King in Exile by John Callow

Author:John Callow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752479880
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2017-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

ECLIPSE AT RYSWICK

I

In June 1694, the Earl of Perth and his wife broke their journey to Antwerp, leaving the comfort of their coach so that they might explore the battlefield of Landen. Almost a year before, King William’s army had defended the streams and river tributaries that criss-crossed the terrain and anchored their flanks, dug in behind hastily improvised fortifications that linked together a chain of four villages, but which eventually had proved inadequate to repel the enormous weight of the French regiments, which had punctured their lines and swept over their trenches. The allied commander, Count Solms, had been carried from the field early in the day, faint from loss of blood, and mortally wounded by a cannon ball that had severed his right leg below the knee. King William – as even his enemies had been forced to concede – had led by example, stiffening his men’s increasingly desperate resistance and placing himself at the head of his cavalry regiments, his diminutive figure often lost amid the crush of his foes, his wig and sash both shot through, as he launched repeated charges against solid walls of enemy troopers who far outnumbered his own. On two occasions, French regiments had occupied the crucial stronghold of Neerwinden on their left flank, only to be driven back from the burning village with heavy losses. However, at the third attempt, Marshal Luxembourg committed his crack troops, the Swiss Guards and the Gardes Françaises, to spearhead an attack that drove the allied defenders back in utter disorder from their emplacements and abandoned gun positions. By nightfall, Luxembourg surveyed more than sixty captured standards and, later still over his breakfast at Tirlemont, thought to toast the ‘good King James’ and to hope that the fruit of his victory would be realised through the consolation of that King and his swift re-establishment, God willing, upon his throne.1 Landen should have been the greatest triumph in a year that had seen substantial victories for French arms in every theatre of the war against the allies. The fortresses of Rosas in Catalonia, Charleroi, Huy in Flanders, and Heidelberg on the Rhine, had all fallen before their siege guns, while Marshal Catinat broke the Savoyards at the battle of Marsaglia in October 1693, throwing open the road to Turin and forcing Duke Victor Amadeus to begin to reconsider his choice of alliances. Worse still, from the perspective of the English government, Admiral Tourville fell upon the Smyrna convoy off the bay of Lagos, destroying the supply vessels and capturing a large amount of bullion, though the majority of the Dutch and English escorts fought their way clear in a running battle along the coast of Portugal.

Yet, as Perth walked ‘over the field where the battle was fought last year’, he derived no sense of satisfaction from seeing the ‘heads and bones of limbs, skellets [i.e. skeletons] of horses, old hatts, shoes, holsters [and] saddles’ that were strewn across the still-cratered landscape. Instead, he noted – with

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