CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library DC 130.T9L85 Marshall Tureniie 3 1924 028 191 553 The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 9240281 91 553 MARSHAL TURENNE BY THE SAME AUTHOR. ROCHESTER AND OTHER LITERARY RAKES OF THE COURT OF CHARLES H. With some Account of their Surroundings. With 15 Portraits. 8vo, ids. FALKLANDS. With 8 Portraits and other Illustra- tions. Svo, los. dd. THE LIFE OF SIR KENELM DIGBY. With 7 Illustrations. Svo, i6s. CHISEL, PEN AND POIGNARD ; or, Benvenuto Cellini, His Times and His Contemporaries. With ig Illustrations. Crown Svo, 5^. PRYINGS AMONG PRIVATE PAPERS, chiefly of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Svo, 7s. 6d. net. THE ADVENTURES OF KING JAMES II. OF ENGLAND. With 27 Portraits and other Illustra- tions. Svo, I3i. ad. net. LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO., London, New York, Bombay, and Calcutta. THE PRIGMENT : " The Life of a Prig," " Prig's Bede," " Hovv' TO Make a Saint," " Black is White ". In one Volume. Crown Svo, 5s. THE PLATITUDES OF A PESSIMIST. Svo, 6s. A LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP LAUD. Svo, 155. THE LIFE OF A CONSPIRATOR (Sir Everard Diqby). With Portrait. Svo, gs. KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD., London. (r-^)^ri^Aj.' i iJir^^ ,i, C» iSl^l M^«. > J II te II 11(1 S^^^^(OM.^ffif,:S^. \ MARSHAL j;]UI|E|sINE T"V\0<-.'.'-A -'.. v. f- -. 'Ji'lJtV'' 'J e,'y t\ve„ BY THE AUTHOR OF "A LIFE OF SIR KENELM DIGBY," "THE ADVENTURES OF JAMES II.," "THE LIFE OF A PRIG," ETC. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BRIGADIER-GENERAL FRANCIS LLOYD, C.B., D.S.O. LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1907 T I '■■' PREFACE To apologise for a book dealing with the campaigns of a celebrated General, but written neither by a soldier, nor by that far higher authority upon such subjects, a civil " military expert," would be useless ; for it is inconceivable that such an apology could be accepted. To the obvious retort, " Then why did you write the book ? " the Author can only reply by saying, "Why do most of us do many things which we ought not to do ? " and by expressing a hope that any ludicrous blunders to be found in the following pages may amuse his military readers as much as it has amused him to make them. Whatever apologies may be due for the book itself, no apology is required for its Introduction, for which the author cannot sufficiently thank the talented, experienced and distinguished officer who has so kindly and so ably written it. While that officer is absolutely irresponsible for anything in the book except its Introduction, the book is responsible to the officer, not only for its Introduction, but also vi PREFACE for a number of exceedingly useful hints and timely warnings. The author also wishes to express his gratitude for some very valuable suggestions, as well as for much assistance, from that kindest and most competent of critics, Mr. Walter Herries Pollock. Of the help always so readily and un- selfishly placed at his disposal in his own family, the author will say nothing. CONTENTS Introduction PAGE xvi CHAPTER I. 1611 — 1634. Birth and boyhood— Services under the Prince of Orange in Holland- Service in the French army in Holland— Siege of La Motte CHAPTER n. 1635— 1638. Appearance — Character and manner— Richelieu's diplomacy — Tur- enne's wars under La Valette — Richelieu offers Turenne his niece in marriage— Dul^e of Bouillon becomes a Catholic— Birth of Louis XIV 14 CHAPTER III. 1639 — 1642. Turenne's campaign in Italy under D'Harcourt — Siege of Turin — Duke of Bouillon's arrest — Loses his sovereignty — Turenne commands the French army in Italy in 1642 — Turenne made a Marshal of France — Turenne's descriptions of what he learned under his different commanders 27 CHAPTER IV. Firearms of the seventeenth century— Pikemen — Cavalry — Artillery — Tactics — Strategy — Fortifications 39 CHAPTER V. 1643 — 1644. Politics in Paris — Mazarin — Duke of Bouillon — Defeat of Saxe-Weiraar — Turenne goes to Alsace — Defeats Gaspard Von Mercy — General de Mercy besieges Freiburg — Turenne goes to its rehef — Freiburg falls — Cond^ — His victory at Rocroi — He joins Turenne — Opera- tions before Freiburg 54 viii CONTENTS CHAPTER VI. 1644. PACE Operations before Freiburg — The Frencfi army tries to cut off the com- munications of the Bavarian — The French army goes down the Rhine — Philippsburg — Mastership of the Rhine fortresses — Conde returns to France — Mercy occupies Mannheim — Duke of Lorraine besieges Bacharach - 72 CHAPTER VH. 1645. Turenne's German campaign in 1645 — Goes to Marienthal — Battle of Marienthal — Turenne's retreat and plans — Napoleon on Turenne's defeat — Turenne joined by Hessians, Swedes, and Conde — Battle of Nordlingen 79 CHAPTER Vni. 1645 — 1646. Napoleon on Nordlingen — Operations and retreat after Nordlingen — Turenne at Treves — Mazarin and Turenne — PoHtics in 1646 — Preliminaries of Turenne's German campaign of 1646 - - - 94 CHAPTER IX. 1646. German campaign of 1646 — Delay of the Archduke — Alarm of the Duke of Bavaria — Turenne is moderate in his requisitions — Allies reach the Danube — Sieges of Rain and Augsburg — Arrival of the Imperial army — Serious position of the French and Swedes — Imaginary map — Strategy of Turenne and Wrangel in taking Landsberg — Troops sent to Munich — Diplomatists and generals - _ - 102 CHAPTER X. 1647 — 1648. Turenne's trouble with his German cavalry — Arrest of Rosen — Slaughter of the mutineers — Turenne goes to Luxemburg — Perfidy of the Duke of Bavaria — War declared against him — Campaign of 1648 — First disagreement between Turenne and Wrangel — Battle ofZusmershausen — Operations in Bavaria — An unfortunate incident — Peace of Westphalia - ,- -114 CONTENTS ix CHAPTER XI. 1649 — 1650. PAGE The Fronde — De Retz — Turenne's attitude — First peace with the Fronde — ^Conde's quarrel with Mazarin — Arrest of the three Princes — The New Fronde — Turenne joins the Fronde — IMadame de Longueville — Turenne meets with a reverse — Rethel - - - 127 CHAPTER Xn. 1651 — 1652. iVIazarin and De Retz — Mazarin leaves Paris, where the Queen becomes practically a prisoner — The Queen gives a general pardon and enriches Bouillon — The Queen bribes Conde to break off the Conti- Chevreuse match — De Retz recommends the Queen to arrest Conde — Cond^ flies and goes over to the Fronde — The King's army placed under Turenne and Hocquincourt — Beaufort's plan to seize the King — The disaster at Bleneau — Conde's rapid journey — Turenne's clever deception and check of Conde— Napoleon's criticisms ---__,_..._ j^j CHAPTER Xni. 1652. The Court goes to St. Germains — The rebels at Etampes and the royal army at Chartres — Duke of Orleans joins the Fronde — Mademoiselle de Montpensier goes to Orleans — Cabals and intrigues — Turenne's proceedings before Etampes — James, Duke of York, under Turenne — The effect of regimental colours — Count Schomberg — Proceed- ings of the Duke of Lorraine — Proceedings of Turenne at Ville- neuve St. Georges --------- 167 I CHAPTER XIV. 1652. Movements of the Court and of Turenne — Movements of Condi — The terror of the Duke of Orleans — Turenne's steps towards attacking Conde — Conde starts for Charonne — He is refused a passage through Paris — Turenne receives news of Conde's movements — Battle of the Faubourg St. Antoine — Proceedings of Mademoiselle de Montpensier ---------- 180 X CONTENTS CHAPTER XV. 1652. PAGE Duel between Beaufort and Nemours — Court goes to Pontoise — Turenne advances against the Spanish army — Death of the Duke of Bouillon — Turenne tries to prevent the junction of Lorraine with Conde — Villeneuve St. Georges— Napoleon's criticisms of both Cond6 and Turenne — Turenne's escape — Conde makes a false move — Turenne advises the King to enter Paris — Vacillations of Orleans — Louis XIV. enters Paris — Turenne advances to Bar-le- Duc — Drunken soldiers — Drunken officers — Fall of Bar-le-Duc — Friction between Turenne and La Fert^ — Fall of Vervins - - 193 CHAPTER XVL 1653- His marriage — The Spanish invasion — Recovery of Rethel — Turenne's plan of campaign — Napoleon's opinion of it — The enemy takes Roye — The surprise near St. Quentin — The enemy marches to- wards Guise — Loss of Rocroi — Capture of Mouzon — Submission of Bordeaux — Arrest of Lorraine 2ro CHAPTER XVn. 1654. Coronation of Louis XIV. — Siege of Stenay — Siege of Arras — Turenne goes to Peronne — Ignition of bags of gunpowder on horseback — Taking of Stenay — Napoleon on sieges — Taking of St. Pol and St. Eloy — Turenne reconnoitres the enemy's lines before Arras — Red- tapism in the Spanish army — Council of War — Relief of Arras — Retreat of the enemy 222 CHAPTER XVIII. r655 — 1656. Friction between the Court and the Parliament — Turenne takes Land- re9ies — Stupidconduct of Castelnau — Quarrel between Turenne and Cond^ — Turenne takes Conde and St. Guislain — Traitorous con- duct of Hocquincourt — Francis of Lorraine changes sides — Crom- well makes an alliance with France — Don John of Austria — Siege of Valenciennes — Relief of Valenciennes — Retreat of Turenne — Loss of Conde and St. Quesnoy — Ill-conduct of Grandpr^ — Turenne besieges La Chapelle — Napoleon on the campaign oi 1656 - - 239 CONTENTS xi CHAPTER XIX. 1657 — 1658. PAGE Cromwell and France — Cambrai and Valenciennes — Siege of Montmedy — Calais — Siege of St. Venant — Siege of Mardyck — Hocquincourt becomes a rebel — Siege of Dunkirl: — Death of Hocquincourt — Battle of the Dunes — Napoleon's criticisms — The rest of the campaign - 252 CHAPTER XX. 1659 — 1668. Peace of the Pyrenees — Louis XIV. marries Maria Theresa, Infanta of Spain — Turenne helps in the restoration of the Stuarts to the throne of England — Turenne urges Louis to help Portugal — Charles II. marries the Infanta of Portugal — Death of Mazarin — Turenne and Mademoiselle de Montpensier — -Death of the Viscountess of Turenne — Death of Anne of Austria — Claims of Maria Theresa to the Low Countries — Louis attacks the Low Countries — Siege of Lille — Coalition to oblige France and Spain to make peace — Peace of Aix- la-Chapelle 269 CHAPTER XXI. 1668— 1671. Turenne and his religion — His quiet life in Paris — Anecdotes about Turenne — France during the years following the Peace of the Pyrenees — The Dutch — Louis XIV. breaks up the Triple Alliance — Turenne's adventures with a lady-in-waiting — Death of Henri- etta, Duchess of Orleans — The two factions among the Dutch — Three French Marshals refuse to serve under Turenne - - - 283 CHAPTER XXII. 1672. Campaign against Holland in 1672 — Improvements in warfare — The Prince of Orange — Passage of the Rhine — Death of the young Duke of Longueville — Siege of Nimwegen — Napoleon criticises Turenne — The Dutch flood their country — Prince of Orange elected Stadtholder — Alarm in Europe at the French conquests — Advance of the Imperial army — Turenne's operations on the Rhine 3or xii CONTENTS CHAPTER XXIII. 1673. PAGE Operations of Turenne in January and February, 1673 — Siege of Unna — Turenne pursues the Imperial army — Tlie armies of Brandenburg and the Emperor separated — The Elector of Brandenburg makes a treaty with France — Louis XIV. talies Maestricht — Operations of Turenne against the fresh Imperial army — Prince of Orange retakes Naarden — Difference of opinion between Louvois and Turenne — Treachery of the Bishop of Wurzburg — Montecuculi deceives Turenne — Junction of the Prince of Orange with Montecuculi and the fall of Bonn — Turenne praises Louvois and D'Abre to the King — Napoleon's criticisms — Montecuculi ------ 315 CHAPTER XXIV. 1674. Nearly the whole of Germany joins the Emperor and Spain against France — Turenne advances against Caprara — Battle of Sintzheim — Criticisms of Napoleon — Turenne marches to the North — He ravages the Palatinate — Conde fights the great Battle of Seneff — Large reinforcement of the Imperial army — Bournonville's suc- cessful march along the Rhine — He crosses the river at Strasburg — Critical situation of Turenne and criticisms of Napoleon - - 329 CHAPTER XXV. 1674. Battle of Ensheim — Criticisms of Napoleon — Retreat of Turenne — Anger in Paris — Sudden appearance of Turenne at Belfort — Battle of Turckheim— Criticisms of Napoleon 347 CHAPTER XXVI. 1675. Turenne's ovation on his return to Paris — His wish to retire to the Oratory — Renewal of war — Turenne begs to be relieved from further military service — Visits De Retz — Starts for his campaign of 1675 — Political condition of Strasburg — Turenne crosses the Rhine — Bridge at Ottenheim — Montecuculi recrosses the Rhine — Turenne removes his bridge to Altenheim — Crosses the Rench — Failure of Montecuculi's great effort — Success of Turenne - - 369 CONTENTS xiii CHAPTER XXVII. 1675- PAGE Attempted retreat by Montecuculi — His failure — Battle of Sasbach — Death of Turenne — The French driven back across the Rhine — St. Hilaire and his son — The news at Paris — Letters of Madame de Se'vign^ — St. Evremond — The Bishop of Nimes — Bossuet - 384 Index -_-_--__.-_- 297 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS MARSHAL TURENNE. From the Portrait by Charles Lebrun in the Museum at Versailles. From a Photograph by MM. Braim et Cie. . . Frontispiece PICTURE OF A BATTLE. From Du Buisson's Vie DU VICOUTB TURENNB, 1695 facing page CARDINAL MAZARIN CONDE. From the Portrait by David Teniers in THE Museum at Chantilly. From a Photograph by MM. Braun et Cie. PLAN DES TROIS COMBATS DE FRIBOURG PLAN DU COMBAT DE MARIENDAL PLAN DE LA BATAILLE DE NORDLINGHEN CARDINAL DE RETZ MADEMOISELLE DE MONTPENSIER DUKE OF SCHOMBERG LEVfiE DU SIEGE D'ARRAS COMTE DE GRAMMONT PLAN DU SIEGE DE VALENCIENNES . LOUIS XIV MARSHAL TURENNE. From the Pastel Portrait BY Nanteuil in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence. From a Photograph by MM. Alinari .... PLAN DE LA BATAILLE DE SINTZHEIM . PLAN DE LA BATAILLE D'ENSHEIM . PLAN DU COMBAT DE TURCKEIM PLAN DES DIFFERENS CAMPS DU VICOMTE DU TURENNE ET DU COMTE DE MONTECU- CULLI MARSHAL TURENNE. From the Portrait by P. Seuin, dated 1670,™ the Jones Bequest Collection. From a Photograph by Mr. Emery Walker 46 58 65 70 82 88 128 168 175 228 231 246 274 2go 332 350 362 375 387 INTRODUCTION. " Read and re-read the campaigns of the great captains," said the greatest of all captains, and fore- most among those of modern times he placed Turenne. But did he not practically contradict this " Maxim" by gathering in the threads of thought and action of all previous leaders and reweaving them in the loom of his powerful and almost omniscient mind into lessons of warfare for all time? For all time certainly, so far as we can see, as regards the greater lessons of strategy, even allowing for the infinite possibilities of the future. Tactics, however, have altered so much that the Napoleonic battlefields are to us little more instructive than those of the Thirty Years' War and the Fronde, much less so than the battles of Turenne were to Napoleon himself, who practically swept away the old methods. Even strategy may in some degree now be said to be affected. Had Turenne undertaken the passage of the Alps, science would have aided him little more than it did Hannibal. When Napoleon performed that wonderful feat, with the exception of rather better roads than Turenne would have had to deal with, the mechanical means at his disposal were U xvii xvHi INTRODUCTION little greater than those on which the great Cartha- ginian could count. Were a general, however, to attempt a like ; invasion in these days, he would have all the accessories of iron, steam and electricity to materially forward his project. As regards the weapons and equipment of the Napoleonic wars, armour had practically ceased to be worn. The pike, the harquebuss and the wheel-lock had given place to the musket and bayonet, pike and wheel- lock in one. Cavalry had ceased to charge at the trot, and the firing of "piece and pistol before setting on with the sword " had yielded to shock tactics proper. In fact the highly trained infantry of the age of Napoleon had considerably curtailed the liberties taken by cavalry in the age of Turenne, and certain modifica- tions in mounted tactics were the inevitable consequence. The conqueror of Austerlitz and Jena, the victor on a hundred fields, remodelled the tactics and altered the system of war, from that which had prevailed in the time of his predecessor, to suit the different conditions under which he led the armies of France into nearly every country in Europe. But although he might alter the conditions of attack and defence, although he no longer laid his armies up in winter quarters, nor sat down before fortresses when there yet remained an army in the field to defeat, still with all the moment- ous changes he made, he could not alter the oreat principles of strategy. On the other hand, his cam- INTRODUCTION xix paigns exemplify every principle upon which Turenne acted, and with the wider field in which he exercised his greater ambitions, he not only mirrored to us all that Turenne thought and said and did, but added to them the fire of his own genius for war. But the great principles of strategy as affected by the configura- tion of frontiers, the necessity for a secure base, the command of the sea, and the strokes of attack and defence, which these demanded, must remain immut- able for all time. The great principles of Turenne are the same as those under which Von Moltke and Oyama worked, and although it may be better worth the time and the study of the military student to read and re-read the campaigns of Napoleon and the great masters of the art that have lived since, than to turn to the pages of a biography ol Turenne, still there may be much there that even the most advanced of modern soldiers will find of value. Are we, however, quite certain that the last word has been said on the principles of warfare? Surely no one would dream of asserting that tactics are not changing day by day? Is it not possible that develop- ments since the Russo-Japanese war, even of _the last few months, may entirely revolutionise strategy as well as tactics? Is it not possible that some modern "Trafalgar" or " Battle of the Sea of Japan" may be fought in the air, that the warship may give place to the airship, that a "secure base" may be looked for XX INTRODUCTION among the higher Alps or in the Himalayas, and that not only our swords but possibly our rifles and our quick- firing guns may find final resting-places in museums,, beside the armour and equipment of past centuries ? But unlimited as are the possibilities of the future, we can only deal with things as they are, and that being so, the student will find much that will interest him in the campaigns undertaken, and nearly all brought to a successful issue, by a great general who com- manded the armies of France in the middle of the seventeenth century. The careful study alone of the strategical marches, which began in 1647, and formed a new development in the art of war — new, indeed, sofarasthe Middle Ages and modern times are concerned, but in reality only a reapplication of that art, as understood by the greater captains, among the ancients — will well repay the reader. Turenne's march to effect a junction with Wrangel at Friedburg is one that has rarely, if ever, been sur- passed in the annals of war, be it taken either as an exemplification of endurance on the part of an army, organisation on the part of a staff, or moral courage on the part of a leader. No doubt a severe discip- line accounts for the first. But the second is another matter. Even in these days with good roads, with more than one road to march over, and with a well- organised and trained staff to direct and work out details, the movement of an army is not the easy matter INTRODUCTION xxi that it may appear on paper. Considering the differ- ence of the conditions in the seventeenth century, the complete absence of even one good road, and the non- existence of a staff in the modern sense of the word, I thinlv there can be little doubt that to the leader him- self belongs the chief credit of the organisation that even in those times was at any rate to some extent an absolute necessity. Still more than this, what shall we say of the decision and moral power which enabled Turenne to make up his mind to enter upon so hazardous an undertaking? This march, if nothing else, should place him for all time among the great captains of the world. Certain it is, that if the modern soldier learns nothing else from the study of the campaigns of Turenne, it will be borne in upon him more than ever that all practices, and all principles, may pass away from the conduct of war save one — the moral. Of this Turenne was as great an exponent as the Corsican himself. It won them both many a battle, as much later it enabled Lee, aided by his great lieutenant, to keep at bay for so long the concentrated might of the Federal cause, and as it will decide many an action of the future, be it fought with the quick- firing guns and far-reaching rifles of to-day, or the boundless possibilities of the future, such as airships armed with unknown weapons, of which we only see faint indications in the present. Again, even if it be acknowledged that the great xxii INTRODUCTION Napoleon has caught up all the threads of thought from the captains that went before him, including the subject of this book, whom, as leader, strategist and tactician, he ranked so hig-h, are there no other reasons for studying his career ? Can the story of a life such as Turenne's lie unnoticed on the pages of the past? Or is it possible that the memory of an honest, upright man of genius, who played so great a part on the stage of the world, can fade away entirely without having left his mark, not only on the century in which he lived, but on the race to which he belonged? The student of history will find much in his career that affected the politics of his time, while the soldier will read of his campaigns and battles with more than a passing interest ; for they are not only examples of the battles and sieges, marches and countermarches of that great century of war, the seventeenth, but also illustrations of the perpetual truth, that the leader who understands how to "set a squadron in the field" and "the division of a battle knows," is more important than many squadrons, that numbers do not make an army, and, above all, that even a trained army is nothing without trained and capable leaders, or without a supreme, trusted and highly experienced commander at its head. This great fact no one knows better than the private soldier, possibly better even than the critic, able though he may be. Did not the "private men" of the Penin- sular Army say that they would rather see the " Duke's" INTRODUCTION xxiii great nose on the morning of a battle than hear that an extra division was coming up? And when the love of the soldier is combined with this respect, as it was in so marlp> ' ^1 1646 ^T. 35] A LONG MARCH loi Mazarin, he started at once to join his army to that of Sweden ; and, as a flood had destroyed his bridge of boats at Bacharach, and he learned that no bridge across the Rhine nearer than Wesel was open to him, he determined to make the long march of 1 50 miles to that place, which is within 100 miles of the mouth of the Rhine. When he reached Wesel he had consider- able trouble in obtaining leave from the Dutch to cross the river. Having at last obtained that permission and transferred his troops to the right bank of the Rhine, he made a second lengthy march, in a south-easterly direction, to join his army to that of Wrangel, near Friedburg, a fortified town in Hesse-Darmstadt, of which the walls and a fine, tall, round tower are still standing, about a dozen miles to the north of Frankfurt. Alto- gether, Turenne's march from Treves, by Wesel, to Friedburg, was about 320 miles, and it was made in very little more than a month. The combined Imperial and Bavarian armies had already approached the Swedish army ; but, although greatly outnumbering it, they dared not do more than encompass it, because Wrangel's position was very strong and admirably entrenched. On the arrival of Turenne, they withdrew to a considerable distance. The French and Swedish allies numbered 10,000 horse, 6,000 or 7,000 foot, and 60 guns ; the Imperial and the Bavarian allies numbered 14,000 horse, 10,000 foot and rather more than 50 guns. We are now at the beginning oi a long campaign which will require a chapter to itself CHAPTER IX. The campaign of the united forces of Turenne and VVrangel (August, 1646) consisted of a series of strategical marches rather than of battles. Turenne and Wraneel got on well toorether ; but not so the two great generals opposed to them. When the rival armies were within easy reach of each other, the Bavarian general urged an immediate attack upon the French and Swedish allies, on the ground that the Bavarian and Imperialist armies outnumbered those of France and Sweden in the proportion of nearly, if not quite, three to two. The Archduke Leopold, on the contrary, was busily engaged in entrenching his posi- tion, his favourite occupation when on a campaign, and he refused to move until he had finished his works; in fact, we are told by Ramsay that, "so far from offering battle, he employed himself day and night in making deeper the entrenchments of his camp, in which he was almost buried already". Wrangel and Turenne had now a difficult and an intricate position to consider. It was almost the middle of August. If they fell back towards the Rhine they would find themselves in a country already laid waste 1646 ^T. 35] PLAN OF CAMPAIGN 103 by wars. On the other hand, if they assumed the offensive they would be fighting at a serious disad- vantage in numbers. Finally they decided to take advantage of the enemy's delay, to leave them behind, buried in their own trenches, and to make a bold dash for the very heart of Bavaria. The difference between wintering in a devastated and in an undevastated country was greater in those days than we, who live in times of rapid transport of supplies, can readily imagine. Nor did this difference only affect a general and his plans in respect to his army at the moment; for "such a difference," says Turenne, "proves a great advantage in the next cam- paign, because new soldiers will readily come to serve in armies that are in plentiful countries". The rivers of the country through which they in- tended to pass were very favourable to their projects. Roads in those times usually followed water-courses, and certain tributaries of the Rhine on the one hand, and of the Danube on the other, flowed through the valleys leading by the shortest route to Munich, the capital of the Duke of Bavaria's kingdom, a city nearly 200 miles to the south-east of Friedburg. If the allies could but make good their way along this route and garrison the fortresses which they would have to capture and leave in their rear, the Bavarian and Imperialist armies would have to go a long way round to get at them. The plan of Turenne and Wrangel was to leave Friedburg and reach the river Main by one of its I04 MARSHAL TURENNE [1646 tributaries, not very far from Frankfurt, then to go up the valley of the Main to where the river Tauber runs into it, and after that to go up the valley of the Tauber almost to the top of the watershed, which is there not a very high one. They proposed next to cross over the watershed and to go down one of the tributaries of the Danube, until they reached that river ; to go up the Danube to where the Lech flows into it ; then to go up the Lech and seize its fortresses, and finally to strike across the country to Munich. It was a very bold venture ; but circumstances assisted the strategic skill of the French and the Swedish generals. To begin with, the Archduke could not be per- suaded by the Bavarian general to start at once so as to intercept Turenne and Wrangel. He was much too busy digging ! The French and Swedish armies started at two o'clock in the morning and had actually to pass within sight of the enemy ; but, says Turenne, his foes "seemed to be irresolute, and only put them- selves under arms. De Wert, however, had been sent on to defend a pass, but apparently without sufficient strength ; " for, brave as he was, he retired "towards the main body of the enemy's army". Turenne and Wrangel marched twenty-seven miles that day. The hesitation and seeming want of courage on the part of the Archduke Leopold is almost inex- plicable. The chief difficulties that Turenne and Wrang-el had to face were the fortresses lying on their route ; for, unless they could be taken, success would be next 1646 ^T. 35] SURRENDERS 105 to impossible. The inhabitants of the country through which they passed knew that the large united armies of Bavaria and the Empire were in the north-west, with the object of defending their own nations, and of crushing the French and the Swedes ; when, there- fore, the Swedes and the French, very obviously un- crushed, appeared in view, they not unnaturally inferred that the Imperial and Bavarian armies must have been conquered in a great battle and, acting upon this inference, they fled in all directions. Of course the suspicion of the defeat of the armies of the Empire and Bavaria was rapidly developed by rumour from suspicion into fact ; and the report being carried from one garrison to another, they, in most cases, either surrendered at once or made only a feeble and brief resistance. When the Duke of Bavaria, at Munich, heard what had happened, he was terribly frightened and furiously angry. He ordered all his valuables to be packed up immediately and removed to a distance ; and he sent to reproach the Archduke Leopold for allowing the enemy to pass him, practically unopposed and entirely unpursued, into the richest plains of Bavaria. Forgetting his own perfidy to France, he assumed an air of virtuous indignation at what he regarded as the perfidy of the Archduke, who had rewarded him for breaking his word to Mazarin and joining his army to that of the Empire, by permitting the troops of the outraged Mazarin to punish him for his breach of faith by plundering his dominions. io6 MARSHAL TURENNE [1646 In respect to this question of plunder, the reader ought to impress upon his memory that the fact that, if Ramsay is to be believed, "the booty might have been inestimable," and that "the Viscount might have demanded for himself alone, 100,000 crowns per month, without doing anything contrary to the usages of war : but with an unparalleled disinterestedness, he only took out of the enemy's magazines what was sufficient to subsist his army". It will be important to remember this when, farther on, we meet with accusations against Turenne of inflicting cruel devastation, as a punishment for some infamous ill-treatment of his own soldiers. The allies successfully carried out their programme described above, so far as it included reaching the Danube, where the Lech flows into it. Near that point stands Rain, now an insignificant town, but then one of the important fortresses of Bavaria. This place was besieged by Wrangel, while Turenne sent the Marquis de Beauvau with 500 horse to demand the surrender of Augsburg, another fortress twenty miles due south of Rain and also on the Lech. There being scarcely any garrison in Augsburg, the Marquis de Beauvau was immediately admitted, without his men, and the citizens began to make terms with him for the surrender. Augsburg stood on a high and commanding position at the junction of the rivers Lech and Wertach. Besides being an important fortress, it was the chief point of commerce between Northern Europe and the Levant. In its trade and in its merchant nobility it was almost a rival to Venice About the time when 1646 Mt. 35] AUGSBURG 107 Turenne was approaching it, one Augsburg- family, originally descended from a weaver, numbered no less than forty-seven counts and countesses of the Empire among its five branches. Now Wrangel was particularly anxious that the French should not take exclusive possession of Augs- burg, partly on the ground that it had once been captured by the great Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, and partly on account of its importance ; therefore he sent to Turenne, who had started for Augsburg, urging him to return at once to his assistance at Rain, as he was in urgent need of support. On receiving this messao-e, Turenne recalled De Beauvau from Aues- burg and hurried to support Wrangel in the siege of Rain, which capitulated in a few days. Meanwhile the Bavarian General Royer had come from Meiningen, a fortress forty miles to the south- west near the frontier of Wiirtemberg-, and had o strengthened the garrison of Augsburg by from 1,200 to 1,500 men. News of this reached Turenne, who, from Wrangel's frequent mention of the former capture of Augsburg by Gustavus Adolphus, had by this time perceived his object and recognised his own mistake in retiring from Augsburg at Wrangel's request, a mistake for which he is severely criticised by Napoleon. After the capture of Rain, both Turenne and Wranorel hurried to Auofsburo- in order to besieg-e it and cut their trenches before the arrival of the united Imperial and Bavarian armies, which they expected to appear in about a week. It was well that they were io8 MARSHAL TURENNE [1646 prepared against an attack from these armies in their rear ; for the Duke of Bavaria had told the Archduke that unless he raised the siege of Augsburg, he himself would forsake the Imperial alliance and join his army to those of France and Sweden ; and, with this fear before his eyes, the Archduke was bestirring himself In due course the Bavarian and Imperial armies, which had come from Friedburg by Bamberg and Nuremberg, a route much to the east of the short cut taken by the French and Swedes, appeared before Auo-sburo-. As we have seen, their armies had been half as large again as those of the French and the Swedes, even at Friedburg. Since then they had been reinforced en route, while the French and the Swedes had been obliged to leave some of their troops behind them, for the purpose of garrisoning the fortresses which protected their rear on their march. For all his numerical strength, the Archduke's ardour began to cool, now that he was getting so near his enemy. Prudence having by this time taken the place of valour, he decided to wait until the French and Swedish armies had consumed their provisions, and then to drive them into Franconia, i.e. the district which they had already traversed and devastated on their march to the Danube, a district in which it would be impossible for them to remain for want of food. When they should have left it in search of supplies, he flattered himself that he would be able to recover the fortresses taken by the French and the Swedes, without any serious fighting, and thus rob them of all the fruits of their campaign. 1646 ^T. 35] CAMPAIGNING IN SNOW 109 On the appearance of forces so greatly outnumbering their own, Turenne and Wrangel thought it prudent to raise the siege of Augsburg and retire to Lauingen, a town on the Danube thirty miles to the north-west. Their plan of campaign from the first had been some- what hazardous ; and now that the middle of November was approaching, in spite of their successes things began to have a very ugly look. They were in an enemy's country, they were greatly outnumbered, they were more than 150 miles from the nearest friendly boundaries, their communications were practically cut, as the Imperial army on its way to Augsburg had passed behind them ; or, to be more accurate, they had no communications to be cut. Their troops " were weak and fatigued," wanting "horses, arms and clothes,"^ and winter was now setting in, with unusual severity, the ground being already covered with snow. To realise what follows, we may imagine an ill- shaped square of territory, with Rain on the north-east, Ulm on the north-west, Meiningen on the south-west, and Landsberg on the south-east, with the river Lech flowing towards the north from Landsberg to near Rain, the Danube flowing towards the south-west from near Rain to Ulm, and the river I Her flowing towards the Danube in the north from Meiningen to Ulm. The side of our square from Landsberg to Rain, that is the eastern side, is the longest, and the four sides vary in length from something over thirty to a litde over forty miles. Augsburg, it may be observed, lies 1 Ramsay, no MARSHAL TURENNE [1646 about half-way between Landsberg and Rain, and Lauingen about half-way between Rain and Ulm. The Imperial and Bavarian generals, apparently thinking that Turenne and Wrangel had marched to the north-west with the object of making their way through the rich country still farther to the west, marched westward themselves to intercept them and to prevent them from obtaining supplies from either Ulm or Meiningen. Both Turenne and Wrangel, contrary to the advice of most of their staff, advanced westwards over the snow- covered roads towards the enemy ; either, says Turenne, "to fight them, or when in sight of them to consider what to do". When they did come within sight of them, near Meiningen, and, saw them at a distance of three miles in a very strong position, with marshes in their front, Turenne and Wrangel decided not to fight them, especially as the Archduke, as usual, had been busy entrenching himself, but ' ' to consider what to do". This they did to some purpose! They had ascertained that, although the richest coun- try lay to the west of our square, the enemy had a very large stock of provisions at Landsberg, and had only left 100 horse as a garrison for that town, never dreaming that the French and Swedes, in the face of greatly superior forces, would dare to advance still farther to the south-east, direct into their enemy's country and in an opposite direction to their own line of retreat. Turenne and Wrangel, therefore, determined to de- ceive the Archduke by affecting to make Ulm their 1646 ALT. 35] AT THE GATES OF MUNICH 11 1 objective, while they seized Landsberg and all its stores. Turenne left 2,000 horse facing west, ostentatiously drawn up within sight of the enemy, as if he was prepar- ing to give battle, while he hurriedly marched away to the east in the direction of Landsberg. He and Wrangel thus made the whole march to within a few miles of that town before the Archduke, who was doubtless still digging, had realised that they had started. The march had been a very rapid one ; and when Turenne had advanced his infantry as far, over the distance of some thirty miles, as it was possible in one day, he sent on sufficient horse to the river Lech, to cross the bridge, which happily was not broken, and to call upon the little garrison of 100 men at Landsberg to surrender. Tired as were their troops after their long march, Turenne and Wrangel had them on foot again before the night was over ; and during the day follow- ing they got their whole army with its baggage safely across the Lech, cut off all danger of pursuit by the enemy at the bridge, and possessed themselves of the ample store of provisions at Landsberg. There was yet another important step to be taken, which Turenne took as soon as he was able, and this was to send 3,000 horse to the gates of Munich, which was then occupied by the Duke of Bavaria. The route to Munich was a continuation of our imaginary straight line from Meiningen to Landsberg, Landsberg being half-way between Meiningen and Munich. " 'Tis affirmed," says Turenne, "that nothing ever provoked 112 MARSHAL TURENNE [1646 the Duke of Bavaria to such a degree, or excited him so much to make peace, as to see the army of the confederates, in the beginning of winter, send parties to the gates of Munich, and to have no news of the Imperial army or his own, for which he had been at so great an expense, and which he believed, as it was true, much superior to ours." And peace he made! Akhough the Imperial and Bavarian armies still largely outnumbered the French and Swedish, which, moreover, were in an enemy's country, the Duke of Bavaria recalled his troops and left the Archduke Leopold, whom he refused even to see, to take care of himself The Archduke then re- tired and marched eastwards with his army. From the contents of this chapter — it may be added from the contents of the whole of this book — it may be ob- served that Turenne endeavoured to succeed in his cam- paigns rather by strategic marches than by great battles. He is reported to have said : "The cause of general battles is either the hope of victory, the necessity to re- lieve a place besieged, the want of provisions, such an ardour and courage in your troops as cannot easily be restrained, a considerable reinforcement known to be on its march to join the enemy in the near future, which would make their numbers much superior to yours, some happy conjuncture which the enemy's movements may give you, such as the passing of a river, or the weakening or separation of their forces. The occasions which oblige you to avoid a battle are, when there is little to be got and a great deal to be lost by it, when 1646 /Et. 35] GENIUS OF TURENNE 113 you are weaker than the enemy, when the enemy is very strongly posted, when your troops are separated, when there is any misunderstanding among your superior officers, when you perceive fear or consternation among your soldiers, or when you suspect their fidelity, or, in short, when you think you can waste the enemy by delays." Of the latter part of this campaign. Napoleon said : "The manoeuvres by which the Archduke was dislodged from his camp between Meiningen and Landsberg, dis- play great boldness, sagacity and genius : they are fertile in grand results, and ought to be studied by all military 1 Two cardinal generals have already been mentioned. Dur- ing the year in which Turenne's last described campaign took place, a third cardinal was given command of an army. This was Cardinal Michel Mazarin, who was sent by his brother. Cardinal Jules Mazarin, to besiege Lerida, an attempt in which he failed. CHAPTER X. There is probably no disappointment more keen, or more vexatious, than to be robbed of the fruit of a hardly-earned victory ; and great was Turenne's cha- grin, when he was forbidden by Mazarin to reap the reward of the campaign of 1646 by conquering the Imperial army in 1647, a task which he believed would have been easy, now that it was weakened by the withdrawal of the whole of the Bavarian army. Worse still, orders came from Mazarin that Turenne was to proceed with all his troops to Flanders, as a large French force had been taken away from there to proceed against the Spaniards in Catalonia. Turenne had two special objections to leaving Bavaria for Flanders. The first was that he still thoroughly distrusted the Duke, or, as he was more often called, the Elector, of Bavaria, who, he felt per- suaded, would not hesitate to break his promises and rejoin the Emperor if he should think it to his interest to do so. The second was his strong suspicion that, if he were to start for Flanders, his German or Weimarian cavalry, which had fought so valiantly for him at Nordlinofen, would refuse to follow him because their pay was five or six months in arrear. He sent to im- 114 1 647 ^T. 36] ROSEN 115 plore Mazarin for these arrears ; but Mazarin replied by saying that one month's pay was all that he could possibly send for them at the moment. The event proved the reasonableness of Turenne's fears. With the exception of one regiment, the Ger- man horse flatly refused to go to Flanders until they were paid their full arrears. Rosen, who had only lately been a prisoner of war, had been made Lieu- tenant-General of the Horse at the request of Turenne. Instead of being grateful to Turenne for this appoint- ment, Rosen felt ill-disposed towards him ; because he supposed that Turenne must despise him for having been the cause of the disaster at Marienthal, the only battle in which Turenne had ever been defeated. Galled at this imagined contempt, Rosen took a dis- like to him, and secretly encouraged the German cavalry in their refusal to move until they were paid their arrears. Turenne, however, had no suspicion of the disloyalty of Rosen. Still believing that, if he put a bold face on it, the German cavalry would follow him, he started with his infantry for Flanders, taking Rosen with him. When, after the first day's march, the German horse did not appear, Turenne sent Rosen back to command them to come at once. After further marches, not only were they still absent, but M. de Traci, another French officer, whom Turenne had sent with Rosen, returned and told him that although Rosen was pretending to be forcibly detained by the mutinous Germans, there were grave grounds for sus- pecting his loyalty. All the French forces, including u6 MARSHAL TURENNE [1647 the German cavalry, were on the west of the Rhine ; but De Traci informed Turenne that Rosen was about to lead the German horse across the river into Germany. Then Turenne, sending on the rest of his forces towards Flanders, made a march of twenty-seven miles in one day with five regiments of cavalry and 3,000 infantry ; and, to the astonishment of the Ger- mans, he caught them just as they were crossing the Rhine at Strasburg. So unexpected had been the appearance of Turenne with his troops that the German cavalry were thrown into confusion. " Rosen, who was thunderstruck at the sight" of Turenne, "not knowing what to do, and perhaps imagining that he could yet conceal his unfaith- fulness from him, said to him : ' You see how they drag- me alono- with them'. These words and Rosen's countenance, convinced Turenne that he was betraying him ; but nevertheless, he thought it necessary to dis- semble his resentment. He might lawfully have fallen on the mutineers ; their conduct deserved an exemplary punishment ; his troops were superior in number, and there was so great confusion among theirs that he could have put them all to the sword. But Turenne, who was the father of the soldiery, could not resolve to sacrifice so many brave men, who had served the King so well, and micfht still be useful to him."^ Through their officers, the men professed a desire to return to their duty ; but in practice they still held aloof and asked for their arrears of pay. Most of the officers ^ Ramsay. i647 ^T. 36] MUTINY 117 renewed their loyalty to Turenne, but among the excep- tions was Rosen, who secretly continued to foment discord among the men. Turenne was persuaded — it is difficult to understand why — to allow all the German cavalry to cross over to the German, or eastern, side of the Rhine. Days passed without any definite sub- mission on the part of the Germans, and as very urgent orders arrived that Turenne should send all his troops into Flanders, he sent thither all but one of the French regiments of horse which he had with him, and also all his forces which were already at Saverne. The orders which he had received to lead his army to Flanders in person he thought himself justified in disregarding, as he was convinced that, were he to do so, all his Weimarian cavalry would immediately go over to the enemy. He was determined to arrest Rosen ; but, with his reduced forces, it was necessary to await an exceptionally favourable opportunity of doing so. For this purpose he took up his quarters with Rosen and rarely allowed him out of his sight. After waiting nearly a month on the banks of the Rhine, Turenne heard one night that the German cavalry were mounting their horses to march towards the north. This was a great relief to his mind ; for his chief fear had been lest they should march to the east and join either the Imperial army or that of Bavaria, which he shrewdly suspected might be on the point of renewing its alliance with the Empire. The German cavalry no longer obeyed their officers and had elected others from their own ranks. ii8 MARSHAL TURENNE [1647 Ignoring all this, Turenne rode at their head as if he was still general in command, keeping with him the deposed officers as his staff, and never allowing Rosen to be out of his sight. " He sent before him the quarter-masters to mark out their camp ; did all the offices of a general as usual, as if there had been no revolt ; and not one of the new leaders durst retain the least shadow of authority in his presence." After marching thus for two days, the leading mutineers came again to demand their six months' pay. Turenne told them that, if they would recross to the west of the Rhine, he would give them one month's pay, and the rest as soon as he could obtain it from the Court of France ; but that he could not possibly give it to them until he had got it himself At this the mutineers looked very sulky, and he suspected from the expres- sion of their faces that they had some idea of arresting him ; but he pretended to be quite at his ease and ordered them to return to their quarters, which they did. Rosen, being exceedingly anxious to get rid of Turenne, endeavoured to persuade him to leave troops with which he declared that general's personal liberty to be in serious peril ; but Turenne took no notice of his warning and again marched at the head of the rebels on the following day. In the afternoon they arrived at Ettlingen, a town about twenty miles from Philippsburg. Turenne, Rosen, and the officers with them, stayed in the town, and the troops encamped outside it. As soon as he had arrived, Turenne sent i647 ^T. 36] MUTINY 119 one of the trustworthy men, whom he had with him, to gallop off to Philippsburg, which was garrisoned by French troops, and to order 100 musketeers to come to him at once. When they arrived very early the next morning he made them arrest Rosen and quietly carry him off as a prisoner to Philippsburg. As soon as they had got safely out of reach, he sent to the rebel camp to inform its occupants of what he had done, and to order them no longer to consider Rosen their commander. Upon this, all the officers, down to the corporals, submitted themselves to Turenne and promised their unqualified obedience, as also did two entire regiments of the mutineers. The rest of the German cavalry, to the number of 1,500, elected fresh officers from their own ranks and galloped away towards the valley of the Tauber. As soon as he heard of this, Turenne pursued them with the two regiments that had returned to their duty. After two days' march Turenne came up with them in a narrow valley of the Tauber, and, in leading the attack on their rear, he was very nearly taken prisoner ; but, shortly afterwards, the mutineers, al- though outnumbering their loyal fellow-soldiers, lost heart and turned tail. Turenne pursued them, killed 300 of them and made as many prisoners. The eight or nine hundred that escaped, instead of going over to the Imperialists, joined the Swedish army. All the prisoners were condemned by Turenne to be hanged. As they were being marched off to execu- tion before him, an old trooper looked him steadily in 120 MARSHAL TURENNE [1647 the face, and baring his breast, which bore the marks of sword-cuts, said : "General, don't stain the glory of your noble actions, by causing an old soldier who is covered with scars, and has a thousand times braved death under your standards, to die by the hands of the common hangman ". What followed shall be described by Ramsay : " The Viscount was softened, forgave him and all the rest, and incorporated them in his own troops, to which he then returned. The Court did justice to his merit ; all the world admired his courage, prudence and humanity. He had, in a very delicate and important conjuncture, dissembled the most just resentment ; paid court to his inferiors, without lessening his authority ; chastised particular persons, without losing the con- fidence of the body ; made himself respected by the rebels at the same time that he put himself in their power ; then punished some and pardoned others, as prudence required ; and at last brought back the greatest part of them to their duty." Never, perhaps, in his whole life did Turenne show greater tact. With the cavalry now regained, Turenne went to Luxemburg and joined his army, which he had already sent on. He received orders from Paris to remain there. It was then September and he employed his time in taking several "sorry castles" as he calls them. Having heard that Turenne was showing a bold front in that quarter, the Emperor sent a large portion of his forces to resist him. This weakened the Imperial army, which was opposed to the Swedes in 1648 /Et. s7] a faithless DUKE 121 Hesse, and the Swedish army began to drive it towards the south-east. Then the Duke of Bavaria did exactly what Turenne had expected him to do, by once more breaking faith with France and sending his army to join that of the Emperor. The Duke, however, with an air of injured innocence, pretended that, although he was fighting the Swedes who were allies of France, he was still maintaining his treaty with France. Thus reinforced, the Imperial army was enabled to retake some of the fortresses which Turenne and Wrangel had captured in the campaign of the previous year, and to besiege Worms. Turenne then received orders to go to the Palatinate with his army, where he obliged the Imperialists to raise that siege. About the middle of December Turenne received further orders to send a formal declaration of war to the Duke of Bavaria, on the ground of that Duke's breach of his treaty. Turenne brought 4,000 cavalry, 4,000 infantry and twenty guns to the assistance of the Swedes, whereupon the Imperialist and Bavarian armies retired to Ingolstadt, a place on the Danube, a little more than twenty miles to the east of Rain, a town which, as we have seen, had been besieged not long before by Turenne and Wrangel. In February, 1648, having got remounts for his cavalry from Switzerland, Turenne marched with the Swedes through Franconia, a devastated country — devastated to some extent by Turenne's own troops — in which it was very difficult to find provisions for men or horses. For the first time Turenne and 122 MARSHAL TURENNE [1648 Wrangel now disagreed as to their plan of campaign. Wrangel proposed to make a dash at the Upper Palatinate, while Turenne objected that such a step would take them too far away from Swabia, the only district upon which they could depend for provisions. Neither general would give way. Turenne made no quarrel ; but, while Wrangel started to carry out his design, he waited quietly where he was, feeling assured that the Swedish army, unsupported by the French, would not be strong enough to cope with the united armies of the Emperor and the Duke of Bavaria. And he was right in his supposition ; for, as he had anticipated, Wrangel and his army presently came back again. While the French and Swedish armies were on the north of the Danube, the Imperial and Bavarian armies were on the south of it. Turenne, with some difficulty, persuaded Wrangel to march with him to Lauingen, a town on the Danube, which it will be remembered lay about half-way between Rain and Ulm. A reconnoitring party of 3,000 horse, which had crossed the Danube to the south, having sent back a report that the enemy was encamped about four or five miles off, Turenne took his infantry over the river