flat plains that have natural obstacles like rivers, swamps, forests, or fortified villages just the right distance apart.
So Villars, concluding that the Allies will have to march between the forests if they want to get past him and his army, fortifies the center of his line extremely strongly.
Marlborough and Eugene decide to begin with a dual flank attack, creating local numerical superiority, to force Villars to pull troops away from his center to defend the positions in the forest.
But they don't have enough troops to attack both forests with numerical superiority. So politics come into play: the nationalities that have the least ability to throw a fit later over high casualties, get sent to attack Boufflers on the right of the French line (Allied left), in the wood of Lainieres, badly outnumbered. Their purpose is not to take the fortified French position, but to create enough of a diversion that Boufflers can't send troops to help Villars on the right, in the wood of Sars.
So the Dutch and the Scots, who have little political clout, have insanely high casualties. This is made worse by the Dutch Prince of Orange, who was denied the chance to inherit William's III title as Stadtholder in the Netherlands, and (according to Horowski) feels extra compelled to prove himself in battle. So he leads a charge against a French fortified position with superior numbers, loses 5,000 of his men in the first 30 minutes, falls back, regroups, attacks again, has horses shot under him, but keeps going.
He has to fall back again, and he's preparing a third attack when some panicked messenger informs Marlborough that the Prince of Orange is getting his entire troops slaughtered. Marlborough and Eugene have to ride over to the Wood of Lainieres, give orders that the Dutch are not to budge until they give the word, no matter what the Prince of Orange says, and then return to what they were doing.
Which was attacking the French in the Wood of Sars, this time with superior numbers. This is where the Prussians (among others) are. We end up with the fierce hand-to-hand infantry combat that is so unusual in this period, and Grumbkow reports having saved a Frenchman's life, which means he's now acquired a French informer for his mission to work out a separate peace with France. (As Horowski says, if Grumbkow's motives were partially humane, because he was shocked by all the slaughter, he wasn't about to report it in a letter to his paymasters. But it may have been some of both.)
Marlborough and Eugene have success on the right, in the Wood of Sars, where their superior numbers begin to tell (but not without enormous casualties, due to the forest + fortification + aggressive commanders = hand-to-hand combat I talked about). Villars and Eugene are both wounded. Villars tries to carry on, but faints from pain and is hors de combat. Boufflers has to take over. Unfortunately, Bouffler can't be sure the Dutch aren't going to attack again (Malborough didn't tell *him* he'd told the Dutch not to attack until he gave the word, after all!), and even though he's got numerical superiority, he's reluctant to leave the safety of the fortifications. So though he does a good job managing the battle as a whole, he misses an opportunity to crush the Dutch, and also is pinned in place in the Wood of Lainieres.
Which means, in order to defend the assaulted French left in the Wood of Sars, the French (Boufflers, I think; I forget exactly what time Villars was carried off the field) have to divert troops from the center, just as Marlborough planned.
Now the French fortifications in the center are abandoned by the infantry. The Allied cavalry goes charging in. It's the biggest cavalry fight of the century.
The battle's been raging for about 5 hours at this point. The Allied cavalry have been sitting tight and waiting. The French cavalry have been being bombarded by the Allied artillery for 5 hours, and are a mess.
Yet every time the Allied cavalry advance, the French cavalry force them back. The battle rages back and forth, each side charging past the fortifications and then being driven back. Neither side can advance, because every time the French are beating the Allied cavalry and driving them back, the Allied infantry, stationed in the middle, come up to support their mounted troops and drive the French cavalry back. Marlborough was a big fan of mixed troops reinforcing each other in the center; this wasn't usual practice but was one of his hallmarks.
In the end, the success of the French cavalry is that they keep the Allies from breaking through the center and chasing the retreating French troops. This allows the French troops to retreat in good order, keeping 66 of their 80 cannon. Which is a miracle by 18th century standards. Cannon were very heavy and almost immobile once the battle started, and in a retreat, nobody fleeing for their lives stops to drag the heavy guns away. But because the French cavalry were preventing the Allied cavalry from running down the retreating French infantry, the French managed to save their guns.
The success of the Allied cavalry + infantry is that they hold their line. Without the infantry support that Marlborough had so cleverly positioned, contemporaries and historians alike agree that the French cavalry would likely have broken through the Allied center, thus possibly turning the tide of the whole battle.