very secretly during the night. Early the next morning, the enemy, ignorant of the proximity of the French, moved leisurely away, and Turenne came up with their rear- guard at a place called Zusmershausen, on the road to Augsburg. General Melander, who had taken the place of the Archduke Leopold as commander-in-chief 1648 ^T. 37] MASTERS IN BAVARIA 123 of the Imperial army in the south while the Archduke commanded the Imperial army in Flanders, came galloping back with supports, and made a stubborn resistance. While showing splendid courage he was killed and his troops were repulsed ; but they succeeded in crossing- the river Lech and foupfht a most creditable o o rearguard action during the retreat, under the command of Montecuculi, a general with whom we shall have a good deal to do in later pages. After this battle the French and Swedish troops manoeuvred about Bavaria. Turenne was the first French general to place the colours of France on the banks of the river Inn. The Duke of Bavaria, who was now seventy-eight, fled with his wife and family to the Archbishop of Salzburg for protection. A city almost within sight of Munich surrendered ; and the Swedish General Konigsmark surprised and captured Prague with the assistance of some French troops. The absence of these troops temporarily weakened Turenne, opposite to whom the Imperial and Bavarian armies were drawn up for a month, but never dared to attack him. Wrangel, however, came in for what it is now the fashion to call "an unfortunate incident," in which he lost some standards, a great many officers and men, and 700 or 800 horses, near Munich. For all that, the French and Swedish armies were practically masters of the enemy's country. "Such," says Ramsay, "was the irruption into Bavaria, in which the enemy were pursued from city to city, from post to post, from river to river, without intermission, for four months 124 MARSHAL TURENNE [1648 together ; during which the whole country was exposed to the fury of the soldiers as far as the gates of Munich, Ingolstadt, Ratisbon, and Prague ; and in which, nevertheless, no considerable action happened, but only a few convoys taken, and some parties defeated." One of these parties, however, as has just been men- tioned, was of considerable size. Turenne went into winter quarters at Lauingen. He was contemplating a campaign, with Vienna as its objective, for the following year, when a message was brought to him announcing the Peace of Westphalia, which meant the end of the Thirty Years' War. It was indeed hig^h time that that long- war should be finished. Every march and countermarch, such as those of Turenne already described, entailed the devas- tation of a large tract of country. It is stated that, in Bohemia alone, 29,000 villages were destroyed. So great was the agricultural ruin that, for more than a generation after the Peace of Westphalia, a third of Northern Germany was left entirely uncultivated. As to the depletion of population in consequence of the war, it is said that that of the Empire was reduced by two-thirds, owing to the slaughter in battles, disease, famine, and emigration for the purpose of escaping from those evils. ^ This peace was brought about to a large extent by the masterly strategy of Turenne —it cannot be strictly said by his victories ; for there were scarcely any great battles in the campaigns of either 1646 or 1648. It 'See The Cambridge Modern History, iv., 417-iq. 1648 JEr. 37] QUEEN CHRISTINA 125 was also partly due to the victories of Cond^ in Flanders. The gains ot France by its terms were very great. They included the acknowledgment of her right to the three Lotharingian Bishoprics (Metz, Toul and Verdun) and also to the possessions hitherto held by the House of Austria in Alsace ; althouorh Strasburg- and some other places were to remain independent. Her ally, Sweden, received considerable territories in Northern Germany. From this time that nation has little to do with the story of Turenne ; but few of the bye-paths beset- ting that story offer a greater temptation to wander from it than the reign of Sweden's monarch during the time when Turenne was serving its interests con- jointly with those of France. That temptation shall be resisted beyond the giving of a few quotations from a letter from the Duke of Guise to a friend about Queen Christina, shortly after her abdication. "She has a plump waist and large hips . . . one shoulder is higher than the other . . . eyes very fine and full of fire ; her complexion, in spite of a few pits of small- pox, is bright and handsome." [She wears] "a man's wig ; thick and high on the forehead, very bushy on the sides. . . . The body of her gown laced up behind, crookedly, is made something like our doublets ; her chemise sticks out all round above her petticoat, which she wears ill-fashioned and not over straight. She is always much powdered, with quantities of pomatum, and she never wears any gloves. She is shod like a man, and she has the tone of voice and nearly all the 126 MARSHAL TURENNE [1648 actions of a man. She affects to play the amazon. She has fully as much glorification and pride as her father, the great Gustavus, ever had. She is very civil and very cajoling, speaks eight languages, princi- pally French as if she were born in Paris. She knows more than our Academy with the Sorbonne added ; understands painting admirably, as she does all other things, and knows more about the intrigues of our Court than I do. In short, she is a very extraordinary woman." Mazarin was very glad to make peace. He had wished to lessen the power of Austria and had done so ; he had desired to put it out of Austria's power to send troops to the assistance of Spain in Flanders, and that object he had also attained ; but he was anxious not to crush the power of Austria altogether. Spain did not join in the Peace of Westphalia, and a war with Spain alone was as much as Mazarin cared for in the way of fighting at one time. Again, he was somewhat embar- rassed by a separate peace, which the Dutch had just made with Spain on their own account. But Mazarin had yet another grave cause for making peace with the enemies of France, in that serious internal troubles were disturbing his own country, and likely to give him quite enough to do without any fighting beyond its borders. Those internal troubles will form the subject of the next chapter. CHAPTER XL The Thirty Years' War was now at an end, and another was to begin, a war described by Michelet as a "burlesque war," a "war of children, with a child's nickname," a war "comic in its origin, its events, its principles " ; yet, he might well have added, exceed- ingly tragic in the bloodshed which accompanied it. Towards the end of the first half of the seventeenth century an anti-monarchical spirit was asserting itself throughout the greater part of Europe. At the end of 1648 the reduction of the powers of Austria and Spain, in which France herself had lent a hand, had demonstrated that the greatest of kingdoms might possibly crumble ; two republics, those of the United Provinces and Switzerland, had been freed altogether from royal control. There had been insurrections, either successful or unsuccessful, in Genoa, Naples and Sicily; there had been riots in Moscow; in England the King was a prisoner about to be tried for his life, and a Commonwealth was on the eve of its establish- ment. The political conditions in France were very ex- ceptional and peculiarly favourable to an outbreak of the revolutionary epidemic with which the European 127 128 MARSHAL TURENNE [1648 atmosphere was impregnated. The King was a minor ; a single minister, and he a foreigner, was ruling and even oppressing the country with a rod of iron, while one of his creatures, also a foreigner, was, or at least was supposed to be, plundering its resources for his own and his employer's personal benefit. The Parliament had ventured to dismiss this corrupt financier, and Mazarin replied to this disgrace of his servant by arresting four leading members of that Parliament. The chief instigator of the popular move- ment against Mazarin, in Paris, was its coadjutor- bishop, Paul de Gondi, better known by his later title of Cardinal de Retz, the name by which it would seem most convenient to speak of him from the first in these pages. De Retz has not been described as a saint by historians ; but, to give him his due, he distributed immense sums among the poor of Paris. Ramsay describes him thus : "Ambitious without measure, and courageous even to rashness, he knew no restraint, and was fearless of danger. To gain his point, he made use of gallantry and politics, vice and virtue, religion and the passions." Yet the same author admits "that virtue rectified, in the latter part of his life, all his vicious inclinations". This appears to have been the case ; but, judging from his own account of his dispositions, even when a bishop, he must have been utterly unsuited for the priesthood, and he had fought three duels before he was ordained. On the arrest of the four members of Parliament all Paris was in an uproar, and the mob raised bar- CARDINAL DE RETZ. i649 ^T. 38] WARS OF THE FRONDE 129 ricades and threatened the soldiers. De Retz, in the character of a peacemaker, obtained the release of the imprisoned members, and it was at first supposed that the disturbance was quelled. The street row was con- temptuously spoken of as the War of the Sling, a scornful comparison with the fights of the gutter-boys of Paris, who used little slings for the purpose of throw- ing stones at each other. But this War of the Sling, or, to use the French word, the War of the Fronde, was destined to become something very much more than mere child's play. Into the details of the Wars of the Fronde it is unnecessary to inquire here, except so far as they have a bearing upon the life of Turenne Early in 1649, just after the King of England had been put to death by his Parliament, relations between the Parliament of France and the Court of France were greatly strained. The Court and Mazarin were at St. Germains ; the Parliament was supreme in Paris. Mazarin then decided upon a very bold step. He blockaded Paris ! Having seized all the places in the vicinity whence provisions could be obtained, he invested the city with 6,000 or 7,000 men, hoping thus to starve it into submission. Meanwhile Turenne was wintering in Swabia with his army. As his conduct on hearing of the events in Paris has been much and very unfavourably criticised, we must consider the condition of affairs as it probably appeared to him. He wished to be loyal to the King, he wished to be loyal to the Oueen-Mother ; but he 9 I30 MARSHAL TURENNE [1649 doubtless asked himself whether to allow their misguided minister to ruin their country and endanger the throne would be an act of loyalty to either. Mazarin's virtual dictatorship was something very different from the regency and council of assistance which the late King had willed to protect the minority of his son. It was possible, perhaps easy, to represent Mazarin as a traitor to the throne. It was true that the Oueen - Regent authorised and endorsed all his . — ■ o actions, and that she trusted him implicitly. But his enemies protested that he had maliciously deceived a gentle and credulous lady, and had infamously obtained a pernicious influence over her. It is not likely that Turenne was predisposed in favour of Mazarin. He had little reason for being so. That cardinal had ill-used his brother, had tried to bribe Turenne himself by offering him estates that should have been his brother's, had failed again and again to send him reinforcements when they were most urgently needed, and had robbed him of the fruits of victory through a fear of entirely destroying the power of the House of Austria. Turenne's brother, the Duke of Bouillon, had joined the party which regarded Mazarin as a traitor in disguise, and his siege of Paris as an act of high treason against the young King. Mazarin, the Queen, and Conde were all afraid that Turenne, the best general of France, would side with his brother, and each wrote to him, pretending to feel assured of his loyalty, while they deplored the defection of Bouillon. i649 ^T. 38] CORRESPONDENCE 131 In a long letter to Turenne, Mazarin said : " Nothing is so true, as that the esteem and passion I have for you and all things in which your interest is concerned, are carried to as high a pitch as they can possibly be for any person". He reminded Turenne that he had offered him his niece, whom the King of Poland had wanted to marry ; and he added that Turenne would receive a grant for the government of Alsace, and despatches for two bailiwicks which he named. In reply, Turenne thanked the cardinal for his offers, and said that, being a Protestant, he did not wish to marry a Catholic. Besides, this was not "a season for him to think of his private interests". In another letter to Mazarin he candidly stated that "he looked upon the blockade of Paris as a very bold step during a minority : that he could not approve of it ; and that, if the cardinal continued to use the people with so much severity, he must not expect he would be any longer his friend ". In obedience to the orders which he had received, he was about to bring his troops back to Paris, but, on his arrival at that city, "he would not favour either the rebellion of the Parliament, or the injustice of the Prime Minister". Upon receipt of this letter, Mazarin sent to the troops of Turenne, ordering them no longer to ac- knowledge him as their general, and, in order to insure their loyalty, he sent 3,000 crowns to be dis- tributed among them, with a promise that their pay, which was six months in arrear, should be immediately given to them. Turenne, "after divesting himself of 132 MARSHAL TURENNE [1649 the generalship . . . retired with fifteen or twenty of his friends into Holland, to reside there till the troubles should be pacified ". Madame de Motteville has some- thing to say concerning this affair, which probably ought to be taken cum grano sails. She declares that, when Turenne found himself deserted by his troops, he was "confounded and repentant"; that Conde re- ceived a letter from him in which, "unhappy and humiliated, he asked pardon for his fault, and entreated the Prince to continue his protection and to obtain from the Minister [Mazarin] forgiveness and absolution for his crime ". Such action sounds very unlike what one would expect from Turenne, and the story may have been mere Court gossip. Not very long after Turenne had gone to Holland, the members of the Fronde, chiefly owing to the suc- cesses of the Government troops under Cond^, became anxious for peace, for which the Government was little less desirous. By the treaty which followed, the cardinal and the Parliament retained their power, the former over the Court, the latter over the people. The Duke of Bouillon was to receive an equivalent for the sovereignty of Sedan, and both he and Turenne, for their descendants as well as for themselves, received the rank of princes descended from a sovereign house. Turenne then returned to Paris, and met with a most gracious reception at Court. Conde was now a personage of very great import- ance and influence, not only as a distinguished general, but also as a grandee ; for he had by this time become i649 ^T. 38] C0ND6 AND MAZARIN 133 Prince of Conde, owing to the recent death of his father — a very different man from the son. " Besides the bad reputation he [the father] had acquired in his youth, he was avaricious and unlucky in war. That is the mildest term one can use about a Prince said not to be valiant." Moreover, "he was in no wise agreeable to look upon" (De Motteville, vol. i., chap, ix.). Now to Cond6 was the merit due of brineine the Fronde into submission, if to submission on very liberal terms, and he thought and demanded that his merit should be suitably rewarded. His own and Mazarin's estimates of that merit and its suitable rewards varied greatly, and considerable friction between them was the consequence. At last Conde, whose temper was none of the longest, insulted Mazarin in public. Mazarin com- pletely controlled his own resentment, which for that reason increased in intensity. The denunciations of Mazarin by the disappointed Cond^, both in private and in public, became as virulent as had been those of the Fronde. In his rage against Mazarin, Conde soug-ht the friendship of the conspirators in the late or, as it was subsequently called, the Old Fronde, by no means always with success. For several months, during the second half of 1649, Cond6 on one side and Mazarin on the other, both having enlisted several members of the Old Fronde to their separate interests, intrigued and plotted for each other's ruin. Presently they had an open quarrel, and a climax was reached in January, 1650, when Mazarin arrested Conde, his brother, the Prince 134 MARSHAL TURENNE [1650 of Conti, and the Duke of Longueville, the two latter being princes who had taken an active part in the Old Fronde ; and he sent all three as prisoners to the castle of Vincennes.^ This action on the part of Mazarin, instead of ending his troubles, increased them ; for it made a split in the royal family and the nobility of France, and eventually brought to birth a New Fronde far more powerful than the old. The New Fronde was anything rather than a re- volutionary mob. It included the next heir to the throne, Gaston, Duke of Orleans, uncle to the King, Louis, Prince of Conde, who was also of the blood royal, his brother, the Prince of Conti, and Henry of Orleans, Duke of Longueville, a descendant of the famous Bastard of Orleans who had fought by the side of Joan of Arc. Next to the princes of the legitimate blood royal, the Duke of Longueville was the most powerful personage in France, and he was married to a sister of the Prince of Cond^. Three of these four great men were now in prison ; but the larger propor- tion of the princes and nobles of France advocated their ' Dr. Guy Patin wrote : " Of the three princes who are prisoners, M. de Longueville is very melancholy and never utters a word ; M. le Prince de Conti weeps and hardly leaves his bed; M. le Prince de Conde sings, hears Mass in the morning, reads Italian books, dines and plays at battledore and shuttlecock. A few days ago, M. le Prince de Conti entreated some one to bring him a work entitled The Imitation of Christ, that he might console himself by reading it. The Prince de Conde exclaimed, ' And for me, Sir, I entreat you to send me the Imitation of M. de Beaufort, so that I may be able to escape from hence, as he did two years ago ' " {Life of Conde, by Lord Mahon (1845), p. 95). I650 Mt. 39] THE NEW FRONDE 135 cause, and chose to consider the young King and the Queen- Mother as practically prisoners in the hands of the detested Italian, Mazarin. Among other noble adherents to the Fronde, of whom we shall hear again, were the Duke of Beaufort, the Duke of Nemours, and the Due de la Rochefoucauld, the author of the cele- brated Maxims. In addition to these, was the Duke of Lorraine, except when he thought it more to his interest to take, or to pretend to take, the other side. But the Fronde, in its fresh phase, was not made up only of princes and dukes ; for duchesses and princesses played almost as important a part in it. In an earlier chapter it was observed that an insignifi- cant incident had led to a split among the ladies of the Court, and that this split subsequently proved a factor of some force in civil wars. It is true that, at the point which we have now reached, some of the partisans had changed sides ; that the lady who had begun the quarrel on one side was now the leader on the other, and that the orreat ladies changed from one faction to o o another just as their convenience, their tempers, or their love-affairs happened to prompt them ; but the fact remained that ever since the apparently ridiculous thin end of the wedge of discord had been jestingly inserted into the highest society of France, the ladies of the blood royal, accompanied by their satellites, both male and female, had been cleft into two parties, one siding with the Queen and the cardinal, the other with anything or anybody, whether Fronde, hostile nation, or aught else that happened to be opposed to the 136 MARSHAL TURENNE [1650 Queen and cardinal. The inner circle of either party usually met at the house of one of its duchesses ; and at least one important political meeting was held at the bedside of a princess shortly after the birth of one of her children. Ramsay shall tell us what Turenne did under the new conditions. "Touched with the misfortunes of Conde, persuaded that in preventing the sacrifice of a hero of the blood of France, he should do service to his country ; prepossessed with the false notion that war might be made against the cardinal without fight- ing against the King, and with several other maxims which were authorised at that time, upon the specious pretence of the public good, he gave way to the im- pulses of his generous nature, and resolved to set the princes at liberty, whatever might be the consequence. His motives were the less to be suspected, as Conde, so far from courting his friendship, before his imprison- ment, had very much neglected it, and had concealed from him all his secret machinations against the Court. The viscount judged that it would be mean in him to abandon the prince, and fancying himself no more than a generous friend, became an undutiful subject." That astute Frondeur, the coadjutor-bishop, after- wards Cardinal de Retz, was far less certain than Ramsay as to the motives of Turenne in joining his party. In a letter^toa friend he says: I own "that to this day I am at a loss about the motives that put him upon acting in that manner ". Probably the truth ' Aleinoirs of De Retz, vol. i., p. 215. i65o ^T. 39] CONSPIRACY 137 is that Tureniie persuaded himself, as did other Fron- deurs who were attached to the Queen and the young King, that the then present dispute was a personal quarrel between Conde and Mazarin, to which the King and Queen were neutral. Turenne's great act of conspiracy took place at Stenay, a town belonging to Conde, situated on the river Meuse, a dozen miles from the present frontier of Belgium. At that time it was an important fortress ; but four years afterwards Louis XIV. had its fortifica- tions destroyed. Turenne's co-conspirators, at that place, were the Archduke Leopold, a brother of the Emperor Ferdinand III., and Madame de Longueville, a lady who is not unlikely to have been attractive to Turenne, if the description of her, by her contemporary, Madame de Motteville, is not exaggerated. Her beauty, she says, was more in her colouring- than her features. "Her eyes were not large but fine, soft, and their blue was beautiful — it was like that of the tur- quoise. Poets could only compare to lilies and roses the beautiful carnation of her complexion ; and her fair and sunny hair, accompanying so many other beauties, made her less resemble woman than angel, according as our weak nature has pictured one to our minds." In the Bibliotheque Nationcdeof Fr^ance (vol. 3855) may be found nineteen folios consisting of a " Traite en orig-inal de Madame de Longueville et du Marechal de Turenne avec Monsieur I'Archiduc Leopold. Stenay. 30 Avril, 1650." This was practically an alliance for a war against the King of France, by which it was 138 MARSHAL TURENNE [1650 agreed that Spain should put 3,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry under the command of Turenne. Historians have been divided in opinion upon the question whether Turenne was induced to join in this treaty by Madame de Longueville. It is a question, again, whether Turenne was in love with her. Very likely he may have been, and without knowing it ; for his contemporary, St. Evre- mond, says : " M. de Turenne was not incapable of love : his nature was not of that severe and rug-o-ed kind which no sentiments of tenderness can soften : he even loved more than he thouoht he did, concealing as much as possible from himself a passion which others might easily discover". Several arreat ladies, as we have seen, were intriofu- ing in politics at the time of the wars of the Fronde : Madame de Bouillon, Madame de Montbazon, Madame de Chevreuse and her two daughters, Mademoiselle de Chevreuse and the Princess Palatine ; but none of them are generally supposed to have been more in- triguing or more active than Madame de Longueville. It is to be hoped that there is more scandal than truth in something about Turenne which Des Maizeaux says, in the notes to his edition of Bayle's Dictionary (iii., 265); but it shall be given so that readers may judge for themselves. Some of the intriguing ladies, he states, were guilty of immoralities which are "almost unavoidable to those women who concern themselves with civil wars. They want the confidence of the party- leaders ; it is necessary that those gentlemen should i6so ^T. 39] TURENNE'S GOVERNESS 139 assist them with their swords and politics ; but they do nothing- gratis, and they know how to improve the opportunity. Such is the condition of a lady who desires to have the direction of state-revolutions. It is said that the Marshal de Turenne, though a very wise man, could not resist the impetuosity of the torrent, and required also such personal services from the ladies during the civil war. I thought it might be the first and the last time he was talked of on account of his gallantry ; but I have been informed by a person, who knew it well, that he frequently used that trade." De Retz does not seem to have esteemed either the activity or the powers of intrigue possessed by Madame de Longueville quite so highly as did other people. Fully admitting her "great store of wit," he says: "Her capacity, which has not been helped by her laziness, could never reach so far as affairs. . . . She had a languishing air, which touched the heart more than the vivacity of women more beautiful than she was." And he states that her gallantries ranked first in her mind, her politics only second. As to Turenne, the woman who De Retz thought had most power over his mind and actions was his sister, "an old maid," whom Madame de Bouillon " hated entirely " and used to call "Turenne's governess". If Turenne was ever in love with Madame de Longueville, any affection she may have felt for him must have been very temporary ; for the chief object of her passion was the Due de la Rochefoucauld. If anything is wanting in the portrait which he has given I40 MARSHAL TURENNE [1650 us of himself in his Maxims, the required touches have been added by De Retz. " He never was fit for any manner of affairs, and I cannot tell why, for he had qualities which would have supplied, in any other, those which he wanted. ... He never was fit for war, though an excellent soldier ; neither was he ever a good courtier, though he had always an inclination to be so. He never was a good party-man, though all his life long engaged in parties. . . . He had done much better to have known himself, and to have been content to pass, as he might have done, for the politest and finest gentleman that appeared in that age. Even if Madame de Longueville had not been in love with Rochefoucauld, it is improbable that Turenne could have gained her affection ; for his biographer, Du Buisson, says that, at the time of which we are speaking, she was also in love for the moment with Comte de Moussaye, the Governor of Stenay. In his endeavours to raise troops for the release of the captive princes, among the regiments which had served under him in Germany, Turenne was only parti- ally successful. The few he obtained met with a re- verse from the King's troops under the Marquis of Ferte-Senneterre, and, to avoid complete defeat, Turenne asked for assistance from the Spaniards, who immediately sent him 1,500 cavalry and some com- panies of infantry. In vain did Turenne write to implore the Queen to enable him to return to his allegiance, which he i6so JET. 39] THE ARCHDUKE 141 heartily desired, by liberating the three princes. His only hope remaining of delivering them was by an alliance with the Spaniards, and it is but fair to say that, in his treaty with them, he endeavoured, as much as possible, to protect the interests of France. In June, 1650, he took command of the Spanish army of 17,000 or 18,000 men, but the Archduke, uneasy at the idea of the soldiers of Spain being commanded by a Frenchman, came from Brussels and personally super- seded him as commander-in-chief The Archduke took Rethel, Chateau- Porcein and Neufchitel ; while Turenne, with 4,000 men, defeated the Marquis of Hocquincourt at Fismes. After this victory Turenne had intended to march on to Vincennes to set the three princes at liberty ; but finding that they had been removed, he rejoined the Spanish army. That army, after taking Mouzon, retired into winter quarters in Flanders in November ; but Turenne remained on the French frontier with 8,000 men. While he was doing his best to organise the relief of the princes, Turenne was infuriated by a report that the leaders of the Fronde were being bribed by Mazarin. In his anger he sent placards, signed with his name, to be fixed in conspicuous places in Paris. "It is your task, people of Paris," he wrote, "to solicit your pre- tended tribunes, who are at last become Mazarin's missionaries and protectors ; who have for a long time made a plaything of you and of your fortunes; and have sometimes stirred you up, sometimes slackened you, sometimes pushed you on, sometimes kept you 142 MARSHAL TURENNE [1650 back, as they were moved to it either by caprice, or the different success of their ambition." De Retz, who was obviously in Turenne's mind when he published this effusion, chose to treat the mat- ter as a joke in a letter to Turenne which he describes as "sufficiently wanton, though upon so serious a sub- ject. It began with these words : ' It well becomes you, cursed Spaniard, to call us tribunes of the people '. The end of it was no less wanton. I bantered him upon account of a young wench in the street called Des-petits Champs, whom he loved with all his heart. The middle part was more solid, and took notice of our good intentions towards a peace." The King's forces had meanwhile been successful in Bordeaux, and before the middle of December Marshal du Plessis Praslin, with 16,000 men, besieged and took Rethel, a fortified town on the Aisne, in Ardennes, about eighty miles north-east of Paris and about thirty from the present frontier of Belgium. Turenne had left 1,300 men in Rethel, and when he heard that it was besieged he made forced marches for four days to succour it ; but he arrived too late as it had just capitulated. Contrary to the opinion of Napoleon, the M^moires du Mai'^chal du Plessis (p. 417) blame Turenne for not immediately attacking. They state that Du Plessis felt certain he would do so ; that there was a hill on Turenne's left, upon which he might have placed guns, and that Turenne's whole position would have had great advantages over that ot Du Plessis. i6So JEt. 39] RETHEL 143 The next day Turenne began to retire ; but in no extra hurry. Napoleon says: "Finding his object unattainable ... he ought to have marched at least seven leagues that day ; he would not, in that case, have been overtaken by the French army, or been compelled to give battle to a superior army. But he marched only four leagues ". Du Plessis, on the contrary, marched all day and during part of the night, and early on the following morning he arrived within a short distance of Turenne. The two armies were posted on the opposite sides of a valley. For some time a thick December fog prevented batt: , r • • , . . ^RETH either general irom ascertainmg the exact position 01 15th d the other, and made any movement dangerous. When it cleared, Turenne, who was largely outnumbered and therefore wished to avoid an action, moved on along the hillside ; while Du Plessis, who was anxious to force an action upon him, kept parallel with him on the opposite side of the valley. They marched thus, within cannon-shot of each other, for three miles ; and then, at twelve o'clock, Du Plessis, fearing lest Turenne might escape him, descended into the valley to attack him on its opposite side. His forces were double those of Turenne, although Du Plessis' memoirs assert that while he was very much stronger than Turenne in infantry he was weaker in cavalry ; but Turenne, observing that only a part of the infantry of Du Plessis had yet reached the plain, thought that by a rapid movement of his whole force against it he might over- whelm it before the remainder could come up to its 144 MARSHAL TURENNE [1650 support. With this hope, he accepted battle, descended into the plain, and charged the enemy with all his cavalry. To accomplish this, he attacked with what was, in proportion to his own numbers, a very extended front, which left him no men to form a reserve in support of his flanks. In these tactics he was probably acting upon a principle which he is said to have laid down in these words : " It is not always necessary to fight in two lines, with a corps de reserve ; for if the enemy be more numerous than you, and the ground open so that they may outflank you, care must be taken to extend your front (though you fight in one line) equal to the front of the enemy". We shall see presently what Napoleon thought on this subject. Turenne led his left with success, and his artillery fire with "cartouches" — some early form of canister or case-shot — was very effective ; but his right was broken by the Marquis d'Hocquincourt, who completely routed it, and then charged Turenne's flank just as that general was beginning to get the best of Du Plessis' right. After a long and sanguinary battle the troops of Turenne were utterly defeated. Although Du Plessis got the better of Turenne in this battle, he was very inferior to him as a general. Possibly Du Plessis may have been one of those whom Turenne had in his mind when he said : "A blockhead has sometimes perplexed me more than an able general ". Turenne himself was taken prisoner — a very serious i6so Mr. 39] RETHEL 145 matter, as he was liable to be executed for hieh treason! Happily, however, although his horse was shot in five places, he contrived to escape from his captors, killing some of them in a hand-to-hand fight. After many adventures, he reached Montm^dy and from thence he went to Bois-le-Duc, where he was able to rally about a quarter of his defeated troops. Then he returned to Stenay and the charming Madame de Longueville. Of this action Napoleon says : "WhenDu Plessis descended into the plain and drew up in line, Turenne might still have avoided the battle by accelerating his movement. He formed no reserve in the rear of his wings, which was the cause of his overthrow. When once broken, his cavalry could not rally : he would have had a better chance of success with a less ex- tended order of battle." As to Turenne's own opinion of the action, when asked by an indiscreet youth, long afterwards, how he happened to lose it, he only replied : "By my own fault!" Cardinal Mazarin was present at the capitulation ot Rethel, and he watched the retreat of Turenne from one of its church towers. He had brought up reinforcements to Du Plessis, which no doubt contri- buted to that general's victory ; but Mazarin, on this ground, very unjustly claimed all the glory of the victory over Turenne. Probably the temptation to a clergyman to represent himself as having overcome in battle the greatest general of the age was more than 10 146 MARSHAL TURENNE [1650 the not impeccable Mazarin had the moral courage to withstand. But, in addition to any desire that he may have entertained to shine as a conqueror, he had another object in view, in relation to the army, which is well described by Madame de Motteville. "Seeing that he was hated by the grandees of the kingdom, and by the people, he tried to preserve for himself the goodwill of the soldiery. His principle was to go to the army as often as he could, and always to carry money to it, taking care to provide the soldiers with all their little necessaries." CHAPTER XII. "Fortune," wrote Rochefoucauld, "so capriciously ruled the events of the battle of Rethel, that M. de Turenne, who had just lost it, became thereby neces- sary to the Spaniards and obtained the entire command of their army ; and, on the other hand, the cardinal, who claimed for himself all the glory of this action, renewed in every breast the disgust and fear of his ascendency." Even those members of the Old Fronde whom Mazarin had won to his side became alarmed at the increase of his power, and this alarm was intensified when a report was spread about that he was going to purchase the support of Conde, by making private terms with him, and liberating him, with his brother and Lono-ueville. Among- those most disturbed in mind was the coadjutor-bishop, not yet a cardinal, who was infuriated against Mazarin for refusing to recommend him for the cardinalate at Rome. Ramsay thus describes the unrest which then suc- ceeded. " Instantly all the coadjutor's turbulence rouses itself: he revives the cabals, excites the cardinal's enemies, and sets the intriguing Court ladies at work. The Princess Palatine treats with the F"rondeurs about 147 10 * 148 MARSHAL TURENNE [1651 the princes ; the Duchess of Montbazon is promised a hundred thousand crowns ; the Duchess of Chevreuse is flattered with the hopes of marrying her daughter to the Prince of Conti ; and, lastly, the Prelate brings over the Duke of Orleans, the Parliament and the people, and prevails with them to demand unani- mously the destruction of the Prime Minister, jointly with the delivery of the princes." On hearingr of this, Mazarin took fright and left Paris. Shortly afterwards the Queen determined to go after him ; but all the gates of Paris were guarded, and she found herself practically a prisoner in the Palais Royal. The surveillance kept over her by order of the Duke of Orleans was so strict and so annoying, that, according to Omer Talon, neither she nor the little King went outside the Palais Royal from the loth of February till the 7th of March. The aristocratic Frondeurs now publicly insulted men of their own position who were known to be loyal to the Queen. A party of noblemen, attached to the Court, were having supper in a garden, when Beaufort, who was followed by a strong body of his friends, all armed, came in, went up to their table, and seizing one corner of the table-cloth, pulled it until all the plates and dishes fell upon their laps, bespattering their fine clothes with sauces and gravy ; a very sad affair if they were wearing the sky-blue or primrose-coloured satin breeches, trimmed with lace, which are to be seen in the pictures of that period. As to the Parisian mob, it did not even respect ladies connected with the i65i ^T. 40] OBLIVION AND PARDON 149 Court. Madame de Motteville and her sister were chased down the Rue St. Honore ; and when they went for refuge into the Church" of St. Roch and knelt before the high altar, although high mass was being sung there, the howling crowd followed them and surrounded them, calling them Mazarines and declaring that they ought to be killed. It was with difficulty that the cure was able to rescue the ladies from the hands of the mob, by a private door. Such pressure was put upon the Queen that she was obliged to consent to the liberation of the princes without consulting Mazarin. But news of her consent was privately conveyed to him, and he instantly set out for Havre, where the princes were at that time im- prisoned, with the object of liberating them himself, hoping by that means to win their gratitude and favour. In this hope he was totally disappointed, although, says Mademoiselle de Montpensier, he went so far as to kiss Conde's boot ; and he found it prudent to leave France and retire to a place near Cologne, while the three princes went in triumph to Paris. In the spring of 165 1 the Queen made an "act of oblivion and general pardon, with regard to all who took up arms for the three princes ". The Crown tried to obtain popularity by distributing dukedoms and other titles, and it awarded "lands and lordships, with all their appurtenances, dependencies, and appendages to the Duke of Bouillon". Turenne, also, was to be pardoned and to be welcomed to Paris. But he felt that he could not, "with any decency, leave the ISO MARSHAL TURENNE [1651 Spaniards," until "France had offered Spain such conditions of peace as were just and reasonable". Conditions of such a nature Turenne succeeded in persuading the Court to offer to Spain ; but, instead of accepting them, Spain, on her own part, was so unjust and so unreasonable that Turenne, feeling he had done all that in honour could be expected of him for the Spaniards, thanked them for the help they had given him in his recent battles, bid them farewell and went to the French Court, at which he was cordially welcomed. Everybody was to be forgiven and there was to be peace for evermore. The Queen was to welcome her recent rebels in person. Madame de Motteville was an eyewitness of these gracious receptions. The Duke of Longueville "did not have the boldness to speak at all. He turned pale, then red, and that was the whole of his harangue." As to his wife's reception, "the whole visit, so stiffly carried on, only served to increase the Queen's resentment against the princess," and "confirmed Madame de Longueville in the evil inten- tions she retained in her heart against the Queen". When the Duke of Chevreuse, who was eighty years old and very deaf told the Oueen that his daughter had improved in beauty, she "shouted with all her might that he had too much love for beauty and that he ought to begin to love heaven and virtue." When he asked permission for his wife to remain in Paris, the Queen replied "that she could not allow her to remain in a city still full of rebellion ". The Queen received Turenne's brother "rather coldly". When 1651 ^T. 40] SHORTLIVED LOYALTY 151 the Duke of Beaufort had arrived in Paris, he "fell ill of so violent a colic" that he imagined he had been purposely poisoned. The disloyal people of Paris went to gaze upon their hero in his agony, "and the crowd was so great that it was necessary to open all the doors of his chamber, raise the curtains of his bed, and expose him to the sight of the populace. This great concourse, and the flattery of a few friends, made him finally irreconcilable." The hitherto loyal Conde, on the other hand, was listenino; to the sugrgrestions of his sister and his family that he should enter into "their schemes for the purpose of making himself master of the Court, instead of being, as they said he was, the cardinal's valet ". A peace of this kind, forgiveness of this kind, and loyalty of this kind, was not likely to be very lasting. Conde, who never lost an opportunity of increasing his own power and properties, least of all by want of asking, suggested to Turenne that now was his oppor- tunity also for asking favours from the Court; but Turenne replied that the only favour he desired was that his troops should have comfortable quarters. Turenne, indeed, never asked favours for himself, or was fond of asking them for others. When those serving him did their duty he was pleased ; but he did not invariably place the same value upon their services that they did ; and he was diametrically opposed to that — to use a word of modern slang — "teapotting" spirit which gives honours and rewards for simple fulfilments of duty. " Improving with pleasure," says St. Evre- 152 MARSHAL TURENNE [1651 mond, " the merits of the most submissive, he looks with displeasure on those industrious persons who endeavour to gain a reputation under him, and to be raised by the Ministry." The Queen, being afraid that the projected marri- age between the Prince of Conti ^ and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse might increase the power of the Fronde, persuaded Conti's brother, the Prince of Conde, by bribing him with the government of Guienne, to have the engagement broken off This infuriated De Retz, who was a great friend of Madame de Chevreuse, a lady described by Madame de Montbazon as "an old woman more mischievous than the devil," with a daughter "yet sillier in proportion " ; and he bitterly accused Conde of breaking his promise. "The Queen, who hated them both," says Ramsay, "hoped that their feuds and divisions would prove their mutual ruin." Conde now aspired to step into the place of Mazarin and, like him, to act as sole counsellor to the King. The Queen, who was longing to get Mazarin restored to power, refused with horror an offer of Hocquin- court's to assassinate Conde, and consulted De Retz, who advised the milder measure of putting a stop to his pretensions by arresting him a second time. ^ Of the Prince of Conti De Retz says : " This head of a party was a cypher that only multiplied because he was a prince of the blood. As for his private character, malice did in him what weakness did in the Duke of Orleans. It drowned all the other qualities, which besides were but mean, and had all of them a mixture too of weakness." 1651 ^T. 40] INTRIGUES 153 Conde heard of this sinister advice, withdrew frum Paris in the greatest indignation, and determined to make himself master of the Court and the King's person by force of arms. To this end he negotiated with the Spaniards, and tried to obtain the support of all the dukes who had joined the Fronde. Some of the latter did not rally to his assistance very readily, and, at the head of some raw levies, he was discouraged by receiving a check from the troops of Hocquincourt. Then he tried to come to terms with the Queen and even went so far as to give her a promise to offer no opposition to the return of the cardinal. The Queen then made a cat's paw of Conde, by seizing this oppor- tunity as an excuse to recall Mazarin ; but, shortly after getting her way on this point, she broke off her negotia- tions with the prince. Although there was nominally peace, many of the aristocratic Frondeurs were intriguing and caballing; and, between these and the Court party, others were hesitating or wavering. Some of the late leaders of the Fronde were in favour of making a real and lasting reconciliation, or, as it was then termed, "accommoda- tion," with the Court, and those who desired the con- trary were much divided in opinion as to the most judicious course to be followed. It may be sufficient to quote De Retz's observations that " M. de Bouillon, who was in no manner pleased either with the prince or with the Court, did not help to fix the resolutions of the party" — the New Fronde — "because the difficulty of keeping fair with both sides confounded at noon the 154 MARSHAL TURENNE [1651 views he had had two hours before, either for or against an accommodation. M. de Turenne, who was not better pleased with either side than his brother, was not so decisive in state affairs as in war." As for Turenne's friend, Madame de Longueville, she "was sometimes for an accommodation because La Roche- foucauld desired it ; at other times she was for a rupture because it would keep her from her husband, whom she never loved". Direct contemporary evidence is always worthy of consideration, and De Retz shall now be called in as a witness concerning an obscure action of Turenne's. Upon the credibility of De Retz, who is often quoted in these pages rather as a gossip than as a witness, no opinion shall be expressed. " Immediately after the prince's [Conde's] leaving Paris and going to St. Maur, Messieurs de Bouillon and De Turenne waited upon his Highness there, offering him their service publicly, and in the same manner with those that seemed the most deeply en- gaged with him. The prince has told me since, that the day before he left St. Maur to go to Trie, after which he returned no more to Court, Mr. de Turenne was still so positive in promising to serve him, that he even accepted of a writing signed with his own hand, whereby the prince ordered La Moussaye, who governed for him in Stenay, to put that place into Mr. de Turenne's hands ; and that the first news he [Conde] heard of him [Turenne] afterwards, was that he was going to command the King's army. I must desire i6si ^T. 40] HISTORICAL MYSTERIES 155 you to observe that of all the men whom I have known, the prince was the least capable of a premeditated im- posture. I never durst bring Mr. de Turenne to ex- plain me this to the bottom ; but what I could indirectly draw out of him is, that as soon as the prince was set at liberty, he had all imaginable reasons to be ill pleased with his manner of proceeding in respect to him : that he [Conde] preferred before him, in everything and in all manner of ways, Mr. de Nemours, who came not nigh to him in merit, and who besides had not rendered him near so many services, for which reason he thought himself free from his first engagements to him. I must likewise desire you to observe that I never knew any- body less capable of a base thing than Mr. de Turenne. Let us therefore once more acknowledge that there are points in history inconceivable even to those that have been nearest to the facts." When Turenne and Bouillon, says De Retz, "had left the prince's party, they lived very retired in Paris, and except their particular friends, they were seen by few persons ". De Retz was one of these and he tried to gain them over to the interests of the Duke of Orleans ; but Turenne's utter contempt for Orleans, and the dislike of Orleans to Bouillon, stood much in the way of such an arrangement. Meanwhile an emissary named Berthet was sent to Paris for the express purpose of winning Turenne and Bouillon to the interests of Mazarin. Their meet- ing was to be managed by the Princess Palatine, of whom De Retz once said he did "not believe that 1 56 MARSHAL TURENNE [1651 Queen Elizabeth of England had greater capacity than she ". The princess invited Turenne, Bouillon and De Retz to "her house betwixt twelve and one at night, where," says De Retz, " she presented Berthet to us, who . . . told us that the Queen, who was resolved to recall the cardinal, was unwilling to execute her resolution with- out hearing what we had to say to it. Mr. de Bouillon, who swore to me an hour after in the presence of the Princess Palatine that he had not to that day received any proposals from the Court, at least in form, seemed to me embarrassed ; but he got off in his usual manner, that is, as a man that knew better than anybody 1 have ever seen how to speak the most when he said the least. Mr. de Turenne, who was more laconic, and in truth much more frank, turned towards me and said : ' I believe that Mr. Berthet pulls by the sleeve all those he meets in the streets, to ask their opinion about the return of the cardinal, for I do not see any more reason to ask it of my brother and me, than of all those who have passed this day over the Pontneuf '. . . . Nothing was more ridiculous than to see a little insignificant fellow . . . take it upon him to persuade two of the greatest men in the world to commit the greatest piece of folly imaginable, which was to declare for the Court, before they had taken any measures there. They would not therefore hearken to what Berthet said to them at that time, but they entered soon after into sure measures with the Court. Mr. de Turenne had the promise of commanding the armies, and Mr. de 1652 JET. 41] ESCAPES ARREST 157 Bouillon had assurances given him of the immense recompense which he has since had in lieu of Sedan." When the Duke of Orleans, who was one of the leaders of the New Fronde, heard that Turenne and Bouillon were about to leave Paris to serve the King, he gave orders, as Governor of Paris, that they should both be arrested, and he told De Retz what he was doing. Although De Retz was of the Duke of Orleans' party and Turenne had now become a political enemy, De Retz still had a regard for him as a personal friend ; and he saved both Turenne and Bouillon from arrest by contriving to delay the execution of the order and by giving them immediate warning. In 1652 Turenne and Bouillon were loyal to the King and in favour both with the Queen and with Mazarin, who had now returned to the French Court, in defiance of the offer by the French Parliament of 50,000 crowns for his head. The cardinal once more acted as supreme ruler in France; but Louis XIV., although only fourteen years old, had come of age and nominally enjoyed the full powers of a reigning monarch. The King's army was placed under the command of Turenne, in conjunction with the Marquis oi Hoc- quincourt ; for Mazarin would not trust it entirely to Turenne after his recent disloyalty. Its total strength, including a force of 5,000 men brought from Cham- pagne by Mazarin, did not exceed 9,000, the greater proportion of which was cavalry. The soldiers of 158 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 the different contingents were distinguished by their scarves : the King's own troops wore white scarves and the levies recruited by Mazarin wore green scarves, while their enemies, the troops of Conde, wore scarves of a pale brownish colour, known by the name of Isabel/ The royal army, the Court, and Mazarin were at Poictiers, nearly 200 miles to the south-west of Paris, while the army of the Fronde, which numbered 14,000, was stationed between Montargisand the Loire, under the Duke of Beaufort, and Beaufort's brother-in- law, the Duke of Nemours. Cond^ had gone to the borders of Spain to negotiate with the Spaniards and to raise followers in Guienne. Mazarin wished to remove the Court to Gien, a town about forty miles to the east of Orleans. For this purpose both Court and army went to Tours and up the Loire, where they were received into every city, except Orleans, with open gates. Beaufort formed a plan for crossing the Loire, by the bridge of Jargeau,^ a few miles to the east of Or- leans, and seizing the person of the King, as well as 1 Not long before the time of which we are writing, the Spaniards were besieging Ostend, and the Archduchess Isabel, wishing to encourage the troops, and thinking that the city would almost immediately surrender, made a vow not to change her linen until she entered it. The siege lasted three years longer and mean- while her linen, as might indeed be expected, lost its whiteness. To comfort her, her ladies-in-waiting had their linen dyed to match hers, and called the colour Isabel. ^ It was at Jargeau that Joan of Arc's troops took Suffolk prisoner, shortly after the siege of Orleans. i652 ^T. 41] GERGEAU 159 those of the Queen and the cardinal, as they passed along the road towards Gien. This plot would prob- ably have succeeded had not Turenne, suspicious of this bridge, ridden hurriedly to it, with a couple of hundred horse and, with that small force, stopped four regiments of Beaufort's cavalry as they were in the act of crossing it. Hastily forming a barricade on the south side of the bridge, Turenne held the position against almost overwhelming numbers for about a couple of hours, when his own troops came to his rescue. His defence was the more meritorious be- cause, as he himself says, "the enemy's cannon all the while annoyed us very much ". In a letter immedi- ately afterwards Turenne modestly wrote in a post- script : " Something has happened at Gergeau, but 'tis of no great consequence ". The Queen, however, said in the presence of the whole Court that Turenne "had saved the kingdom," when that "something hap- pened ". A peculiar condition in the rival armies, at this time, was that on neither side were the grenerals on good terms with each other. Hocquincourt was jealous of Turenne on the one side, and Beaufort and Nemours were actually quarrelling on the other. Whether Turenne was enabled to foster this quarrel does not appear ; but one of the maxims attributed to him is : " If you have to do with a confederate army, endeavour to break down the confederacy by raising discord and jealousy amongst their generals ". It was the month of April, and it was impossible i6o MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 to find provender for the horses at Gien. The King's army, therefore, leaving the Court at Gien, moved a little to the west, Turenne going to Briare and Hocquincourt to Bl^neau, both keeping only their infantry with them, and allowing their cavalry to disperse in search of forage. One day Turenne went to dine with Hocquin- court, and, having observed the disposition of his men, told him "that he thought them very much exposed, and therefore advised him to contract them ". Hoc- quincourt was annoyed at being offered advice by Turenne, and did not act upon it. Having returned to his own quarters at Briare, Turenne heard, the next evening, that the rebel army had attacked Hocquincourt's camp and routed it. Without losing a moment, Turenne ordered his in- fantry to prepare to start at once to the relief of Hoc- quincourt, and he sent officers to bring on the cavalry, which was foracrin^ in the neighbourino- villages. This time he had not allowed any of his horse to wander more than three miles away in search of provender. He marched without a guide, although the night was very dark. Presently he saw flames rising in the distance, in the direction of Hocquin- court's camp. There was no longer any doubt about Hocquincourt's disaster, and Turenne, well aware of the feebleness of both Beaufort and Nemours, quietly remarked that the Prince of Cond6 must have ar- rived. This turned out to be true. Cond6, having heard i6S2 ^T. 41] BL^NEAU 161 of the quarrelling between Beaufort and Nemours, had secretly left Guienne, accompanied only by his son and Rochefoucauld, and had ridden some two hundred miles, past hostile fortresses, through hostile cities, and right across a hostile country. After extraordinary ad- ventures and, as Napoleon says, "after escaping a thou- sand dangers," he had reached Beaufort's army, just in time to take advantage of Hocquincourt's careless dis- position of his troops, at Bleneau, where he put him to flight and sacked his camp. By this victory, with his great superiority in numbers, Conde had every hope of seizing not only the person of the young King, but also that of his hated enemy, Mazarin. Perceivino- that their commander was advancingr against Conde, Turenne's generals pointed out the dangers of proceeding against an enemy largely out- numbering him and flushed with victory ; and they urged him to retire upon Gien, for the protection of the Kino;- and the Court. But, the evenino- before, Turenne had noticed an advantageous position, which he determined to occupy, and, in spite of their remon- strances, he went on silently and deep in thought. "Never," he afterwards said, "did such a multitude of dreadful things crowd into the imagination of one man, as filled mine at that time. I had not lone been O on good terms with the Court ; and had but lately received command of the army which was to defend it. That man who has distinguished himself ever so little is sure of being envied, and of raising enemies. Some I had, who declared in all places that I still II i62 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 carried on a secret correspondence with the prince [Conde]. The cardinal did not believe it ; but he, per- haps, the very first misfortune which should have befallen me, would have entertained the same suspicion. Besides, I knew Marshall d'Hocquincourt, who would certainly have said that I exposed him, and [that I had] not brought him the least succour. These were very troublesome thoughts, and the worst of all was, the prince was ad- vancing towards me, victorious and with a superior force. "^ Turenne had good reason for thinking that Hoc- quincourt would say that he exposed him and brought him no succour if he did not o-o to his assistance. In spite of all, as will now be seen, that Turenne did to help him, two years later St. Evremond heard him say : " I remember well that Turenne suffered me to be beaten by the Prince of Conde [at Bleneau] when the Court was at Gien ; perhaps I may find an opportunity to be even with him".