The Malplaquet volume in the Osprey Campaign series actually has better maps, but I'm going to respect the copyright there, because that book is so much about the detailed, colorful visuals that I feel like they're why you're paying $10 for some 100 pages. It's also extremely recent (October 2020) and about this particular battle, hence all the detail.
I'm also disgruntled that it had me believing in Eugene's memoirs for a few minutes there, and halfway to posting them in the library to get a second opinion from Selena. :P
rheinsberg for future reference, I'm going to lose it all within a month.The map again:
The French line stretched from a forest to a forest because you wanted a natural defense on your flanks, to prevent a flanking attack. This limited the number of available battlefields in Europe, because there aren't that many flat plains that have natural obstacles like rivers, swamps, forests, or fortified villages just the right distance apart.
So Villars, concluding that the Allies will have to march between the forests if they want to get past him and his army, fortifies the center of his line extremely strongly.
Marlborough and Eugene decide to begin with a dual flank attack, creating local numerical superiority, to force Villars to pull troops away from his center to defend the positions in the forest.
But they don't have enough troops to attack both forests with numerical superiority. So politics come into play: the nationalities that have the least ability to throw a fit later over high casualties, get sent to attack Boufflers on the right of the French line (Allied left), in the wood of Lainieres, badly outnumbered. Their purpose is not to take the fortified French position, but to create enough of a diversion that Boufflers can't send troops to help Villars on the right, in the wood of Sars.
So the Dutch and the Scots, who have little political clout, have insanely high casualties. This is made worse by the Dutch Prince of Orange, who was denied the chance to inherit William's III title as Stadtholder in the Netherlands, and (according to Horowski) feels extra compelled to prove himself in battle. So he leads a charge against a French fortified position with superior numbers, loses 5,000 of his men in the first 30 minutes, falls back, regroups, attacks again, has horses shot under him, but keeps going.
He has to fall back again, and he's preparing a third attack when some panicked messenger informs Marlborough that the Prince of Orange is getting his entire troops slaughtered. Marlborough and Eugene have to ride over to the Wood of Lainieres, give orders that the Dutch are not to budge until they give the word, no matter what the Prince of Orange says, and then return to what they were doing.
Which was attacking the French in the Wood of Sars, this time with superior numbers. This is where the Prussians (among others) are. We end up with the fierce hand-to-hand infantry combat that is so unusual in this period, and Grumbkow reports having saved a Frenchman's life, which means he's now acquired a French informer for his mission to work out a separate peace with France. (As Horowski says, if Grumbkow's motives were partially humane, because he was shocked by all the slaughter, he wasn't about to report it in a letter to his paymasters. But it may have been some of both.)
Marlborough and Eugene have success on the right, in the Wood of Sars, where their superior numbers begin to tell (but not without enormous casualties, due to the forest + fortification + aggressive commanders = hand-to-hand combat I talked about). Villars and Eugene are both wounded. Villars tries to carry on, but faints from pain and is hors de combat. Boufflers has to take over. Unfortunately, Bouffler can't be sure the Dutch aren't going to attack again (Malborough didn't tell *him* he'd told the Dutch not to attack until he gave the word, after all!), and even though he's got numerical superiority, he's reluctant to leave the safety of the fortifications. So though he does a good job managing the battle as a whole, he misses an opportunity to crush the Dutch, and also is pinned in place in the Wood of Lainieres.
Which means, in order to defend the assaulted French left in the Wood of Sars, the French (Boufflers, I think; I forget exactly what time Villars was carried off the field) have to divert troops from the center, just as Marlborough planned.
Now the French fortifications in the center are abandoned by the infantry. The Allied cavalry goes charging in. It's the biggest cavalry fight of the century.
The battle's been raging for about 5 hours at this point. The Allied cavalry have been sitting tight and waiting. The French cavalry have been being bombarded by the Allied artillery for 5 hours, and are a mess.
Yet every time the Allied cavalry advance, the French cavalry force them back. The battle rages back and forth, each side charging past the fortifications and then being driven back. Neither side can advance, because every time the French are beating the Allied cavalry and driving them back, the Allied infantry, stationed in the middle, come up to support their mounted troops and drive the French cavalry back. Marlborough was a big fan of mixed troops reinforcing each other in the center; this wasn't usual practice but was one of his hallmarks.
In the end, the success of the French cavalry is that they keep the Allies from breaking through the center and chasing the retreating French troops. This allows the French troops to retreat in good order, keeping 66 of their 80 cannon. Which is a miracle by 18th century standards. Cannon were very heavy and almost immobile once the battle started, and in a retreat, nobody fleeing for their lives stops to drag the heavy guns away. But because the French cavalry were preventing the Allied cavalry from running down the retreating French infantry, the French managed to save their guns.
The success of the Allied cavalry + infantry is that they hold their line. Without the infantry support that Marlborough had so cleverly positioned, contemporaries and historians alike agree that the French cavalry would likely have broken through the Allied center, thus possibly turning the tide of the whole battle.
The Malplaquet volume in the Osprey Campaign series actually has better maps, but I'm going to respect the copyright there, because that book is so much about the detailed, colorful visuals that I feel like they're why you're paying $10 for some 100 pages. It's also extremely recent (October 2020) and about this particular battle, hence all the detail.
I'm also disgruntled that it had me believing in Eugene's memoirs for a few minutes there, and halfway to posting them in the library to get a second opinion from Selena. :P
Re: War of the Spanish Succession: Netherlands: Gossipy Addenda
mildred_of_midgard
2021-05-23 06:37 pm (UTC)(link)
Far, far fewer things than I actually want to say:
Burgundy: is owned by Duke Charles the Bold, also called Charles the Rash, because he really was
Emperor Friedrich III (very austere, short of cash due to having had a ruinoius war against his brother in his youth, also a very cautious man in general)
Note forcahn: Both show up in Ash, if my memory holds.
Philip: *dies young*
Ferdinand of Aragon: *picks up where Philip left off, because if Juana is crazy, HE gets to rule in Castile*
While compiling Charles II's genealogy, I ended up on their wiki pages, and apparently Ferdinand is a suspect in the early death of Philip?
Burgundy: is owned by Duke Charles the Bold, also called Charles the Rash, because he really was
Emperor Friedrich III (very austere, short of cash due to having had a ruinoius war against his brother in his youth, also a very cautious man in general)
Note for
cahn: Both show up in Ash, if my memory holds.Philip: *dies young*
Ferdinand of Aragon: *picks up where Philip left off, because if Juana is crazy, HE gets to rule in Castile*
While compiling Charles II's genealogy, I ended up on their wiki pages, and apparently Ferdinand is a suspect in the early death of Philip?
Edited 2021-05-23 18:37 (UTC)
Re: War of the Spanish Succession: French, Dutch, and Bavarian Backstories
mildred_of_midgard
2021-05-23 09:38 pm (UTC)(link)
Splitting the "lead-up" post into two parts, as I couldn't find a less confusing way of telling the story.
Don't worry, once we're done with the political and military history of the War of the Spanish Succession, I have a whole bunch of gossipy sensationalism about Fritz & co. that I've been saving up for the last couple months.
The French
As we've learned, France and Spain were at war in the mid 17th century: 1635-1659. In 1660, as part of the peace, Louis XIV married Maria Theresa, daughter of the Spanish king (sister of future Charles II). The idea was that this would help improve relations between the countries and end the constant war.
So naturally Louis' reaction is: "This is a great excuse for a war!"
Specifically, Louis' marriage treaty said neither he nor his descendants could invoke the marriage to claim any part of Spanish territory. But the treaty also said the Spanish king would pay a certain sum as dowry for his daughter.
Spain, being sort of broke after all the war, predictably couldn't afford to pay that sum. So Louis declared the whole treaty null and void (something that his contemporaries majorly side-eyed) and started invading the Spanish Netherlands (and another Spanish province, France-Comte, which bordered France).
Louis conquered it, but at the end of the war, had to give it back. But no worries, he's got another war up his sleeve!
Which leads us to...
The Dutch
As we discussed recently, the Dutch spent eighty years getting their independence from Spain and hanging onto it. In 1648, they're finally free! Or at least, the Protestant United Provinces of the Netherlands are; the Spanish Netherlands remain Spanish, obviously.
So naturally the United Provinces, aka the Dutch Republic, end up at war with their new Catholic neighbor: France.
Also naturally, it's the French doing the invading again, and by the French we mean Louis.