^ Turenne's army of 4,000 men, and Condi's army of 14,000, passed each other during the night with- out being aware of it ; but, in the morning, they both discovered their propinquity by the sound of each other's drums and bugles. Turenne, however, had reached his desired position. He had in front of him a narrow defile, with a wood on the right, and a lake and a bog on the left. Immediately opposite this defile ' Histoire d' Heiu-i dc la Tour d'Auveriie, torn, ii,, pp. 204, 205. ^ Works of St. Evremond, vol, i., p. 182. i6S3 Mt. 41] A TRAP 163 he concealed a strong battery of guns. Contrary to the advice of his staff, Turenne did not place any infantry in the wood, because he feared that, if he did so, Conde's infantry might attack them and bring on a general engagement, in which, with his inferior numbers, he would certainly have been beaten. Meanwhile, Conde was advancing towards this narrow passage, which lay on his direct road to Gien. Having drawn up his troops about a musket-shot from the wood, Turenne rode through the defile with ten squadrons and, as soon as Cond^ could see him, he led his men back again, as if retreating in alarm. Conde was not to be so easily deceived, especially when he observed Turenne's forces stationary on reaching the opposite end of the pass ; and he halted and hesitated for some time at his own end of it. In order to induce Conde to advance, Turenne then turned away from the defile with his troops, as if in- tending to retreat. On seeing this, Conde sent fifteen or twenty squadrons into it. As soon as some of these squadrons had got through it, Turenne wheeled about and attacked them with his whole force, causing them to hurry back into the narrow passage in con- fusion. At the moment when the defile was thus over- crowded, Turenne unmasked his battery of artillery, which "did dreadful execution on the enemy, who, in their hurry, trod down each other in heaps," as the Duke of York describes it. In the evening Hocquin- court joined Turenne with such forces as he had rallied pr saved out of his army. II i64 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 Then, says Turenne, in his Memoirs, "both armies stood looking at each other till night, and afterwards retired on both sides, the King's army to Briare, and that of the Prince to Chatillon. . . . Some days after- wards, the Prince departed from Chatillon ; his army made the best of its way to Montargis, and he himself went to Paris, where he thought his presence was necessary." It was indeed urgently needed there. During his consequent absence from his army, he left it under the command of General Tavannes. Napoleon praises Turenne for his execution of this "able and successful manoeuvre to impose on Conde" — not for underta.king the manoeuvre. Napoleon points out that Turenne had no intention of maintaining his position, which is proved by his stationing his army in a situation for easy retreat, and by his having care- fully avoided the temptation to place any of his infantry in the wood. It is true that musketeers concealed under its cover could have slaughtered Condi's cavalry as it passed through the defile ; but the consequence might have been a general action, in which Turenne, with his inferior numbers, would inevitably have been defeated. "When once an affair has commenced par- tially," says Napoleon, "it gradually becomes general." Turenne, continues Napoleon, "kept his troops to- gether, sufficiently near the defile to render its passage dangerous to the prince, and to annoy him by a fire of a battery planted so as to play through the whole length of the defile, but sufficiently removed to prevent the compromising of any part of his force. This circum- i6S2 JEt. 41] CRITICISMS 165 stance may appear trifling, but it is one of those trifles which are the indications of military genius." Much as Napoleon praises Turenne's tactics in this affair, and while fully admitting his "talent and pru- dence" in the execution of the "delicate manoeuvre," he blames his strategy. In short, he maintains that the manoeuvre ought not to have been undertaken at all. "As soon as Turenne had mustered his cavalry, he should have retired towards St. Fareeau and not have returned and marched forward until after his junction with Marshal d'Hocquincourt." The posi- tion had been as follows : Conde had been in the north and had advanced towards the south, upon Bleneau. Bleneau, Briare and St. Fargeau form a triancrle, Bleneau beincr in the north, Briare in the south-west, and St. Fargeau in the south-east, the sides of the triangle varying from ten to fifteen miles in length. "The rules of war," says Napoleon, "require a division of an army to avoid engaging alone a whole army, which has already obtained victories. It is risk- ing a total and irretrievable overthrow ; the Prince of Conde had above 12,000 men, and Turenne only 4,000." Again, he says: "The rendezvous for the two armies in quarters was fixed too near the enemy : this was an error; the point of junction for an army, in case of surprise, should always be fixed in the rear, so that the troops may reach it from all the cantonments before the enemy. On this principle, it should have been fixed between Briare and St. Fargeau." It wiJ] i66 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 be remembered that Napoleon made a somewhat similar criticism of Turenne's selection of a rendezvous for his cavalry before the battle of Marienthal/ Voltaire, however, says that it is difficult to decide which general deserved most praise, Cond6 for his victory at Bleneau, or Turenne for robbing him of the fruits of it ; but, says he, if Conde had not been checked by Turenne, he would probably have captured the King, Mazarin and the whole Court. De Retz also divides his praises. He says that "they both did what the two best generals in the world would have done ! " Napoleon, on the contrary, finds fault with each of them. We have already seen his criticism of Turenne's strategy, and he says that Conde "did not display in this campaign, the daring spirit which distinguished the general of Freiburg and Nordlingen ; he ought not to have suffered himself to be overawed at Bleneau by demonstrations ; even when united, the two royal armies were inferior to his ; he ought to have been convinced, as by demonstration, that there could not be any considerable force before him ; he contented himself with an insignificant advantage, and stopped short at preliminaries, without pushing his enterprise to a conclusion. With a litde of his habitual daring, he must have obtained the last favours of fortune : he neglected to gather the fruits of his own calculations, and of Marshal d'Hocquincourt's error." 1 See chapter vii. CHAPTER XIII. The task of a general is infinitely increased when, in addition to the ordinary duties of a campaign, he has to protect a Court, including the person of a King driven out of his own capital, wandering aimlessly and unwelcome among his own dominions, and per- petually shadowed by an enemy consisting of his own subjects. And a yet further and very serious addition is made to these increased difficulties when the general wishes one thing and the Court another. Turenne sometimes found it little, if at all, easier to drive the Court than to drive the enemy where he desired. Eventually, however, by making a long detour to the east, with Turenne's and Hocquincourt's armies be- tween it and the rebel army, the Court reached St. Ger mains. Tavannes then established his forces at Etampes, a town about twenty-five miles south of Paris, and Turenne and Hocquincourt made their headquarters at Chartres, about thirty miles to the west of Etampes. Chartres and Etampes lie in the richest corn-growing district of France ; and Chartres, which is a very much larger town than Etampes, is one of the principal French corn markets. The rebels fortified Etampes, 167 i68 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 for it was an important position to them, as it lay on the direct road from Paris to Orleans. The Duke of Orleans had now joined the Fronde, and it had been suggested to him, some little time before the Court passed Orleans, that he should go to that city and enlist the services of its citizens. The cowardly Duke refused to go there himself, as the disposition of the inhabitants seemed rather doubtful ; but he gladly sent his much more courageous daughter. We may be introduced to that young lady by Madame de Motteville, who says : " She had beauty, intelli- gence, wealth, virtue, and royal birth. . . . Her beauty, however, was not without its defects ; and her mind was not always in a condition to please. Her vivacity deprived her actions of the dignity desirable in a personage of her high position, and she was too readily carried away by her emotions." Pitiable was the position of the authorities in the city of Orleans ! A representative of the King had appeared at one of its gates and demanded admittance for some of Turenne's troops which were on their way thither ; and while the functionaries were in the act of pondering about a reply, they were informed that an emissary was demanding admittance at a gate on the opposite side of the city. There they found the Duke of Orleans' daughter, clad in armour, with many other Amazons attired like herself, accompanied by the Duke of Rohan, several members of Parliament, and a band of gay young men from Paris. This picturesque force was as imposing as it was brilliant, but it savoured some- hL\J}F.M01SELUu, i6S2 yET. 41] AMAZONS 169 what of comic opera, and the rulers of Orleans would necessarily reflect that, insignificant in comparison as were the King's representatives at the other gate, so far as appearances were concerned, they would soon be followed by much more able-bodied warriors than this second Maid of Orleans, her pretty companions, and her troop of boys and politicians. Unable to decide between loyalty to the lord of their city and province on the one side, and loyalty to the King of their country on the other, they determined to be neutral and refused admittance to the representatives of both. Later in the day they were quietly congratulating each other upon their prudence, by which they imagined that they had insured themselves against all clanger of Mazarin's much-dreaded resentment, when news was brought to them that Mademoiselle de Montpensier was in the middle of their city, haranguing a crowd of her father's subjects and demanding their own immedi- ate presence and loyal homage. Mademoiselle, by dint of persuasion and bribes, had induced some boatmen to get her into the town ; and they had succeeded in doing so by rowing her across the river and breaking down a disused doorway in the walls, through which they gave her entrance. Con- cerning the negotiations, demurrings, upbraidings, waverings and consultations which followed, ending in the triumph of one bold-faced but half-frightened girl over a whole pack of both military and civic authorities, the reader must be referred to the entertaining pages of Mademoiselle de Montpensier herself To complete 170 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 the comedy, Turenne's troops did not attack Orleans after all, but left that city, its authorities, and its Mademoiselle severely alone. Turenne strongly advised the King to enter Paris with his army ; but, for purely personal reasons, Mazarin would not hear of it, because he knew himself to be so hated by the Parisians that he feared for his own safety. Meanwhile, Mazarin was secretly, and as it turned out ineffectually, trying to negotiate terms with Conde. De Retz, now like Mazarin a cardinal, although nominally an ally of Conde, was endeavouring to get him out of favour with the Duke of Orleans as industriously as the Duke of Orleans' daughter. Mademoiselle de Montpensier^ was endeavouring to get him into it. The reason of this was that De Retz wished Orleans to place the government in his own hands instead of in those of Cond6, while Mademoiselle was now in love with Conde, whom she had formerly hated, and hoped to marry him whenever his very excellent but very delicate wife should die. OPERA- When Turenne was contriving an attack upon TIONS '* BEFORE Etampes, Mademoiselle de Montpensier was about to return from Orleans to Paris, and, to do this, she would have to pass not only through the rebel army at Etampes, but also through the region held by the royal army, as Turenne had posted some troops between Etampes and Paris. She therefore sent a trumpeter from Etampes to Turenne, with a request for a pass, which, after some delay, he granted to her. Nor was this all ; for he expressed a hope that she would Etampes Mav, 16=52. 1652 JET. 41] liTAMPES 171 pay him a visit, on her way, and inspect his troops. During the delay just mentioned. Mademoiselle says she amused herself by stopping all the couriers, taking their letters, opening and reading them; "for I had realh^ nothing^ else to do. Some I found charged with despatches, others with family matters or love- letters, ridiculous enough. . . . When they were of no advantage to my own party, I turned them into a source of merriment." Turenne happened to hear that Tavannes' men had not been foraging during Mademoiselle's visit, probably as he thought, because there had been in- spections and reviews for her entertainment, and he believed that, as soon as she left Etampes, his enemy would find it necessary to send out foragers on an un- usually large scale to make up for lost time. He also expected that the principal officers would accompany her during the first part of her journey towards Paris. Thinking-, therefore, that a large number of Tavannes' soldiers would be absent for foraging purposes, and that many of their officers would be away, as a guard of honour to Mademoiselle, on the morning of her departure, Turenne and Hocquincourt agreed that it would be a favourable moment for an attack. They proposed to make a long night-march by a considerable detour to intercept the foragers, and to enter and take possession of the comparatively defenceless city in their absence. Unfortunately, when, after a very wearisome but admirably conducted night-march, Turenne and 172 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 Hocquincourt arrived at the critical spot exactly at the critical moment, there were no foragers to intercept. On the contrary, Tavannes' troops were all drawn up under arms, on the plain outside the city, for an inspec- tion by Mademoiselle, who was just then driving away from them and from Etampes, on her way to Paris. Great as was the surprise of Turenne at finding the rebel army drawn up under arms, the surprise of Tavannes at the unexpected appearance of the royal army was even greater, and he hurried his men back into Etampes so vigorously that they fell into some confusion. Of this confusion Turenne and Hocquin- court determined to take advantage, and they attacked the enemy's troops as they were passing through the suburbs. The rebels made a gallant defence, and the battle was long and obstinate ; but eventually the King's troops forced their way into the suburbs, entirely de- feating, says Turenne, after a fight of three hours, "nine regiments of infantry, and four or five squadrons of cavalry," taking "2,000 prisoners, and a great number of officers ". The King's army, says the Duke of York, lost 500 men. Brilliant as was the action of the royal troops in this affair, Etampes was not taken ; in fact the town itself was not ev^n entered ; the royal army was withdrawn to Etrechy, a place about three miles off, and the next day it returned to Chartres. Hocquincourt was now sent to take command of the King's army in Flanders, and Turenne was left in sole command of the army in France. He removed it i652 yET. 41] ST. DENIS 173 from Chartres to Paliseau, a town about eicrhteen miles to the north of Etampes, so as to cut off all com- munication between the rebel army and Paris. He also sent some cavalry, for the protection of the Court at St. Germains, and he took possession of St. Denis, then iully four miles distant from the northern walls of Paris. Here he left a garrison, and we shall hear acjain of this fortress before lon^.^ Turenne then moved to the South, to lay siege to 1 Turenne was buried at St. Denis. It is remarkable that, during the French Revolution, in 1792, the tombs of three celebrated men who had been so much associated in life — Turenne, Richelieu and Mazarin — should have been defaced at the same time. Again, in 1793, says AUson {History, vol. iii., chap, xiv.), " a furious multitude, headed by the revolutionary army, pre- cipitated itself out of Paris ; the tombs of Henry IV., of Francis I., and of Louis XII., were ransacked, and their bones scattered in the air. Even the glorious name of Turenne could not protect his grave from spoliation." The bodies of " kings, queens and heroes were thrown into a vast trench and destroyed by quicklime. The body of Du Guesclin was lost in this way. That of Turenne alone escaped, not from any reverence for his memory, but from the fortunate circumstance that, after it had been ordered to be thrown into the common tomb, two of the officers of the Museum of Natural History requested to have it, as being ' a vitW-preserved mummy ^ which might be of service to the science of comparative anatomy. It was delivered to them accordingly, and carried to the Jardin des Plantes, where it lay for nine years in a storehouse be- tween the skeletons of a monkey and a camel. In 1802, however. Napoleon heard of the circumstance, and had the body of the illustrious warrior removed to the church of the Invalides, where it now reposes beside his own mortal remains." During the French Revolution his body, so little altered as to be recognisable from his portraits, had been exposed in a glass case for the amusement of the populace. 174 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 Etampes, with 6,000 foot and 4,000 horse, against the enemy's 4,000 foot and 3,000 horse. Unfortunately he was lamentably short of the "tools and warlike stores" necessary for a siege, and, as a result, his "line of contravallation " proceeded very slowly. The enemy made frequent sallies to interrupt it, and there was a great deal of fighting and much loss of life on either side. The details of the siege of Etampes are fully de- scribed in the Memoirs of the Duke of York, which were handed by him to Turenne's nephew. Cardinal de Bouillon, and also in the Life of James II., written from King James's own manuscripts and diaries. James, Duke of York, had taken service under Turenne, at the age of nineteen, a few weeks before the first attack upon Etampes. Turenne "gav^ him a reception suitable to his birth ; and endeavoured, by all possible proofs of affection, to soften the remem- brance of his misfortunes ". A little later in the campaign, Turenne employed the Duke ot York to write despatches from the front to his brother, the Duke of Bouillon. And, as a substitute for his own defects of vision, Turenne frequently kept the Duke at his side, "to observe as exactly as he could and inform him what the enemy were doing ". Turenne is reported by Burnet^ — no friend of the Duke of York — to have said of him that he "was the greatest prince and like to be the best general of his time". In one of the attacks during the siege of Etampes, Turenne's own regiment specially distinguished itself ' History of His Own Times, vol. i., p. 168, DUKE OF SCHOMBERG. i652 ^T. 41] :^TAMPES 175 His captains, says the Duke of York, took the colours in their hands and marched with them at the head of their men, till they "came up to push of pike," and he adds that Turenne was of opinion that it would have been impossible for the men to have done so much if their colours had not been always before their eyes. "And this," says he, "was what partly determined the regiments afterwards to procure new colours, the old corps, as well as the rest, having till then through a mistaken glory, affected to have their colours so tattered and ragged, that oftentimes there was nothing left but the staff" Besides the Duke of York, another foreigner, who had volunteered, was serving under Turenne. This was Count Schomberg, "who was wounded before Etampes while standing beside the Duke of York. Although then allies, these two men were to meet again on opposite sides, nearly forty years later, at the battle of the Boyne, in which James 1 1, was defeated and Schomberg, though victorious, was killed. Just as Turenne had half finished undermining a portion of the wall of Etampes, and had a reasonable hope of taking the town in a few days, his operations before it had to be given up altogether. Some little time before the siege of Etampes, the Duke of Lorraine had assured Mazarin that, if allowed to raise troops in Lorraine, he would hasten with them to join them to the army under Turenne. Pleased by this promise, Mazarin had ordered Marshal de la Ferte, the Governor of Lorraine, to give the Duke the privilege of levying troops, and to furnish him with whatever 176 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 provisions he might require for his march. With 10,000 men the Duke of Lorraine then marched towards Paris, being permitted to forage as he passed through France. When Lorraine, with his army, was within a few miles of Paris, it was discovered that, instead of going to the assistance of the King's army, as he had promised, he was in reality going to join his forces with the army of the rebels. As a matter of fact, before he had made his promises to Mazarin, he had been already hired by Spain to proceed against the army of the King of France. He afterwards admitted that he had very nearly thrown over the Spaniards, in their turn, as he came near Paris. Mademoiselle de Montpensier rode out to inspect his troops. "The cavalry were very fine," she says ; " but the infantry nothing to speak of There were among- them some Irish, who in general have nothing to recommend them but their bag-pipes." Pos- sibly Mademoiselle may have confused the Irish with another Celtic nation. News was presently brought to Turenne that Lorraine was on his way to attack him. If Turenne had remained at Etampes he would soon have found himself between the armies of Tavannes and Lorraine ; therefore he raised the siege of Etampes, and hurried northwards to meet Lorraine. So few horses had he that he was obliged to send to St. Germains to beg for every available remount. The courtiers and the King and the Queen-Mother sent him their private carriage horses ; and, even with all these, he had to take some of his guns on first, and then send back the horses i652 ^T. 41] VILLENEUVE ST. GEORGES 177 which had dragged them to bring on those still re- maining behind. Lorraine, he heard, was at Villeneuve St. Georges, a town near the Seine, rather more than twenty miles north-north-east of Etampes, and nine or ten miles from Paris ; and he was very anxious to fight a decisive battle with Lorraine before Tavannes could join forces with him. To this end, Turenne marched as quickly as he could ; but a small river, which runs into the Seine, being in his way, when he was almost within sight of Lorraine's camp, he had to make a night-march to get within fighting range of his enemy, a position which he succeeded in attaining at daybreak on the 15th of June. As Lorraine "expected every moment the arrival of the [rebel] army from Etampes, he flattered himself with the hopes of amusing the Viscount by negotia- tions " ; ^ thinking it wiser to refuse battle until the junction of the two armies should make victory a certainty. While he had been still pretending to be on his way to help Turenne, Lorraine had succeeded in getting the yet uncrowned Charles II. of England into his camp, and he now sent word to Turenne that Charles would negotiate terms of peace if his brother, the Duke of York, would come over to his camp for an interview with him. To this Turenne consented and negotiations were opened. Charles felt in a very awkward position. He had just been at the French Court, and although we learn from Madame de Motteville that "the King and he behaved together ^ Ramsay. 12 178 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 like young" princes who felt embarrassed by each other's presence"; he was under the protection of the King ; but he was under pecuniary obliga- tions to Lorraine, who was also his personal friend. While the negotiations were in progress, Turenne kept drawing nearer and nearer and planting his guns in more and more advantageous positions. It was only at the last moment that Lorraine, after a good deal of swao-g-er, consented to Turenne's terms, which were that Lorraine should at once desist from making a bridge of boats, which he had begun, across the Seine, that he and his army should be out of France within a fortnight, and that he should give his word never again to help the rebel princes against the King. On the other hand, says De Retz, Turenne consented to Lorraine's demands "that what troops belonging to the princes were in the Prince of Conde's camp, might safely come into Paris ; and that provisions should be furnished by the King's order to the Duke of Lorraine's troops during their retreat ; . . . Mr. de Turenne saying that he was persuaded the Duke of Lorraine's army would save the King the trouble and expense of furnish- ing them with provisions, because they would take care to provide for themselves upon the road ; and as for the liberty that was asked for the troops of the princes to get safely into Paris, Mr. de Turenne granted it with joy, because he was sure that that would more alarm than encourage the city." Turenne dictated the route which Lorraine's army was to take within an hour, and it lay through a long and narrow pass, in which, 1652 ^T. 41] VILLENEUVE ST. GEORGES 179 for the moment, Lorraine would be completely at Turenne's mercy. It was well that Turenne had chosen this route for his adversary, and that he took the precaution of stand- ing to arms as soon as Lorraine had started ; for the retiring army had only just got well into the pass, when the rebel army from Etampes came into sight from the opposite direction. If that army had appeared a couple of hours earlier, Lorraine would doubtless have fought in- stead of accepting Turenne's terms ; and Turenne, with 7,000 men against Lorraine's 9,000 and Tavanne's 5,000 or 6,000, would have been in an exceedingly perilous posi- tion. As soon as Tavannes had learned what had just occurred, he withdrew his army and retired to St. Cloud. If the royal army had been defeated at this con- juncture the political history of France would have been considerably altered. Great credit is due to Turenne ; but Napoleon slightly qualifies it by saying that "Turenne's march against the Prince of Lorraine was attended by every possible advantage ". The Parisians were furious with Lorraine for sub- mitting to the terms of Turenne, and they were very angry with Charles II. and the Duke of York for their reputed share in the negotiations. The Queen of England and Charles II. and their household "were kept in the Louvre without daring to go out ; for the people said : ' You wish to render us as miserable as yourselves, and are doing as much to ruin France, as you have done, and are doing, to ruin England ' ".^ 1 Memoirs of Mademoiselle de Mo}itpensier, 12 * CHAPTER XIV. Shortly after the events recorded in the last chapter the Court was again in a fidget and on the move. First it went to Melun, about twenty-five miles to the south-east of Paris, and, a little later, to Lagny on the Marne, about fifteen miles due east of Paris. Thither also went Turenne with his army and he was joined by La Ferte, who reinforced him with 3,000 men, bringing up the strength of the royal army to between 10,000 and 11,000. The Court presently moved on to St. Denis, and Turenne went there, too, encamp- ing his army about three miles from the town. Mean- while Conde, who had been ill, joined the army of the Fronde, which had marched towards Paris from Ville- neuve wSt. Georges, and he encamped at St. Cloud. In Paris the Duke of Orleans, the head of the New F"ronde, became in a fever of alarm when he found that the royal army was on the north of the city, and that the rebel army was on the south-west of it. Apart from any question of the shame of betraying his own party, he was afraid to admit the royal army into Paris, because, as head of the Fronde, he dreaded the vengeance of Mazarin. And as that vengeance would be greatly increased if he should make an armed 180 1652 yET. 41] THE DUKE OF ORLEANS 181 resistance in the case of an attempt by the royal army to enter Paris by force, he was equally afraid to admit the rebel army, which was the army of his own party, the Fronde. To make matters worse, the temper of the Parisians themselves was very undecided, and many of them were as much frightened as Orleans himself: more they could not have been ! The civic authorities were, indeed, in a very awkward predicament ; for on the one hand they had denounced Conde as a traitor, and, on the other, they had set a price upon the head of Mazarin. Under these distressing circumstances the heroic Duke of Orleans gave orders that neither army was to be allowed to enter Paris ; and, pretending to be very ill, this leader of men got into bed and refused to see anybody. Turenne was now determined to force a battle upon Conde, and, to understand his movements, we must consider their relative positions. Cond6 was south- west of Paris, at St. Cloud, which is on the west bank of the Seine. From St. Cloud the Seine flows in a north-easterly direction for about eight miles to St. Denis, which is on the east of the river. To get at Cond^, therefore, it was necessary for Turenne to cross the Seine somewhere, and he chose to do so by making a bridge of boats at Epinay, about a mile from St. Denis. Conde, hearing of this, hurried towards Epinay with a small force, hoping to be in time to prevent Turenne's army from crossing the bridge ; but he was too late, as Turenne had already got most of his artillery upon an i82 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 island in the Seine, so as to guard both banks, and had landed a strong force of musketeers on the west bank of the river. There was no alternative then left for Cond6 but to retire upon St. Cloud. But St. Cloud was no longer a place of safety for his army, since that of Turenne, double its size, was on the eve of advancing upon it ; therefore Conde decided to remove it to the east of Paris and to place it between the Marne and the Seine at their junction, near Charenton, a position which it would be very difficult for Turenne to attack. In fact, Conde proposed to occupy very much the same position as that on which the modern Fort of Charenton now stands. Accordingly that night he made his forces cross the Seine by two bridges, at St. Cloud, to the eastern or Parisian side of the river. He cherished a lingering hope that his army might be admitted into the city, notwithstandinor hints that its admission would be re- fused ; and to put the matter to the test, he marched his forces through the Bois-de-Boulogne, led them up to the gate of La Conference, and asked, not to be allowed to take up his quarters in the city, but merely for permission to march through it on his way to Charenton. To his vexation, although scarcely to his surprise, admittance was refused ; the reason given for this refusal, says the Duke of York, being that although the Parisians "were indeed against the cardinal, and wished his ruin, yet it was unworthy of the Parisians, as they were good Frenchmen, to suffer an army, i6S2 ^T. 41] FAUBOURG ST. ANTOINE 183 partly composed of Spanish troops, and the greatest number ot whose officers were either subjects to that King, or in his pay, to enter within the walls. . . . That it would look as if they had already submitted to the Spanish yoke, to see so many red scarves strutting through the streets of Paris." Conde, to some extent prepared for the refusal, proceeded to reach the east of Paris by marching under the north wall, which stood near where the Boulevardes de la Madeleine, des Capucines, des Italiens, de St. Denis and de St. Martin now run ; and then to make his way south-east to the junction of the Marne and the Seine, near Charenton. Although the Duke of Orleans had refused ad- mittance to the army of his own party, his sympathies were with it, and orders had been given that nobody was to be allowed to pass out of any of the gates of Paris, lest an intimation might be given to the enemy of the movements of Conde. Turenne, however, had friends in Paris who put a messenger into a basket and let him down in it by a rope over the wall. On reaching- the ground on the other side, he made off with all speed to carry the information to Turenne that Conde was leading his army round the north wall of the city. It was early in the morning of the 2nd of July battle of , ™ . , , . . .... THE FAU- wnen i urenne received this important intelligence, bourg st. After a brief conference with Mazarin, he collected his 2nd juiy, ' troops in his camp and started at about 4 a.m. in pur-^ ^" suit of Conde, sending orders to General la Ferte to l84 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 hurry after him with the artillery, which had been placed on the island in the Seine, as well as with the infantry which had been posted on the western side of it ; an operation which, be his expedition what it might, would necessarily occupy considerable time. Conde had passed between Montmartre and the walls of Paris before Turenne came within sight of him. When Turenne, who had ridden forward with ten or a dozen horsemen, reached La Chapelle, a place about a quarter of a mile inside the modern fortifica- tions on the north of Paris, but more than a mile from the walls at the period which we are studying, he caught a glimpse of the rear of Conde's infantry passing through the Faubourg St. Martin, and rounding what was then the north-eastern corner of the walls of Paris. He observed that Conde had posted some infantry about the windmills and small houses in the suburb to protect his rear ; and, as soon as he could get some cavalry up, he attacked them and routed them. A strong force of his horse having arrived shortly after- wards, it attacked a rearguard of Conde's, consisting of 200 or 300 horse, close to the Hospital of St. Louis, a little to the south-west of Belleville, and cut them to pieces. Then it made several charges against the rear of Conde's infantry, took a good many prisoners, and spread disorder in the ranks, much where the Boulevard Voltaire now runs. Things were going so badly now in Conde's rear that he faced about and ordered his artillery to return and fire upon Turenne's cavalry ; and he recalled his i652 JET. 41] FAUBOURG ST. ANTOINE 185 van, part ofwhich was already at Charenton. Turenne's cavalry was now near the Faubourg St. Antoine ; but he ordered a halt to await the arrival of his infantry and artillery. When his infantry came up, Turenne still thought it dangerous to advance against Conde's guns until the arrival of his own, and another difficulty against which he had to contend was that Conde's musketeers had taken up their positions behind barricades, which they found ready-made. " These barriers," wrote Turenne, "the people of Paris had made, on purpose to secure themselves against the scouts of M. de Lorraine's Army, while he was at Villeneuve St. Georges." Conde's infantry, therefore, though inferior in numbers to the troops of Turenne, had superiority in position. Yet Turenne felt confident that he had only to await the arrival of his artillery to insure the capture of his enemy. On the south of Conde's army ran the river Seine ; on its western side stood the walls of Paris, with the gate of St. Antoine closed against it and the great towers of the fortress of the Bastille frowning above it. On the north of it, and commanding its eastern side also, was the powerful army of Turenne ; for Conde, finding his rear hard pressed, had brought back his troops from the front and had concentrated them in the Faubourg St. Antoine. In fact his rear had now become his front. Turenne, accordingly, had caught Conde in a trap and was only pausing until his guns came up to demolish him. As those guns had i86 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 been carried across the water in two ferry-boats,^ and mounted upon the island in the Seine, near St. Denis, he did not expect to see them for some time. Soon after Turenne had left St. Denis, Mazarin had awakened the King and the Court. Both King and cardinal wished to see the battle, and the rising ground above Charonne offered them a splendid oppor- tunity of doing so. While the Queen went to the chapel of the Carmelite convent at St. Denis and spent the whole day on her knees before the Sacra- ment, only rising from them to go to the grating when messengers from the King brought news of the battle,^ Mazarin and Louis XIV., then a boy of fifteen, took up their position on the hill of Charonne, probably somewhere near where the cemetery of Pere la Chaise ^ now stands. The King and cardinal reached this eminence when Turenne had driven the enemy into the Faubourg St. Antoine with his cavalry and had halted to await the remainder of his forces. His inactivity puzzled the cardinal, who sent a message to him asking why he did not attack. Turenne replied that he was waiting for the remainder of his forces. When Mazarin presently saw the infantry arrive and Turenne still stationary, he sent another message asking what he was waiting for now. Turenne replied that he was ' Memoirs of James II., vol. i., p. 98. ''■Memoirs of Madame de Motieville (1902), vol. iii., p. 75. ^ Pere la Chaise, from whom the cemetery takes its name, was then living, and he became confessor to Louis XIV. i6S2 ^T. 41] FAUBOURG ST. ANTOINE 187 waiting for his artillery, and also for his implements for breaking or pulling down the barricades and garden walls behind which the enemy was sheltered. Mazarin sent again to advise him to waste no more time, but to attack with his infantry and cavalry. Turenne replied by begging him to have a little more patience ; but again the cardinal sent a message to Turenne, and this time it took the form of an order to attack at once. Turenne also received a message from his brother, the Duke of Bouillon, who was with the Court, to which he had only recently been reconciled, warning Turenne that, if he put off his attack any longer, it would be thought that he did so out of friend- ship for Conde. Indeed, as the Duke of York wrote, Turenne himself was fully aware that he "was not yet so well established in the opinion of the Court, nor his integrity so thoroughly known that he durst hazard it by refusing to act against their orders, though they were contrary to his own judgment ". Much against his will, therefore, Turenne gave orders for an immediate attack upon the barricades. The suburbs of St. Antoine consisted of three principal streets leading to the gate of the city, with narrow streets crossing them, forming "a kind of duck's foot," as one historian of the battle described them. Having extended his troops in a curve as far as the river, so as to guard every outlet, Turenne ordered three simul- taneous attacks. One of these attacks was made upon a barricade in a narrow street, which ran into the market-place of the faubourg. It was gallantly carried i88 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 by the infantry, in spite of musketry fire and peltings with stones from the windows of the houses on either side. Unfortunately, the Marquis of St. Maigrin, who was in support of the infantry with the King's Horse- Guards, instead of waiting until the infantry had dis- lodged the enemy from the houses on each side of the narrow street, pushed through the ranks of the infantry with his cavalry to pursue Concle's men as they fled from the barricades. Just as they nearly reached the market-place, they were met by five and twenty officers, headed by Conde himself, who charged them in the narrow street, while a heavy fire was poured down upon them from its windows on both sides. The Marquis of St. Maigrin, the Marquis of Nantouillet, and many of the troopers were killed on the spot, and the Marquis of Mancini, a boy of seventeen and a nephew of Mazarin, received a wound from which he afterwards died. The King's Horse-Guards then retired in something very like a rout, scattering the infantry of their own side before them in their panic. Turenne's own regiment valiantly ousted the enemy from several gardens and houses ; but when it heard of the flight of the Horse-Guards and the infantry accompanying them, it refused to proceed farther. A regiment of cavalry was behind it, and, suddenly, such a heavy fire was opened from loop-holes in a wall on the flank of these horsemen that all their captains, except one, were killed, as well as many of the men. The rest, says the Duke of York, " ab- solutely ran " ; but they were rallied by their tew 1652 ^T. 41] FAUBOURG ST. ANTOINE 189 remaining officers, and showed great bravery during the rest of the action. "This particular deserves the rather to be remarked," says he, "because 'tis very seldom known, when soldiers have been once frightened so as to run, that they have ever performed any good action the same day." Meanwhile, in the third attack, the lieutenant- colonels of two of Turenne's battalions were killed as they were marching to the attack. A furious fusillade was poured upon the troops from a loop-holed wall. Althouo'h sufferino- tremendous losses, the Kind's in- fantry pushed on right up to this wall "till they had placed themselves under it betwixt the holes which the enemy had made in it. Being lodged there, a new manner of fight began, there being only the wall be- tween the two parties for not being able, on either side, to do any great execution with their muskets, they heaved massy stones against each other over the wall, shot their pistols through the holes, and thrust their swords through the crannies ; one party endeavour- ing to maintain possession, and the others to make them quit it."' It has already been seen that Cond6 with a small party of officers had turned back a whole regiment of the King's Horse-Guards in a narrow street ; and, as the battle progressed, the officers, on both sides, took more and more part in the hand-to-hand fighting. "There were then more officers than soldiers in the ^The Duke of York, in Chrke's James II. 190 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 fray, the great Turenne and the great Conde, within pistol-shot of each other, fighting themselves, hand to hand, and showing an admirable contrast between martial fury and intrepid coolness. ' Did you see the Prince of Conde ? ' was afterwards asked of Turenne. ' I did not see one Prince of Conde,' replied he, ' I saw more than a dozen ! ' So rapidly did this hero appear to rush from danger to danger, from exploit to exploit. It is related that M. le Prince, who wore a breastplate, and was more active than anybody else, was so stifled with his armour that he was obliged to have himself disarmed and unbooted, and to throw himself quite naked upon the grass in a field, where he rolled like a tired horse. Then he dressed and armed and returned into the conflict." ^ Ramsay says that both Turenne and Cond6 were covered with blood, though not with their own ; that Cond6 was in a fury, but that Turenne, if physically hot, was mentally cool. It must have been galling to him to reflect that much of this bloodshed might have been spared to his own men, if he had been allowed to await the arrival of his artillery. When La Ferte at last came up with the artillery, Turenne rave orders that a general attack should be made as soon as the guns had delivered a heavy fire. Magnificent as had been the defence of Conde against largely superior numbers — at least 1 1,000 against 5,000 ^St. Aulaire's History of the Frojide, vol. iii., p. 191, quoted in Lord Mahon's Life of Conde, p. 230. 1652 JEt. 41] FAUBOURG ST. ANTOINE 191 — Turenne now felt that he had him completely at his mercy. The combined attack of artillery, musketry and cavalry that followed soon told its tale. Presently Conde's troops began to retire and even to disappear with unaccountable speed. For a moment Turenne was puzzled ; and then, to his astonishment and his vexation, he saw that the great gates of St. Antoine had been thrown wide open and that his enemy was escaping from him into the city of Paris. Instantly he ordered his cavalry to charge his retreat- ing foes in the rear, while the gateway was crowded with the entering troops, and without doubt it would have inflicted terrible slaughter; but just then the guns on the great tower of the Bastille began to boom, and Turenne 's horsemen were exposed to a murderous artillery fire. Among the most interesting of the delightful pages of Mademoiselle de Montpensier are those giving an account of her proceedings on this eventful day. They describe her vain attempts to persuade her cowardly father, the Duke of Orleans, to be a man for once, and to act quickly and decisively on that critical morning ; they tell us how she found him shamming illness, but, in reality, frightened almost to death, with a carriage in waiting at a backdoor to carry him post-haste to Orleans, in case of need, and how she alternately coaxed and scolded him until he gave her his authority to go in person to the Hotel de Ville, and there to demand full powers in his name ; they inform us of the hesitation and the vacillation, but the final consent of 192 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 the municipal authorities, and, with many graphic details, they give us a vivid picture of Mademoiselle hurrying — and only just in time — with the powers thus conferred upon her to the gate of St. Antoine, which she ordered to be thrown widely open, and of her rush into the tower of the Bastille, where she made its governor give orders that its guns should be fired upon the troops of Turenne.^ Thus was Turenne foiled, at the last moment, in his attempt to capture Cond6 and his army ; but while we may sympathise with our hero in being robbed of the fruits of his victory, it is difficult to avoid sympathy with Conde in his escape, when we reflect upon the inferiority of his numbers and the splendour of his defence. ^ Mademoiselle de Montpensier gives us the story of her meet- ing with Conde at the Porte St. Antoine : " He was in a deplorable state : his face covered with dust, his hair dishevelled, his neck and shirt stained with blood. Although not wounded, his cuirass bore the marks of blows ; and he carried his naked sword in his hand, for he had lost the scabbard. He gave it to my equerry, and said : ' Ah, Mademoiselle, I am in despair ; I have lost all my friends '. He was much cast down ; for he wept bitterly, as he exclaimed : ' You must excuse the grief in which you see me '. It had been said that he cared for nobody ; but I had always found him attached to his friends, and kind to those he loved." As a matter of fact, several of his friends whom he then believed to be dead, or mortally wounded, recovered. CHAPTER XV. It might be expected that rest and repose would have been the well-earned reward of Cond6, his officers and his troops, when, wearied and blood-stained, they staggered through the gates into Paris ; but they neither sought it, nor obtained it. Space cannot be spared to describe the disorders or the riots, the massacres or the political complications which followed during the first few days after the entry of Conde and his troops into that city. The riots were succeeded by a duel between the brothers-in-law, the Duke of Beaufort and the Duke of Nemours. It may be remembered that those two very inefficient generals had been in command of the army of the Fronde which opposed the army under Turenne and Hocquincourt on the Loire, when the latter generals were on bad terms and the former were actually quarrelling. Although, at the battle of St. Antoine, Beaufort and Nemours had sunk their differences sufficiently to ao-ree to defend a barricade too-ether, as soon as Nemours had partially recovered from some wounds which he received on that occasion, he challenged Beaufort. When they met to fight, on the ground be- hind the Hotel Vendome, Beaufort exclaimed : "Ah ! 193 13 194 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 my brother, what a disgrace this is to us ! Let us for- get the past and be friends! " To which Nemours re- plied : "You rascal! I will either kill you now, or you shall kill me ! " And then he aimed his pistol at Beau- fort and pulled the trigger ; but it missed fire, where- upon he rushed, sword in hand, at Beaufort, who was obliged to fire in self-defence, when three of his bullets struck Nemours in the head and killed him. Two of the seconds in this duel were also killed, and one was dreadfully wounded.