The Dutch only manage to stop him using a trick they devised in the eighty years of fighting against Spain that gave them a lot of time to come up with defenses: they discovered that if they used dykes strategically, they could flood parts of their country to stop an advance. You have to flood the land too deeply for soldiers to be able to easily march through (and drag their supply wagons and artillery through), but not so deeply that boats can get through. You also, in freezing weather, have to keep solid ice from forming. A really cold winter can screw you over (and did for the Dutch, on another occasion).
But it worked against the Spanish, and it worked again against the French.
So in 1678, Louis has successfully conquered the Franche-Comté province, which is today part of France, and the Dutch have held onto their country but are super nervous about him trying it again. (Being a flat country makes you easy to invade, just ask Poland.)
So the Dutch set up what is called the Barrier: a series of fortresses near the border with France. These fortresses are their strategic and psychological securities against another French invasion.
They REALLY REALLY hate the French.
So naturally, the first thing Louis does after grandson Philip goes off to be king of Spain is occupy the Spanish Netherlands (because they're right there and he's just doing his grandson a favor by administering them for him!) and seize the Dutch Barrier fortresses.
Why is he able to do this so easily? Because of...
The Bavarians
Or more specifically, the one Bavarian guy who's going to cause so much trouble.
It's Max Emmanuel again. He's governor of the Habsburg Netherlands. He's son-in-law of Emperor Leopold and his wife is niece of Charles II, and since Spain and Austria have been intermarrying and fighting on the same side for ages and are both ruled by Habsburgs, it makes sense that the Spanish Netherlands are administered by a subject of the Holy Roman Empire, who's closely related to both the Emperor and the King.
But Max Emmanuel, who, as we know, wants to be Emperor and has been told no, is now buddying up to Louis, and he agrees to let Louis' troops march through the Spanish Netherlands and invade the Netherlands, even though as a member of the Holy Roman Emperor, he's kind of supposed to be supporting his emperor's family claim to the Spanish throne, not the French claim. But, part of life as a Holy Roman Emperor is that you can count on German principalities having interests that run counter to yours (just ask MT and FS about the Margrave of Brandenburg).
So now Louis is occupying the Spanish Netherlands as well as Dutch fortresses along the border, and the Dutch, who had previously acknowledged Philip as King of Spain, WANT WAR.
P.S. There is no one who hates the French and Louis specifically more than William III, Prince of Orange and King of England. To the point where when he dies a year or two later, the Dutch are worried that maybe Anne isn't going to be as committed to this war. But don't worry, she is.
The War Starts
Even worse, Spain has now granted overseas trading privileges to its new best buddy France, which extremely goes against the interests of the Maritime Powers, aka England and the Netherlands. And, as we know, France is now trying to centralize government in Spain and make it more France-like, and also there's a French court in Madrid, etc. And people are starting to nervously comment that "The Pyrenees are no more," i.e. France has de facto absorbed Spain.
So now England and the Dutch are ready to team up with "What took you so long? I've been fighting for a year" Austria in war against France.
Nine days after they sign a treaty and form the Grand Alliance that will fight the War of the Spanish Succession against France and Spain, what does Louis do but acknowledge the son of his dying friend James II as king of England. You know, the thing that he put in writing four years ago that he wouldn't do, when he signed the Treaty of Ryswick and acknowledged the Protestant succession.
So then the English have to add an addendum to the treaty of the Grand Alliance, which is "We ALSO want Louis to acknowledge the Protestant succession and stop supporting the damn Stuarts. But, like, FOR REAL this time."
So now it's 1701 and most of Europe is at war now (more countries will get sucked in in the next year or two), four whole years after the end of the last major war.
Don't worry, once we're done with the political and military history of the War of the Spanish Succession, I have a whole bunch of gossipy sensationalism about Fritz & co. that I've been saving up for the last couple months.
The French
As we've learned, France and Spain were at war in the mid 17th century: 1635-1659. In 1660, as part of the peace, Louis XIV married Maria Theresa, daughter of the Spanish king (sister of future Charles II). The idea was that this would help improve relations between the countries and end the constant war.
So naturally Louis' reaction is: "This is a great excuse for a war!"
Specifically, Louis' marriage treaty said neither he nor his descendants could invoke the marriage to claim any part of Spanish territory. But the treaty also said the Spanish king would pay a certain sum as dowry for his daughter.