^ After the battle of St. Antoine the Court returned to St. Denis and remained there. A few weeks later news was received that a Spanish army — with the per- fidious Duke of Lorraine, who had joined it, making in all 20,000 men — had entered France in the ex- treme North, and was marching through Picardy towards Paris. Mazarin was much alarmed, as the Court might very soon be between this large force and the much smaller army of Conde then in Paris. He 1 After the duel Conde, Mademoiselle de Montpensier and several others went to condole with the widow of Nemours. She was in bed, says Mademoiselle de Montpensier, " senseless — the curtains open, and everybody around her. . . . Amidst all this desolation, Madame de Bdthune said something, I know not what, in so lamentable a tone that it set off Madame de Guise laughing, who was yet the most serious person in the world, so that the Prince (of Conde) and even myself, who heard it, burst out into a violent fit, of which we were quite ashamed.'' They then went to condole with Nemours' brother. " We were again almost tempted to laugh ; for he, too, was in bed, with all the curtains drawn, and spoke to us very lugubriously through them " (^Memoirs, vol. i., p. 299). i652 JET. 41] MARTIAL COURTESIES 195 therefore proposed to remove the Court either to Rouen or to Dijon ; but, on inquiry, he learned that neither of those cities would consent to receive it. Mazarin then talked of taking the Court to Lyons ; but Turenne begged him not to remove it so far from Paris, pointing out that if the royal army had to go so far South to protect the Court, all the fortresses in Picardy would fall to the enemy. He also urged that the moral effect of such a retreat would be most disastrous among the Parisians, who, he had reasons for believing, were already growing heartily sick of Conde and his Spanish, or semi-Spanish, army. He besought the Queen and the cardinal on no account to appear to be retreating, much less flying, but simply to take the drive of fifteen miles to Pontoise, where he would have a strong force ready and would undertake to protect the Court. This advice was fortunately followed. The army of Turenne lay between the Court and Paris ; and the rival armies were anxiously watching each other. Even when ready to fly at each other's throats, they could be courteous. While Mademoiselle was visiting the rebel army at Charenton, it was agreed between Conde and Turenne that hostilities should be suspended. In a letter to Conde, she says Turenne and De la Ferte "presented me with many fine compli- ments, and declared that I was to command, and to consider myself mistress of their army as well as of our own ". Shortly afterwards Turenne advanced to oppose 13* 196 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 the Spanish army with a force of less than half its number. This bold step succeeded. The Archduke contented himself with a victory over the Duke of Elbceuf and 600 men, and retired into Flanders, leaving Lorraine, with his army of 10,000 men, to winter in Champagne. Turenne then retired to- wards Paris and encamped his army four miles to the north-east of St. Denis. Bad news then reached Turenne in a report of the serious illness of his brother, to whom he was de- votedly attached, and, a few days later, that illness terminated fatally. Death came to the Duke of Bouillon at a moment when he was in high favour at Court and when his opinion was much consulted and carried great weight with the Queen and even with the cardinal. Had he lived longer, he might have become one of the Queen's principal counsellors ; it was even thought by some that he might have become a rival to Mazarin himself He was a man of great determination of character, even to severity. When he was in command of the troops of the Fronde at Bordeaux, he was informed that the royal army had taken a small neighbouring fort, and that, by Mazarin's orders, the commandant of the fort had been hanged as a rebel. Without a moment's hesitation. Bouillon sent for a captain of the Novailles regiment, who had been taken prisoner some time previously. He was found playing a game of cards with some ladies, and he went to Bouillon without the slightest suspicion of any impending evil. Bouillon ordered him to be i6S2 JET. 41] DEATH OF BOUILLON 197 instantly hanged and that his body should be fastened on the wall of the city as a reprisal. Even in those days many of his friends considered his conduct cruel in this case. Shortly after the death of Bouillon, negotiations took place between the Court and the princes. The latter hinted that if Mazarin could be banished all would be well. In the hope of thus pacifying the people of Paris, Mazarin left the Court, ostensibly for ever, and retired to Bouillon, on the Belgian frontier. The King then opened a Parliament at Pontoise ; so there was now one Parliament at Pontoise and another in Paris. Underhand negotiations were being attempted in all directions. Each side was watching for an oppor- tunity of attacking the other ; yet everybody was tired of fighting. The leading politicians were all prepared to throw over their allies and their friends, if they could gain anything by so doing. Now that the Spanish army was withdrawn to Flanders, Turenne supposed that Lorraine would not renew hostile operations until the spring. He was therefore surprised on receiving information that that uncertain Duke was marching towards Paris. At once Turenne started to meet him and, on the 4th of September, he had reasons for believing that Lorraine was advancing to join his forces with those of Conde, which Turenne learned were either leaving, or had al- ready left, Paris. Suspecting that a juncture would be attempted at Villeneuve St. Georges — a place with which we are already familiar — he marched thither 198 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 in order to prevent It, and arrived just at the time when the quarter-masters of Conde and of Lorraine were beginning to mark out the lines for the encamp- ment of their approaching armies. Although Turenne thus put a stop to the junction of his two enemies at the particular spot which they had selected, those generals successfully acccomplished their purpose at a place about a mile and a half to the west of it, near the small castle of Ablon. In some ways Turenne's position was a strong one. He had a wood on his right, the town and the river Seine on his left, and the river Yerre at his rear, while in his front stood five redoubts, which had been made by Lorraine on the memorable occasion when Turenne had forced him into a futile promise never again to make war against the King of France. All that Turenne accordingly had to do, to fortify his position, was to continue the lines between these five redoubts. Notwithstanding these advantages, Turenne was now in peril. As he had left a strong force to protect the Court at Pontoise, the army he now had with him was scarcely more than half the strength of the com- bined armies of Lorraine and Conde ; having made a forced march, in the hope of preventing the juncture of Conde with Lorraine, he had brought very few stores with him ; and he was greatly disappointed at finding scarcely any provisions in Villeneuve St. Georges either for man or for beast. On the very night of their arrival some of the troopers were reduced to feeding their horses on vine leaves. Nor was their i6S2 yET. 41] VILLENEUVE ST. GEORGES 199 unhappy condition unknown to Conde, who, although so much stronger in numbers, determined, instead of attacking Turenne, to keep him fast in what the Duke of York calls his "narrow nooke " and thus starve him out. Starved out he undoubtedly would have been, had he not had the good fortune to find four or five large boats, by the use of which and every gate to be found in the town, together with the timber of some of the houses which he had pulled down to supply it, he contrived to make a bridge across the Seine. Fortunately, some of his cavalry which had been at Montrond came to Corbeil, about seven miles higher up the river. These Turenne ordered to remain there and to protect his men when they went out on foraging expeditions. Conde's army had at first lain between Villeneuve and Corbeil. Had it remained in that position Turenne says his own army would have been starved out of its camp in four days. As it was, his foraging expeditions, during the six weeks he remained at Villeneuve, were conducted under very great diffi- culties, and the Duke of York even goes to the length of saying : "It may with truth be said that the French Monarchy was reduced to that extremity, that its preservation depended on each of these convoys, the loss of but one being capable of inducing that of the whole army". Napoleon finds fault with both Turenne and Conde for their conduct at this juncture. "Turenne's 2CXD MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 stay at the camp of Villeneuve St. Georges during six weeks, in presence of two armies superior in strengtli," says he, "was very hazardous. What motive could have induced him to incur so much danger? His camp was not too strong to be forced, and such an occurrence would have been his ruin, and that of the Court party. His situation appeared so critical that it retarded the submission of Paris." Of Conde he says: "After his junction with the Duke of Lorraine, as he had such a superiority in strength, it is not easy to understand why he was satisfied with entrenching^ himself on the heights of Limeil — a place within cannon-shot of Turenne's out- posts — instead of attacking the King's army : he might have had as much artillery as he pleased, being so near Paris ; and nothing but a decisive victory could, under the circumstances, retrieve his affairs and main- tain his party in the capital. Condi, on that day, was not sufficiently daring^ Towards the end of September Turenne prepared to leave his camp. The reason he himself gives for doing so is this : "At last, the roads grew so bad by the continual rains, that the horses could not go so far for their forage as before : so that we were obliged to think of breaking up". But the Duke of York adds another reason. He says that the Parisians were "discontented that the princes kept up the war at their gates " ; for Conde's army, after having been, as ^ The Duke of York says that Cond6 made these entrench- ments very deep. i652 JEt. 41] ESCAPE 201 we saw, for some time in Paris, now kept foraging between Villeneuve and Paris, as also did Lorraine's. The Parisians, heartily tired of all this, were in treaty with the Court. "And now," says the Duke of York, "a negotiation being on a good footing, the Court sent to know of the two Generals " — Turenne and La Fert6 — "whether they believed it practicable to dis- engage the army, from the post it was in without running any hazard, and to find means to join the King, in order to favour the treaty which was on the anvil." On the 4th of October, as soon as it was dark, that is to say at about half-past six or seven o'clock, Turenne took his army across the Yerre, the small river which lay in his rear, by fourteen bridges, which he had made ostensibly for foraging purposes, and marched in exactly the opposite direction from Paris, to Corbeil, where he had given orders to his cavalry, there stationed, to make some entrenchments. The bridges were broken when the last men had crossed them, to prevent pursuit by the enemy. The night-march was conducted with great silence and secrecy ; and it was not until the next morning that the enemy discovered the escape of the army of Turenne. After resting a day at Corbeil, Turenne marched slowly to Meaux, about twenty-five miles to the east of Paris, always keeping in order for an attack, which he constantly expected, and would probably have re- ceived, had not Cond6 been unwell and obliged to return to Paris. When Conde heard of Turenne's 202 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 escape, says Mademoiselle, " he was in a perfect fury," and he exclaimed : " We ought to put bridles on Tavannes and Vallon ; they are nothing but asses ". From Meaux Turenne moved his troops to Senlis, a place somewhat less than thirty miles from Paris in a northerly direction. Conde now made a false move. Out of temper with the vacillating Parisians, who kept complaining of the drain made upon their resources by the foraging parties of the armies of Conde and Lorraine in their neighbourhood, and finding some difficulty in pro- curing further provisions, he withdrew his forces to join them with those of Spain, at Laon, some seventy miles to the north-east of Paris. Although this rave him a very powerful military position numerically, it left Paris at the mercy of the King's troops and lost him the allegiance of its inhabitants. Turenne was not slow in taking advantage of this opportunity. Leaving his army under the command of La Ferte, he hurried to the Court at Pontoise and urged the King and the Queen to enter Paris immedi- ately. The counsellors of the Court opposed this advice; but Turenne insisted "that they ought to take advantage of the Prince of Condi's absence, and not give the Parisians time to " recover from their present ill-humour with "the Frondeurs ; that as (Turenne's) officers daily left the army for want of money, the King would soon be left without troops ; that the Court would not be in a condition, the next campaign, to make head against the enemy, whose forces would i6S2 JET. 41] THE DUKE OF ORLEANS 203 then be augmented ; that the Parisians would be less inclined to receive the King, and that other cities would follow the example of the capital ". Against all this the Queen's counsellors objected that the Duke of Orleans, and, what was much more to the point, his clever and courageous daughter, would order the Parisian soldiers to seize the King, the Queen and the Court, if they entered Paris without the support of a very for- midable military force. Their fears on this point were not shared by Turenne, who felt sure that, if the King went into Paris, the Duke of Orleans would very soon run out of it. Nor was he much mistaken in holding this opinion. The King and the Queen yielded to the entreaties of Turenne, and, having made up his mind to go to Paris, Louis XIV. wrote to the Duke of Orleans to inform him of his decision. Upon receiving this letter, the Duke sent for Cardmal de Retz, to whom he said that he had "almost a mind to shut the gates against the King ". De Retz says that he told him he had no reason to be alarmed, at which he "uttered five or six oaths one after another," and told De Retz to come aeain in the evening-. When De Retz did so, he found him talking to the Duchess and in a fine fury. He was speaking " as if he had been armed cap-a-pie, and ready to cover the plains of St. Denis and Crenelle with blood and slaughter". The Duchess was trying to pacify him, but in vain. " I will make war to- morrow," replied the Duke, in the tone of a warrior. " Not a doubt of it. Sir," said De Retz. And, as the 204 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 Duke continued to state his warlike intentions, De Retz continued to assent to them, much to the disap- pointment of the former, who wanted to be able to say that he had wished to fight, but had reluctantly yielded to the entreaties of De Retz that he should sheathe his sword. The Duke left them for a few minutes, when the Duchess, "half laughing and half crying," said to De Retz : " Methinks that I see Harlequin telling Scaramouch : What fine things I would have said, if thou hadst not had wit enough to contradict me". When the Duke came back, he said that, although all the world knew that he could prevent the King's return to Paris with ease, if he so pleased, he thought that for the sake of the peace of the State he should permit it. The Duchess felt so ashamed of this sudden collapse that she said : " This way of reasoning, Sir, might become the Cardinal de Retz, but not a son of France ". At this he became as angry "as if she had proposed to throw him headlong into the river ". " Retire, then. Sir, immediately," added she. "And where the devil shall I retire?" said he. When the Court was passing through the Bois-de- Boulogne, on its way to Paris, a report was brought to the Queen that the people were rising in rebellion and that it would be most perilous for the King to enter the city. The Queen got out of her coach and, summon- ing Prince Thomas, and the Marshals de Turenne, de Villeroi and du Plessis, "held a council in the open field". With the exception of Turenne, her council was unanimous in advising that the Court should go i6S2 ^T. 41] THE KING ENTERS PARIS 205 back and not enter Paris/ But the Queen, who was naturally courageous, "followed without once hesitating the advice ot Turenne and, accordingly, the King at the head of his guards entered the city, through St. Honore's Gate, was received everywhere with accla- mations and was followed to the Louvre by a crowd of people, who were for ever crying : Long Live The King". As might have been expected, the Duke of Orleans bolted ! On the evening of her arrival in Paris, the Queen held a Court at the Louvre. Turenne, who attended it, found himself standing next to De Retz, who had come to do homage at the Court, although he had belonged to the party opposed to it and had acted as right-hand man to the Duke of Orleans. As we have seen, De Retz had once saved Turenne from arrest by a timely warning, and now Turenne endeavoured to do the same good office to De Retz. " Do you think yourself safe here?" said he. De Retz squeezed his hand and loudly replied in the affirmative ; but only be- cause he had observed that "a great Mazarinian" had overheard the question ; for he confesses that this asser- tion of his safety was "only bragging". Some ot the courtiers flattered the Queen upon the acclamations of the populace as she had driven through the streets of Paris ; whereupon Turenne whispered in the ear of De Retz : "They did the like lately for the Duke of Lorraine". ^ So says Ramsay. But the Memoires du Marechal du Pkssis (Guyot, 1850, p. 435) state that all were agreed that the Court ought to proceed into Paris without hesitation 2o6 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 The King was liberal in the matter of amnesties. "The Prince of Cond6 was the only one who refused to accept of the pardon : he chose to go over to the Spaniards and lose all his estates."' But although he became the ally of Spain, and formed what is sometimes termed the Spanish Fronde and sometimes the Pro- vincial Fronde, the Parisian Fronde was now at an end. Having seen the King securely established in Paris, and havino- obtained considerable reinforcements, with the expectation of more to be brought to him by Mazarin from Sedan, Turenne, at the end of October, advanced agfainst Lorraine and Conde. He made the lono- march of more than one hundred and twenty miles to the re- lief of Bar-le-Duc, which was besieged by the enemy. Half-way thither he had to pass through Epernay, where, says the Duke of York, he was "obliged to stop a whole day, because the soldiers, in coming thither, found so great a quantity of new win {sic), after the Vintage in a Country plentifully stor'd with that liquour, that of all the foot there came not enough up to the quarter, to make the ordinary guard for the Duke and Mr. de Turenne ; so that they stirr'd not till the 4th" (of November). Fortunately for Turenne, Count Fuensaldagne, who was in command of the Spanish army, had marched away with it, being in a hurry to go into winter quarters ; for the Spaniards did everything by rule. If it was the usual time for going into winter quarters, into ^ Ramsay. i6S2 Mt. 41] BAR-LE-DUC 207 winter quarters they went, whatever might be the circumstances of a campaign. Their machine-like movements, their punctilious military etiquette, and their red-tapism proved maddening to Conde. Bar-le-Duc would have been relieved with far greater ease had it not been for what the Duke of York calls "the rashness and indiscretion of Monsr. de Roussillon . . . that addle-headed Governour " of the town. In this siege Lorraine lost his best general, who, after supping with Conde, and getting very drunk, tied a white napkin round his head to make himself the more conspicuous and, out of sheer drunken bravado, rushed out, exposed himself to the fire of the enemy, and was shot, before Cond6, who ran after him, could catch him. Nor was it only on the side of the enemy that an officer lost his life, at Bar-le-Duc, through drink. During the same siege Turenne ordered General du Tott to conduct the assault upon a part of the town which had been taken by the enemy. Du Tott had " drunk more than ever Commander ought to do," says the Duke of York, who adds that he never saw any other officer drunk in the French army. Foolishly rushing forward far before his men, opening a door in an exposed position, and standing vacantly in the doorway, the poor, tipsy Du Tott "was shot dead". But what else can one expect when people wj'// fight in a champagne^ district? 1 The Bar wine is not, strictly speaking, classed as a champagne, but it is of that character. Champagne, exactly as we drink it, was not made until later than the days of Turenne. 2o8 MARSHAL TURENNE [1652 Cardinal Mazarin, who was on his way to return to Court, now that the King's power was firmly established, brought valuable reinforcements to Turenne at Bar-le- Duc, and he was present at its relief. Being in need of provisions, Turenne quartered his men in St. Michel, a town under the governorship of La Fertd, without asking leave of that general. He had asked for provisions to be brought out of it ; but, as difficulties were made and time was pressing, he had no alternative but to enter the town and take them. So angry was La Fert6, when he heard of this, that he hurried thither from a place thirty miles distant and summoned Turenne to leave the town, a summons which Turenne obeyed. "But Mr. de la Ferte," says the Duke of York, "was so much enraged by seeing that some of the men had been bolder than became them in their quarters, taking more than meat and drink, that as they were marching out, he himself, attended by his guards, fell upon such of them as stragled or were loytering behind, hacking and hewing them as if they had been Enemys." Turenne may have been wrone, in the first instance ; but most cer- tainly La Ferte was wrong in the last. This incident made ill blood between the two generals, and it was long before they were thoroughly reconciled. Mazarin would not listen to Turenne's representa- tions that his men were worn out, that, owing to the severity of the frost, thirty or forty soldiers died in a day, and that it was cruel to keep the troops any longer out of winter quarters. At the siege of Vervins, which i6S2 ^T. 41] FALL OF VERVINS 209 followed, when Conde's soldiers, on its walls, loudly cursed Mazarin, the King's soldiers shouted "Amen" in reply, so incensed were they at being still kept in the field by the cardinal. After the fall of Vervins, Mazarin, in the month of February, consented to a termination of the campaign. According to Napoleon, Turenne's strategy, re- corded in this chapter, was open to criticism ; so also, perhaps, may have been his conduct at St. Michel ; but the events of the later months of 1652, so far as Turenne was concerned, are chiefly interesting because of the excellent advice already mentioned, which, on at least two very critical occasions, he gave to the Court, advice which probably saved the Crown of France for Louis XIV. 14 CHAPTER XVI. A MOST important event now occurred in Turenne's private life. Soon after his return to Paris, early in the year 1653, when he was at the age of forty-two, he married a great lady, a great heiress and — a point upon which he laid much importance — a great Protestant. Charlotte de Caumont was the only daughter and the sole heiress of Armand de Nompar de Caumont, Duke de la Force and a Marshal of France. Of this lady Ramsay says : "Her birth and fortune distinguished her less than her virtues and superior understanding ; noble, elevated sentiments, with those parts of knowledge that are the least common among the sex, were in her accompanied with sweetness and modesty, an inexpres- sible delicacy and sweetness of manners : to say all in a word, she was worthy of the Viscomte de Turenjte" . It will be observed that Ramsay says nothing about her looks ; and, when excessive stress is laid upon a lady's virtues, without any mention of her beauty, it may be generally assumed to have been somewhat deficient. In his notes to Bayle (vol. iv., p. 331) Des Maizeaux says : " It is not unusual to see persons of quality very virtuous, and very zealous for religion, and at the same i6s3 ^Et. 42] MARRIAGE OF TURENNE 211 time so jealous of their rank, and so fond of receiving a great deal of honour, that they are always upon their punctilios on that account. Madame Turenne is an example of it. Her virtue and piety are not more memorable than her exact precautions to preserve the privileges of highness, and the precedence she pretended to above the duchesses." Whatever may have been the charms of the Vis- comtesse de Turenne, her husband had to tear himself away from them in about three months, that is to say in June, 1653, as his services were required in the wars. Although Paris was now quiet and loyal, Guienne was in a state of insurrection in the South, while, in the North-east, the enemy was within a hundred miles of Paris, at Rethel, and it also occupied Rocroi, Dunkirk, Gravelines and Mardyck. Another very serious matter was the disproportion between the rival forces. Turenne and La Ferte between them had only 7,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry, with which to defend a large space of country and to garrison several fortresses, whereas the Spanish army, with those of Conde and Lorraine, in the north-east of France and Flanders, numbered 30,000. These are the statistics given by Ramsay ; but Napoleon, although giving the same numbers to the enemy as does Ramsay, puts the King of France's troops at 6,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry. Information reached Turenne that one of the enemy's army corps was on the Sambre in the North, and that another was more than 120 miles distant from it, in the East. He at once decided that this was an 14 * 212 MARSHAL TURENNE [1653 opportunity that might never occur again of regaining Rethel (which lay between them) ; he therefore hurried thither and retook it in a few days — it capitulated on the 8th of July, 1653 — while the Spaniards were trying to make up their minds which army corps to send to its relief Turenne then marched towards the North and soon found himself within reach of the enemy, whose force, at that particular point, consisted of 16,000 infantry, 11,000 cavalry and between thirty and forty guns. The King and the cardinal now came out to Turenne in order to hold a Council of War. At this council one proposition was to make use of half the army for garrisoning the frontier fortresses, and to use the other half for dogging the enemy on his march, carrying off his convoys and threatening his communications. An- other proposition was to keep the army intact, to de- fend the passage of the river Oise by taking up a strong position behind it, and to centralise any reserves, which might be obtained from the Provinces, before Paris. The Oise, it will be remembered, flows in a south-westerly direction, from near the Flemish frontier, until it joins the Seine, about a dozen miles to the north- west of Paris. To both of these plans of campaign Turenne raised objections. The King's army was too small to divide, he said ; on the other hand, to defend the passage of a river like the Oise would be impossible. Turenne pro- posed to march with the whole army within a certain distance of the enemy, to weary him by threatening i653 ^T. 42] DIFFERENT OBJECTS 213 movements, but to avoid a general action, and thus to wear away the weeks and months between June and the time for going into winter quarters. If, says Turenne, he had decimated his small army by garrisoning the fortresses, the enemy would have been relatively strong enough in numbers to have marched to Paris ; and, if he had kept behind the Oise, for the purpose of preventing a passage of that river, supposing the enemy had attacked one of the fortresses or cities on the farther side of it, it would have taken him some time, perhaps several days, to cross the river and to go to its relief; whereas, by crossing the river at once and keeping within a few miles of the enemy, if that enemy were to besiege a place, Turenne could go to the assistance of its garrison in a few hours. In carrying out his proposition, to which the King and cardinal had agreed, Turenne had extraordinary luck. If Conde had been commander-in-chief of both of the allied armies Turenne would probably have met with disaster ; but, fortunately for Turenne, the Archduke kept the exclusive command of his own army and would brook no interference. Again, the objects of the Archduke and of Conde, although those two generals were allies, were totally different. Conde's object was to reach Paris, to revive the Fronde in that city, to encourage the revolt in Bordeaux, and to raise an insurrection in Central France. The Archduke on the contrary, cared not a jot or a tittle for either Paris or the Fronde, or Bordeaux, or Central France. His sole object was to enlarge the frontier of Flanders, 214 MARSHAL TURENNE [1653 for which purpose he desired to take a few of the French fortresses ; but he had no intention of advancing to Paris or to Central France, or of fig-htino- a creneral action, unless indeed an opportunity should occur of defeating the French army, with little or no risk or trouble. Under these peculiar circumstances Napoleon ad- mits that Turenne's line of conduct was likely to suc- ceed ; but, says he, "it would have been very dangerous in any other conjuncture. To march by the side of an enemy twice your own strength, is always a difficult operation : there are few positions strong enough to protect an army so inferior in numbers. Nor does it appear that he took the precaution to pitch his camp every evening in a chosen position : on the contrary, he frequently encamped in very bad positions, where his army was in imminent danger." Whether Turenne was aware of the diversity of the objects of Cond^, on the one hand, and of the Archduke, on the other, may be doubtful ; but he certainly was well aware of the difficulties and draw- backs likely to be met with by a French general when in alliance with a Spanish army ; for he had experi- enced them himself when fighting with the Spaniards for the release of the princes. It was this knowledge, with his own intelligent inferences therefrom, which justified him in a proceeding which would have been otherwise exceedingly dangerous. "Achilles," says Napoleon, at the end of the same chapter, "was the son of a goddess and a mortal. This is emblematical of the genius of war. The divine i653 ^T. 42] THE GENIUS OF WAR 215 part is all that is derived from the moral considerations of the character, the talents, and the interests of your adversary : as well as of the spirit of your own troops, whether they feel strong and victorious, or whether they fancy themselves feeble and beaten. The mortal or earthly part of arms, are entrenchments, positions, orders of battle, and all that appertains to the combina- tion of physical means and methods." Now Turenne exhibited his genius in "the divine part of war" by his "moral considerations of the characters " of Conde and the Archduke. That they would not and could not work harmoniously together, he felt assured. As to their " talents," those of the one were so ill-balanced, in relation to those of the other, that the equilibrium of their strategy was certain to be upset, and their "interests" were quite conflicting enough to neutralise each other. Ramsay gives more unqualified praise to Turenne's management of this campaign than does Napoleon. He compares him to Fabius Maximus, in always en- camping on eminences or places otherwise difficult of access. "Whenever the enemy halted, he stopped likewise, and when the enemy marched, he followed them, keeping along the side of them at a considerable distance, and posting himself so that he could not be forced to fight against his will." And Ramsay com- pares Conde with Hannibal in trying every stratagem to force a general action on Turenne. "Sometimes he drew near the French and beat up their quarters : at other times, he removed to a great distance, that he 2i6 mArSHxA.L TURENNE [1653 might induce them to decamp and surprise them in some march, where he might have an advantage over them." In a work written for the general reader by a writer ignorant of military matters, it is unnecessary to follow all Turenne's marches and countermarches during this campaign in detail. But some little must be said about them. Much of his success in shadowing a superior enemy, without approaching him too closely, necessarily depended to a great extent upon successful scouting, a military art which must have developed considerably during the twenty-one years which had passed since two rival armies — that of King Charles I. and that of the Parliament — wandered about Warwick- shire, tor several days, before they could find each other. Every morning, says the Duke of York, Turenne "went out of his quarters ... by sunrise, slenderly attended," to make observations and to receive intelli- gence from his outposts. While avoiding contact with his enemy, Turenne embarrassed him by stopping his convoys. When the enemy besieged Roye, a place of no great import- ance, Turenne resisted the temptation to risk a general engagement by attempting to relieve it ; and allowed the allies to amuse themselves by taking it. When they had done so, he says, "they began to be very much at a loss what to do next : they did not dare to advance into a country where they had no places, while an enemy lay within three hours' march of them ". i653 /Et. 42] PERONNE 217 Near Peronne, a town on the river Somme, about half-way between Amiens and St. Ouentin/ Turenne had a very narrow escape. The enemy had made a forced march and Turenne was surprised on his flank, in a very bad position. This position, which was held by the troops under La Ferte, was commanded by a hill up the farther side of which the enemy was advancing. On discovering their dilemma, both La Ferte and his men were panic-stricken and retreated in a confusion which began rapidly to spread among the other troops. In this difficulty, says Napoleon, any ordinary general would have withdrawn his troops to Peronne,* a mile and a half off, crossed the Somme there, and protected himself behind the river ; a course which would have disheartened his troops, encouraged his enemy, and only postponed a general engagement ; for, unless he remained where he was to guard the bridge at Peronne, the enemy would have crossed it and pursued him. "Turenne," continues Napoleon, "risked everything and marched to meet the enemy." He had just time, and only just, to ascend the hill from which the danger lay. Had the enemy reached it first, he would inevitably have sustained a crushing defeat. With some of his troops in a condition ot 1 It was at the battle of St. Quentin, in 1871, that the French army of the North, raised for the relief of Paris, under Faidherbe, was defeated by the German army under Von Goben. - Peronne seems fated to be the scene of battles. It was taken by Charles the Bold in 1465, and it was before its walls that the Emperor Charles V. met with defeat in 1536. It was captured by Wellington in 1S15, and by the Germans in 1871. 2i8 MARSHAL TURENNE [1653 panic it was an exceedingly difficult, even a speculative, proceeding, but it was accomplished, barely accom- plished, it is true ; but still accomplished I Instantly Turenne gave orders to make five redans, which the men, having now regained their confidence, worked at with a will, as well as in self-defence. But the enemy had double Turenne's numbers, and Conde determined to attack him at once. Even with his improved position, Turenne says, "'tis more than probable that we should have fought with ill success that day". The Spanish General, however, absolutely refused to attack. It was nearly three o'clock ; three o'clock in the afternoon was not the proper hour for beginning a battle ; his men had had a long march ; the end of a long march was not the regular time for fighting, and Spanish generals never did anything except at the regular time. It was the time for resting, and a rest they would take. After a good night's rest, they would very soon demolish the French, who could not possibly escape them in the meantime. When the morning came, however, the Spaniards found that Turenne, who did not take a rest, had spent the night in entrenching himself and had made his position so strong that an attack would have been most hazardous. During the next few days there were some skirmishes and then the enemy moved off to invest Guise, a town about sixteen miles to the east. Turenne heard in time of this intention, and as Guise, unlike Roye, was a place which it would have i653 ^T. 42] MOUZON 219 strengthened the enemy's position to possess, Turenne sent 2,500 men into it. Happily, on the way thither the allies, who would otherwise have reached it before Turenne, were delayed, owing to some trouble being raised by Lorraine ; and, when they came to Guise, which they had calculated upon taking by surprise but found already garrisoned, they did not invest it. After a fortnight's rest they made a march of more than forty miles to Rocroi, besieged it, and took it in something under a month. Turenne did not go to the relief of Rocroi, because, owing to the large woods surrounding it, the army which reached it first had an enormous advantage ; but he endeavoured to counterbalance the loss of Rocroi by laying siege to Mouzon,^ a very important fortress on the Meuse, half-way between Sedan and Stenay, which was in the hands of the enemy. Mouzon capitulated after a siege of seventeen days. Here, says the Duke of York, Turenne had no engineer and was obliged to contrive and superintend all the siege works himself Nothing further of any great importance took place in this campaign, after which both armies went into winter quarters. While that campaign was in course, the people of ' Like so many of the important places in Turenne's cam- paigns, Mouzon has much later military interests. It was at Mouzon that MacMahon crossed the Meuse with his army, in his attempt to march to the relief of Bazaine, in 1870; and, in the same year, only six miles from Mouzon, the Saxons surprised and captured 3,000 French soldiers, placed there to defend the passage of the Meuse. 220 MARSHAL TURENNE [1653 Bordeaux had submitted to the King. This was a terrible disappointment and discouragement to Cond^. He was still further disheartened by the loss to his in- terests of his brother, the Prince of Conti, who availed himself of the King's amnesty and pardon, and became a royalist.^ At about the same time a much more sur- prising secession from the rebels to the Court was that of Madame de Longueville, who gave up politics, as well as other things which it was quite as desirable that she should forgo, returned to her husband, and eventu- ally devoted herself entirely to religion. Meanwhile, all was not going smoothly among the allies. Charles, Duke of Lorraine, began to demand either the restoration of some of his ancient territory in Lorraine, or some of the places which might be captured by the allies in France. So importunate and troublesome did he become^ that the Spaniards, to put an end to the nuisance, quietly arrested him, and sent him off as a prisoner to Spain, where he was ' In the first war of the Fronde, when Mazarin invested Paris, Conde was on the side of the Court, while his brother, Conti, who was on the side of the Fronde, was made commander of the rebel army within the city. Conti was very ugly, and Montglat says that Conde, on seeing a pet monkey chained up in the young King's room, made a low bow before it and said : " I salute the general- issimo of the Parisians ". 2 Before this campaign Lorraine declared that he would not embark upon it unless a certain very pretty bonrgeoise of Brussels came and asked him to do so. The whole council was obliged to go in procession to the girl and to her parents, to induce her to present herself before Lorraine and beg him to go to the war for her sake (Lord Mahon's Life of Conde, p. ::48). i653 ^T. 42] FRANCIS OF LORRAINE 221 detained until the Peace of the Pyrenees. They placed his troops under the command of Duke Francis of Lorraine, his brother, with whom he had quarrelled. This campaign of Turenne's was another instance of successful strategy with litde fighting. Command- ing an army less than half as numerous as that of his enemy, he prevented the threatened advance on Paris ; he succeeded in driving the invading forces farther towards the frontier than they had been before the campaign began ; he recovered Rethel, and he fully made up for the loss of Rocroi by taking Mouzon. In the game of war Turenne often resembled a chess- player who checkmates his adversary without either losing or taking more than a piece or two. CHAPTER XVII. It was fortunate that the Kings of France used to be crowned at Rheims ; for although the coronation of Louis XIV. and its attendant ceremonies, military displays, and entertainments considerably delayed the opening of the campaign of 1654, the journeys of the officers and troops who took part in them had brought them a long way on their route for the war. The submission of Guienne had liberated a number of the King's troops, and the army of Turenne was now somewhat stronger than it had been in the cam- paign of the previous year ; yet even now that of the enemy far outnumbered it. As we have seen, the military operations of 1653 had ended by the' taking of Mouzon ; and the new campaign began with the siege of Stenay, an important fortress which had long served as an asylum for the Fronde, about fifteen miles to the south of Mouzon. It will be remembered that Turenne himself had stayed some time there in the company of that archconspiratress Madame de Longue- ville, when he was about to fight against the King's troops for the relief of the princes. Expecting that the siege of Stenay would be particularly galling to Conde, as it was his own property, i6S4 ^T. 43] ARRAS 223 Turenne anticipated a strenuous effort for its relief, and he had everything in readiness to give Cond6 a warm reception as soon as he should appear before it with the allied armies. But that warm reception was never given, for the simple reason that Conde and the allied armies never did appear before Stenay. While Turenne was daily expecting them, they were 120 miles away, besieCTincr Arras. Arras, whose railway station is familiar to travellers from Paris to Lille, which is about fifteen miles to the north of it, was a very important fortress ; if it fell, all the acquisitions of the French in Artois would be in the greatest danger. The fortress itself was a very strong one ; but unfortunately, at the time when Conde and the Archduke sat down before it, its garrison happened to be very weak ; and the forces brought up to lay siege to it, on the 3rd of July, 1654, amounted, says Turenne, to 25,000, while he states that the total forces which he could collect at Peronne, before proceeding to the relief of Arras, did not exceed 14,000 or 15,000. In leaving Stenay to its fate, and by making forced marches to Arras, Cond^, for once, had outwitted Turenne, who never suspected him of any such design. On the other hand, with no forces coming to its relief, Stenay was doomed, and, feeling certain of its capture, Turenne left the siege to be conducted by Hocquin- court, one of his generals ; but he was unwilling to begin operations against the besieging army at Arras, until he could be reinforced by his troops which would be liberated when Stenay should fall. Therefore he 224 MARSHAL TURENNE [1654 made his headquarters at Peronne, some thirty miles to the south-east of Arras, and employed himself in making observations and despatching scouts for infor- mation. Conde and the Archduke had very wisely marched their armies to Arras with extraordinary expedition, so as to invest the place before Turenne could throw a strong garrison into it, and so far all was well for them ; but, in making so rapid a march, it was impossible to carry with them either the provisions or the ammuni- tion necessary for the siege. Turenne's first oppor- tunity, therefore, was to try to intercept their convoys. The allies dared not carry gunpowder in carts while Turenne's cavalry were patrolling the country ; so they had it carried in bags of fifty-pounds weight, each bag being fastened behind the saddle of a trooper. One night, says the Duke of York, a drunken soldier fired a pistol at his lieutenant, thereby igniting one of these bags of gunpowder "behind the Lieutenant's horse, which taking fire, blew it up, and so, from one successively to the other who was next, it spread through the whole regiment ". This regiment consisted of "six score going from Douay to the enemy's camp, all of them, officers as well as soldiers having behind them a bag of powder, besides about four score horses laden with hand grenades, which were led by countrymen on foot ". All of them, says the Duke, were " blown up. . . . Indeed it was a very dismall object to behold a great number of poor men, who were brought into camp with their faces disfigured and their bodies burnt by powder, i6S4 ^T. 43] ARRAS 225 so that few recovered, their companions having been all killed outright." Although not intending an attack until his rein- forcements should arrive from Stenay, Turenne marched to the village of Mouchi le Preux, which stood on a hill, overlooking the plain of Arras, about four miles to the east of the walls of the city, and about two from the nearest camp of the enemy. From this position he was able to send out scouting parties every night to endeavour to intercept the enemy's convoys on their way from Cambrai and Douay ; but on such a flat country it was impossible to prevent all of them from getting through to the enemy's camp. Turenne's inability to attack, on account of his numerical weakness, enabled the enemy not only to complete his lines round Arras for the siege of that city, but also to dig elaborate trenches for defence against the army of Turenne, which was about to attempt its relief. The allied armies, therefore, lay between an inner and an outer circle of entrenchments. Ramsay thus describes the entrenchments made by the Spaniards between their own army and the re- lieving army. The "lines of circumvallation were 12 foot broad and 10 deep, with an advance ditch, 9 foot in breadth and 6 in depth," and they "had built re- doubts and little forts at certain distances, planted artillery in all parts, and raised Eprndments to cover themselves from the cannon. In the space between the circumvallation and its advance ditch, they had dug 1 2 rows of holes or little wells 4 foot deep, and a foot 15 226 MARSHAL TURENNE [1654 and a half over, disposed chequer-wise, and in the intervals, they had fixed palisades a foot and a half high to stop and hamper the horses." As, in addition to all this, the Spaniards had to make their entrench- ments on their own side for the siege of Arras, they must have done a prodigious amount of digging. These entrenchments, says Napoleon, enabled the Archduke to continue the siege for thirty-eight days. Without these entrenchments "he would not have been able to carry on the siege twenty-four hours ". Hocquincourt's army arrived from Stenay on the 17th of August, and this reinforcement, together with the garrison inside Arras, placed the King's troops almost on a numerical equality with that of the enemy, which had lost a good many men in the open trenches during the month which had passed since the trenches had been completed and the actual siege had begun. But Napoleon, in speaking of this very siege, says that engineers require a besieging army to be seven times the number of the garrison ; when, therefore, a reliev- ing army comes to the assistance of the garrison, the besieging army ought to be equal to the relieving army, plus seven times the garrison itself At that rate, if the garrison of Arras was 5,000 and the reliev- ing army 20,000, the besieging army should have been 7 ^ 5 = 35.000 -I- 20,000=55,000. As the besieging army was much below that strength, its only hope of safety lay in making, in addition to the contravallations for the siege, circumvallations, i.e. very formidable en- trenchments, against the relieving army. These terms i6S4 ^T. 43] ARRAS 227 are only used here to explain their meanings on the accompanying plan of the siege. Modern weapons, to some extent, must have upset the above calculations, as in the siege of Paris 236,000 Prussians were sufficient to shut up and reduce by famine a garrison of 300,000 French soldiers/ At Kimberley, 5,000 Boers besieged a garrison of 4,730. At Ladysmith an army of 22,000 besieged a garrison ot 13,000, while an army of observation of 8,000 de- feated a force of 18,000 on its way to the relief of Ladysmith. At Port Arthur the besieging army with the army of observation cannot have greatly exceeded in numbers the army which attempted to relieve it, combined with its garrison. A good deal of skirmishing went on before Arras between the King's troops and those of the allies, who were sent out to bring in convoys ; and, after the arrival of Hocquincourt, he and Turenne took St. Pol, a village to the west of Arras, and also the Abbey of St. Eloy, which stood about three miles to the north-west of it. Both places had been garrisoned, but made a weak defence. The positions of the armies were then as follows : On the south-east Turenne on the left, and La Ferte on the right, were encamped side by side, their left resting on the river Cocreul and their right on the river Scarpe. hi their centre was the hill of Mouchi le Preux, upon the front of which they placed their guns, while from either side of the hill entrenchments were ^ Ency. Brit. (9th ed.), vol. ix., p. 467 c, IS * 228 MARSHAL TURENNE [1654 carried to the rivers. Altogether, it was a very strong position ! On the opposite side of Arras, to the north- west, Hocquincourt was encamped on a steep hill called Cjesar's Camp, his left resting on the river Scarpe, while a tributary of the Scarpe llowed round his right and under his front, joining the Scarpe below the corner of his left iront. Within the enemy's entrenchments, Conde lay in the south, the Archduke in the east, Fuensaldagne in the north, and Fernando de Solis in the west. When Turenne, with his troops, having helped Hocquincourt in taking St. Pol and St. Eloy, was re- turning to his own camp at Mouchi le Preux, he took the opportunity of riding along the enemy's western, northern and eastern lines — carefully avoiding the southern lines for a reason which will presently appear. This reconnoitre, he says, "gave us great lights, both how to make the attack, and as to the road we were to take to the making it. . . . None but a few skirmishers came out of the lines, which M. de Castelnau went and took a close view of, and the cavalry marched all the time within the reach of a three-pounder cannon-shot." Turenne noticed that the lines in front of Dom Fer- nando Solis's were "very naked," and then he rode past the quarters of Fuensaldagne and the Archduke, the whole ride occupying about a couple of hours, in the course of which he made very careful observa- tions. "The cannon of the Spaniards," says Ramsay, "killed several ot his soldiers." According- to the Duke of York, "there was never a squadron but lost nn*i Rii J (II, a \\ it ' ' f./' lu If; ir^ ,fi',';H >»<»-». »• »•, i "^ '^ t »• •: •■ I ; ^ i«Ki" , ii^^J '^■n:>6o, /^ rt s&i ..-§» ic Cix< '^aJJa, f i :j;i i< I' 1 p W "- >; a S i6S4 ^T. 43] ARRAS 229 two or three men, without reckonino- horses ". Some o old and experienced officers murmured at Turenne's thus exposing his men without apparent necessity ; but, continues the Duke of York, some time after- wards "these gentlemen were sensible of their error, after that we had forced [the enemy's] lines, since it was at that very time that he chose, as he was expos- ing himself, as well as others, the place where to attack them : and, if he had not approached with all the troops he had with him, the enemies' advanced guards would not have retired as they did, and he could not have taken notice of everything with so much exact- ness ". As he was riding near the enemy's lines, some of his staff took the liberty of expostulating with him about his own personal danger, and of saying that the enemy could come out of his lines, at any point, attack Turenne and defeat him. Turenne replied that no doubt this was true, and that it would be exceedingly dangerous to ride so close to the lines in front of the camp of Conde, which, as has been remarked, he care- fully avoided ; but, from his own experience of the Spanish army, he felt certain that, before stirring a foot, Fernando de Solis would send to consult Fuensaldagne, the generalissimo, that Fuensaldagne would then send to consult the Archduke, that the Archduke would then send to Conde, and would summon a Council of War to decide whether, on the whole, it would be better to send out a force to attack Turenne, as he rode past the lines, or whether it would 230 MARSHAL TURENNE [1654 be wiser to refrain from doing so. Long afterwards, Conde told the Duke of York that exactly what Turenne anticipated had happened, and that by the time it had been decided to send out troops to attack Turenne, he was safe back again behind his own en- trenchments. Having discovered the weakest places in the enemy's lines, Turenne was anxious to attack, and his anxiety on this point was increased by a message which he received from the governor within the city of Arras, to the effect that he had very little ammunition remaining and that, unless the siege were raised very shortly, he would be obliged to capitulate. It is difficult to ascertain fully the position of Turenne towards the other French generals and to make out whether he was at that time commander-in- chief, in the modern sense of the word. When he proposed the attack, at a Council of War, all the generals opposed it, with the exception of the Count of Broglie and the Duke of York ; but La Ferte and Hocquincourt raised stronger objections than any of the others. Turenne at last seems to have got his way, not by command, but by sheer force of argument, backed up by an order h'om the Court urging a speedy attack. Great preparations were made for the attempt ; fascines for filling in ditches, hurdles, and other im- plements for enabling soldiers to make a passage over entrenchments were procured in abundance. Turenne spent much time in explaining to his officers the mea- COMTE DE GRAMMONT. i6s4 .^T. 43] ARRAS 231 sures which they were to employ. The Duke of York says that "public prayers" were said "at the head of each battalion and squadron, for several days before, and as many as could confessed and received the Blessed Sacrament," and he expressed his confidence that "no army ever showed more marks of true devo- tion than ours at that time ". A couple of days before the attack was to be at- tempted, Turenne and a good many of his officers were riding about examining the lines of the enemy opposite to, but at a respectful distance from, the quarters of Conde, when they were attacked by some of Conde's cavalry, and a squadron of their own cavalry which was with them was panic-stricken and fled. Con- sequently Turenne and his officers were obliged to pocket their pride and run away as fast as their horses could carry them, with their foes in full pursuit, greatly to the vexation of Turenne. In the midst of all this grave anxiety there was a somewhat disconcerting arrival at the camp of Turenne in the person of that lively courtier, the Comte de Grammont, who had ridden thither for the fun of seeing a battle. This gilted amateur amused himself by going alternately from one rival camp to another, having friends in both, to whom he related the latest gossip and scandals of the Court which he had just left. He had the impudence to tell Turenne that unless he were victorious Mazarin would hold him personally responsible for undertaking an enterprise of which the cardinal strongly disap- 232 MARSHAL TURENNE [1654 proved, and to tell Condd that, if he were taken prisoner, Mazarin intended to have him beheaded. Having been informed by Turenne that he proposed to attacls; the lines of the enemy on the following morning, Grammont rode across to Conde and made him a present of this important secret. From what followed it may be assumed that such was Conde's opinion of Grammont that he did not believe it. In an epitaph on Grammont, written long before his death, by St. Evremond, are the rather lumbering lines : — We may once more see a Turenne ; Conde himself may have a double ; But to make Grammont o'er again, Would cost dame nature too much trouble. It was by night that Turenne determined to make his grand attack. The reason he gave for this, says the Duke of York, was that "in the night time, no one of the enemy's quarters durst come to assist another ; that each fearing for itselt because of false attacks" — for the making of false attacks in three separate places was part of his plan — "no one would venture to quit its ground, or at most would only aid its next neighbour till break of day, before which we should have made a passage through their lines". Of the making of this attack by night. Napoleon says : " Nocturnal marches and operations are so uncertain, that although they sometimes succeed, they more frequently fail". The attack was to be made on the point farthest i654 ^T. 43] ARRAS 233 from the camps of Turenne and La Ferte, at the north-west corner of the enemy's lines, behind which lay the quarters of Fernando de Solis ; but three small bodies of troops were despatched to make feigned attacks, the first on the south of the lines, opposite the quarters of Concle, the second on the north-east, opposite the quarters of Fuensaldagne, and the third on the west, opposite the more southern portion of the quarters of De Solis. Soon after dark Turenne and La Ferte started relief of with their troops. They crossed the river Scarpe by August, '1654. tour bridges, which had been previously constructed over it, and marched first to the north, straight away from Arras, and afterwards to the west. As every soldier was wanted for the fighting lines, the baggage and transport in the camps were left unprotected, and orders were given that they were not to be removed till it was broad daylight, when they were to be brought on as might best be managed. A night had been chosen on which the moon would be shining during the first half of the march, when the French troops would not be visible from the positions of the allies ; but on which it would be dark during the second part of the march, when they would be advanc- ing towards, and in full view of the enemy's lines. The first part of the march was made in great silence and in excellent order. The night was fine and still, and there was bright moonlight until the troops came to the appointed and only halting- place. Soon after that had been reached the moon went down, intense 234 MARSHAL TURENNE [1654 darkness set in, and a fresh breeze sprang up. Just before the moonlight failed the troops had been drawn up in order of battle. Turenne was in the centre, La Ferte was on his left, and Hocquincourt, whose troops, although they had no distance to come, had not yet arrived, was to be on his right. The infantry were drawn up in two lines, and each battalion had four or five squadrons of horse behind it carrying fascines and hurdles, wherewith to cover the holes made by the enemy for the purpose of stopping cavalry and imped- ing infantry. The time arrived for the attack ; but not so the forces of Hocquincourt, who was, however, on the ground himself He begged Turenne to wait for his troops ; but Turenne said that was impossible, and, riding in front of the whole army, he led it to the attack in person. It advanced in the dark to within half-cannon-shot of the enemy's lines without being discovered. Suddenly the darkness was illuminated by a blaze of light along the whole line of the advancing army. "Our foot," says the Duke of York, "at once lighted their matches. They made a glorious show, which appeared the more by reason of the wind, which kindled them and made them blaze through the darkness of the night." Almost immediately three of the enemy's guns fired at Turenne's army, and lights gradually appeared all along the Spanish lines. Turenne's officers then advanced boldly ; but not so the men. The Duke of York declares that he "never knew them to 00 on so i6s4 .^T. 43] ARRAS 235 unwillingly as then ". Yet, owing to the "vigour of the officers who led them " and to the pressure of "the horse by keeping so close to their rear," they "stopped not till they came to the Line itself, where the resistance they found was not so great as they expected ; for in a very little time all our five battalions made themselves masters of that part of it which they attacked. Then the horses brought up the fascines and covered hurdles, and after doing so retired a little to the rear. The engineers then set to work to make a safe road-way through the entrenchments, by which the cavalry might enter the lines." To encourage his men, the Duke of York was injudicious enough to order his kettledrum to be sounded, which drew upon his men the fire of the enemy. "The kettledrum was soon silenced, he {sic) being the first man killed " in his squadron. La Ferte was less successful than Turenne, "having not put his men so soon in order, as Mr. de Turenne had," for although they advanced right into the ditch, they were beaten off and came running away to shelter themselves amonost the horse which the Duke o commanded. They were in terrible disorder. The officers were loudly complaining that their men had refused to follow them into the enemy's trenches, and the men were crying out that they had only fled in following their own flying officers. Worse still, the disordered mob not only made confusion among the cavalry, but, through carrying their lighted matches, drew the fire of the enemy upon it. We learn Irom Turenne that it took his sappers. 236 MARSHAL TURENNE [1654 or such of his soldiers as he employed in engineering work, "a good half-hour in filling up the ditches". When this had been done over a space sufficiently wide for horses to pass over the entrenchments, Turenne's cavalry dismounted and led their horses over the roadway into the enemy's lines. A scene of great confusion followed. The Spaniards were in confusion from fright ; the French were in con- fusion from the eagerness of each man to be before his neighbour — not in defeating the enemy, but in looting the enemy's camp ; and the confusion of both was worse confounded by the darkness, by the uncertain flickering of matches and torches, and by the dazzling glare of some burning huts, which had been set on fire by the French soon after they entered the Spanish lines. Squadrons of cavalry belonging to the rival armies passed through each other, in the darkness, without recognising that they were foes. In the weird lights and shadows caused by the burning huts and the torches, others imagined foes where none existed. Here and there, on either side, a detachment would gain a temporary success or be driven away into the darkness. Frequently troops found themselves close to unexpected entrenchments ; for those made by the Spaniards as a defence against the relieving army, and those made for the sieye of Arras, were at distances from each other varying from less than a quarter of a mile to three-quarters of a mile ; and the river Scarpe, which crossed both, formed another embarrassing barrier. i654 ^T. 43] ARRAS 237 When, with the early morning, it became light enough to distinguish objects clearly, and the Spaniards could see that the space between their defensive and offensive entrenchments was filled with French troops, they were more terror-stricken than ever. Conde, who had ridden up with some cavalry, was asked by tine Archduke what he would advise to be done, and when he observed the panic of the Spaniards he recom- mended the Archduke to retire ; but he himself at- tacked and put to flight some of La Ferte's squad- rons. Turenne witnessed this attack, and, when he saw that the flying Frenchmen were not being chased imprudently by their pursuers, he felt pretty certain that the attack must be under the command of Conde. Conde, on his part, when leading his cavalry in pursuit of La Ferte's runaways, perceived some guns admir- ably posted on an eminence in front of him, and, thinking that the commander of so well chosen a posi- tion could be none other than Turenne himself, he gave orders to halt. Yet, so great was the confu- sion among the French troops, in consequence of their leaving the ranks for purposes of pillage, that Turenne says he would have been forced to withdraw his army for protection into the town of Arras, if Conde had been able to bring up infantry with him as well as cavalry. As it was, with such forces as Turenne could persuade to deny themselves the pleasures of plunder, and with the help of the cavalry, which now made a sortie from Arras, he was able to put to rout the totally demoralised Spaniards. 238 MARSHAL TURENNE [1654 Conde rallied his scattered troops, quitted his en- trenchments and retired in good order to Cambrai ; the Archduke and the Count Fuensaldagne fled in a terrible hurry with only a squadron or two, to Douay, and the other generals of the Spanish army galloped away as best they could, with fragments of their forces. They lost 3,000 men in killed, wounded and prisoners, and they had to leave behind them 63 guns, 2,000 waggons, 9,000 horses, " all the equipage of the officers, and the baggage of the whole army". Turenne, who received a contusion from a musket-bullet, did not lose more than about 400 men. The French Court came to Arras after its relief, and then went to Paris, followed by La Ferte and Hocquincourt. Turenne marched eastwards, some fifty miles, to Quesnoy, a fortress near the Flemish frontier, which he took in two days. In September he marched southwards, to Cambresis, and demolished some castles on the frontier. Then he sent his troops into winter quarters, and went to Paris, where, Ramsay tells us, "his presence was like to be necessary". CHAPTER XVIII. The purpose for which the presence of Turenne ap- peared likely to be necessary was to quell a riot in the streets of Paris, for there seemed to be some danger of a revival of the Paris Fronde. One symptom of this was a friction between the King tincl the Parlia- ment about a new coinage. De Retz, who had been arrested and imprisoned at Nantes, having heard of this, had managed to escape from prison, and was riding off towards Paris, to "show himself to the people in the public market, and make new barricades," when he observed a soldier galloping in pursuit. In getting his pistol ready he frightened his horse, who swerved and threw him. Although his collar-bone was broken by the fall, the dignified cardinal managed to crawl away on foot and to hide in a haystack. Going thence under cover of the dark to the house of a friend, he got a change of clothes, and then he embarked in a fishing-boat which landed him on the coast of Spain. There he had great diffi- culty in accounting for himself and experienced some disagreeable adventures ; but eventually he reached Rome. Thanks to his absence from France, the threatened rising of the Fronde fell through. There 239 240 MARSHAL TURENNE [1655 was still, however, much discontent. Louis XIV. went to the Parliament, seated himself on his throne, and "without any preamble forbad the Parliament to con- cern itself in public affairs and then, rising hastily, went out, being determined not to hear any remonstrance. Notwithstanding this prohibition, the Parliament con- tinued to assemble, and the minds of the members grew every day more and more soured."' The popular hatred of Mazarin became fiercer than ever, while the cardinal, on his part, became more despotic than ever. Cardinal de Retz, although in Rome, was intriguing through his agents in Paris ; and another intriguer, through the medium of his Parisian friends and admirers, was the Prince of Conde. At this critical juncture Turenne, by the request of Maza- rin, acted as a peacemaker between the King and the Parliament, and, thanks to his good offices, all dis- puted matters were sufficiently smoothed over in the early summer for the campaign to begin in June. We have now to consider a campaign in which, says Napoleon, " Turenne constantly observed the two maxims : i st. Never attack a position in front, when yon can obtain it by turning it. 2ncl. Avoid doing what the enemy wishes ; and that simply because he does wish it. Shun the field of battle which he has reconnoitred and studied; and more particularly that in which he has fortified arid ent^-enched himself .'' Turenne began by besieging and taking Land- regies, without which, as it was s(jme miles nearer the ^ Ramsay, i6S5 /Et. 44] AMUSED 241 interior of France, it would have been impossible to hold Quesnoy. The operations which followed were con- ducted for some time within the triangle made by Landrecies, Bouchain and Valenciennes, each side of the triangle being only a little over or under twenty miles in length. Not far from Valenciennes Conde was nearly, and ought to have been, taken prisoner. The Spanish army was retiring from a position it had occupied, and the Spanish generals had undertaken to protect Conde's rear ; but the Spanish troops entrusted with that duty, on seeing a strong body of French approach- ing, scampered off, to take care of themselves, without troubling their heads about, or warning, Conde, who was then left with a very small force. The French troops in question were twelve squadrons and two or three battalions, under General Castelnau, to whom Turenne had given orders to press on and deliver a sudden and very energetic flank attack. But when Castelnau was approaching Conde's little force, says the Duke of York, he "suffered himself to be amused by some of the Prince of Conde's officers, who being in the rear of their troops and seeing him advance at the head of his, desired to speak with him upon honour : to which having consented, because they were his old acquaintance, he ordered his troops to halt a little, and, while they were complimenting one another, the Prince of Conde hastened his troops forwards, and Castelnau was duped ; a fellow who was left behind, on the top of a small hill, having given the officers the signal, they took leave of 16 242 MARSHAL TURENNE [1655 the Lieutenant General and galloped after their troops. This unseasonable piece of civility gave the enemy time to cross the Schelt before we could come up with them." One fault is apt to lead to another, and so it was with Castelnau. In order to screen his stupid error from Turenne he told him a lie. He represented that he had put the enemy to a headlong flight and that Conde's last squadron had been so sorely pressed that it had been obliged to swim the river to effect its escape. Believing this story, Turenne repeated it in a despatch to Mazarin, a despatch which unfortunately was intercepted by the enemy, and fell into the hands of Conde, who was furious. He sent a most insulting letter to Turenne, accusing him of lying, and bitter ill- feelinof continued between these two great generals from that date till the Peace of the Pyrenees, four years later. Before this quarrel, even when antagonistic in warfare, their personal relations had been most friendly. During their campaigns against each other, it is said, they kept up a correspondence ; if Turenne beat Cond6 in a battle, he very fully and very courteously ex- plained the means by which he had succeeded ; and, when Conde gained a success, he wrote to Turenne asking him whether he approved of his tactics.^ The sieges of the fortresses of Conde and St. Guis- lain were successfully accomplished by Turenne, and in November he received orders to go to the Court at Compiegne, on a matter of great importance. The matter in question was as follows : — ^ Lo2iis XIV. in Court and Camp, p. 84. By Col. A. C. P. Haggard. i65S ^T. 44] HOCQUINCOURT 243 Hocquincourt had fully expected to be made commander-in-chief, and he was very angry with Mazarin for having given that office to Turenne. To keep Hocquincourt quiet and, as he thought, out of harm's way, Mazarin had made him Governor of Ham and Peronne. At the time when Hocquincourt was nursing his wrath against Mazarin for putting him on the shelf, one of the oreat ladies of the Provincial Fronde happened to come in his way, and promptly made him fall in love with her. Perceiving the temper he was in, she communicated with Conde, who made him an offer of the post of Lieutenant-General of Flanders with 100,000 crowns down in cash, if he would deliver up Ham and Peronne into the hands of the Spanish army. Mazarin heard of this offer, sent for Turenne, and suggested to this general that the King's army should march at once to Peronne for its protection. Turenne objected that as the Spanish army was at Cambrai, and Condi's army only half a dozen miles from Peronne, a movement of the King's army in the direction of the latter town would be anticipated by the enemy ; and that if Peronne and Ham should be lost, there would probably be a general insurrection throughout France. He suggested, instead, that nego- tiations should be opened with Hocquincourt. The cardinal said that for the King to stoop to bargaining with one of his own rebellious subjects would be in- tolerable, with which Turenne quite agreed ; but, at the same time, this practical and cool-headed general gave it as his opinion that, of the two, it would be a 16 * 244 MARSHAL TURENNE [1655 lesser evil than to lose Ham and Peronne and to risk a dangerous insurrection. Finally, Mazarin took the advice of Turenne. The negotiations lasted a fortnight, during which Hocquincourt gave alternate audiences to the envoys of the King and the envoys of Spain, "not concealing from either party what the other offered him, as if he had been free to make what choice he pleased". After much haggling, the impudent Hocquincourt struck a bargain with the representatives of the King. He was to receive 200,000 crowns down, and to lose his governorship, but it was to be given to his son. Thus the disgraceful affair ended ; Turenne, adds Ramsay, " saved his country by this method, and disposed Maza- rin to finish without violence an affair which, had he employed force, might have had fatal consequences ". The troops then went into winter quarters and Turenne to Paris. Thither also went another general, Duke Francis of Lorraine, who shared the vacillating spirit of his family — vacillating, at least, where they thought it to their interest to vacillate — and made an excuse of the continued detention, by the Spaniards, of his brother (whom he hated and was only too glad should be detained), for deserting the Spaniards and allying himself to the King of France, whose fortunes he thought seemed just then to be in the ascendant. But a more important potentate than Francis of Lorraine had noted the improvement in the prospects of France and determined to make an alliance with her. Towards the end of the year 1655, Cromwell, 1656 JET. 45] VALENCIENNES 245 who had long wavered as to whedier he should take the side of France or that of Spain, came to the con- clusion that France was gfoinp' to win, and, in accordance with that conclusion, he made a treaty with Mazarin. Charles II. had already left France for Brussels, where he signed a treaty with the King of Spain and sent peremptory orders to his brother, the Duke of York, to leave the service of France and join him there. Mazarin was, at the same time, anxious for a treaty with Spain, his object being to negotiate a marriage between Louis XIV. and the Infanta, presumptive heiress to the Crown of Spain. Philip IV., however, refused to listen to such a proposal. On the contrary, he prepared to carry on the war in the following year with increased vioour. Dissatisfied with the conduct of the previous campaigns, he recalled Fuensaldagne and persuaded the Emperor to find other employment for the Archduke. Then he substituted, for these generals. Marshal Caracena, an experienced veteran, but a true Spaniard in his phlegmatic deliberation, and Don John of Austria, his own bastard son by an actress in Madrid, a young man full of energy, but almost without education, and as yet without ex- perience. The negotiations which Mazarin had attempted with Spain delayed the opening of the campaign of 1656. It was not until June that Turenne laid siege to Valenciennes, then a strong fortress on the river Scheldt. It is now in France, a few miles from the frontier of Belgium. The surrounding country is very 246 MARSHAL TURENNE [1656 flat, and, in the seventeenth century, the sluggish river formed morasses both above and below it. Its garrison consisted of 2,000 foot and 200 horse ; but 10,000 of its inhabitants^ were capable of bearing arms. The river ran through the town, and Turenne took up his quarters on the east side, with Lorraine to the south of him, on some slightly rising ground. La Ferte took up his position on an incline to the west of the town, on the opposite side of the river. Valenciennes was, at that time, one of the principal towns of the Low Countries and it served as a maga- zine for the military stores of Spain. It was known to Turenne that the Spanish army of 20,000 men was on its march to the relief of the fortress ; so the first thing he did was to make entrench- ments, not against the fortress itself, but for his own defence against the army of relief; and in six day* this " circumvallation " was completed, with a double ditch defended by palisades. He had arrived before Valenciennes sooner than La Ferte, who had been ill, and he had planted a double row of palisades along La Ferte's lines for his protection ; " but La Fert^, on his arrival," says Napoleon, "out of a mere spirit of contradiction, had them pulled up ". The Spaniards flooded the country round the fortress by drawing up all the sluices. Turenne em- ployed several regiments of foot and nearly all his horse in carrying fascines to strengthen a dyke against 1 Valenciennes, the town celebrated for the lace bearing that name, has now more than double that number of inhabitants. ;;^'^n':ii-';o,ViMTT/'r ' ^ S', ^:\^'' . iM., 'ri * 01 '.I f I CO il , ! t I t ! t KM. '1*1 ' I r ' f ;> n 1 1 ' I ,1'i ?((., 1656 JEt. 45] VALENCIENNES 247 the water. This required enormous labour ; the men were working in water up to their waists ; but their efforts were successful, so much so, in fact, that they were enabled to divert some of the water in such a manner as to flood one 'quarter of the city. When the Spanish relieving force arrived, it spent the first week in entrenching itself. The French in- fantry, which was about 12,000 strong, was neces- sarily much scattered in guarding entrenchments of seven or eight miles in circumference ; and, with a relieving army of i 2,000 men close at hand, Turenne felt the necessity of watchfulness, especially when, after eight days, the enemy's entrenchments were evidently completed, and the withdrawal of the transports denoted readiness for immediate action. The day that this happened Turenne fully expected an attack either that afternoon or during the coming night. Accordingly he sent to La Ferte warning him to be "upon the watch and to place guards everywhere : but the Marshal looked upon the Viscount's advice as an affront and slighted it ".^ When darkness came on, althouo-h no attack had relief of 1 1 T^ J J , • VALENCI- yet been made, 1 urenne ordered his regiments to re-ENNES , -, , . , ^Y^ BY THE mam under arms, and the event was just what i urenne spani- , , . . , . ..,.,. ARDS, i6th had anticipated. Farly in the night his lines were at-juiy, 1656. tacked. He made a vigorous resistance and the enemy was quickly repulsed. In fact the weakness of the attack led Turenne to suspect it to be a mere feint. Presently news was brought to Turenne that heavy ^ Ramsay. 248 MARSHAL TURENNE [1656 musketry fire had been heard to the left, more than a couple of miles off, on La Ferte's side of the river. It was now clear to Turenne that the enemy's attack in force must have been made upon the lines of La Fertd Immediately he despatched two regiments to cross the bridge of boats on the left and to hasten to the relief of that general ; and he ordered four more regiments to follow them as soon as possible. By the time he had given his own generals their orders and galloped round to La Ferte's quarters, he found that the two regi- ments he had sent on had been defeated, that the four which followed them had then halted, that the Spaniards had begun by entering La Ferte's lines at a point which had been practically unguarded, and that in his quarters there was now a regular rout. Turenne did his best to save the situation, but it was too late. The battle had not lasted more than a quarter of an hour. La Ferte himself had been taken prisoner, with more than 400 of his officers and nearly 4,000 of his men, and before loncj the sounds of cheering", which could be heard in the distance, proclaimed that the town of Valenciennes had been relieved. Nothing was left to be done by Turenne but to order a general retreat and, if possible, tosave the guns. Many of his men were three miles away and he lost half of them : some of his " tents and baggage " had also to be left behind. At first all was confusion, "but in a short time he got into such good order that the enemy durst not pursue him".^ Well might Turenne ^ Ramsay. 1656 JET. 45] RETREAT 249 say: "A fine retreat is looked upon by many ex- perienced officers as the masterpiece of a good general, for which nothing- should be neglected that can render it safe and honourable ". His staff to a man recommended him to retire rapidly into Picardy ; but, contrary to the advice of all his generals and in spite of their urgent remon- strances, when he had marched about a dozen miles, he halted and turned round to face the enemy, near Quesnoy. He knew that if he made a full retreat the Court would be thrown into a panic, that the discon- tented throughout France would join in the insurrection of Conde, and that, in all probability, the Parisian Fronde would be revived. Therefore, although he had now no entrenching tools — they had been left before Valenciennes in his flight and it would have been useless to waste labour with weak substitutes — he awaited in open camp the approach of his formidable foe. When the enemy came in sight Turenne's men began hurriedly to prepare the transport for flight, whereupon Turenne rode up to them, fired a pistol at the nearest man thus engaged, and forbade the rest to leave their posts on pain of death. So puzzled were the Spaniards, when they observed Turenne's army awaiting their arrival with tents stand- ing, that they did not know what to do. Fearing some trap, they waited a couple of days and then moved off to besiege the fortress of Conde. Perceiving their in- tention, Turenne sent 1,000 of his cavalry, each trooper 2SO MARSHAL TURENNE [1656 carrying a sack of corn behind him, to victual the place. But he knew that he was not strong enough to save either Conde or Quesnoy, the fate of both was sealed, and he retired to a strong position between Lens and Arras. Soon afterwards a little incident occurred which ex- hibited the character of Turenne. When a convoy was being taken to Arras under the charge of the Count of Grandpr^, that young officer stayed behind, having an assignation with a lady. During his absence from his post the convoy was attacked by the Spaniards and was only saved from capture by the courage of a major. When Turenne was privately informed of Grandpre's ill-conduct, he said in presence of his officers: "The Count of Grandpr6 will be very angry with me for having given him a private commission, which kept him at Arras at a time when he would have had an opportunity of showing his bravery". On Grandpre's return, he heard what Turenne had said, although fully aware of his delinquency. Going into Turenne's tent, he threw himself on his knees and beesfed for forgiveness. Turenne "spoke to him with a pater- nal severity," and with such good effect that the young Count became "one of the ablest captains of his age". Unable to interfere with the proceedings of the Spaniards, Turenne besieged La Chapelle. Conde came to its relief ; but his troops were so wearied out by a long march through rain and mud that they rested two days before attacking, and this delay just enabled Turenne to take the fortress. He afterwards relieved i6s6 ^T. 45] VALENCIENNES 251 St. Guislain and was thus enabled to end this dis- astrous campaign with a couple of slight successes. For the defeat at Valenciennes, Turenne receives a scolding from Napoleon. "The army commanded by Turenne," says he, "was superior both in number and quality to the Spanish army ; how came he to allow it to approach his quarters at Valenciennes, and not to march out of his lines to give it battle? His lines were far from equal to those at Arras ; and Marshal de la Ferte's position was evidently unsup- ported, separated from the rest of the army by a river and an inundation of 1,000 toises" — an obsolete word meanino- six feet — "this circumstance alone oug'ht to o o have determined him to engage." But after condemning Turenne for being defeated at Valenciennes, he gives him unstinted praise for awaiting the enemy in his position near Ouesnoy, against the advice of every member of his staff This, says Napoleon, "was because he had more talent than they : men think only of avoiding a present danger, without troubling themselves about the influence which their conduct may have on subsequent events. With common minds the impression of a defeat wears out but slowly and gradually." As an example of courtesies between enemies, it may be mentioned here that when, after this cam- paign, Conde was seriously ill at Brussels, the Oueen- Dowager of France sent a Parisian physician, in whom she knew that Conde placed great confidence, to attend him. CHAPTER XIX. With all his holy horror of Popery and Kingcraft, Oliver Cromwell was quite prepared to ally himself with the most autocratic of kings and to make use of the most intolerant of Papists when It suited his pur- pose so to do. After much wrestling with the Lord, he had come to the conclusion, towards the end of 1656, that it would be to his interest to be on a firmer footing of friendship with France than that already obtained, and early in 1657, after considerable bargaining, an offensive and defensive alliance was concluded that was to last for twelve months. Sir John Reynolds was sent to Calais with 6,000 splendid English infantry, one half to be in the pay of the Protector and the other half to be in that of the King of France. The combined forces of England and France were to endeavour to seize Dunkirk, which, when taken, was to be made over to England as a return for her services in the war. If either Gravelines or Mardyck were taken first, that fortress was to be held as a hostage by England until she received Dunkirk. It will be necessary now to bear in mind that Calais, Gravelines, Mardyck, and Dunkirk are all on the north-east coast of what is now France, Gravelines being about a dozen miles to 252 i6S7 ^T. 46] CAMBRAI 253 the east of Calais, Mardyck about five miles to the east of Gravelines, and Dunkirk some six or seven miles to the east of Mardyck. Turenne started on his campaign in May to lay siege to Cambrai. The very evening after he had arrived before it he learned that Concl^ had marched from Valenciennes, which was only fifteen miles to the north-east, and would shortly arrive to the relief of the fortress. Turenne, says Ramsay, " being persuaded that the Prince would fetch a compass to avoid the French camp, he went and posted himself in a place where, according to all the rules of war, Cond6 must pass. By good fortune for the Prince (Conde) his guide misled him, and brought him by the high road." The consequence was that Conde met with but a weak opposition and was able to enter and to relieve the fortress ; therefore Turenne "thought proper to raise the siege ". On hearing of this Turenne's enemies in Paris spread a report that he had treacherously allowed the Spanish troops to relieve Cambrai, out of friendship for Conde, for they hoped by this calumny to induce Mazarin to recall him. In this they happily failed. "During this time," Ramsay tells us, "the Prince of Conde and Don John of Austria made several marches and counter-marches to amuse the Viscount, divert him from his purpose, and fall suddenly upon Calais." The Duke of York who, it must be borne in mind, was now fighting for the Spaniards against the French ; instead of, as before, for the French against the 254 MARSHAL TURENNE [1657 Spaniards, describes the long march, the object of which, he says, in the very words of Ramsay, was "to fall suddenly on Calais ". The Prince de Ligny was to approach a part of the town without the walls, adjoining the quay, at low water. Had he been once master of that position, the place could not "have held out above twelve hours, the garrison being weak, as well as the town on that side of it. But he coming half an hour too late, the water was then so high that it was impossible for him to pass." So the only result of the attempt was to give "the town a hot alarm," and to demonstrate to the governor "the weakness of that part," which he immediately strengthened. "And thus we failed of our design, having made so great a march for so little purpose." After the capitulation of Montm^dy, which had been besieged and captured by La Ferte, Turenne marched to besiege St. Venant — a place little known now, but then an important frontier fortress on the river Lys. The Duke ot York shall describe an incident that occurred during this siege. "We arrived at Calonne on the Lys within a league of St. Venant which M. de Turenne was besieging, and the lines whereof were already so far advanced that this con- sideration and the disproportion of forces by no means allowed of any endeavours to relieve the place. We only studied how to cut off the enemy's provisions and prevent the passing of a convoy of four or five hundred waggons which were to go the next day from Bethune to their army. . . . We were ready to break 1 657 ^T. 46] SIESTA 255 up camp at dawn of day." It was represented to Don John "that the least delay would give the convoy an opportunity to enter the lines ; but whatever could be said to quicken him, the army stirred not till noon ". When it at last arrived at the place where the convoy would inevitably pass, Don John and Caracena "would needs, according to their custom, take an afternoon nap ". They had not long been asleep, when the Duke of York saw Turenne's convoy coming "in all haste". The Duke went to the Prince of Ligny, the general of the horse, and urged him to attack. The Prince "answered he saw the thing as well as he, that it was the easiest thing in the world to carry off the convoy, but that he durst not attack it without orders from Don John or the Marquess of Caracena". Still less "durst he " disturb the siestas of those worthy generals. The Duke "conjured him not to lose so fine an opportunity by being over-scrupulous ; but his reply was that [the Duke] knew not how far the Spanish severity went ; that by falling on without orders, it might cost him his head". As a consequence of allowing the convoy to pass, not a waggon of it was lost to Turenne. St. Venant capitulated on the 29th of August, after a magnificent attack on its supposed impregnable counter- scarp by Cromwell's pikemen from Hampshire and Huntinodon. Durins" this siere Turenne was so short to too of money, with which to pay the English troops that he was reduced to breaking up his own plate and distributing morsels of the silver among the men. The Spaniards might have prevented the fall of 2S6 MARSHAL TURENNE [1657 St. Venant had they not withdrawn with the object of taking Ardres, which had then a garrison of only 300, while Turenne was occupied at St. Venant. And Ramsay tells us that, if they had attacked Ardres "the same night they arrived before it, they would have carried it, but they lost twenty-four hours in making an useless circumvallation ". While the Prince of Conde was "suffering these delays with the utmost impatience," the Spanish generals made matters worse, by determin- ing to hold a Council of War, at which still more pre- cious time was lost " in superfluous reasoning . . . about an enterprise which required not the least reflection". At last a decision was arrived at ; but, at the same time as the decision, arrived Turenne, who had hurried to the relief of Ardres as soon as St. Venant had fallen. Then the Spaniards made off for the coast and Turenne followed them until they were under the protection of the gTjns of Dunkirk. It was too late in the season to begfin a sieo-e of that fortress, so Turenne attacked Mardyck, took it in a few days, and handed it over to the English troops, according to the agreement. The young King and the cardinal joined the French army during the siege of Mardyck. Madame de Motteville says that, on this occasion, Louis XIV. "lived like a private person, dining with Cardinal Mazarin or the Viscomte de Turenne : he had no officers, and neither servants nor money ". After taking Mardyck, Turenne tried to take Gravelines ; ^ ^ It was off Gravelines that the Spanish Armada had been defeated, some seventy years earlier. i6s8 ^T. 47] DUNKIRK 257 but, as an old writer describes that fortress, "It is very strong, by reason that they can drown it round in four hours, so as no land shall be within a mile of it ". And so it happened on this occasion. They drew up their sluices and any approach to it became impossible. Thus ended a tedious and indecisive, although by no means unsatisfactory, campaign, during which Cromwell grew very impatient and perpetually pestered his French allies with remonstrances, as well as with suggestions which it was impossible to carry out. Yet this campaign was a necessary prelude to its very important successor. The year 1658 did not open auspiciously for the French. The pardoned rebel, Hocquincourt, now openly allied himself with Conde, and persuaded the Mayor of Hedin to deliver that town to the Spaniards. Meanwhile Cromwell was haughtily calling upon the French Government to fulfil its treaty by besieging Dunkirk. The French army was early in the field. The siege of Dunkirk is so much the most important incident of this year that we will not linger over the military operations which preceded it. Although plenty of rumours had reached the Spaniards, at Brussels, to the effect that the French were going to besiege Dunkirk, they were convinced, says the Duke of York, who was with them, that Turenne's real objective was Cambrai, and that he purposely spread reports about an in- tended attack upon Dunkirk for the purpose of in- 17 258 MARSHAL TURENNE [1658 ducing the Spaniards to withdraw their forces from Cambrai to Dunkirk, and thus leave Cambrai very weakly protected. The country round Dunkirk is a wilderness of sandhills, raised by the fierce northerly gales. These white sandhills go by the name of Dunes. On the south side of this sandy plain were canals and morasses. When Turenne was approaching Dunkirk, all the low- lying land about the town was under water. From flooded fields, again, he had suffered much on his march thither. It had been an unusually long winter and the roads were in a fearful state. He had been advised that it would be impossible to take cannon with him ; but he persisted in doing so and he suc- ceeded in the attempt. It was a most miserable march ! Much time and labour had been spent in filling up ditches and makinij brido-es, and sometimes the soldiers were wading through deep water, holding their muskets above their heads. Cromwell sent a fleet to blockade the harbour of Dunkirk, as well as 5,000 or 6,000 infantry with some guns to be added to the army of Turenne. The English regiments, now that Reynolds was dead, were under the command of Lockhart, the English Ambas- sador at Paris, who was suffering agonies from a most painful complaint, and, at the great battle about to be described, he drove about in a carriage. ^ Not lono- o o ^ The Emperor, Louis Napoleon, was suffering from the same malady at the battle of Sedan, where he also watched the fighting from a carriage. i6s8 Mt. 47] DUNKIRK 259 afterwards he was drowned when crossing the Channel to pay a visit to Cromwell. "The first days of the siege," says Turenne, "we suffered very great hardships from want of food for the men and of forage for the horses," and he adds that the English, "who behaved very well, brought very few conveniences to the siege ". The King, the cardinal, and the Queen came to Mardyck tct be witnesses of this important siege ; but they were greatly in the way, and happily they were persuaded to return to Calais. Much more welcome were some barques, bringing provisions for men and horses, palisades and siege tools. During the early days of the siege the enemy's cavalry made frequent sallies, under the protection of their guns ; but they were invariably driven back and Turenne was able to proceed with his entrenchments. He was anxious to complete those works, because Don John was expected daily, if not hourly, with a relieving army ; and for several nights Turenne never went to bed. On the eighth or ninth day, some of the enemy's cavalry were seen approaching, but were driven back by Turenne's troops ; and he learned later that in this slight affray "a musket-ball," as the Duke of York writes, struck that arch-traitor, Hocquincourt, "in the belly and killed him on the spot". Of this Napoleon remarks : "A just punishment for his crime ! " The next morning, the 13th of June, the whole army of relief was observed advancing along the coast from 17 * 26o MARSHAL TURENNE [1658 the east. The sea was on its right and the canal from Furnes to Dunkirk on its left. A line of infantry- marched before the cavalry. "The artillery was not yet arrived," says the Duke of York, who was in the march, "nor the tools for breaking ground; scarce was there powder sufficient for their infantry ; thus unprovided of whatever was most necessary for a battle, we encamped at less than twice the distance of a cannon-shot from the enemy." Napoleon says: "The Spaniards were so certain that their mere ap- pearance would relieve the place, that they presented themselves without artillery and without tools to en- trench themselves with ; their park [of artillery] had been accidentally delayed on the road". That evening Turenne says he "sent orders to all the quarters to rendezvous at his order, two hours before day" — i.e., at 1.45 a.m., as the sun rises at 3.45 on the 14th of June — being "presently sensible that there was nothing to be done but to fight " the enemy the next day. The Spanish generals were in no such hurry. As he says himself the Duke of York, being at supper with the Marquis of Caracena, "expressed his dislike of their encamping without lines or the least thing to cover them, and his fixed belief that if the French did not attack them that night, they would infallibly give them battle next morning". Caracena replied : "That is what I desire". " I am well acquainted with M. de Turenne," said the Duke of York, "and I venture to promise that your desire shall be gratified," i658 JET. 47] BATTLE OF THE DUNES 261 At about s A.M. the next mornino;- the Duke of battle ^ & OF THE York and Conde, hearing that the French were on the dunes, move, mounted their horses and rode to the outposts, 1658. where they saw artillery and cavalry marching towards them. They galloped back to tell Caracena, who, annoyed at being disturbed so early — it was one of the hours for being in bed ; so in bed, of course, he was lying — pettishly replied that no doubt the French were only going to attack the outposts. Provoked at Caracena's indolence, Cond6 said: "Artillery are not generally used in capturing outposts " ; and turning to the young Duke of Gloucester, he said sharply : "Have you ever seen a battle won?" Receiving a reply in the negative he said: "Then in half an hour you will see one lost ! " Further reports confirmed the approach of the French, and delay for another moment became impossible even to the Spanish general. The rival armies were numerically pretty even, each numbering about 14,000, but the French had 8,000 infantry to 6,000 cavalry, while the Spaniards had 6,000 infantry to 8,000 cavalry ; and, as Napoleon observes, the ground was "ill adapted to horse"; therefore, in his larger proportion of infantry, Turenne had a decided advantage. Another, and a great, ad- vantage on the side of Turenne was that he not only had his own artillery on the field, but also the support of the guns from the English ships, which kept annoy- ing the right flank of the Spaniards, whereas the Spanish artillery had not yet arrived and the enemy 262 MARSHAL TURENNE [1658 had not a single gun with which to defend himself. Moreover, the Spaniards had not been expecting an attack that morning, therefore they must almost in- evitably have formed themselves into battle array with undue hurry, and undue hurry generally entails con- fusion. The Battle of the Dunes, as it was afterwards called, was fought on the sands between the sea on the north, and the Furnes and Dunkirk canal on the south. Turenne drew up his army in three lines. He placed the English troops on his left, next to the sea, and the French on the right, resting on the canal. His guns were in front of either flank. In the opposing army Don John was on the right and Conde was on the left. Where there was cavalry, and cavalry largely prepon- derated, there was a line of infantry in front of it. Turenne had five guns at each wing of his army, and they were fired four or five times before the rival infantry and cavalry came into contact. Two battalions of EnglLsh pikemen, on Turenne's left, began the attack, and began it too soon, by running forward, getting out of line with the front rank of the French army, and advancing against a Spanish battalion which was posted upon the highest of the sandhills. Colonel Fenwick, who was in command, halted at the foot of the sandhill to give his pikemen time to take breath before charging up the hill. Meanwhile his musketeers opened fire upon the Spaniards, who returned it with vigour. Colonel Fenwick falling to one of their bullets. His second in command, Major Hinton, then led the 1658 ^Et. 47] BATTLE OF THE DUNES 263 attack. The Englishmen scrambled up the soft, yielding surface of the mound, says the Duke of York, who was watching them from the Spanish ranks, and they "stopped not till they came to push of pike ; where notwithstanding the great resistance which was made by the Spaniards, and the advantage they had on the higher ground, as well as that of being well in breath, when their enemies were almost spent with climbing, the English gained the hill and drove them from off it ". He might have added that these English soldiers had been marching- all night ; for such was the fact. o o ' When the English came down the hill, on the Spanish side, the Duke of York charged them with his cavalry ; but the sandhills afforded very unsuitable ground for horses to gallop over, and the pikemen made such a stolid resistance that, says the Duke, " I was beaten off, and all who were at the head of my own troop were either killed or wounded, of which number I had been, had not the goodness of my armour preserved me ". If, says he, "they whose business it was to have taken advantage of it" had sent some cavalry to the rtank and rear of the English infantry, which had out- marched the French, those Englishmen "might have paid dear for their rash bravery " ; but " the opportunity was let slip " by the Spanish officers. The Duke met the Marquis of Caracena, who asked him why he had not charged the enemy. " I have already done so," replied the Duke, "and I have been worsted for my pains." 264 MARSHAL TURENNE [1658 The English were now advancing out of sight behind some sandhills, and the Duke of York, who had rallied some cavalry, ordered a Spanish officer to attack them in front with some infantry, while he attacked them in their flank with his small body of cavalry. Although the Spanish infantry only appeared in front of the English without attacking them, the distraction prevented the Englishmen from noticing that the Duke of York, with his horse, was charging upon their flank. " I charged that battalion so home," says he, "that I broke them, doing great execution upon them to the edge of the sandhill next the sea." It seems that the ranks, which he "broke," were those not of pikemen, but of musketeers ; for he continues : "not so much as one single man of them asked quarter or threw down his arms ; but every man defended him- self to the last : so that we ran as great danger by the butt end of their muskets, as by the volley they had given us ". Conde, on the Spanish left, was meanwhile making a valiant effort with his cavalry ; but the Spanish centre soon fell into hopeless confusion before the vigorous onslaught of Turenne's troops. Conde's cavalry, alarmed at seeing the rout of the Spanish troops on their right, were still further discouraged at seeing Conde himself hurled to the ground ; and they turned and joined in the flight before Conde, who, as it happened, was unhurt, had had time to mount another horse in place of the one which had been shot under him. i6s8 Mr. 47] BATTLE OF THE DUNES 265 As to the Spanish infantry, which the Duke of York had ordered to charge the English front, while he attacked its flank, "discovering from the top of the sandhill, where they were, that our whole army was in rout, they scattered, and every man endeavoured to get off, which few of them were so lucky as to per- form ". It was indeed something like a rout ! Turenne says that "there were between three and four thousand of the enemy made prisoners, and a thousand killed and wounded " ; but the French loss was comparatively slight. On the evening after this great victory, Turenne wrote the following laconic description of it to his wife : " The enemy came to us and God be praised they have been defeated : I was pretty busy all day, which has fatigued me : I wish you good night : I am going to bed ". A letter of a very different nature about this battle is said to have been sug"g"ested to him. It is asserted that he was offered some of the hig-hest dig-nities as a bribe, if he would consent to write a letter attributing to Mazarin the credit of having conceived the entire plan of operations which led to the victory. Turenne replied that his signature should never cover a fraud.' Napoleon's criticisms of this affair are interesting. " Don John," he says, " deserved his defeat for ad- vancing within sight of Turenne, without artillery or tools to entrench himself with. It was not with such 1 Lives of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin (1854), p. 104. 266 MARSHAL TURENNE [1658 culpable negligence that Turenne presented himself before the lines of Arras " (as we saw in Chapter XVII.). "He," that is to say Turenne, before Arras, "might have occupied the position of Mouchy by ten o'clock in the morning ; but he took care not to do so : he remained all day behind a rivulet, and, in the evening took up his position : he therefore had the whole night in which to entrench himself" But, while describing the Battle of the Dunes as "Turenne's most brilliant action," he says that his victory " was to be expected ". He had a superiority of three to two in infantry, over "ground ill adapted to horse, which rendered the superiority of the Spaniards in cavalry useless to them. Turenne had artillery, and his enemy had none." And "the English ships, at anchor in the roads, cannonaded the right flank of the Spaniards ". Turenne's "order of battle was parallel, he had no manoeuvre to execute, nor anything out of the ordinary course to perform ". When he resolved to attack he was unaware that the enemy's artillery had not yet arrived ; but he was right in attacking before the enemy had had "time to entrench themselves". Yet he has a fault to find with Turenne. After the Battle of the Dunes Turenne continued the siege of Dunkirk, which fell in ten days. Now Napoleon says: "After the taking of Dunkirk, and so brilliant a victory as that of the Downs, . . . Turenne might have done more than he did. He ou<)'ht to have struck a orand blow and taken Brussels, which would have rendered the French arms far more 1658 /Et. 47] BATTLE OF THE DUNES 267 illustrious, and accelerated the conclusion of peace. An event of such importance would have produced the hill of all the smaller places. Turenne infringed the rule which says : 'Avail yourself of the favour of Fortune, while she is in the humour : beware that she does not change, through resentment of your neglect : she is a woman '." Great credit had been given to the English troops in the description of this victory in these pages ; but it is only fair to say that there were several English, Scotch and Irish regiments in the vanquished army — Lord Ormonde's, Lord Bristol's, the Duke of York's, Lord Middleton's and King Charles's royal regiment of Guards, afterwards called the i st Guards, and now known as the Grenadier Guards. If the takine of Dunkirk did honour to the French army, the delivery of Dunkirk to England was a humiliation to French pride. Turenne endeavoured to make up for its loss by capturing for France, Furnes, Dixmunde, Gravelines (after a siege of twenty-six days), Ypres, ^ and Oudenarde, an unfortified cit)' on the Scheldt, within thirty-five miles of Brussels. It was then generally expected that he would advance to Brussels, but Turenne himself explains his reasons tor not doing so. " Having only .some field-pieces, and but two or three days' provisions, he could not enter upon a siege." He chose the alternative of proceeding ' At the siege of Ypres the English delivered such a brilliant assault that, when it was over, Turenne embraced their leader and called him one of the bravest captains of the period. 268 MARSHAL TURENNE [1658 against the maritime towns, and conquered the whole country between the Lys and the Scheldt, two rivers which are twenty-five miles apart on the present Belgium frontier, but join at Ghent. Leaving garrisons in the important fortresses, Turenne went to Paris in December, about six months after the Battle of the Dunes. This campaign had been long and wearying ; but its effects, if not immediate, were eventually decisive ; for, as there were no fortresses beyond those already captured by Turenne, the King of Spain was afraid lest, in another campaign, the French troops should capture all his territory in the Low Countries. Before the end of the year 1658 an event had happened which had a considerable influence upon European politics. Within three months of the Battle of the Dunes Cromwell lay dead. Little less influential upon the affairs of Western Europe was the recovery from the jaws of death of a neighbouring potentate. For ten days in July the young King of France had lain in a most critical condition ; and, when his health and strength were completely restored, the Queen-Mother told Mazarin that she felt it to be a matter of conscience to show her thankfulness by putting a stop to the effusion of Christian blood and making peace with her brother, the King of Spain. CHAPTER XX. 