Spain, being sort of broke after all the war, predictably couldn't afford to pay that sum. So Louis declared the whole treaty null and void (something that his contemporaries majorly side-eyed) and started invading the Spanish Netherlands (and another Spanish province, France-Comte, which bordered France).
Louis conquered it, but at the end of the war, had to give it back. But no worries, he's got another war up his sleeve!
Which leads us to...
The Dutch
As we discussed recently, the Dutch spent eighty years getting their independence from Spain and hanging onto it. In 1648, they're finally free! Or at least, the Protestant United Provinces of the Netherlands are; the Spanish Netherlands remain Spanish, obviously.
So naturally the United Provinces, aka the Dutch Republic, end up at war with their new Catholic neighbor: France.
Also naturally, it's the French doing the invading again, and by the French we mean Louis.
The Dutch only manage to stop him using a trick they devised in the eighty years of fighting against Spain that gave them a lot of time to come up with defenses: they discovered that if they used dykes strategically, they could flood parts of their country to stop an advance. You have to flood the land too deeply for soldiers to be able to easily march through (and drag their supply wagons and artillery through), but not so deeply that boats can get through. You also, in freezing weather, have to keep solid ice from forming. A really cold winter can screw you over (and did for the Dutch, on another occasion).
But it worked against the Spanish, and it worked again against the French.
So in 1678, Louis has successfully conquered the Franche-Comté province, which is today part of France, and the Dutch have held onto their country but are super nervous about him trying it again. (Being a flat country makes you easy to invade, just ask Poland.)
So the Dutch set up what is called the Barrier: a series of fortresses near the border with France. These fortresses are their strategic and psychological securities against another French invasion.
They REALLY REALLY hate the French.
So naturally, the first thing Louis does after grandson Philip goes off to be king of Spain is occupy the Spanish Netherlands (because they're right there and he's just doing his grandson a favor by administering them for him!) and seize the Dutch Barrier fortresses.
Why is he able to do this so easily? Because of...
The Bavarians
Or more specifically, the one Bavarian guy who's going to cause so much trouble.
It's Max Emmanuel again. He's governor of the Habsburg Netherlands. He's son-in-law of Emperor Leopold and his wife is niece of Charles II, and since Spain and Austria have been intermarrying and fighting on the same side for ages and are both ruled by Habsburgs, it makes sense that the Spanish Netherlands are administered by a subject of the Holy Roman Empire, who's closely related to both the Emperor and the King.
But Max Emmanuel, who, as we know, wants to be Emperor and has been told no, is now buddying up to Louis, and he agrees to let Louis' troops march through the Spanish Netherlands and invade the Netherlands, even though as a member of the Holy Roman Emperor, he's kind of supposed to be supporting his emperor's family claim to the Spanish throne, not the French claim. But, part of life as a Holy Roman Emperor is that you can count on German principalities having interests that run counter to yours (just ask MT and FS about the Margrave of Brandenburg).
So now Louis is occupying the Spanish Netherlands as well as Dutch fortresses along the border, and the Dutch, who had previously acknowledged Philip as King of Spain, WANT WAR.
P.S. There is no one who hates the French and Louis specifically more than William III, Prince of Orange and King of England. To the point where when he dies a year or two later, the Dutch are worried that maybe Anne isn't going to be as committed to this war. But don't worry, she is.
The War Starts
Even worse, Spain has now granted overseas trading privileges to its new best buddy France, which extremely goes against the interests of the Maritime Powers, aka England and the Netherlands. And, as we know, France is now trying to centralize government in Spain and make it more France-like, and also there's a French court in Madrid, etc. And people are starting to nervously comment that "The Pyrenees are no more," i.e. France has de facto absorbed Spain.
So now England and the Dutch are ready to team up with "What took you so long? I've been fighting for a year" Austria in war against France.
Nine days after they sign a treaty and form the Grand Alliance that will fight the War of the Spanish Succession against France and Spain, what does Louis do but acknowledge the son of his dying friend James II as king of England. You know, the thing that he put in writing four years ago that he wouldn't do, when he signed the Treaty of Ryswick and acknowledged the Protestant succession.
So then the English have to add an addendum to the treaty of the Grand Alliance, which is "We ALSO want Louis to acknowledge the Protestant succession and stop supporting the damn Stuarts. But, like, FOR REAL this time."
So now it's 1701 and most of Europe is at war now (more countries will get sucked in in the next year or two), four whole years after the end of the last major war.
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