'Tis less to conquer, than to make wars cease, And, without fighting, awe the world to peace. — Halifax. It appeared, at the end of the last chapter, that Turenne's victories had made the King of Spain desire peace with France, and Mazarin, again, on his part, had his own reasons for desiring peace with Spain. He still cherished his project of a marriage between the young King of France and Maria Theresa, the Infanta of Spain, and he thought that Spain's present embarrassments offered a peculiarly favourable op- portunity of accomplishing it. To France the year 1659 was one not of warfare but of diplomacy. After negotiations, which lasted during many months, the Peace of the Pyrenees — so called because the conferences between the repre- sentatives of France and Spain were held near that boundary between the two kingdoms — was concluded in November, after a war which had lasted twenty-four- years. By this agreement France retained many of the places she had conquered, such as Philippsburg, Mont- medy, Arras, Lens, Gravelines, Landregies, and all the fortresses in Artois, as well as some on the frontiers of Spain. 269 270 MARSHAL TURENNE [1659 At about the same time a marriage contract was made between Louis XIV. and the Infanta, Maria Theresa, with the agreement that she was to renounce her rights to the Crown of Spain. Conde was for- given and his honours and estates were to be restored to him ; but he was to be Governor of Burgundy instead of Guienne. The Duke of Lorraine was to retain his duchy, but his capital was no longer to be fortified ; and, in order to put him out of the tempta- tion of placing his military services and those of his troops at the disposal of the highest bidder, he was to have no troops at all for the future. As will be seen later, however, he contrived to raise some. The choice of a spot among the Pyrenees for negotiating the peace, and the marriage with the Infanta, brought both diplomatists and the Court from Paris to those mountains. In these days of admira- tion for mountain scenery, it is interesting to observe how differently it was regarded in the seventeenth cen- tury. Madame de Motteville writes of the "frightful mountains" which she saw on this occasion. " I was amazed," she says, "to find that the agreeable and the horrible made an admirable blending of the different beauties of nature. From space to space among these high and monstrous mountains are very beauti- ful valleys". Of Lourdes, a place now celebrated for such different reasons, she says: " It appears to have been placed on the French side to defend the entrance and the exit against the Spaniards, in case they had fhe audacity to attempt to enter France on that side "■ i66o ^T. 49] MARRIAGE OF LOUIS XIV. 271 After the peace had been finally settled, Turenne spent much time in seeing to the defence of the for- tresses. He had also the difficult task thrown upon him of the reduction of the army, which he carried out with every possible consideration for his officers and his men. He also arranged for the reception of the troops of Conde into the army of the King. In the spring of 1660 Louis XIV. was married to Maria Theresa. At the dinner which followed, the King of Spain asked the Oueen-Dowager of France if Turenne was present ; and, when she had pointed him out, the King said in a low voice: "That man has given me many bad nights".^ Louis XIV. was anxious to make Turenne Con- stable of France, the highest dignity in the gift of the Crown, and he deputed Mazarin to inform him that it would be offered to him, but that it was a post which could only be held by a Catholic. On hearing of this condition, Turenne, gratefully and respectfully, but very firmly, declined it. The King then made him " Marshal General of his Majesty's Camps and Armies" and Governor of Limousin. " It appears by several letters to the King of Great Britain and the Duke of York," that Turenne "was in close correspondence," after the death of Oliver Cromwell, "with the Royalists in England, and that he contributed more than any other stranger to the 1 On the other hand, De Retz declares that he never slept so soundly as he did in misfortune ; and, curiously enough, St. Evremond makes a similar statement about their contemporary, Mademoiselle de Beverweert, 272 MARSHAL TURENNE [1660 happy restoration of Charles II."' Probably his personal friendship with the Duke of York may have influenced Turenne in this direction. He not only corresponded with General Monk, but sent a special envoy to England to confer with him. Having ob- tained the consent of Louis XIV. he proposed, "at his own expense to assist the King of England in ascending the throne of his ancestors : he requested the Duke of York to come to Amiens and offered him his regiment of foot, consisting of 1,200 effective men, togfether with the Scots gendarmes, ammunition and arms for 4,000 or 5,000 men ; provisions to subsist them two months ; ships to transport them into Eng- land ; passports to embark at Boulogne the troops the Duke had in Flanders, and lastly all his credit for borrowing the necessary sums. The Duke of York having joyfully accepted these offers, Turenne sent him a letter for the Kind's Lieutenant at Boulog'ne, who promised to furnish all the vessels belonging to the ports of his government even to his fishing smacks." And the Duke of York, in his own Memoirs, says that, besides all this, Turenne insisted upon his accept- ing a personal present of 300 pistoles, or about ^240 sterling. The Restoration of King Charles II., how- ever, was effected without any necessity for foreign intervention or assistance. Peace had not long been made between France and Spain, before Turenne, who "was ever fond of procuring succour for distressed Princes," advised 1 Ramsay, i66o ^T. 49] ROYAL MARRIAGES 2'j'i, Louis XIV. to assist Alfonso, King of Portugal, in his war with the King of Spain. Richelieu had always supported and encouraged Portugal, in order that it might reduce the power of Spain by proving a constant thorn in her side, just as he had supported and encouraged Scotland, for the purpose of serving as a thorn in the side of England ; and Mazarin, in his wars with Spain, had practically supported Portugal by giving the armies of Spain more than enough to occupy their attention in Flanders, as well as on the northern frontier of Spain itself But, now that peace had been made between Spain and France, Spain was able to concentrate its army for the destruction of Portugal. Louis XIV., without nominally breaking his treaty of peace with Spain, agreed to send money and a general to the assistance of Portugal against her powerful neighbour. Turenne proposed the Count of Schomberg as a general for this purpose, for being a German by birth, although he had served in the French army, his appointment was likely to give less offence to Spain than that of a Frenchman. Schom- berg, although already a distinguished general, was somewhat out of favour at Court, not on account of any demerits of his own, but because his wife and the Oueen-Dowager had quarrelled about a chemise. Meanwhile, Charles II. of England arranged a marriage between himself and the Infanta of Portugal ; and another match was made between Henrietta, the sister of Charles IL, and Philip, the new Duke of Orleans; for Gaston was dead. Charles II. had no 18 274 MARSHAL TURENNE [1660 money to give as a dowry to his sister ; but Louis was clever enough to offer to buy Dunkirk from Charles, thus providing him with funds for his sister's dowry and a large balance in hand. To this bargain Charles agreed. In the course of his life Louis XIV. showed many kindnesses to the Stuarts ; but he never lost sight of his own interests in so doing; and he once observed that he felt the natural antipathy towards the English, which was said always to have existed be- tween England and France. The period during which these events took place was essentially a period of intrigues, and while they were yet in progress the arch-intriguer of Europe showed unmistakable symptoms of being about to intrigue no more. As a result, intrigues were doubled ! Never, says Voltaire, was there more intriguing in any Court than during the fatal illness of Cardinal Mazarin. Every beautiful lady at the Court flattered herself that she would become a sort of governess to a prince of only twenty-two, who had already nearly sunk so low as to offer his crown to his mistress ; all the young courtiers expected that the reign of Louis XIV. would now become a reign of favourites ; each Minister of the Crown hoped to take the place of Mazarin ; and nobody believed that a King, brought up without any knowledge or cares of business, would either care or dare to take upon his own shoulders the burden of the Govern- ment of his country.^ They were all mistaken ! Cardinal Mazarin died in 1661. "He showed no '^Steele de Louis XIV. (ed. 1835), vol., i., p. 112. LOUIS XIV. i66i ^T. so] DEATH OF MAZARIN 275 fear of death, "said Montglat, "but an incomprehensible attachment to money to his last breath."^ "When- ever," says Madame de Motteville, who hated him, "he had moments of reprieve, he was often seen to be busy weighing the pistoles which he won at cards, in order to stake the lightest of them on the morrow." But there is rebutting evidence. It is said that he ex- claimed : " I feel my end approaching ; I pray God to be merciful to me," and that he asked forgiveness of all whom he might have offended. His last words are reported to have been, " My hope is in Jesus Christ". If this be true, his end was very different from the deathbed scene of Richelieu, who, when the viaticum was brought to him, has the reputation of having said : " Behold the judge, who will soon pronounce my sentence. I supplicate him to condemn me, if during my ministry I have had any other object than the good of my country, the service of my sovereign, the glory of God, and the advancement of religion." The con- fidence of the dying Richelieu, said the Bishop of Lisieux, who was present, "filled me with terror ".- Louis XIV., who had already begun to grow tired of being governed by Mazarin, from the time of his death took the reins of government entirely into his own hands. This he did at the advice of Mazarin himself who, when he felt that he was dying, warned the King against the great dangers of ever raising a minister ^ A'Temoirs of Madame de Motteville, vol. iii., p. 226. '■^ Lives of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin (1854), pp. 52 and 113. 18 * 276 MARSHAL TURENNE [1661 again to the height of power which he, Mazarin, had enjoyed. The King occasionally employed Turenne on dip- lomatic errands, for which he may have been less fitted than for war. One of these, if not directly dictated by the King, yet at his instigation, was to persuade Mademoiselle de Montpensier to consent to a marriage with the young King of Portugal. We have her own account of it. After telling her that he hsid always loved her as a daughter and expressing a hope that she would yield to his advice in the most important affairs in life, Turenne informed her that he was anxious to make her Queen of Portugal. Her reply was discouraging : "Get away with you! I will have nothing to do with your Queen of Portugal." Turenne then said that young ladies of her rank ought to have no will independent of that of the King ; and that although the King himself had not directly ordered Turenne to speak to her on the subject, he knew that the King desired the match. The King of Portugal was the kind of youth who could be easily moulded by a wife of strong character like Mademoiselle, who could amuse herself with his great wealth and control him as she pleased. When he came to describe the proposed bridegroom, he was in an almost ridiculous difficulty ; but he did what he could under the circumstances. The King of Portugal, said he, "was tolerably good-looking, fair, and would have been well-made, but that he was born with a paralysis of one side, which made it a little weaker i665 ^T. 54] DEATH OF PHILIP IV. 277 than the other, yet this was not observable when he was dressed ; he merely drew one leg a little after him. He could only use one of his arms ; but he was begin- ning- to get on his horse without help." His inclina- tions were neither good nor bad ; but, as he was of a submissive temperament, he would be quite safe in the hands of so virtuous a mistress as Mademoiselle. " No," replied she. " I prefer to be Made- moiselle in France, with 500,000 livres a year, to do honour to the Court, and to be held in as high con- sideration for character as for rank." Turenne then reminded his cousin — for she was a relation of his — that, high as was her position, she was still a subject of the King, who was not scrupulous with those who opposed his wishes, nor hesitated to annoy them in a thousand ways. " If the King were to say this to me," answered Mademoiselle, " I should know how to answer him. But you are not the King ! " Perceiving that her royal highness was in a passion, Turenne dropped the subject ; but he returned to it a few days later, and to as little purpose. The death of Philip IV. of Spain took place in 1665, and, in the same year, England declared war against Holland. France intended to join the Dutch against the English ; but the war turned out to be entirely naval, and the French fleet was unable to join that of the Dutch before the latter had met with a defeat from the English, under the Duke of York, off Lowestoft. 278 MARSHAL TURENNE [1666 Although Turenne had spent much of his married life on campaigns, he was devoted to his wife, and her death in 1666 caused him great grief He had indeed been able to be with her more during the last few years of her life than at any other period since his marriage. Some of his letters to her, which are in print, are full of affection ; but they are not devoid of candid advice : "Call to mind a little my lessons," he says in one of them. "Avoid dejection of mind : it is the most dangerous of all diseases. ... I am more hard upon those I love than upon others ; but though I take upon me to reprimand, I am not the less sensible of my own faults." On another occasion he seems to have thought that his wife was too severe in her treatment of some girl. "You . . . who exclaim so much how hard it is to win upon a young woman, do you take the proper methods? Let me tell you that roughness and severity beget aversion in young people. . . . Before I turn over, I shall own that what I have just said seems expressed with a little too much dry- ness : I ask your pardon." Sometimes the reprimand appears to have come from exactly the opposite quarter ; for, in one letter, Turenne writes: "I was some time before I could understand what you meant by a stroke you aim at me ; I don't deserve it, and in such affection as ours, little twittings are always out of season. ... I know very well, that loving me as you do, you will be extremely concerned to find me having so quick a feeling for your reproaches. ... I impart my thoughts to you ingenu- i666 Mt. 55] DEATH OF THE VISCOUNTESS 279 ously and they displease you : to confess the truth, I don't look upon the trouble you are in with the same eye as if I had found you candid enough to acknow- ledge certain truths, which seem to me as clear as day." Towards the end of his letter he becomes more submissive to the matronly correction. "Notwith- standing anything I have said, I shall not slight your remonstrances ; and I beg you to believe that I am not insensible how much you love me ; it affects me very much. ... I was going once to tear up this letter, but the conclusion will assure you anew of my entire affec- tion." Almost at the same time as the Viscountess of Turenne, died also the Queen-Dowager, Anne of Austria, after a long, tedious and exceedingly painful illness, which she bore with very remarkable fortitude, patience and resignation. On the death of Philip IV. of Spain, the weakly boy, Charles II., Philip's son by his second marriage, became King. Although the Queen of France, as In- fanta of Spain, had renounced any future right to the crown of her native country, Louis XIV. claimed that the Spanish possessions in the Low Countries fell to her, on the death of her father, by the right of devolu- tion, according to the laws of the Low Countries, which ordained that they should go to the issue, whether male or female, of the first marriage, before that of the second ; and the Queen of France, Maria Theresa, was the only remaining child of Philip's first marriage. According to Ramsay, Turenne was the first person 28o MARSHAL TURENNE [1667 to call the attention of Louis to this right, or, at any rate, asserted right, of his Queen. Louis tried to come to some compromise about the matter with the Queen-Regent of Spain ; but, when she had refused to recognise that the Queen of France had the shadow of a right to the Low Countries, Louis made up his mind to take by force what he had failed to obtain by diplomacy, and he said in confidence to Turenne : " I will march in person at the head of my army, but I will learn the art of war under you ". Louis, who was now twenty-nine, was as good as his word. Having sent Turenne to the war with 25,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry, he left St. Germains, on the i6th of May, 1667, taking with him, as a fellow-pupil, his recently appointed Minister-of-War, the Marquis of Louvois. Turenne and Louvois between them, but at Turenne's initiative, had arranged a new system of furnishing an army on campaign with supplies, which the weakness of the Government had hitherto rendered impossible. The Low Countries were utterly unprepared for war. Turenne had already taken Armentieres and Binche, before the arrival of Louis ; after that arrival, Douay, Ouclenarde and several other places were taken without a blow. When they came to Lille it was a different matter. The governor was an officer of great experience ; it was well fortified, well provisioned, and, although its garrison of regular troops only numbered 4, 200, it contained 20,000 men capable of carrying arms. The Marquis of Louvois tried to persuade the King i668 ^T. 57] PEACE OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE 281 not to attack it ; but Turenne was inflexible ; and it was well that he was so, for the siege was a great success and the fortress capitulated in seventeen days. The siege works were conducted by Vauban, then a young engineer. His system was quite new to the besieged, who were taken by surprise, confused and bewildered. The King accompanied Turenne when he visited the trenches during the siege, and took an eager, intelligent and active interest in their progress. The Count of Marsin and the Prince of Lignes, not knowing that Lille had fallen, advanced with 8,000 men to its relief When they learned that it had capitulated, they retired, but the army of Turenne fell upon their rear, routed them, and took 1,500 prisoners. As the King was present at this engagement it counted as his victory. The Dutch became alarmed at the successes of their ally ; for they by no means desired to have France as a next neighbour, and they began secretly to give assistance to their old enemies the Spaniards. England was as uneasy as was Holland at the advances of the French, and Sir William Temple was sent across the Channel to form a triple alliance between Holland, England and Sweden, for the purpose of obliging France and Spain to make peace. The first three months of the year 1668 were spent in negotiations, military demonstrations, and threatened coalitions. On the 1 5th of April peace was made at Aix-la-Chapelle. France gave up Franche-Comte, but kept her conquests in the Low Countries, known afterwards as French Flanders ; and this treaty had been immediately pre- 282 MARSHAL TURENNE [1668 ceded by one between Lisbon and Madrid, by which Spain acknowledged the independence of Portugal. Four years of peace were to follow; but not of idleness for France in military matters. Louis XIV. surrounded his seaports with forts, levelled unnecessary inland fortresses, and greatly strengthened such as were of importance. This was a very busy period for Vauban. People who did not understand his system were astounded at seeing high walls and towering battlements disappear, and give place to earthworks, almost level with the ground. Louis directed that the fortifications of the important places on the frontier of French Flanders should be carried forward before any others, as he was bitterly annoyed with the Dutch for having made the triple alliance which enforced the peace, just as he was getting Spain into his power, also for representing themselves, on a medal, as the preservers of the peace of Europe ; and he determined to punish, if not to annihilate, Holland. Though strong at sea she was weak on land, and Louis had every hope of success ; but he was not going to strike until certain of victory. Meanwhile, he was doing something besides improving fortresses. He was en- deavouring to prove superior to the United Provinces by sea as well as by land. His navy occupied much of his thoughts and increased very rapidly. Altogether, under the veil of a profound peace, he was eagerly and energetically preparing for war. CHAPTER XXI. Most of the extant records of the experiences of Turenne relate to his public career ; but, in all bio- graphical sketches, the private life of their subjects should not be allowed to pass altogether unnoticed. We have now to consider a personal matter in the life of Turenne, which has nothing to do with warfare. The staunchness of his Calvinism has already been noticed. It has also been observed that he refused two splendid marriages rather than take a wife of a religion different from his own ; and, in the last chapter, we observed that, when the King offered to revive for his acceptance the office of Constable of France, the highest in the power of the Crown to grant, but one which had to be held by a Catholic, Turenne re- spectfully declined it, on the ground that he could not change his religion, for even the highest honours of the world. But so long ago as two years before that offer was made to him, he had begun to take a more charitable view of the Catholic religion. Writing to his wife, from Ypres, when on a campaign already described, he said, in 1658: "We had a communion here last Sunday. M. Brevin made an excellent sermon ; one ought to grow better for such discourses ; that is the great point : 383 284 MARSHAL TURENNE [1668 but it is very hard to become good ; and when I examine myself thoroughly, I find methinks but little amendment. In discoursing on these words : Go out of Babylon, he let me understand that he should not have made such post-haste as our Reformers. He has a great deal of knowledge and no bitterness of spirit : he agreed with me that the people of the two religions are not on either side fairly and honestly instructed in the tenets of the other, and that each party represents the religion of the other in such a manner only as may beget an aversion to it ; just as in a town where there are two cabals, you never meet with sincerity or candour on either side." Turenne had probably been considerably influenced by Beaulieu, a Calvinist who held a Professorship of Divinity, founded by Turenne, at Sedan. This Calvinist, says Bayle {Die, vol. i., p. 705), made "it appear that many disputes, which are thought to be real, are only disputes about words. It is scarce credible how much this method prejudiced a great many ignorant persons against him. They imagined that he endeavoured to bring back the Reformed to the Communion of the Church of Rome." It must be remembered that Bayle wrote from a very anti-catholic standpoint. On the same page Des Maizeaux says, in his Notes, that Turenne was "very fond of re-uniting both religions," or rather of wishing to unite them. In conversation, also, he advanced the view of M. Brevin that "he should not have made such post-haste as our Reformers ". i668 ^T. 57] A CONVERT 285 St. Evrenidnd says, in his Eulogium on M. de Turenne : "He ever loved to talk of religion, particu- larly with M. d'Aubig'ni, and used to say that the doctrine of the Reformed was the soundest, yet they ought not to have made a separation, but to have in- sensibly distilled their principles into the Catholics". "When a man confesses that he is in the wrong to separate from a Church," answered M. d'Aubigni, "he is in a fair way of returning to it ; and if I survive Madame de Turenne, I shall see you in ours." M. de Turenne smiled, says St. Evremond, "but that smile did not sufficiently discover whether he meant to laugh at M. d'Aubigni's prediction or to approve of it". But was Aubicfiii fair in hintincj that Turenne was afraid of his wife ? In 1660 Turenne wrote to her from Amiens : " Let us but lay aside prejudice, and we shall often find in those long declamations that are made against Catholics, a spirit ot strife and wrangling, and that some people are so intent upon reforming, that they quite forget charity ". hi the same letter he says : " I had sent a Gentleman, who speaks English very well, to Monck,' to learn his intentions upon his arrival at London. . . . This Gentleman examined the state of religion in England. . . . One sees by this and by the multitude of sects in England" — what would he have said, if he could have known what their number would be now? — "that through a too presumptuous spirit of independency, though there may be good sense and perhaps devotion among them, they have so 1 The famous English general. 286 MARSHAL TURENNE [1668 much disfigured religion, that each private man is for setting" up a new sect of his particular fashion, and that whoever reads the word of God, and will explain it after his own fancy, goes greater lengths in folly than is easily imagined." Four months later, in the same year, he wrote to her : "I read this morning a book, which I found at M. Duplessis's, Secretary of State. It is a collection, in French, made at the Port Royal, of what the Fathers of the first centuries have said concerning the Eucharist. The passages are there entire, with the context be- fore and after them, and nothing of the author's own. If the quotations are not fairly made, it is easy to show it ; but I assure you that these passages do not square with what we say. I believe it is what I write to you from time to time on this head, which draws upon me those reproaches you make me : but nothing can lessen my affection for you." From this it would appear that Turenne was not afraid of speaking his mind very freely to his wife on the subject of religion ; so M. d'Aubigni need not have insinuated that Turenne wanted to become a Catholic, but was afraid of doing so during his wife's lifetime. On the contrary, Madame de Turenne herself seems to have been anxious to learn more about the Catholic Church ; for Ramsay says: "This year (1665) died the Viscountess de Turenne, whose virtues cannot be enough admired. Though she had several conferences with the Doctors of the Catholic Church, yet she continued under the prejudices of her education as long as she lived." 1 668 /Ex. 57] A CONVERT 287 Ramsay hints at Turenne's anxiety that, if he made any movement towards the Catholic Church, his wife should go with him, and it may be that, when she seemed to be outpaced, he sometimes paused in his inquiries to give her time to overtake him. But so far indeed was he from merely waiting for his wife's death to become a Catholic, that it was not until two years after her death that he took that step. " The calm which Europe enjoyed after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, allowed the Viscount a great deal of leisure : he employed it wholly in the study of religion, which he had long reproached himself for not having thoroughly examined. From the time of the Peace of the Pyrenees, he had begun to have doubts about Calvinism. The accounts he had frequently from the English, during his intercourse with them, of the multitude of sects that overspread Great Britain, had struck him exceedingly."^ When he had become disposed to inquire into the claims of the Catholic Church, he consulted the celebrated preacher, Bossuet, afterwards Bishop of Meaux, with whom he had many conversations. Du Buisson, in his Vie de Turenne, published in 1695, says that one of the Fathers of the French Oratory had more to do than any one else with Turenne's pre- paration for reception into the Church, and that it was conducted as secretly as possible, because Turenne had a great dislike to any fuss being made about himself. Ramsay says of Turenne that "so long as he ' Ramsay. 288 MARSHAL TURENNE [1668 was not convinced, no human views, no motives of ambition, no temporal interest could prevail with him to chanw his relieion ; but, as soon as he saw the truth, he yielded to it, sacrificing his reputation to the unjust suspicions of those who accused him of acting from political views, unworthy of a great soul ". If he had become a Catholic some time earlier, no doubt it would have materially assisted his career ; but at, and from, the date at which he did so, it in no way influ- enced his worldly prospects. Of course that entertain- ing and cynical old sceptic, Voltaire, attributes his change of religion to political motives, on much the same principle that led Bismarck to say when a certain diplomatist was prevented by serious illness from keep- ing an appointment, " I should very much like to know what his object is in being ill at this particular time ". Yet even Voltaire says of Turenne : " It is also possible that his conversion was sincere".-' A great admission from such a writer ! When, at the age of fifty-seven, he had completely made up his mind to become a Catholic, Turenne decided to make his abjuration before the Archbishop of Paris ; but, fearing that, if the day and hour were to be known, the cathedral would be crowded, he did not make his appointment with the archbishop until the evening before it took place. It will be remembered that Turenne's brother, the Duke of Bouillon, became a Catholic long before his death, and one of the Duke's sons had been made a ' Steele de Louis XIV., vol. i., pp. 186, 187. i668 ^T. 57] PENITENTS 289 cardinal by the time of Turenne's conversion. Possibly conversations with his nephew may have supplemented those with Bossuet and the fathers of the oratory in convincina Turenne of the claims of the Church. o Besides Turenne, several characters figuring in our story, characters formerly anything but saintlike, became what is called in their own language ddvotSs — Cardinal de Retz, Prince de Conti, "the beauty of whose repentance," says Madame de Motteville, "far surpassed the hideousness of his faults," that very political Magdalen, Madame de Longueville, who devoted her later years entirely to religion, and, to some extent, the Great Conde, of whom Bossuet said that, in his last illness, he had "the Psalms always on his lips, and faith always in his heart ". St. Evremond said of Turenne that, both as a Calvinist and as a Catholic, he "aimed at what was riofht and o-ood. While a Hufjuenot, he had no schemes contrary to the interests of the Catholics ; when converted, he had no zeal prejudicial to the safety of the Huguenots." Of his excellence, Madame de Sevigne wrote, in a letter to M. de Grignan : "No one believes that sin and evil could have any place in his heart : his conversion was so sincere . . . every- body speaks of the innocence of his manners, the purity of his intentions, his humility far removed from all kind of affectation, his love of virtue for itself without respect to the approbation of men, and his generous and Christian charity ". There can be little doubt that, in the seventeenth 19 290 MARSHAL TURENNE [1668 century, some Frenchmen left the Huguenots to be- come Catholics for the purpose of advancing their prospects of obtaining office or other privileges from the King or the Government. The Bishop of Nismes contrasted Turenne with such as these : " How sin- cere was his conversion, Gentlemen, and how different from that of those who, forsaking heresy from in- terested views, change their opinions without changing their manners, who enter into the bosom of the Church only to wound her the deeper by a scandalous life, and from being declared enemies, become rebellious children. Though his mind had escaped the deprava- tion commonly occasioned by the passions, yet he was still the more careful to regulate it ; he thought that the innocence of his life oug-ht to be conformable to the purity of his faith: he knew truth, he loved it, he followed it." Shortly after becoming a Catholic, he made a vow never again to commit a certain sin of which hitherto he had not been guiltless. Sometime afterwards, some one who was cognisant of his vow asked him if he had kept it. Turenne replied : "I have never broken my word to man : could you think that I would break it to God?" After his change of religion he lived a very quiet life in Paris, only associating with a small circle of chosen friends, and he rarely went to Court, except to pay his respects to the King. To his intimate friends his frugal table was always open. " He loved to be gay at meals : he then liked pleasantry, being himself facetious but still with prudence and politeness : few MAKSHAL lUKENNE. i668 JET. 57] A QUIET LIFE 291 people knew more stories or could tell them better."^ Several anecdotes are told about his imperturbable good- temper and his stolid coolness under provocation, during this period of tranquil life. In a block in the streets of Paris a young gentleman, who did not know Turenne by sight, struck his coachman. Some one loudly asked him what he meant by treating a servant of Marshal Turenne in such a manner. He immedi- ately went to the door of the carriage to apologise : "You seem thoroughly to understand the correction of servants, Sir," said Turenne, smiling. "Allow me to send mine to you when they are in need of it." He often walked alone to hear mass and then took a turn on the ramparts. Once he passed two trades- men, playing at bowls, and, without knowing who he was, they asked him to decide a disputed game. He measured with his cane and gave his opinion, when the loser began to abuse him in the most violent terms. Turenne quietly measured the distances a second time ; and, while he was doing so, some officers came up and saluted him. When the man who had abused him ascertained who he was, he fell on his knees and begged his pardon. All Turenne said was : "My friend, you need not have been afraid that I should cheat you ". In a theatre, he was sitting alone, on the front seat, when several strangers from the country swaggered in and rather rudely asked him to make way for them. This he refused to do, whereupon one of them had the 1 Ramsay, ii., p. 357. 19* 293 MARSHAL TURENNE [1669 impudence to take up Turenne's hat and gloves, and throw them on to the stage. Turenne said nothing ; but he asked a well-known young nobleman, who was standing near, to fetch them for him. Seeing that Turenne must be some one of importance, the strangers asked who he was, and were hastily retiring in great confusion, when Turenne called them back and told them that, if they would only sit close together, there was plenty of room for all of them. Driving home late one night, his carriage was stopped by highwaymen. The robbers took every- thing of value that they could find on him, including a ring, which he highly prized quite apart from its intrinsic worth. He promised the men that, if he might keep the ring, he would give them 100 Louis- d'ors, a sum far beyond its value, the next day. They returned the ring to him, and, on the following afternoon, one of them was bold enough to oro to his house and, although it so happened that a number of people were visiting him, the man whispered his claim to Turenne, who ordered 100 Louis-d'ors to be paid to him, and, when the robber had had ample time to get clear away, he told the story of his adventure to his friends, saying : " A promise ought to be kept inviolably, and an honest man should never break his word, even when it has been given to knaves". Of this period of Turenne's life — the quietest period — the Abbot Flechier said: "When he returned from those glorious campaigns that will make his name immortal, he shunned the acclamations of the people, i669 ^.T. 58] "SWEET REPOSE" 293 blushed at his victories, came to hear himsell applauded as one comes to make an apology, and was almost afraid to approach the King, because he was obliged, out of respect to him, to suffer patiently the praises with which his Majesty never failed to honour him. It was then that, in the sweet repose of a private condition, this Prince divested himself of all the glory which he had acquired during the war, and confined himself to the conversation of a few chosen friends, exercised himself without noise in civil virtues, and being sincere in word, plain and simple in action, faithful in friendship, and great even in the smallest things, he concealed himself; but his reputation dis- covered him ; he went without a train and without ec]uipage ; but everybody in thought sot him upon a triumphal car. People when they saw him, counted the number of enemies he had conquered, not of servants that followed him. . . . There is a nobleness in that simplicity. The less he was proud, the more he commanded respect." With all his humility and love of retirement, Turenne, as will presently be seen, was not long to be allowed to enjoy "the sweet repose of a private condition ". Besides Turenne, another great warrior was prov- ing, as a contemporary writer describes him, "as grand in his humility and gentleness as he had been in his victories ". It seemed as if Conde could not do enough to show his loyalty. After the King and the Duke of Orleans, he was the greatest prince in France ; but he now took delight in servile, if highly honourable, duties. 294 MARSHAL TURENNE [1670 The King, the two queens and the Duchess of Orleans used often to take a collation on their splendid gilded boat, shaped like a galley, on the canal. On such occasions Conde, in his office of grand-master, used to wait upon them and serve them with so much respect that it was difficult to remember that he had lately been a rebel. As to that earliest of all the Frondeurs, Beaufort, he was ever following the King and un- wearying in his efforts to please him. The years which followed the Peace of the Pyrenees provided a period of prosperity to France, buildings and public works made great progress, the arts flourished, and, as has already been observed, while the kingdom was embellished, its fortifications were strengthened ; its army was increased, and its navy enlarged. But meanwhile a neighbouring country had risen in pro- portion to its size even more rapidly than France. The States-General were now at the very summit of their glory and their greatness. Louis XIV. had not forgotten that their minute country had practically obliged him to make peace with Spain against his will, nor had he forgiven it for so doing. The Dutch, on the other hand, were still boasting of having been the peacemakers of Europe, and of having compelled the most powerful kingdoms in the world to lay down their arms. They were yet prouder of being the rulers of the seas, and of having sailed up the river Thames and burned the English battle-ships. Their trade was enormous, and their colonies dwarfed those of France. But large i67o JEt. 59] A SECRET TREATY 295 as were their colonies, important as was their com- merce, and powerful as was their navy, their army was insignificant, and Louis hoped to annihilate it. To do this it was necessary to break up the triple alliance. In 1670 his first step in this direction was to make a secret treaty with England, and for this purpose he employed Turenne. Owing to the services which he had rendered to the House of Stuart, both before and after the death of Cromwell, Turenne enjoyed the intimacy of King Charles's sister, the young Duchess of Orleans. In making her his friend, the veteran and staid Turenne now found himself associated much against his will with the gayest and most frivolous party in the Court, a party, moreover, strongly disliked both by the Queen and the Queen-Mother. Madame, as she was called, being the wife of the King's brother, remem- bered, says Madame de Motteville, "with a certain noble vexation, that the King had formerly disdained her when she might have expected him to marry her ; and the pleasure bestowed by vengeance made her welcome joyfully the contrary sentiments which ap- peared to be rising in the King's soul towards her. . . . The daily pleasures, the repasts, the excursions into the woods lasting till two or three o'clock in the morning, began to be practised in a manner that had more than a gallant air, and as if the best of pleasure would presently corrupt a virtue which had been, with cfood reason, all the more admired, because it was a rare possession at the King's age. But the sight 296 MARSHAL TURENNE [1670 alarmed the Queen, who was distressed to find the King so occupied with other objects." Whatever may have been the King's personal feel- ing towards Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, he was anxious to make her useful for political purposes, and he made Turenne visit her every day, and instructed him to spare no pains in enlisting her services as an intermediary with her brother, the King of England. As everybody knows, she eventually did so and the secret treaty was accomplished ; but, in the course of the pro- cess, there occurred a rather unfortunate incident, or rather an incident which might have proved unfortunate. The favourite lady-in-waiting of the Duchess of Orleans was a young Marchioness who was even more remarkable for her intellio-ence than for her o beauty, which was very great. Great also was her influence over the Duchess, and Turenne determined to obtain the use of that influence for the political purpose with which he had been entrusted by the King. Accordingly he began to show her a fatherly friendship. But even increasing years — Turenne was in his sixtieth year — are not an infallible defence against the charms of a pretty woman. It so happened that, in this particular instance, the pretty woman made full use of those charms, and Turenne fell in love with her without being in the least aware of it. One result of this was that he believed he could place the most implicit con- fidence in her fidelity and secrecy. In the course of his diplomatic endeavours to obtain her influence over 1670 ^T. 59] PUT OUT THE CANDLES 297 the Duchess of Orleans, he incautiously confided to her a secret known only to himself, to the King and to Louvois. The pretty Marchioness could not resist the pleasure of telling it to Lorraine ; Lorraine told it to the Duke of Orleans, and the Duke of Orleans informed his brother, the King, that he knew all about it, and complained at not having been taken into confi- dence on the subject by the King himself. As the King had confided his secret to nobody except Louvois and Turenne, and felt absolutely certain of the trustworthi- ness of the latter, he sent for Turenne and told him that Louvois had betrayed his trust. Now Turenne disliked Louvois, but he at once declared him to be innocent of all blame in the matter, and confessed his own weakness in having entrusted a State secret to a woman. His candour delighted the Kingf, whose con- fidence in him was increased, instead of diminishing by this untoward incident. Turenne would have nothing more to do with the beautiful Marchioness. He studiously kept out of her way, and to the end of his life he felt ashamed of an adventure in which there was nothing immoral, but by which he might have lost the favour of the King. It is said that some time afterwards Lorraine wished to talk about it to Turenne, and that Turenne said : "Then let us begin by putting out the candles". After Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, had crossed over to Dover and there obtained a promise from Charles II. to break off the triple alliance, she returned in triumph to Paris and then went to St. Cloud, taking 298 MARSHAL TURENNE [1671 with her Turenne, the Duke of Rochefoucauld, and other friends. In a few days she died very suddenly, and no one in France was more grieved at her death than Turenne. The year 167 1 was spent in negotiations. Sweden, like England, was divorced from the triple alliance with Holland ; the neutrality of all the German States and all the Electors, as well as that of the Emperor, was se- cured, with the exception of the Grand Elector of Brandenburg ; but Spain sent 6,000 men to the assistance of the United Provinces. " Thus was the face of Europe entirely changed : France and England, who had contributed to the raising and aggrandising the Re- public, were now endeavouring to ruin her : Spain, on the contrary, who had been for an age attempting to destroy the Dutch as revolted subjects, was now their chief support." ^ It will have been by this time observed that, in the seventeenth century, there were very few allies who had not been formerly enemies, or enemies who had not been at one time allies. The Dutch suffered under the disadvantage of being divided into two factions. One of them desired a Republic, and at the head of this faction were John de Witt and his brother Cornelius, who desired the friendship of France, being well aware that Louis XIV. was better able to defend them against the King of England and the Elector of Brandenburg than either Spain or the Empire, both of whom were hostile, at heart, to the Dutch. The other faction wished for 1 Ramsay. 1671 Mr. 60] INSUBORDINATION 299 the re-establishment of the Stadtholdership, in the person of the young Prince William of Orange, afterwards so well known as King William III. of England. Unlike the republican faction, it dreaded the power and ambi- tion of Louis XIV., and hoped that the young prince might be able to curb them. Both factions, however, combined to repel the invader. If the two De Witts were well-disposed towards France, they were obliged for the moment to oppose her when she approached, as an enemy, to invade their fatherland. They and William of Orange, with other Dutchmen, formed the staff to arrange the plan of the approaching campaign ; in which the Prince of Orange, although only twenty-two, was to be com- mander-in-chief. The King of France intended to divide his forces. Both Turenne and Cond6 were to have leading com- mands, thus once more fighting under the same flag, although not side by side, or even near each other. Commands were also to be assigned to the Marshals d'Humieres, Bellefonds and Cr6qui, and, as they were likely to be within reach of Turenne, the King, to prevent any dispute on account of rank or precedence, in the case of their forces joining, ordered that, if this happened, Turenne was to be in command of either, or all, of those three marshals. On hearing of this, all three at once refused to serve under Turenne, an act of insubordination which the King punished with banishment. In six months he permitted them to return to France ; but never to his service. 300 MARSHAL TURENNE [1671 That considerable jealousy of a general so success- ful as Turenne is likely to have existed is sufficiently obvious ; but on what grounds any questions could arise concerning obedience to a commander-in-chief appointed by the King is not so clear. That some such questions were mooted, and that they led to remonstrances to the King, is shown by the following memorial of four marshals : — " Some of the Marshals of France having consulted us in order to know our sentiments with regard to the obedience we ought to pay to the absolute command we have received from the King to take the word from the Viscount de Turenne, Marshal of France, we say and declare, that after the most humble remonstrances which have been made to his Majesty, he persisting in his will, the Marshals ought to submit to that order, there being no reason that can or ought to hinder us from obeying his Majesty's absolute commands. This is our opinion, and as we say and declare, so we most willingly sign it. Grammont, Plessis Praslin, Villeroy, D'Albert." CHAPTER XXII. On several occasions we have seen Turenne com- manding an army very inferior in numbers to that of his enemy. We shall now find the relative positions completely and largely reversed. In the campaign against Holland in 1672 the numerical advantage of France was enormous. Louis XIV. had an army of 100,000 men, to which the Elector of Cologne and the Bishop of Mlinster added 30,000. To oppose the advance of this great army, the Prince of Orange had an active army of 25,000, the Spaniards had 6,000, and there was a garrison of 12,000 at Maestricht. The Grand Elector of Brandenburg, while nominally supporting Holland, did nothing during the first months of the war to help her, although he had a large army at, or near, Berlin. At most the defending force was much less than half the size of the invading force. Vauban was to engineer the sieges ; Louvois, the Minister of War, was to accompany the King on the campaign ; 30,000 men were placed under Cond^, and the very large army that remained was put under the command of Turenne. Besides the improvements in the art of fortifications 301 302 MARSHAL TURENNE [1672 since the earlier campaigns of Turenne, there were now several important developments in warfare. There was a great increase in the proportion of infantry to cavalry. Even in the campaign of 1 667 half the army had consisted of cavalry. Now three-quarters of the troops were infantry, among which there were far more musketeers and fewer pikemen. Instead of the old invariably solid bodies of pikemen — when Turenne joined his first regiment the pikemen were ten ranks deep — with a few musketeers on either side of them and running behind them to reload, Napoleon says, even of the campaign of 1667, that the infantry were drawn up in four ranks, only the fourth being armed with pikes. But in the campaign of 1672, although pikes were still retained,^ the celebrated disciplinarian, Martinet, had been allowed to equip some regiments with bayonets, which fitted into the nozzles ot the muskets. There was also an increase in artillery ; there were field guns, and siege guns, and mortars. Portable bridges were carried in separate parts, as it was expected that a good deal of the campaign would take place near the rivers Rhine, Meuse and Yssel. Perhaps most important of all, the transport service was reorganised, if not revolu- tionised ; and, in the matter of stores, Louvois had secretly outbidden the enemy for large quantities of provisions, which the Dutch were trying to purchase in the Low Countries for their own use. Against the skill of two such experienced generals as Turenne and Conde, the Dutch army was to be ^ Pikes were used even in Turenne's last battle. 1672 Mt. 61] MAESEYCK 303 commanded by a youth of twenty-two, in the Prince of Orange, whose troops were very inferior in quality to those of the French. His soldiers were burghers who had rarely left their homes for military training, and most of his officers were sons of burgomasters or their relatives, without any knowledge of even the rudiments of warfare. Conde wished to begin the campaign by taking the important fortress of Maestrlcht,^ a city on the Meuse, about eighteen miles to the north of Liege, and fifteen to the west of Aix-la-Chapelle. But Turenne per- suaded the King to leave it behind with 5,000 men to keep its garrison in check, as he considered that to take so strong a fortress garrisoned by 12,000 men would require a very long siege. But he rendered Maestricht more or less useless in the campaign, by taking Maeseyck, a small town about twenty miles to the north of it, which he ordered to be very strongly fortified and left with a garrison of between 4,000 and 5,000 French soldiers, by this means cutting off the communications between the fortress of Maestricht and Holland. Turenne then induced the King, after going some distance down the Meuse, to leave that river, to march about five and twenty miles north-east to the Rhine, and take the fortresses on its banks belonging to the Elector of Brandenbursf. All of these — Rhinebere, 1 This fortress has been the scene of sieges in 1579, 1632, 1673, 1748 and 1830. It is still one of the strongest fortresses of Europe. A great part of the land around it can at any time be put under water, by opening the sluices. 304 MARSHAL TURENNE [1672 Burich, Wesel, Rees, and a large number of minor fortified towns — either opened their gates to the French troops or surrendered in a few days, and Ramsay observes that the Dutch " were not much troubled at the taking of towns which did not belong to them and were only under their protection ". The French troops, however, were now in Holland, and had next to consider the army of the Prince of Orange drawn up behind the river Yssel, a branch of the Rhine which, instead of running like the main river to the west until it joins the Meuse at its mouth, flows due north into the Zuyder Zee. The French army crossed the Rhine near where the Yssel branches from it. The summer was excep- tionally dry, and the river was abnormally low. Before a bridge could be thrown across it some of Conde's cavalry forded it, except for a short space through which they had to swim. A slight opposition was made on the opposite side by a small body of Dutch troops, and the French lost about twenty men. But the Dutch defence was hopeless against such numbers, and Conde, who had crossed the river in a boat with his son, the Duke of Enghien, and his nephew, the young Duke of Longueville, called out to the Dutch infantry, who were retiring, that, if they would lay down their arms, they should have quarter. Apparently Enghien and Longueville did not hear this order, for, as Ramsay puts it, "warmed by the former night's wine," they "advanced impru- dently to the enemy," and Longueville, firing a pistol. i672 ^T. 6i] HOLLAND 305 shouted: "No quarter". This drew upon them the fire of the enemy ; Longueville was killed on the spot, and Condi's wrist was broken by a pistol bullet, this being the only wound that he ever received in his many campaigns. Notwithstanding his injury, he struggled on at the head of his troops, till the enemy was scattered ; but his wound was so severe that he was oblio'ed to resign his command for a considerable time. The King now put Condi's army under Turenne, in addition to the troops already serving under him. His opponent, the Prince of Orange, left garrisons at some of the fortresses and retired from the Yssel, with only 12,000 men, into the Province of Utrecht. Over- yssel and Gelderland were soon overrun by the French army, and Utrecht gave way a little later. Naarden, a town on the Zuyder Zee, little more than a dozen miles from Amsterdam, was taken. This would have been a most important capture, if advantage had been taken of it. Nearly all the fortified places surrendered without any attempt to defend themselves. Napoleon says of this : "The army took sixty fortified places in a short time ; but there is no glory in conquest where there is no danger : these places were only garrisoned by ill-armed militia ". The single place where any- thing like a stand was made was Nimwegen. This is the first fortress which we read of as having been subjected to a bombardment by Turenne, and, accord- ing to Ramsay, "the bombs had not all the effect which the Viscount had hoped for," an experience which has been repeated in the case of many much 20 3o6 MARSHAL TURENNE [1672 later generals and bombardments, even with shells immeasurably superior to the bombs then in use. And, although the mortars were probably placed very near the town, "the distance was so great that the greatest part of the bombs could not cross the river ". In spite of the difficulty experienced by the bombs in crossing the river, Nimwegen capitulated early in July. Napoleon criticises Turenne for his conduct of this part of the campaign. Instead of besieging Nimwegen, Napoleon says that he ought to have advanced upon Amsterdam. "When masters of Utrecht and Naarden, the French might have possessed themselves of Amsterdam, which would have ended the war. They knew not how to profit by occurrences. Louvois thought proper to send back 20,000 prisoners" — these must have been chiefly the garrisons of the surrendered fortresses — "who were immediately armed again and increased the army of the Prince of Orange. He had the army dispersed in fifty fortresses, by which means it was so much weakened that it could perform nothing. They should have demolished forty-five of these places, carried all the artillery belonging to them into France, and preserved four or five to facilitate the communi- cations of the army. Turenne enjoyed the principal share of the King's confidence and it is to him that these errors ought to be ascribed. It does not appear that he opposed their commission publicly and with energy. He might have entered Amsterdam, on the very day that his troops entered Naarden." Long before Napoleon, Voltaire held this opinion. 1673 Mt. 61] HOLLAND 307 He says [Siecle de Louis XIV., vol. i., p. 160): " Naarden, in the immediate neighbourhood, had already been taken. Four cavalry soldiers, marauding, went to the gates of Muiden, a place within a league of Amsterdam, where the fiood-gates are by which the country can be inundated." (In reality it is half way between Naarden and Amsterdam.) " The magistrates of Muiden, distracted by terror, were going to give up their keys to these four soldiers ; but, when they saw that no troops were advancing from Naarden, they took back their keys and shut their gates. The least energy would have placed Amsterdam in the hands of the King." Perhaps St. Evremond may have been right when he wrote of Turenne : " He does not so well take those unforeseen opportunities which produce an abso- lute victory, and this is the reason why his advantages are not complete ". The Dutch now betook themselves to their last and peculiar resource to defend their capital. They opened their sluices, pierced their dams, broke their bridges, and laid all their country under water. Holland, Brabant and Dutch Flanders became one great sea, with the towns rising, as it were, on islands, in the vast expanse of waters. It was a desperate expedient : the Dutchmen's own flocks and herds were drowned before they could be got in ; even for those that had been got in there was not sufficient provender to last long, and famine threatened the inhabitants. The Prince of Orange was now elected Stadtholder by the Provinces of Holland and West Friesland ; 20 * 3o8 MARSHAL TURENNE [1672 though not as yet by all the United Provinces. Nor were his supporters satisfied without wreaking their vengeance upon the leaders of the opposite faction. They cruelly tortured one of the De Witts in prison and they subsequently assassinated both him and his brother in a very barbarous manner. "The Prince of Orange, whose partisans had made him this horrible sacrifice," according to Ramsay, "seemed touched with the unfortunate end of the two illustrious brothers : he made the Pensioner's eulogium, though coldly enough, and he ordered the murderers to be prosecuted ; but the clemency he showed them gave cause to suspect that he had countenanced the murder. The real advantages he drew from it did not a little contribute to strengthen the suspicion. Scarce were the De Witts dead when the Magistrates of all the United Provinces declared the young Prince, as those of Holland and Friesland had declared him some days earlier. Governor, Admiral, and Captain-General : so that by this event he became master of all the deliberations of the States." Now that the country was under water, it was im- possible to take Amsterdam and thus finish the war. In this respect the campaign had been unsuccessful ; but, if the paradox be permissible, in another respect it had been too successful. The Dutch sued for peace, and France proposed terms ; but they were too hard to be acceptable. Turenne had recommended more lenient conditions ; and, if his advice had been followed, the French frontier would have been advanced to the Rhine, and six years 1672 JEt. 61] THE IMPERIALISTS 309 of war would have been saved; but Louis XIV. was overpersuaded by Louvois. When the negotiations for peace failed, the whole of Europe became alarmed at the conquests made by France and the ambitions of Louis XIV. The Emperor ordered all the members of the Empire to unite for the protection of the Germanic body ; and even England began to waver. Louis XIV. returned to Paris, leaving Turenne in command of his army. In Aug-ust the Elector of Brandenburg advanced to the assistance of the Dutch with 25,000 men; and the Imperial army of 18,000 started for the same pur- pose, under Montecuculi and the Duke of Bournonville. They all marched towards the Rhine apparently with the object of crossing it and carrying on the war to the west of that river. Turenne, knowing that the support of those two allies of France, the Elector of Cologne and the Bishop of Miinster, was essential to the honour of his King, and highly important to the protection of his country, left Holland to intercept the enemy and marched up the Rhine, until he reached its junction with the Lahn, after which he marched in an easterly direction towards the enemy. With some reinforce- ments which he received and the troops of Miinster and Cologne, Turenne's forces were nearly equal to those about to confront him. Meanwhile Cond6, who had now sufficiently recovered to take the field, was stationed in the South with 18,000 men, for the defence of Alsace. The soldiers under Turenne, most of whom had been under arms since April and all through the long 310 MARSHAL TURENNE [1672 campaign in Holland, showed great discontent at being ordered to make long, tiring marches up the right bank of the Rhine, in September, for what looked very like being a winter campaign. Napoleon says that Turenne's march, "to support the King's allies was at once politic and military : he was insensible to the murmurers of his army. The soldiers were reluctant to commence a winter campaign in a distant country, at a moment when they were anxiously expecting to go into winter quarters. His marches from the gates of Amsterdam to those of Miinster, Cologne and Treves, were rapid and worthy of remark." In October began one of those series of marches and counter-marches of which Turenne was so able a master. His success in them was chiefly owing to the importance which he placed upon scouting, the large use which he made of spies, and his encouragement of deserters from the enemy. "Spare neither promises, pardon, nor recompense," he is reported to have said, "to deserters, though accomplices in treason, if they will discover it. Never slight the intelligence given you. Something may seem very improbable which never- theless may happen. Therefore you should watch the event. . . . Have in the enemy's camp some spies. . . . You should have secret intelligence with some of the inhabitants, officers or soldiers (of the enemy) gained with money or fair promises, but you must take care you are not deceived or drawn into some scrape, by their seeming to accept your proposals ; so you should always have some hostage or security for his or their 1672 ^T. 61] THE RHINE 311 fidelity. . . . Spies are attached to those who give them most, he who pays them ill is never served. They should never be known to anybody ; nor should they know one another. When they propose anything very material, secure their persons, or have in your possession their wives and children as hostages for their fidelity. Never communicate anything to them, but what it is absolutely necessary that they should know." The Elector of Brandenburg and the Imperialists were manoeuvring to cross the Rhine and Turenne was endeavouring to prevent them from doing so. The enemy tried to give him the slip ; but he had scouts in all directions. He found it prudent to re- cross the Rhine to its west side, with the object of preventing the enemy from crossing its bridges, and when he entered the Electorate of Treves, or Trier, the Elector made a great show of perfect neutrality. Turenne, however, having discovered that he had been intriguing with the Court at Vienna, felt no scruple in laying his country under contributions to provision the French army. The Grand Elector of Brandenburg then retired to Coblentz, where he received an Imperial garrison ; and shortly afterwards he was joined by the Imperial army. The allies proposed to cross over the bridge at Coblentz ; but, to their surprise, they found that Turenne was waiting in force, on the opposite side, to receive them. They then marched fifty or sixty miles up the river on its east bank, hoping to cross it at Mayence. But here again they were foiled ; not this time by 312 MARSHAL TURENNE [1672 Turenne, but by the Elector of Mayence and the Elector of the Palatinate, who, intimidated by the news that Turenne would arrive in a day or two, feared the consequences of giving his enemies a passage ; and, when the Imperialists showed signs of taking the law into their own hands and crossing the bridge at Mayence by force, the Elector broke it down. The Imperialist armies then started on the long march of more than a hundred miles, in a southerly direction, up the Rhine, with the object of crossing the river by the bridge at Strasburg. Turenne, having discovered their intention, sent couriers to in- form Conde, who, as has been observed, was stationed in Alsace. Thereon Conde sent messengers to the Governor of Breisach, with orders to send boats loaded with combustibles down the river to burn the bridge at Strasburg ; and when the Imperial troops reached that city, they found the bridge destroyed. The Imperialists then turned back again and made a hurried march all the way to Mayence, and, as there was no bridge unbroken there, they made one for themselves of boats. Just as they were going to cross the river, on the 30th of November, Turenne appeared on the opposite bank, "so that they were constrained to continue in a ravaged country, though very much wearied by sickness, want, and useless marches and counter-marches".^ And now inhospitality was added to scarcity, for the Electors of Mayence, Treves and the Palatinate complained to the Emperor that the Im- 1 Ramsay. 1672 JEt. 61] WINTER QUARTERS 313 perial troops were ruining their electorates by marching backwards and forwards through them, and consuming everything that was eatable ; therefore, to prevent the resentment of those three electors, the Imperial army and its allies were ordered to make their winter quarters in Westphalia and in the territories of the Elector of Cologne and the Bishop of Miinster. It was now near Christmas and Louvois wrote to Turenne telling him that the King "positively com- manded him " to put his troops into winter quarters. Turenne replied "that it would be prejudicial to the King's service " to do so ; and that, if the enemy were not prevented from invading the territories of the Bishop of Miinster, that bishop would be certain to ally himself to the Emperor. Then Turenne went privately to see the Bishop of Miinster, confirmed him in his allegiance to the King of France, and assured him of a guarantee against any pressure or raiding by the troops of the enemy. Up to the end of the year 1672, this long and wearying campaign consisted, like several of Turenne's other campaigns, in a series of marches and counter- marches with very little fighting. It may indeed be said to have been a campaign in two parts : the first in Holland, and the second in Germany ; the one against the Dutch, the other against the allied armies of the Emperor and the Duke of Brandenburg. Ramsay says that great astonishment was expressed at so great a general as Montecuculi never hazarding a battle during the whole of this campaign. " Some pre- 314 MARSHAL TURENNE [1672 tended [again] that Prince Lobcourtz, the Emperor's Minister, had counterfeited the Imperial Seal, in order to forbid Montecuculi to fight. The Minister was afraid of engaging his master in a war, at a distance, while the Ottoman Porte on the other hand, threatened to invade the Hereditary dominions." And well he might ! For grave indeed would have been the posi- tion of a monarch who had "the most Christian King" pommelling him in the face and "the Unspeakable Turk" kicking him in the back. CHAPTER XXIII. Possibly the frequent restraint alleged to have been put on the pugnacious instincts of Montecuculi by Prince Lobcourtz may have got upon his nerves ; for he became ill in January, 1673, and had to relinquish his command. In his absence, the Elector of Bran- denburg and the Dukes of Lorraine and Bournonville were in command. These generals had a suspicion that Turenne would join his troops to those of the Bishop of Mtinster, and they consulted together as to the best method of preventing such a juncture. Their army had been reduced from 40,000 to 20,000 by garrisons left in fortresses, losses in minor attacks, and sickness ; but they advanced towards Soest, a curious old walled town, on the road between Hamm and Paderborn, hoping thereby to intervene between the army of Miinster and that of Turenne, which they imagined to be upon the banks of the Rhine. Great was their surprise when they heard, on the 3rd of February, that Turenne had already effected his juncture with the army of the Bishop of Mtinster, and that he was besieging Unna, a town about twenty miles to the west of Soest. Some of Turenne's battalions volunteered to take 315 3i6 MARSHAL TURENNE [1673 Uniia by storm, sword in hand, but he was anxious to save his men, so, refusing this gallant offer, he ordered the town to be bombarded by five mortars, while eight siege guns fired on the walls until a breach was made. When this had been done Unna surrendered. Turenne occupied Hamm and several other places, including Soest, the Imperial troops retreating before him, and then he resolved to pursue the enemy and to take pos- session of all the towns in Westphalia belonging to the elector. That winter was very severe in the Westphalian Highlands. The country was mountainous with narrow valleys, and in most cases there were fortified passes in these valleys which had to be forced, an operation which Turenne always effected with success. When his army was passing slowly through one un- defended pass, Turenne, exhausted by fatigue and anxiety, lay down to take a short sleep behind a bush, although snow was falling heavily. Some soldiers, seeing him lying exposed to the weather, cut down branches of trees, stuck the ends into the ground, and, laying their cloaks upon them, made a sort of hut to shelter him. Their well-meant exertions woke him up, and he asked them what they were doing. "We want to take care of our father, " they replied, "for if we should lose him, who would lead us back again to our own country? " Throughout this long march — for a very long march it proved to be, in a difficult country and in terrible weather — Turenne, as his historian tells us, "was i673 ^T. 62] NAPOLEON'S PRAISE 317 present everywhere, and supported his soldiers under their fatigue by sharing it ". He chased the Imperial armies from post to post, and drove them out of West- phalia into the Bishopric of Hildesheim, which was a Httle south of Hanover. The Imperialists then moved still farther east ; but were there opposed somewhat un- expectedly. The Dukes of Brunswick, Wolfenbiittel, and Lunenburg-Zell did not fancy being involved in a war in which they took no interest, or having hungry troops overrunning their territories ; so they blockaded the valley which served as the main entrance to their dukedoms with 12,000 men. This left the Imperialists and their allies no alternative but to divide and retreat. Towards the end of March the Grand Elector of Brandenburg made off to Berlin, his capital, and the Emperor's troops retired into Franconia, or what is now the north-western part of Bavaria. Napoleon gives unqualified praise to Turenne's winter campaign in 1672-73. "The Marshal," he says, "made longer marches in this campaign than in the preceding one. During the winter of 1672-73, he marched from the Lower Rhine to the Weser, braving the frosts of the Northern regions. ist. He saved the Elector of Cologne and the Archbishop of Miinster, the Kine's allies. 2nd. He defeated the Prussian army, and compelled the Grand Elector to detach himself from the Emperor and to make his peace. He therefore made good use of his time and turned his forced marches and severe fatigues to good account." 3i8 MARSHAL TURENNE [1673 Having no longer any enemy to fight, Turenne returned to Soest, in the Duchy of Marck, and placed the Westphalian territories that belonged to the elector at the discretion of his troops, a discretion of which they availed themselves very freely. "They found there abundance of provisions, put all under contri- bution, and enriched themselves. The Viscount was the only man who did not make advantage of the spoils of the enemy, and evidenced throughout the whole of this famous expedition a disinterestedness as great as his valour."' A certain general suggested to Turenne a method by which he could obtain for himself 400,000 livres in fifteen days, without any possibility of dis- covery by his Government. " I am very much obliged to you," said Turenne, "but as I have often had opportunities of the same nature without ever taking advantage of them, I think I ought not to change my line of conduct, at the age of sixty -two." Near the place where this occurred the inhabitants of a large city offered to give him 100,000 crowns if he would not march through it. "You need offer me no money," said Turenne, "for I do not intend to lead my army through your city." In this campaign Turenne had a young English- man of the age of twenty-three among his officers ; namely that John Churchill who became one of the most famous of English generals and was created Duke of Marlborough. Turenne used to call him "the handsome Englishman". In the course of the 1 Ramsay. 1 673 ^T. 62] A TREATY 319 campaign a column of the enemy attacked and captured an outpost from which a French colonel retired without fighting. Turenne made a wager that " the handsome Englishman " would retake it with half the number of men that had been under the command of the French colonel, and he won his bet. In his Life of Marl- borough Lord Wolseley calls Turenne Marlborough's "tutor in war" (vol. i., p. 146). The Grand Elector of Brandenburg, alarmed at the successes of Turenne, and not considering himself safe even in Berlin, offered to make terms with France. After some negotiations a treaty was signed, on the loth of April, by which the Grand Elector renounced his alliance with Holland and all the engagements into which he had entered against the interests of France, and promised to remain neutral for the future. The King of France, by the same treaty, agreed to restore to the elector Wesel and all the towns in Cleves, which had been retained for many years by the States- General, as well as all the fortresses belonging to the elector which Turenne had taken in Westphalia. Leaving Westphalia, Turenne went south through the Duchy of Berg, and thence south-east through Hesse- Darmstadt, encamping in the beginning of June, 1673, at Wetzlar, near Frankfurt, so as to be in readiness to prevent the Emperor's troops from advancincf to the Rhine, which he had reason to believe was their intention. Meanwhile Louis XIV. entered Brabant with an army of 40,000 men, and, with 7,000 more, for which 320 MARSHAL TURENNE [1673 he sent to Turenne, he invested Maestricht and took it, on the 23 rd of June, thirteen days after opening the trenches. It was in this siege, which was engineered by Vauban, that parallels were used for the first time in Europe, although they had already been employed by Italian engineers, in the service of the Turks before Candia. Conde advanced against Utrecht, but his operations were frustrated by a further flooding of the country. The King then left Conde with an army of 20,000 men to keep watch on Flanders, and pro- ceeded himself to the frontiers of the Empire. The 7,000 men borrowed from Turenne returned to him after the fall of Maestricht. He remained at Wetzlar till the 14th of August, and the surrounding- country inevitably suffered during its long occupation by idle troops. Cases of disorder committed by the soldiers, in neutral territory, were complained of by German princes in communications with the King of France. Louvois wrote sternly to Turenne, requiring him to keep his men under stricter discipline. Turenne replied that the country was suffering as little as any country could possibly suffer when occupied by a strange army. As a matter of fact, the valley of the Main got off lightly in comparison with the district of Treves, which was occupied by the army of the King himself, a district which suffered such ill-treatment that its elector bitterly complained to the Diet of the miseries endured by his country at the hands of the army of Louis XIV. On the 30th of August a fresh alliance was made, i673 ^T. 62] NAARDEN RETAKEN 321 at the Hague, between the United Provinces, the Emperor, Spain and the Duke of Lorraine against France. Certain conditions were made by Spain, but they scarcely concern the history of Turenne. The Emperor collected an army of 30,000 men in Bohemia, and placed them under the command of Montecuculi, who had now completely recovered his health. A little later the armies of the Elector of Saxony and the Duke of Lorraine joined him with 10,000 men, bringing up the force to 40,000. To oppose this army, Turenne had a force, including the troops of Munster and Cologne, amounting to only 20,000, but he had hopes of being joined by the troops of the Elector of Bavaria ; hopes, however, which were destined to be grievously disappointed. The prospects of Louis XIV. were much clouded by his having followed the advice of Louvois to garrison the fortresses he had taken, thus seriously reducing his armies in the field, instead of following the advice of both Turenne and Conde to demolish all, but some half- dozen, of the fortresses, and to keep his soldiers for active use in his campaigns. The Prince of Orange gained a success in Hol- land by retaking Naarden. Dupas, its governor, sur- rendered it sooner than the French military regulations permitted, and the King ordered him to be sentenced to death. On hearing of this Turenne, who knew Dupas to be a brave man, interceded for him, and obtained remission of the death sentence as well as the King's consent that he should serve as a volun- 21 322 MARSHAL TURENNE [1673 teer at Grave, where he died nobly, at the siege of that town. Being- anxious to drive Montecuculi from the country bordering on the Rhine, Turenne asked for re- inforcements, but Louvois, in the name of the King, refused them. The friction between the Marshal and the Minister of War increased until it became a quarrel. Turenne represented that many of his men had deserted, that his English and Irish contingents were gradually disappearing, and that his soldiers were ill and dying from want of food. To these representations Louvois paid no attention, and Turenne was suffering more now from want of reinforcements than he had suffered from the same cause even in the days of Mazarin. Montecuculi, with his allied armies of 40,000 men, advanced towards Nuremberg, from whence it was open to him either to march south-west to the Upper Rhine and invade Alsace, or to proceed north to the Lower Rhine and effect a junction with the Prince of Orange. Although his enemy possessed double his own numbers, Turenne, who was now at Aschaffenberg, was in a good position to prevent Montecuculi from marching to the north, as he had fortified all the passes on the Main, and had obtained a promise of strict neutrality from the Bishop of Wiirzburg. Monte- cuculi remained inactive, and Turenne, after waiting some time, advanced to meet him. He passed the river Tauber, at Marienthal, a place with which we are already well acquainted, and he found the Imperial i673 ^T. 62] DECEPTION 323 army encamped near Rottenburg. With forces of only half the strength of those of Montecuculi, Turenne had no desire for a pitched battle, for its own sake ; but he was anxious to block the way to the Rhine, and to block it in the place where it might be easiest for an inferior force to make a successful stand against a superior. Montecuculi wished to avoid an action, to afive Turenne the slip, to hurry to the north-west and to effect a junction with the Prince of Orange ; but, even with his numerical superiority, he had no fancy for fighting rearguard actions throughout a long march. To conceal his intentions, he began to put his first line in order of battle, as if preparing for a general action ; and Turenne did the same. Meanwhile Montecuculi made his second line file off, with all its transports, to the rear, under the concealment of a neighbouring mountain. Turenne had not long drawn up his army in battle formation when, to his surprise, he saw his opponent's army filing off He immediately pursued it, attacked its rear, and captured some stores and ammunition, yet without succeeding in bringing on a o-eneral engagement. His enemy having escaped him, he encamped upon high ground, beside a Carthusian monastery, while Montecuculi took up a position be- hind the morasses between Wurzburg and Oschen- furth. The two armies remained near each other for a fortnight, and then Montecuculi, who had privately induced the Prince Bishop of Wurzburg to break his promise of neutrality to Turenne, quietly led his troops 324 MARSHAL TURENNE [1673 away to Wiirzburg and marched them by its bridge over the river Main. The perfidy of the Prince Bishop thus enabled Montecuculi to make himself master of the right bank of the Main, from Wiirzburg to Wer- theim, where he seized an immense quantity of provi- sions which had been collected there for the use of Turenne's army. This completely upset all Tur- enne's designs, and there was nothing left for him to do but to march clown the left bank of the Main. While he was doing this, in October, he was slightly encouraged by receiving a reinforcement of 4,000 men. The whole aspect of the war was now altered. The Prince of Orange, hoping to meet Montecuculi, marched with 25,000 men up the left bank of the Rhine and invested Bonn, while Montecuculi marched down the right bank of the Main as far as Mayence. The Dutch and the Imperial armies were now within eighty miles of each other. By crossing the bridge at Wiirzburg so unexpectedly, and before Turenne had been aware of it, Montecuculi had stolen such a march upon him that he had reached Mayence by the north bank of the Main when Turenne had only got as far as Miltemburg, a place by the river's bank and on the south of it, some sixty miles short of Mayence. By forced marches Montecuculi could probably have joined the Prince of Orange at Bonn before Turenne could have caught him up ; but he was too wise a general to run unnecessary risks, and he determined to practise a further deception on Turenne before proceeding. He i673^T. 62] OUTWITTED 325 therefore selected a place on the Rhine, where there was an island, made a bridge to the island, and then a flying bridge from the island to the opposite side. As soon as it would bear horses to pass in single file, he began to send his cavalry across it to the west bank, as if he intended to march into Alsace. News of this was at once conveyed to Turenne, as Montecuculi wished that it should be. Turenne had, from the first, expected Montecuculi to attack Alsace and Lorraine, which were almost undefended, unless indeed Conde had already returned from Holland to Alsace, which seemed doubtful. Accordingly, so soon as he heard that Montecuculi was crossing the Rhine and pointing for Lorraine, Turenne left the river Main and hurried in a south-westerly direction, with the object of crossing the Rhine at Philippsburg, and in- tercepting Montecuculi in the north of Alsace and Lorraine. As soon as Montecuculi had sent enough cavalry across his temporary bridge over the Rhine in a southerly direction to make Turenne's spies gallop off to inform Turenne that Montecuculi was marching towards Alsace and Lorraine, he shipped his infantry on boats, at Mayence, sent them down the Rhine in a northerly direction towards the Prince of Orange at Bonn, and sent orders to the cavalry, which had crossed over the bridge, to recross it and follow them. The Prince of Oransre, havino- heard of the advance of Montecuculi, went up the Rhine to the south, and effected a junction of the Dutch and Imperialist armies. 326 MARSHAL TURENNE [1673 near Coblentz. Then they all went to Bonn, ' which fell in a few days. The French troops were now obliged to retreat from Holland, which then closed its sluices and gradually emerged from the waters. Turenne put his army into winter quarters in Alsace, Lorraine and Hainaut ; then, with "an air of thought- fulness and melancholy," he went to the Court of France. The King received him with great esteem and affection, and deplored the bad advice which he had received from Louvois and had, unfortunately, followed. This gave Turenne a splendid opportunity of avenging himself upon his enemy; but all he said was : "The Marquis of Louvois is capable of doing your Majesty admirable service, in the Cabinet ; but he has not yet had sufficient experience in war to take upon himself the direction of campaigns". The Kino- told Turenne that he would never again employ the Marquis d'Abre, because he had written to Louvois severely blaming the strategy of Turenne and saying that, if he had been consulted, he could have saved Bonn without endangering Alsace. "Why did he not tell me how he could do so?" said Turenne. " I should have listened to him with pleasure and per- haps I might have profited by his advice." Then he made excuses for D'Abre, praised him, mentioned good services which he had rendered, and persuaded the 1 Bonn had undergone a severe siege in 1584 by Archbishop Ernest of Bavaria, who had been deposed from his see for heresy ; and it was subsequently besieged and taken by Marlborough in 1 703. Its celebrated university was not established until 18 18. i673 ^T. 62] HIS GREATEST FAULT 327 King to give him a gratuity and not to deprive himself of the services of so able a lieutenant-general. We shall hear of him again. Napoleon severely blames Turenne's conduct of the summer and autumn campaign of 1673 : " Montecuculi completely deceived and imposed upon Turenne. He got rid of him and sent him marching into Alsace, whilst he proceeded to Cologne, and joined the Prince of Orange, who was besieging and taking Bonn. Turenne's conduct on this occasion has been censured : 1st He manoeuvred at too great a distance from his enemy : 2ndly He did not act according to Monte- cuculi's movements, but ascribed to him an intention of entering France, without any foundation whatever. Yet Holland was the centre of the military operations. No one knew better than Turenne that war is a con- jectural art : he ought to have regulated his movements by those of his adversary, and not by his own ideas : 3rdly Montecuculi would have been insulated in Alsace and would have had to enoacre the united armies of Conde and Turenne, whilst under the walls of Bonn he found himself on the orand rendezvous, where the momentous question was to be decided, far from Conde's army, and covering Holland and Belgium. This march established the reputation of Montecuculi. The error committed by Turenne on this occasion was a blemish to his glory ; it was the greatest fault of which this dis- tinguished Commander ever was guilty." Once more, and for the last time, we have had to consider, in the latter part of this chapter, a campaign 328 MARSHAL TURENNE [1673 in which Turenne had no fighting beyond skirmishing ; but a campaign wherein, for the first time, instead of outmanoeuvring his enemy, he was outmanoeuvred him- self Yet in Montecuculi Turenne met a foe worthy of his steel. He was three years older than Turenne and had displayed great military genius under his uncle during the Thirty Years' War. He had distinguished himself in campaigns against the Swedes in Silesia ; he had commanded a successful expedition against Prince Rakoczy in 1654; he had assisted Denmark against Sweden with such effect as to obtain the peace of Oliva in 1660; and, in 1664, he had defeated the Turks so decisively that they concluded an armistice for twenty years. In his leisure time, he had written several military works of considerable importance, and he was an ardent lover of science. A few years later than the date with which we are dealing, he was made a Prince of the Empire by the Emperor Leopold, and Duke of Melfi by the King of Naples. CHAPTER XXIV. Louis XIV. has been aptly entitled Le Grand Mon- arque, but at the time which we are at present consider- ing he had managed to make his country intensely unpopular throughout the greater part of Europe, and nearly every European King and Prince his enemy. The ill-fortune of Turenne in his last campaign had shaken the adherence of those fair-weather friends, the Archbishop of Cologne, the Bishop of Mlinster, and Charles II. In the spring of 1674 all the German Princes, with the exception of the Electors of Hanover and Bavaria, allied themselves with the Emperor against France. The Elector of Cologne, the Bishop of Miinster, and, later, the Elector of Brandenburg, broke their treaties with France and turned against her. Charles II. of England was bullied by his Parliament and his Ministers into withdrawing from his alliance with France and recallinsf the EnoHsh regiments which had been fighting under her banner ; but those regi- ments were devoted to Turenne and refused to leave him. Louis felt obliged to evacuate all the places he had taken on the Rhine and the Meuse in the two previous campaigns, except Maestricht and Grave. He then 329 330 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 resolved to recompense himself for the loss of the United Provinces, by acquiring Franche-Comte, the large province lying to the south ot Lorraine, which was then Spanish. Having taken a large army thither in April, he eventually conquered it, and made it a part of France, which it has ever since remained. About the same time he sent another army, under Schomberg, to the frontiers of Spain, and he gave Conde 40,000 men wherewith to advance against the Prince of Orange. To Turenne was consig-ned the guardianship of the Rhine, with a very much smaller army than that of Conde. Turenne's being entrusted with so heavy a task with so inadequate a force was the work of his bitter enemy, Louvois. It is not impossible, even if it be improbable, that there may have been some collusion between Louvois and Conde. In his Siecle de Louis XIV. (vol. i., p. 133) Voltaire declares Conde to have been jealous of Turenne, and he describes a certain scheme which Cond6 once confided to Louvois, which was to be to the advantage of Conde and to the disadvantage of Turenne, adding that, on hearing of it, Louvois eagerly embraced Conde. Undoubtedly Turenne and Conde admired each other as generals ; and in a certain sense they were friends, even great friends ; but there are several sorts of friendships, and it may be that the particular variety of friendship which Conde felt for Turenne did not altogether exclude sentiments of jealousy. He loved Turenne, he loved him much ; but he loved him- self and his own interests still better. i674^T. 63] FORCED MARCHES 331 Turenne encamped near Saverne, or Zabern, a town about twenty-two miles to the north-west of Stras- burg ; and he had to consider the very serious question of how he was to guard the Rhine from Coblentz to Basle, a frontier of some two hundred miles. Early in June he learned that two armies were on the march to effect a junction with the object of crossing the Rhine, one a force of about 9,000 men, under Count Caprara and the other of about the same numbers, under the Duke of Bournonville. Turenne was anxious to defeat one of these armies before it could be joined by the other. To this end he started on the 12th of June, made forced marches with little or no transport, crossed the Rhine by the bridge at Philippsburg on the 14th, and thence hurried forward with 9,000 men, six guns and three days' provisions to Hockenheim, where he encamped. On the way his men came in for some very sharp skir- mishing. One night, fearing a surprise, he went out in the dark to see for himself that all the men were at their posts, and, in passing a tent, he heard some young soldiers complaining at his having made them take such a long and useless march. Then he heard an old soldier, who had been wounded in one of these skirmishes, say : " You do not know our father : he would not have exposed us to so much fatigue, if he had not some great thing in view, of which we as yet know- nothing ". The next day Turenne proceeded to Wiesloch, having marched nearly ninety miles in four days. This 332 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 BATTLE OF was a tiringr march; but he started agfain between SINTZ- & ' & HEiM, i6th three and four o'clock the next morning. After march- June, 1674. . _ mg for nearly five hours, he discovered the enemy on a hill, on the farther side of a small town of the Palatinate, called Sintzheim, about half-way between Philippsburg on the Rhine and Heilbronn on the Neckar, and situated itself on the river Eltzbach. The rival armies were pretty equal in point of number, as Turenne had only 9,000 men with him, having left strong garrisons to occupy Hagenau and Saverne in order to protect the north of Alsace, and havingf sent a strong detachment to Bel- fort. While Caprara had far more cavalry than in- fantry and no artillery, Turenne had six guns and almost as much infantry as cavalry, a great advantage in the kind of country where the battle was to take place. Caprara, on the other hand, had two advantages over Turenne : his position on a hill with steep sides was excellent, and his men were fresh, whereas Turenne's had just completed a march of about 100 miles in four days and as many hours. The enemy sent one detachment into the town and another into an old abbey, fortified like a castle, which lay between the town and the hill. On the hill the army was drawn up in two lines, the first commanded by the Duke of Lorraine,^ and the second by Count Caprara. Behind them was a large wood. The position of Turenne was hazardous, for, in 'Lorraine's army, which used to be 10,000, was now only 2,000. i674 ^T. 6s] SINTZHEIM 333 case of defeat, the retreat would have been very diffi- cult in an enemy's country deeply wooded ; but it would have been still more hazardous to allow Caprara and Bournonville to join their forces. Two branches of the river Eltzbach had to be crossed, and Turenne effected this crossing under cover of the fire of his artillery. Then followed fierce fighting, first in the suburbs, and next in the little town itself and at the abbey beyond it ; but after an hour and a half the French troops had driven the enemy both out of the town and out of the abbey. After that there was some stubborn figrhting- in the suburbs, the vineyards and the hedgerows. The troops of Caprara, which had been defending the town, then retreated from it to the east, and ascended to the plateau upon which his main body was drawn up. From the town there was a narrow defile, which led up the hill on Turenne's left. Here his great pre- ponderance of infantry proved invaluable ; for his musket- eers scrambled up the ascent, and, lining the defile on both its sides, protected his troops, while they passed through it up to the sloping plateau above. He also succeeded in getting three battalions into a vineyard on this plateau by a passage up a steep bank on his extreme right. Even allowing for Caprara's weakness in in- fantry, it is difficult to understand why he could not prevent troops from ascending a hill of which he held the command with an equal number of men, especially as the ascent had to be made by a narrow defile on the one side, and by a steep climb on the other ; and 334 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 Caprara'smen were fresh while Turenne's were wearied by forced marches. Once on the hill, Turenne drew up his cavalry in lines and placed platoons of infantry between them. He had a vineyard on his right and a hedge with a steep declivity on his left. General d'Abre, of whom we lately heard, commanded the right wing of the first line, and he imprudently advanced beyond the line of cavalry on his left and the farther end of the vineyard on his right, thus exposing both his flanks. Taking ad- vantage of this imprudence, the enemy immediately attacked his front and each of his flanks, thereby throw- ing his ranks into confusion. D'Abre himself was mor- tally wounded. Seeing what had happened, Turenne galloped up and just saved the situation. The ground being very dry, the charges of cavalry raised clouds of dust, and, under their cover, he took the oppor- tunity of extending his front until he had eighteen squadrons in his first line, with three battalions of in- fantry on either wing. The enemy was in a reversed position, having four battalions of infantry in his centre, with eight squadrons of cavalry on either side. Very sharp fighting followed. Every squadron of cavalry charged several times, and every charge raised more dust, until it was difficult to distinguish friend from foe. Turenne, who kept in the forefront of the battle, encouraging his men by voice, gesture and example, suddenly found himself in the midst of the Emperor's cuirassiers, and some time passed before he was able to cret clear of them and return to his own i674 ^T. 63] SINTZHEIM 335 men. Although now sixty-three, he showed magnificent personal courage in this action. Well might Napoleon say of him: "Turenne is the greatest of the French Generals : he is the only one who became bolder with age ". It was long doubtful, amidst the thick clouds of dust and smoke, which side was orettin(j the best of the battle ; standards and colours were taken and retaken on either side, and great was the slaughter ; but gradu- ally the Imperial troops wavered, fell back, broke up, and retired. The wood at their back now came into view, through the dusty air, and they retreated into it, after making a weak defence on its outskirts. Then the German soldiers disappeared among the trees. To pursue them through an unknown forest was impracti- cable, and the Marquis of Renty, who was sent with 400 men to attempt it, failed to effect his purpose. The batde, from the first crossing of the river by Turenne to the flight of the enemy into the wood, lasted four hours. During that time, the French lost nearly 200 officers and 1,100 men, and the Imperialists lost nearly 2,000 in killed, besides large numbers of wounded, 500 or 600 prisoners, and forty waggons. When Turenne's principal officers congratulated him and admired his personal courage in the battle, he replied : "With such splendid soldiers, a general need never hesitate to attack ; for he is certain of victory ! " Of these operations Napoleon says : " In this cam- paign, contrary to his usual custom, Turenne engaged in several actions and fought one great battle. His 336 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 march against Caprara, when he passed the Rhine at Philippsburg, to surprise him previously to his junction with the Duke of Bournonville, was admirable. Caprara thought him forty leagues off, when he discovered him with his army formed in line, opposite his camp. The numerical superiority of the infantry secured him the taking of Sintzheim and the passage of the defile. Caprara committed an error in accepting battle : he ought to have repassed the Neckar and marched to meet and join the Duke of Bournonville." A few days after his victory at Sintzheim, Turenne returned to Philippsburg, recrossed the Rhine and en- camped in a very rich plain near Neustadt, a town about eighteen miles to the north-west of Philippsburg — it may be well to have mentioned its whereabouts as there are thirty places bearing that name. Here he received considerable reinforcements. Meanwhile he sent de- tachments to gain information about the enemy, to dis- cover passes through the mountains and to spread various false reports as to his own intended movements. After making a false march to the west, in the direction of Kaiserslautern, to deceive the enemy, he turned back, marched south-east to Philippsburg on the 3rd of July, again crossed the Rhine and then marched nearly due north to Weiblingen, a village on the Neckar between Mannheim and Heidelberg. He was now accompanied by an army of 18,000 men. By this time Caprara, with the remains of his army, had joined Bournonville, and their united armies numbered about 15,000. They were some miles north i674 ^T. 63] SOLDIERS TORTURED 337 of the Neckar and were marching on Mannheim, when they discovered the army of Turenne a few miles off, and, not desiring a battle just then, they retired towards Frankfurt, two hours before Turenne had learned that they were within reach of him. He sent cavalry in pursuit ; but it was too late. Being unopposed on the north of the river Neckar, Turenne was master of the Palatinate. And now we come to an incident in his career for which he has been severely criticised. He allowed his troops to live at their discretion, which they used so freely that in a month they had consumed all the food and forage in the country. Most of the peasants abandoned their houses and went elsewhere in search of provisions ; before doing so, large bodies of them revenged them- selves upon the soldiers by surprising them whenever they could find them single, or even in twos and threes, murdering them and torturing them with abominable cruelty. They burned them to death over slow fires, or left them to die hanging by their feet from trees with their heads downwards, or tore out their hearts and entrails, or maimed them in various ways and left them exposed alive on the high-roads : in some rare in- stances they contented themselves with putting out their eyes. It was but natural that the soldiers should retaliate upon the peasants for the terrible cruelties which had thus been perpetrated upon their comrades. This re- taliation is said to have been begun by the English soldiers serving under Turenne, and Ramsay says that, 22 338 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 when they saw what horrors had been committed upon some of their comrades, they became like madmen, and taking torches in their hands set fire to villag-es and even to some small towns before their officers could restrain them. " Had not the threats and orders of Turenne put a stop to their fury, they would have laid waste the whole country. He exemplarily punished those who began the burning, though they were the bravest soldiers of his army. He could not condemn them to death without doing great violence to him- self: but, as the maintaining of discipline was concerned, he made clemency give way to severity." Napoleon, on the contrary, says that Turenne "set fire to two towns and twenty-five villages, by order of Louis XIV." Most historians have attributed this incendiarism to Turenne's own initiative and have con- sidered it a stain on his memory. But, even if it had been by his orders, which cannot be definitely proved, it must be allowed that his provocation at the hideous cruelties practised upon his soldiers was immense ; and in addition to this, it should be remembered that, if he had not laid the country waste, the enemy might have foraged in it, on his way to attack Philippsburg, Hagenau, Saverne, or other French positions of im- portance near or on the river Rhine. Captain Hozier says that "an English army, in order to compel Mas- sena to fall back from Lisbon, wasted a friendly country and thus turned the tide of the Peninsular war ".^ 1 Turenne, p. 187. 1674 ^T. 63] A CHALLENGE 339 And, even in our great Boer War, farms were burned, crops were destroyed, and districts were cleared of pro- visions. Louis, the Elector Palatine, who watched the con- flagrations from the tower of his castle at Mannheim, was exceedingly enraged at the devastation of his territories, more especially because Turenne was a relation of his own and had hitherto been on friendly terms with him. He wrote to Turenne saying that he understood the burninsf of the towns and villages to have been by his orders. " I am at a loss to find out a reason for it. ... I cannot help being surprised at a procedure so little conformable to the laws of wars amongst Christians and to the assurances you have so often given me of your friendship." Then he said that he did not believe the alleged atrocities to have been com- mitted by his peasants, and he continued : " But grant- ing that it had been my subjects, I cannot see how the inhumanity of some private men, whom I would have severely punished had I known the authors of it, could have obliged you to ruin so many innocent families, and consume even the very churches of your own religion. Actions so contrary to the improvement you pretend to have made in the practice of Christianity by your con- version " — this was evidently intended to be a particu- larly nasty slap — "make me believe that they proceed from some prejudice or spite you have conceived against me ; but it would have been easy for you to have taken satisfaction from me by ways more usual among men of honour." And he ended his letter by requesting 22 * 340 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 Turenne to send by the bearer a letter naming a time and a place for a duel. Turenne immediately wrote in reply: " I have re- ceived the letter your Electoral Highness did me the honour to write to me ; I can assure you that the burn- ing of some of your villages was without my order, and that the soldiers who found their comrades killed after a very strange manner, did it at hours when they could not be hindered. When your Electoral Highness shall be sufficiently informed of the fact, I doubt not but you will continue to honour me with a share of your favour, since I have done nothing that can be a reason for de- priving me of it." He altogether ignored the challenge to a duel. Ramsay states that when the elector inquired further into the matter, he "found it such as the Viscount had represented and was ashamed of having been so much transported with passion "} When his army had consumed everything that was eatable in the Palatinate, north of the Neckar, Turenne again crossed the Rhine and encamped south-west of Philippsburg. Sickness having broken out among his men, he spent much time in going among them, doing 1 When Napoleon was about fourteen he was conversing with a lady about Marshal Turenne and extolling him to the skies. " Yes, my friend," she answered, " he was a great man, but I should like him better if he had not burnt the Palatinate." " What does that matter," Napoleon replied briskly, "if burning was necessary to the success of his plans ? " [Tahle Talk of Napoleon Buona- parte. Sampson Low & Son, 1868). i674 ^T. 6s] SENEFF 341 all in his power to comfort them and provide for their wants. Occasionally, when he had spent for this pur- pose what money he happened to have in his pockets, he borrowed some from his officers and told them to ask his steward for repayment. The steward some- times suspected that they demanded larger sums than they had lent, and, hinting at this to Turenne, he suggested that when he borrowed money from his officers he should give them written orders for the exact amount. " No," replied Turenne, "give all they ask for. It is impossible that an officer should demand a sum which he has not lent — unless he be in great want, and in that case it is but just to assist him." While Turenne was for the moment at a standstill, Conde fought one of his greatest battles, the battle of Seneff, in which with 45,000 men he encountered the Dutch and Spaniards who had nearly 60,000, under the command of the Prince of Orange. Both sides claimed the victory and chanted Te Deum in their cathedrals. On both sides, again, the slaughter had been enormous ; it was said that the battle-field was strewn with 27,000 corpses ; and in such personal danger had been both commanders-in-chief that Cond^ and the Prince of Orange had each more than one horse killed under him. Conde's energy in this great battle was the more meritorious on account of his ill-health. For some years he had been obliged to live chiefly on milk.^ After the batde of Seneff, at which he spent seventeen ^ Desormeaux, vol. iv., p. 208. Mahon's Life of Conde, p. 266. 342 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 hours in the saddle, he had such a severe attack of gout that, when he went to present himself to the King, he could scarcely crawl up the great staircase at Versailles. But we must return to Turenne, who also was to fight a great battle in a few weeks. The Imperial army, which had meanwhile been en- camped between Mayence and Frankfurt, was largely reinforced by German levies, until the Duke of Bournonville had 35,000 men and thirty guns under him by the end of August. With this large army he forced the bridge at Mayence and crossed to the west of the Rhine. Both Louis XIV. and Louvois were much alarmed at hearing of this advance of the Imperial army, and Louvois laid all the blame of it on Turenne. He urged the King to withdraw his troops, to abandon Alsace, and to fall back into Lorraine. Louis XIV. consented and sent pressing orders to this effect to Turenne ; upon which Turenne sent back a respectful remonstrance. "The enemy," he wrote, "hownumer- ous soever their troops be, cannot think of any other enterprise this season but that of making me leave the Province I am in : they have neither provisions, nor the means of passing into Lorraine, till I be driven out of Alsace. If I go away of my own accord, as your Majesty orders me, I shall do for them what they would find it difficult to make me do. When a General has a reasonable number of troops, he need never quit a country ; though the enemy may have a great many more. I am persuaded that, of the two, it would be i674 ^T. 63] GIVEN THE SLIP 343 less prejudicial to your Majesty's interest that I lost a battle, than that, abandoning Alsace, I should repass the mountains into Lorraine : for, if I were to do so, Philippsburg and Breisach would soon be obliged to surrender. The Imperialists would take possession of the whole country from Mayence to Basle, and very possibly they might invade Franche-Comte, Lorraine and Champagne. I know the strength of the Imperial army, the Generals who command it, and the country in which I now am. I am prepared to take the whole responsibility and I will answer for the event." The King so thoroughly trusted Turenne that he told him to do as he pleased, reinforced him with eight battalions and ordered Louvois to submit. Bournonville now marched south and made a bridge of boats six miles from Philippsburg. Turenne was uncertain whether Bournonville intended to besiege Philippsburg, or to recross and march up the Rhine, or merely to make a feint of crossing the Rhine and then turn back to the west. In this uncertainty, Turenne made elaborate arrangements for watching his move- ments. Four guns were to be fired as a signal if he did one thing, and six guns if he did something else. A detachment of 500 infantry, specially told off to observe his proceedings, was under the command of "the hand- some Englishman ". In spite of all the precautions of Turenne, Bournon- ville managed to give him the slip. He recrossed the Rhine on the 20th of September and hurried up the river, by its right or eastern bank, to Strasburg. 344 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 Turenne followed him on the left bank, being anxious to reach Strasburg before his enemy, in order to confirm its magistrates in their neutrality ; not that he had much anxiety on that point, as they had refused the Imperialists a passage over its bridge a few months earlier, and they were not likely to run any danger of incurring the wrath of Louis XIV. or of having their city made the centre of a great war. And Turenne was very nearly right, so far as the magistrates of Strasburg were concerned ; for they refused point-blank to permit Bournonville to cross over their bridge ; but Count Hohenlohe, who had undertaken the negotia- tion, on failing with the magistrates, had tried his luck with the people, and with such effect that they rose against the magistrates, took possession of the bridge, and gave the Imperialists a free passage over it. The army of the Empire then crossed the river on the 26th of September, Turenne arriving only six hours too late to stop them.^ After crossing the river, the Imperial army turned to the south, up the 111, a river which flows into the Rhine below Strasburg, and en- camped between that city and Gravenstadt, a small town about three miles to the south, on the 111. "By this disposition," Ramsay tells us, "the Im- perialists became masters of the country, from the Rhine to the mountains of Saverne, and by consequence of all Upper Alsace, where they found provisions in abund- ance to support a very powerful army, a long time, 1 So at least says Napoleon. i674 ^T. 63] CRITICAL POSITION 345 and from whence they might easily make an irruption into France." Of these operations Napoleon has this to say : "The Duke of Bournonville surprised Turenne, by gaining several marches upon him and taking pos- session of Strasburg. The French ministry had been remiss in not ordering the occupation of Strasburg. What had they to hesitate about ? N early the whole Empire was at war, and the hostile disposition of the citizens of Strasburg was known : the possession of the place was indispensable to the security of the frontier. But Turenne ought to have watched this important point. He was on the left bank of the Rhine, and the enemy on the right: he ought to have kept a division near Stras- burg so as to have been able to anticipate the enemy, particularly as there was no other point on this whole frontier calculated to excite his solicitude in a similar degree." The position now was exceedingly critical. The army of the Empire already greatly outnumbered that of Turenne, and the Elector of Brandenburg was ex- pected in a fortnight with a reinforcement of 20,000 men. Turenne had only 22,000 men, and with little more than half the numbers of the enemy he had to cover Saverne and Hagenau, places as important as they were weak. A retreat would have been dangerous and its consequences fatal, including the loss of Breisach, Philippsburg, Alsace and possibly also Franche-Comte and Lorraine. Likely enough, again, it might have been followed by the pillaging of Champagne. If Bran- 346 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 denburg joined the Imperial army, Turenne's force would meet with almost certain destruction from one nearly three times its number. Turenne's only chance of success, and that a poor one, seemed to be to attack the enemy at once, before Brandenburg could join him. CHAPTER XXV. It must have put a severe strain upon the spirits of even so brave a soldier, and a man of such an equable temperament, as Turenne, to prepare for attacking, with a comparatively small army, a large and splendid army, which was soon to be very considerably reinforced. But one of Turenne's maxims was to "appear more gay than ordinary in the time of the most imminent danger". St. Evremond wrote of him, while he was still living: " He is never elevated in good, never cast down in bad fortune". While the enemy was encamped three miles to the south-west of Strasburg, Turenne encamped about as far from it on the north-east, at Wanzenau, on the 111, a little above where that river flows into the Rhine. Although he could calculate on only fourteen days before the arrival of 20,000 fresh enemies to join the forces greatly outnumbering his own, already present, he wisely gave his own men a three days' rest before beginning his operations. Early in the night of the and of October he sent off three regiments of dragoons, at midnight he de- camped himself, but the main body of his army does 347 348 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 not seem to have started till the next morning. It marched first due west and then to the south-west of Strasburg, his cavalry keeping next to that city, his infantry in the centre and his transports on the farther side. Torrents of rain fell during the night, and, as a good deal of ploughed land had to be traversed, the marching was very heavy. At four o'clock, in the afternoon of the 3rd, Turenne encamped on high ground above Achenheim, a village near the river Breusch, over which he was fortunate enough to find a bridge unbroken at Holtzheim. He at once crossed the river with some cavalry, and used the rest of the daylight for reconnoitring. He discovered the camp of the enemy, about three miles due south of his own, on the opposite side of Ensheim, a village some half- dozen miles to the south-west of Strasburg. On the Strasburg side, that is to say at the enemy's right flank, was a very large wood ; and, in front of his right wing, separated by a wide passage from this wood, was a vineyard. In front of his left wing was a small wood which seemed to Turenne, and, as it after- wards turned out, to Bournonville also, the most impor- tant point in the coming battle. In front of the Imperial centre was the village of Ensheim, with two open spaces of from half a mile to three-quarters of a mile each, one between the village and the vineyard on the right, and the other between the village and the small wood on the left. Knowing that he had not a moment to lose, Turenne made his army begin to file over the small i674 ^T. 63] ENSHEIM 349 bridge at Achenheim as soon as possible that evening, and to continue this movement throughout the night. As quickly as his troops passed over the river Breusch, he drew them up in order of battle, on the farther side of the village of Holtzheim, which stood upon the south side of the river. Thus occupied, he spent the whole night in the saddle. Soon after six o'clock, on the mornine of the 4th battle of * . ENSHEIM, of October, both the French and the German armies 4* October, 1674. were in order of battle. It was a gloomy morning, and a fog, with which the day began, soon developed, first into a drizzle, and presently into a steady downpour of rain which lasted till the evening. Lord Wolseley s-a.ys {Life of Marlboivugh, vol. i., p. 140) that Turenne, theoretically, with an army little more than half the size of that of his enemy and with a river which could only be recrossed by one bridge behind him, ought not to have attacked at all ; but, he adds, Turenne knew that he could depend upon a want of agreement be- tween "the many serene Highnesses in the Imperial army, " which was made up of contingents from many elec- torates and provinces commanded by their own princes. " None but a master in the practice of war," says he, "knows when to discard theory; the instinct which prompts him to do so at the right moment is the hall- mark of real military genius." Making all allowances, however, Lord Wolseley is of opinion that Turenne was scarcely "justified in the attack upon which he now resolved". Both armies had infantry in their centres and 3SO MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 cavalry on their wings ; but with this important differ- ence, that the Imperialists placed the whole of their infantry in their centre, while Turenne placed a few battalions in his centre and divided the rest into platoons, which he placed between the squadrons of cavalry. Napoleon would probably have been the first to acknowledge that musketry was, at that time, in a very experimental and transitional stage, and that little blame could be laid upon Turenne for making a mistake in its use ; but he says : " The plan of mingling platoons of infantry with cavalry is bad and produces nothing but disadvantages : the cavalry loses its activity and is obstructed in all its movements ; it loses its power ; the infantry is endangered and, on the first movement of the cavalry, remains without support ". Turenne^ "posted himself in no particular place, intending to go wherever his presence should be necessary";'^ but Bournonville, who was commander- in-chief of the Imperial army, "placed himself at the head of the main body ". Before the action opened, Bournonville sent troops with guns to occupy the small wood which stood before his left wing and ordered the position to be entrenched. He also had the village en- trenched and armed by artillery. In the open spaces, on the right and left of the village, he placed infantry concealed by lying in hollows and behind banks. Then he quietly awaited the French attack. The first line 1 Ramsay. ^ Turenne, nevertheless, is reported to have once said : " A general who ' is everywhere ' is nowhere ". fc ^ * \>"M\ \ 1 * »■ fife "^ '*><'**fQSr'* t?^ II > A.*A is Mill -^ 5^ K C;n. tJ ^ p «H i674^T. 63] ENSHEIM 351 of the French was as long as that of the Imperialists; the second was shorter than theirs ; but the French reserve was only about a fifth of that of the enemy, which, in his case, was to all intents and purposes a third line of battle. The two armies were drawn up about a mile from each other. It seemed to Turenne that the first thing to be done was to take, if possible, the small wood on his own right and on the Imperialist left ; and he began the action by sending the Marquis Bouffiers, with eight squadrons of dismounted dragoons, to attack it. The artillery on either side cannonaded each other for some time, the Imperialists using "cartridge shot". Under Boufflers, and with Monmouth's force, fought the future Duke of Marlborough, who was commanding a regiment, the nucleus of which, says Lord Wolseley i^Life of Marlborough, vol. i., p. 135), were drafts of fifty men from each of the three regiments of English Foot Guards. Sir F. Hamilton, in his History of the Grenadier Guards (vol. i., p. 194), says: "The men of the three companies of the King's [Grenadier] and Coldstream Guards, forming part of Monmouth's original Royal English Regiment, had . . . been drafted into the other companies of that corps still remaining in the French King-'s service, and . . . more than half of each of the Guard's companies of Skelton's battalion were similarly drafted into Churchill's corps". An Englishman, in writing about Turenne, may be ex- cused for dwelling upon these details and for feeling proud that some of the hardest fighting, in one of the 352 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 hardest-fought battles of Turenne, was the work, and the successful work, of his fellow-countrymen. Both Bournonville and Turenne constantly sent reinforcements to this important position. At last Boufflers, sword in hand, marched up to the entrench- ments, stormed them, drove the enemy out of them, and took two guns ; but, on advancing through the wood, he was surprised and staggered at being con- fronted by a second entrenchment, a little distance behind the first, from which no less than six guns opened fire. For three hours the French struggled against this fire, without being able to make any way. Turenne then sent further reinforcements ; but a blind- ing storm of rain for some time interfered with the attack. Then the French made a most vigorous on- slaught. The bloodshed was terrible on both sides. As they fought, many of the living were standing upon the bodies of the dead ; but the French persevered until they carried the second entrenchments, captured the six guns, and drove the enemy out of the wood. Bournonville, as will presently be seen, did not concentrate his attention too exclusively upon the small wood where there was such terrific fighting ; but he still considered it of the utmost importance, and he sent a strong force and six guns in hope of recovering it. Turenne sent about an equal number of men to repel them, but, at first, no artillery. These rival reinforce- ments came into contact between the wood and the village of Ensheim, but the Imperialists had strong support, being close to their own lines, whereas the i674^T. 63] ENSHEIM 353 French troops were quite unsupported and suffered great losses from the Imperial artillery. As Napoleon describes it, "the carnage soon became dreadful". Turenne himself led this attack, one horse was shot under him, and several of his staff were killed at his side. The personal courage which he exhibited did much to animate his troops, and they fought with ex- traordinary valour. When the guns which had been captured by the French in the wood had been brought up and reversed against the Imperial forces, they did much to turn the tide of the battle, and the Imperial troops were gradually driven back, until they sought shelter behind the entrenchments which had been made at the village of Ensheim. When the battle had been at its hottest, Bournon- ville had observed reinforcement after reinforcement leaving the French centre and even the French left to support the attack between the small wood and the village, until the French left became considerably weakened. He then conceived what Napoleon calls an "able manoeuvre". Advancing himself, at the head of several carefully chosen squadrons, he led them between the village of Ensheim and the vine- yard on his right to make a demonstration of charg- ing the French centre. Before starting he had sent Caprara, with a much stronger body of cavalry, by a way invisible to the French, between the vineyard on his rieht and the larcre wood, to make a sudden attack on the French left flank. When General Foucault, the oldest of the French 354 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 lieutenant-generals, saw the Imperial cavalry advanc- ing across the plain, he immediately suspected Bour- nonville's design, and prepared for an attack upon his flank or rear. Perceiving that Foucault had made a formation accordingly, Bournonville, thinking that his plot had been discovered, instead of charging, retired ; the brave Caprara, however, faithfully carried out the orders that he had received, and emerging from be- tween the cover of the vineyard and the large wood, he charged the flank of the second line of the French cavalry almost before his approach had been noticed, broke up several squadrons of Turenne's cavalry and attacked the rear of the French infantry. If Bournon- ville had executed his share of the manoeuvre, the left wing of the French army would have been in a most perilous condition ; but, failing that charge, the French left and centre, although weakened by withdrawals for the great battle that was going on between the small wood and the village of Ensheim, and no longer sup- ported by any right wing, was just sufficiently strong to withstand the attack of Caprara's cavalry, which had at last to retire. Cavalry and infantry, on both sides, had now had about as much fighting as they could well endure. The remainder of the daylight was used for cannonading ; and it soon became too dark for further action on this cloudy, dreary day, during which the rain had hardly ever ceased. The Imperialists then withdrew to their camp, close at hand, where they had provisions await- ing them ; while Turenne, who had no food for his i674^T. 63] ENSHEIM 35S men, led the main body of them back, past Holtzheim, and across the river to his camp at Achenheim. Both armies ended this severe day's fighting by retaining their positions ; Turenneleft twelve squadrons of horse and four of dragoons to hold the battlefield before retreating to Achenheim ; but the Imperialists decamped during the night, leaving behind them a num- ber of wounded, a considerable quantity of provisions, with two guns, and retired to Strasburg. Their loss in the battle had been 3,000 killed on the spot, besides many who died on the day after the action, in addition to other wounded. The French loss was 2,000, in- cluding many officers ; but they captured eight guns, several standards and colours, and many prisoners. In the opinion of Napoleon, if Turenne "had joined to his extreme left, all the infantry which he injudiciously dispersed amongst his squadrons : had he placed them in the wood with some cannon, covering them with en- trenchments and trees cut down, the left of his cavalry would have had an appui; this would have compensated for his inferiority in cavalry. The best way of protect- ing cavalry is to support its flanks. ... If, after the taking of the little wood, which the enemy had defended with all his means, Turenne had pushed his advantage, the battle would have been decisive. He might, at all events, have lain on the field of battle, but he fell back a league and a half, the same day. On this occasion, he carried his circumspection so far that it amounted to timidity." It was little that Turenne gained by the battle. 23 * 3S6 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 Indeed it was almost waste of energy, if his own maxim be correct, that "actions ought not to be valued on their own account, but only for their consequences". True, the enemy had withdrawn to Strasburg ; but what of that? The Germans, again, had lost more in numbers than the French, but their original numbers having been much greater, their proportionate pre- ponderance over the French had been little, if at all, reduced by their losses in the battle. And in a few days the Grand Elector of Brandenburg arrived at Strasburg and reinforced the Imperial army with 20,000 men, bringing up its numbers to between 50,000 and 60,000, while Turenne had now scarcely 20,000. So confident then were the German allies of victory, that they brought with them the Electress of Brandenburg and several other princesses, who declared that they were going with the Imperial army to Paris to make the acquaintance of the French ladies, and learn manners from the politest of nations. The German generals, also, fully looked forward to advancing through France and capturing its capital. As one more example of the courtesies of warfare at that period, it may be observed that, during this campaign, Turenne sent his nephew, a lad of fourteen, to convey his compliments to the Duke of Lorraine, who was fighting against him. "My young Cousin," said Lorraine, " you are too happy in seeing and hearing M. de Turenne every day. Kiss the ground whereon he treads. Be killed at his feet." Turenne now fell back upon his fortress of i674 ^T. 63] A RETREAT 357 Hagenau, about seventeen miles north of Strasburg, and that of Saverne, some twenty miles to the north- west of the same city, the distance of twenty miles between Hagenau^ and Saverne being of great im- portance because it covered the principal entrance to Lorraine and Northern France. He broke the bridges which lay between the two fortresses, spoiled the fords and placed scouts to watch the narrow valleys by which the few roads led towards Lorraine. On his own retreat towards Saverne, or rather towards Dett- weiler, which lies a few miles to the east of it, he was attacked by the enemy, which dogged his footsteps ; but 6,000 horse of the French Reserve, supported by a number of French Dragoons who dismounted and fired on the Imperialists from the cover of hedges, held a narrow defile until the main body of Turenne's army reached a camp on a very strong position, after a most creditable retreat in the presence of a hostile force nearly three times its size. At several points during this retreat the Germans had opportunities of either coming up with the French army, or of placing them- selves between the French and either Saverne or Hagenau ; and it is doubtful whether their failure to take advantage of those opportunities was owing to ignorance of the country, bad generalship, or want of resolution. As to generalship, indeed, they had now too much of it ; for they had so many generals that there is likely to have been a bewildering diversity of 1 Hagenau is about eight miles from Worth, the scene of the great battle between the Prussians and French on 6th August, 1S70. 358 MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 counsel. On the other hand, Turenne was a general who was a past-master of the very difficult art of making a retreat. Great was the alarm in Paris when the position of Turenne was realised. The King insisted upon strenuous levies ; and, by degrees, Turenne was largely reinforced. The report of these reinforcements, raw levies as they were, had the effect of making the Imi- perialists more cautious. In connection with these levies a story is told which shows something of the character of Turenne. Noticing an officer in one of them exhibiting great military zeal, a zeal very far from being shared by his weary, woebegone steed, Turenne insisted upon changing horses with him, pretending that the officer's screw, being quieter than his own spirited and valuable charger, would suit a man of his age much better. At the end of November the Imperialists, observ- ing Turenne's inaction, thought that he had abandoned Alsace, that the campaign was over, and that there was nothing left for them to do but to divide their forces into detachments, and select winter quarters in the most fertile districts of Alsace. Louvois complained bitterly to the King of the conduct of Turenne. Reinforcements, said he — ^large and repeated reinforcements' — had been sent to him, his army was now a formidable one, yet he was doing nothing. Admitting that the army of the Empire ex- ceeded Turenne's in numbers, Louvois reminded the King that Turenne had undertaken the entire re- i674 ^T. 63] ST. EVREMOND 359 sponsibility of keeping the Imperialists out of Lorraine and Franche-Comt^ ; yet now he had allowed them to overrun the whole of Alsace, and they were waiting at the very gates of Franche-Comt^ and Lorraine to enter those districts and ravage them, if not to take posses- sion of them, as soon as the coming spring might permit. At this time Turenne was the subject of much abuse among the military critics of Paris. But he had a champion in St. Evremond, who wrote of him : " Nature has bestowed on him as much sense, capacity, and merit, as on any man living, but has denied him that fire of genius, that openness and freedom of mind, which makes it appear bright and agreeable. He must be destroyed before we can know his value ; and it will be at the loss of his life that he will obtain full justice to his reputation." The Imperialists scattered themselves over different parts of Alsace, so as to give plenty of room for forag- ing to each detachment of their large army. They all felt safe from any danger of attack, but those who felt most secure of all were they who were in the extreme south of Alsace. They knew that Turenne was in the north of Lorraine, fifty or sixty miles off The great chain of the Vosges Mountains, many of them from 3,000 to 4,000 feet in height, protected the whole of the western side of Alsace, and, between the south and the north of Alsace, detachments of the Imperial army were quartered in all directions. The Grand Elector of Brandenburg had sent for his wife to spend the winter quietly with him at Colmar, a town half-way 36o MARSHAL TURENNE [1674 between Strasburg and Basle, with the mountains of the Black Forest and the Vosges ranges about ten miles off on either side. Some of the Imperial troops were in the extreme south-west, close to the frontier, where the army of the Empire was intended to pass between the Jura and the Vosges ranges, through Southern Lorraine, to invade Franche-Comte, in the early summer ; but now there was snow down to the very foot of the hills, and all warfare was in abeyance. Christmas came, and the Prussian and Austrian soldiers joined with the Alsatian villagers in the customs and festivities of that season so dear to Germans. All was now " Peace on earth, and good- will towards men ! " Many mes- sages came in for the officers on the south-west frontier, most of them being good wishes of the season ; but this monotony was suddenly and violently varied by a de- spatch to the effect that Turenne was only eight miles off, at Belfort,^ with a very large army, and that, it they wished to escape capture with their detachments, they had not a moment to lose. Belfort is the gateway from mid-eastern France into Germany and Switzerland, being situated in the gap between the Vosges and the Jura ranges known as the " Trou6e de Belfort ". Well might the astonished Imperial officers ask how the Turenne could possibly have got there ! Early in the last Boer War, when the Boers were 1 It was at Belfort, in 187 1, that Bourbaki, with 100,000 men and 240 guns, made a desperate attempt to relieve the garrison which was besieged by Werder and Manteuffel. After his failure to do so Bourbaki tried to commit suicide. i674 ^T. 63] A SURPRISE 361 holding Magersfontein and the English army was mak- ing no apparent progress towards taking it, an American, who was discussing the position with an English friend in London, said: "Is there no way round?" That was exactly the question which Turenne had asked himself in Northern Lorraine at the end of October, 1674, and he had answered it in the affirmative. He conceived the idea of marching to the west of the Vosges Mountains through what are now the French de- partments of Meurthe-et-Moselle and Vosges, but what was then Southern Lorraine, and entering Alsace in the south-west. Early in December, leaving sufficient troops to garrison Saverne and Hagenau, he divided his army into detachments, and ordered them to march by different routes, which he carefully specified, and finally to concentrate at Belfort. They all met there, at about the time intended, after three weeks of march- ing, sometimes over mountains covered with snow, sometimes through valleys flooded by overflowing rivers, sometimes by roads almost impassable with mud. This long march was unknown to the enemy until it had been accomplished. On the appearance of the French army, the Imperial troops in the extreme south retreated ; some of them were driven across the Rhine, at Basle, and 5,000 or 6,000 Imperial cavalry were attacked by Turenne, who put them to flight, after a sharp engagement, capturing twenty officers, 300 prisoners and eighteen standards. Several days were passed by Turenne, either in dis- persing the German troops in the south of Alsace, or 362 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 in giving his men a rest before advancing north against the enemy. In the meantime the Imperial generals had received intelligence of his appearance. There- upon the Duke of Bournonville joined the Grand Elector of Brandenburg, near Colmar, and together they drew up their troops between that town and Turckheim, another four miles to the west of it. They had a splendid position. On their left they had the rivers Lauch, Thur, and 111 ; on their right they had the river Fech and a branch of that river ran across their entire front. On their own side of this branch of the river, in their front, they made parapets and erected batteries of artillery. They also placed some guns on their left, just north of Colmar. BATTLE OF On the morning of the sth of January Turenne TURCK- * . HEiM, 5th advanced — -Napoleon says with 40,000 men, but 1675. ' Ramsay says with only 30,000 — against, according to Napoleon, 50,000 of the enemy, drawn up on the very strong position just described. The battle began at eleven o'clock. Turenne put his right wing under his relative, Comte de Lorges, with orders to extend it along the entire front of the enemy, as if intending to attack Colmar. This had the effect of making the Imperialists neglect Turckheim and turn all their at- tention to concentrating their forces to their left, to oppose any attempt by the French right upon Colmar. Meanwhile Turenne, with his left, lay concealed behind a hill, in a gorge, which led between two spurs of the Vosges Mountains, in the direction of Turckheim and the Imperial right. As soon as the enemy was seen to ir!" *'fitew v■-""t' i675 ^T. 63I TURCKHEIM 363 be moving his troops towards Colmar, Turenne led his men through the gorge to his left, in the opposite direction -to Colmar and towards Turckheim. The Imperialists had expected the battle to be the battle of Colmar, and it was exactly because Turenne saw that they expected it to be the battle of Colmar, and had made all their preparations for a battle of Colmar, that he determined to make it the battle of Turckheim. As soon as the Imperial generals perceived Turenne's tactics, they despatched six guns, twelve battalions and several squadrons of cavalry to their extreme right to prevent Turenne from crossing the Fech and occupying Turckheim. Against this force, Turenne sent Foucault with eight battalions, and soon afterwards reinforced him with four others ; but, instead of taking advantage of having arrived before the enemy's reinforcements, he ordered Foucault not to begin the attack till an hour before sunset, as he hoped that the Imperialists might retire without fighting. Accordingly, after enduring the artillery fire patiently for some time, at three o'clock Foucault crossed the arm of the Fech, and, after a very brilliant attack, in which he was killed, his troops drove their opponents towards the Imperialist centre. The delay, ordered by Turenne, in the delivery of this attack, is rather difficult to understand.^ As the sun set at four o'clock ^ The following is Ramsay's account of this incident ; " The Viscount made Lieutenant-General Foucault advance with eight battalions and attack the post which the enemy had seized along the brook, ordering him, in case he should drive them from thence, 364 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 darkness soon came on and the battle ended ; but the French army had gained a position on the Imperial flank, behind its entrenchments. Turckheim was now completely undefended, and Turenne sent seven battalions to occupy a hill beyond the town, immediately above the Fech and command- ing the entire right flank of the enemy. But when the sun rose the next morning, the Imperialist army had disappeared. Turenne then occupied Colmar, where he found 3,000 wounded, sick and stragglers. The most remarkable features of the battle of Turckheim were that, although what fighting there was was fierce, only a comparatively small number of the troops upon the battlefield fought at all ; that the fighting was only in one place ; and that the space upon which the action occurred was a very small portion of a very large field of battle. Neither side appears to have desired a oreneral encragfement. The Imperial army continued to retreat, and Turenne followed it till it came to Strasburg, where it crossed the Rhine and retired into Germany. Turenne had thus driven the enemy entirely out of Alsace and also out of Strasburg, to whose inhabi- tants he gave a promise to forgive and forget all that was past. not to follow them nor take their cannon, in order to avoid a general battle ; he likewise forbad him to begin the attack till an hour before sunset, that the enemy might take counsel in the night and retire by favour of it to prevent being attacked next day in front and flank ". i675 ^T. 63] CRITICrSM 365 The whole of Europe was astounded at Turenne's success, and greater still was the astonishment when it became known that he had foretold it two months earlier. The King read before his whole Court a letter which Turenne had written so early as the 30th of October to Le Tellier, the Chancellor and Secretary of State, in which he had said : " Pretending not to be able to resist the enemy after his junction with the Elector of Brandenburg, I will still retire before them, to give them the greater confidence. I will retreat into Lorraine, after which they will not fail to extend them- selves all over Alsace, then I will fall upon their quarters, by a way by which they will never expect my approach to surprise them : and I may perhaps oblige them to repass the Rhine and take up their winter quarter in their own country." In fact Turenne was acting upon what is reputed to have been one of his own maxims : "Seem some- times to show fear, to give a greater confidence to the enemy in their own strength, and to make them more negligent and less distrustful of you ". It might be supposed that Napoleon would have nothing but the highest praise to offer to the memory of Turenne in relation to this splendid strategy. Yet he found a good deal to criticise, and very interesting are his criticisms. He says: " It was on the 27th of December, that Turenne reached Belfort, and it was on the 5th of January that he fought the battle of Turckheim, being nine days after his arrival, and six days too late. . . . The cantonments being once 366 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 mustered at Belfort, the manoeuvre was unmasked, there was not an hour to lose. Had Turenne marched with more rapidity, he would have obtained important successes ; but the enemy's troops had time to rally from all their quarters, so that he found all their army united on the field of Colmar. He ought to have prevented this junction. The whole spirit of this operation consisted in reaching the bridge of Strasburg before the army had rallied. Turenne failed in this ; such a manoeuvre would have been fruitful in grand results, and certain of success, if, instead of debouching by Belfort, that is to say by the extremity of the Vosges, Turenne had debouched by the middle of the Vosges, direct on Colmar ^ and Strasburg, he would have arrived before the cantonments could have rallied. On this occasion, he evinced more talent in the con- ception than in the execution of this fine plan." And he hints that Turenne might have been defeated at Turckheim, if the Grand Elector of Brandenburg had thought the risks of a great battle worth running for the sake of retaining Alsace, a place 250 miles from his own dominions, from which it was separated by a number of small states. The Grand Elector, Napoleon declares, "ought to have given battle at Colmar. He was in an excellent position, his whole army had rallied, and his retreat on Strasburg was secure. The possession of Alsace was 1 There is a pass, rather less than half-way between Strasburg and Belfort, through the Vosges Mountains to Colmar, by St. Marie-aux-Mines. Its height is 2,625 feet. i675 ^T, 63] TURCKHEIM 367 undoubtedly worth a battle, but not to him or to the princes of the North of Germany. There was nothing to compensate them for the risks they would have run and the losses they would have suffered in accepting battle." This question whether the Imperial army voluntarily retreated, owing to differences of intention in the allies composing it, or fled through defeat, is an interesting one. The people of Brandenburg, or Prussians, were the chief of the German Protestants ; and although in some sense allied to the Empire, they were, at heart, rather the enemies than the friends of the Austrians. They had been glad enough to make common cause with them in curbing the ambitions of Louis XIV. and they were ready to help them in driving the French out of Alsace, so long as the united armies were in something like the proportions of three to one to the French army. But it was quite a different thing to run the risks of a great battle solely for Austria's ad- vantage, when the proportions were reduced to five to four. For the opposite supposition — that the Germans, at any rate after the battle of Turckheim, retreated from necessity and not from choice — it may be argued that the French, by establishing themselves inside the right flank of the Imperial army, and thus getting partially behind their entrenchments, had rendered a large portion of those entrenchments useless, and that a simultaneous attack upon the Imperial right front and its weak and unprotected right flank, on the follow- 368 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 ing morning, would have exposed its army to very serious risks. Moreover, now that the French troops had advanced some distance on the high ground north of Turckheim, it was possible that they might have harrassed the retreat of the German army towards Strasburg, although, as Napoleon says, they might not have been able to cut it off CHAPTER XXVI. On his return to Paris, and more or less in every town through which he passed on his way thither, Turenne was received in triumph. Whenever he appeared in public he was surrounded by a crowd who cheered with joy. Louis XIV. could not show him enough favour or affection, and he obliged Louvois to make him an apology for all the trouble he had given to him. Far from being proud of all the honour that was paid to him, or from enjoying the public proofs of his popularity, his one desire was to escape from them. Indeed he intended to retire altogether from military and public life, and to make a prolonged visit to the House of the Fathers of the Oratory at Paris. He said that having spent nearly all his life in heresy he was anxious to devote one or two years exclusively to the study and practice of the Catholic religion. Two priests of the Oratory, Pere du Castel and Pere St. Denis, had ac- companied him as chaplains in the campaigns which followed his reception into the Catholic Church. The Parisian Oratory was founded in 1611 by Cardinal Berulle, who also founded fifty colleges, seminaries and houses of retreat in connection with it ; but the French 369 24 370 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 Oratory was in no way connected with the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, so well known in Rome in its early days, and in later years in England. While Turenne's sole desire was peace, and especially peace brought by religion, his country was again on the brink of a great war, and was calling loudly for his services. There was a probability of much fight- ing in Europe. The Austrians threatened Alsace. The Swedes had renewed their alliance with France, and had declared war against the Grand Elector of Brandenburg, who had thus plenty to occupy his at- tention at home, without interfering with French affairs on the Rhine. The attention of the Princes of Bruns- wick and Lunenburg and the Bishop of Munster was also now turned to military matters in the North, instead of in the South. Six large armies were being prepared in Europe during the spring of 1675. A French army, under Conde, was to oppose the Dutch and Spanish armies, under the Prince of Orange, in Flanders. The Grand Elector of Brandenburg was to lead his army against that of Sweden, under Wrangel ; and the Emperor was sending his very skilful general, Montecuculi, into Swabia, to fight the French under And here was a difficulty! Louis XIV. wished Turenne to lead an army once more to the banks of the Rhine, but Turenne pleaded his desire to give up military work, at the age of sixty-three, and to retire for privacy and prayer. The King urged, the Marshal expostulated. In his difficulty Turenne consulted one i67S 'Et. 63] VISITS DE RETZ 371 of the Fathers of the Oratory in whose opinion he had great confidence, and received from him the advice that it was his duty to serve his King and his country ; whereupon Turenne submitted to the wishes of Louis XIV. Before starting for the war he visited Cardinal de Retz, who was then leading a life of strict retirement, penitence — for which there was ample necessity — and charity. He said to De Retz : "I am no great talker ; but I beg you to believe me in earnest when I tell you that, were it not for these affairs, which perhaps may re- quire my assistance, I would retire as you do ; and I give you my word that, if I return, I will not die in a trench but, in imitation of your good example, I will put a period of religious retirement between my life in the world and my death ". Always, before starting on a campaign, Turenne carefully examined his accounts and scrupulously paid his debts. On this occasion he took unusual care in seeing that he owed nothing. He was by no means excessively wealthy. Although he had had so many opportunities of enriching himself after victories and of obtaining lucrative appointments as rewards for his services, and in spite of having lived a very simple and inexpensive private life, so generous had he been to his troops and so large had been his charities that, at the age of sixty-three, he was scarcely, if at all, richer than he had been when he first inherited his patrimony. On the nth of May, 1675, having had a rest of little more than three months, after the long and weary- 24 * 372 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 ing campaign of the previous year and the early days of the present, Turenne left Paris to join the army, which he had left in Alsace, at Schlettstadt, a town on the river 111, a dozen miles north of Colmar and twenty- eight to the south of Strasburg. His forces numbered 20,000 and Montecuculi's about 25,000. The eyes of Europe were intently fixed upon the approaching duel between the two great generals, upon whose skill and judgment the war between France and the Empire was to depend. There was little difference in their ages ; each of them had carried a musket before obtaining a commission, they had been respec- tively trained to arms under the two rival uncles, Prince Maurice and Count Ernest ; they were both scientific students of the art of war ; both had had much experi- ence of actual warfare upon the field of battle, and each was beloved by his soldiers. Turenne was nearly sixty-four and Montecuculi only a couple of years older ; but Montecuculi suffered much from gout and was less active than Turenne, consequently he was less able to ride about and make observations for himself and more dependent upon information received from others. With the object of making up for the pusillanimity of the Grand Elector of Brandenburg during the pre- ceding campaign, Montecuculi had been in corre- spondence with the magistrates of Strasburg, with whom he was personally extremely popular, and he had explained to them that his victory was certain and that he was about to free them for ever from any annoyance at the hands of France. i67S ^T. 63] STRASBURG 373 It is necessary for students of the history of this campaign to bear in mind the political position of Strasburg. Formerly, and for a very long period, it had been an episcopal city, and, during the Mero- vingian period, its bishopric had attained to great importance and vast wealth. But afterwards, as the citizens grew in riches and in power, there was a prolonged struggle between them and their bishops, ending in the battle of Oberhausbergen, in 1262, by which the people threw off the episcopal rule and made Strasburg a free. Imperial city. Seventy years later there was an internal revolution, and after that the guilds were given a share in the government of the city. Its government, therefore, was essentially democratic, and it is this democratic government to which refer- ence is made whenever the magistrates of Strasburg are spoken of in these pages. During the Thirty Years' War, and up to the date with which we are now dealing, Strasburg, although an Imperial city, had professed absolute neutrality in all the wars between France and Germany. Having heard of the negotiations between Monte- cuculi and Strasburg, Turenne thought it wise to over- awe the magistrates of Strasburg, by marching to Achenheim, where he had encamped before the battle of Ensheim. As this encampment was hardly six miles from Strasburg, Turenne's presence there had a salutary effect. But he was scarcely a day too soon ! As it was, Montecuculi was close to Strasburg, on the oppo- site side of the river, and had only been deterred from 374 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 crossing the Rhine into Alsace, over the bridge of Strasburg, by the absence of part of his army, which had wintered in the country of Liege, and had not yet arrived. Checked at Strasburg, Montecuculi endeavoured to draw Turenne away from it, by marching eighty miles to the north down the right bank of the Rhine, and pretending that he was going to besiege Philipps- burg. He seized all the important places round it and then made a bridge of boats, ten miles north of Philippsburg, at Spires. This ruse on the part of Montecuculi neither de- ceived Turenne nor induced him to remove his army from its camp close to Strasburg ; but he took the precaution of going in person to the north, accompanied by 1,400 cavalry, to judge for himself of Montecuculi's proceedings. When there he strengthened the garri- son of Philippsburg, went to Hagenau saw that all was right at that very important fortress in Northern Alsace, and then returned to his army, near Strasburg. Montecuculi next tried to entice Turenne away from Strasburg, by sending cavalry across the Rhine to the western side of the river, and on to Landau and Neustadt, in the Palatinate, as if threatening the Moselle and the northern frontier of Alsace.- But again Turenne refused to take the bait. In fact, he did exactly the opposite to what Montecuculi was tempting him to do ; for early in June he sent a regiment of cavalry and a brigade of infantry, protected by six guns, to make a bridge ten miles to the south of i67S ^T. 63] OTTENHEIM 375 Strasburg, near the village of Ottenheim, at a point where several islands made the spaces to be bridged over comparatively narrow, the materials having been brought down the river, from Breisach. The bridge was finished and fortified in four days. He then marched his whole army over this bridge and en- camped near Willstadt, a place to the south of the river Kinzig,^ and about six miles to the south-east of Strasburg. Of Turenne's bridge at Ottenheim Napoleon says: "This great Captain committed the error of placing his bridge four leagues from Strasburg" ; an error which he declares ' ' might have produced the destruction of his army, if he had had the Prince of Conde to deal with ". In Napoleon's opinion Turenne should have placed his bridge only one league " from Strasburg. Yet Napoleon fully acknowledges the skill of Turenne in refusing to be beguiled by Montecuculi's pretended siege of Philippsburg, or by his sending troops across to the west of the Rhine and threateningf an invasion of Northern Alsace. Turenne, he says, by taking the lead himself, and crossing to the east or German side of the Rhine, obliged Montecuculi also to return to the eastern side of it. "This first victory," a bloodless victory, "was a substantial advantage." When Montecuculi realised the position of things, he brought his army south, and encamped on the north of the river Kinzig, about seven miles to the south-east 1 It is called the river Kinche on the accompanying plan. 2 Napoleon spoke of French leagues — not of English. Z7^ MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 of the camp of Turenne, and close to the fortress of Offenburg, where he had a garrison. Offenburg is at the foot of the mountains of the Black Forest ; there- fore, in case of failure, so long as he remained at Offenburof, Montecuculi had his retreat clear before him into Germany. " Turenne's position," says Napoleon, "was bad. He ought rather to have given battle than to have ex- posed himself to the loss of the bridge of Ottenheim and his retreat." Montecuculi 's encampment was, as it were, the apex of a nearly equilateral triangle, one side of which extended from his camp to the bridge at Ottenheim, and the other from his own camp to that of Turenne. But Napoleon finds serious fault with Montecuculi. "If" he says, " Montecuculi had thought fit to advance by an uninterrupted nocturnal march of six hours, directly on Ottenheim ... he would have forced the bridge of Ottenheim before the whole of Turenne's army could have covered it ; but he did nothing of the kind ; he trifled and contented himself with prolonging his rio-ht : he thought that manoeuvres would be enoug-h to determine Turenne to abandon his camp at Willstadt and to uncover Strasburg. Turenne penetrated his plans." Turenne, as Ramsay points out, had two bridges to guard, his own at Ottenheim and another between Fort Kell and Strasburg, belonging to the inhabitants of Strasburg, who " waited only an opportunity to break their word with impunity " and deliver the place over i6 JEt. 63] ALTENHEIM 377 to Montecuculi. Turenne's best chance of preventing this from happening was by remaining at Willstadt; but this entailed upon him the necessity of gxiarding a front of at least ten miles. Indeed, as Willstadt was at some distance from the Rhine, he had really to defend a front of nearer fifteen miles. "At last," says Napoleon, Turenne "comprehended that he was hazarding his army, he raised his bridge of Ottenheim, which he brought within two leagues of Strasburg and of his camp at Willstadt, placing it at Altenheim. It was still too far from Strasburg : it should have been constructed within one league^ of that city." Turenne completed his bridge at Altenheim on the 22nd of June. Montecuculi, who had been threatening Ottenheim, then withdrew to Offenburg. Montecuculi now gave up the idea of taking the bridge at Altenheim and moved his camp about seven or eiofht miles farther north, to the foot of the mountains of the Black Forest. Observing this, Turenne also moved his camp about as far to the north, but along the flat, between Strasburgand the army of Montecuculi. Throughout most of these operations, although the month was June, the weather had been very wet, and the Rhine and even the small rivers running into it were unusually full of water. Montecuculi had laid up a considerable amount of provisions and ammunition in Strasburg, and the re- quirements of his army made him anxious to obtain 1 An English league is 5,280 yards ; but a French league is 4,263 yards. 378 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 them for immediate use ; therefore he sent messengers to Strasburg ordering his people there to float his stores down the Rhine, on a bridge of boats that he had had made at that town. Hoping to meet the convoy, as it came down the river, he left the Black Forest and marched north-west across the plain towards the Rhine, encamping at Schertzheim, a village ten miles below, that is to the north of, Strasburg, and about one and a half from the riverside. On observing this Turenne immediately removed his camp to near Freistett, a village between Strasburg and Schertzheim, about three miles nearer Strasburg, and much closer to the Rhine than Schertzheim. The river Rench, a tributary of the Rhine, lay between the two camps. Having learned through spies that Montecuculi was expecting a convoy to come down the river from Strasburg, Turenne took means to inter- cept it. There were several islands in the Rhine at that point ; and on these he placed batteries of artillery, while in the main channel he anchored boats filled with soldiers. Although, by these means, Turenne prevented Montecuculi from getting his provisions and ammu- nition from Strasburg, it was at considerable cost to himself His soldiers, on the islands, were camping on very boggy and unhealthy ground ; even the body of his army beside the bank of the river was upon a marsh, and the continual rains had rendered ground of such a nature exceptionally wet. And, as to provisions, his own men were in want of them, while his horses were reduced to feeding on the leaves of trees. It was i675 ^T. 63] OFFENBURG 379 natural that the young soldiers should grumble when the water stood above their ankles ; but the old ones said to them : "What makes you complain? You do not know our General. When we are in any distress, he suffers more than we do. At this moment his thoughts are wholly employed in contriving how to ex- tricate us from this difficulty. He is awake when we are asleep. He is our father ! It is easy to see that you are but young ! " ^ In some respects Montecuculi was better off than Turenne. Although he had failed to get his convoy from Strasburg, he had a country at his back in which he could forage ; again he had communications with Offenburg, whence he could threaten Turenne's bridge at Altenheim, and, if he could but capture that bridge, he would be able to cut off his enemy's communications. Thus, for two months, as Ramsay says, Turenne and Montecuculi had "put in practice all that long experience had taught them : by their different move- ments, real or feigned, they exhausted all the finesses of art to starve, intercept, surprise and gain some ad- vantage over one another, without which both had determined not to hazard a battle ". So far as any records inform us, not a shot had yet been fired nor a blow struck, on either side, since they had been on the east of the Rhine. And now Turenne found that he would be unable to remain much longer where he was without being in ' Ramsay. 38o MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 serious want of provisions for his men. It was neces- sary to take some decisive step at once ; and he took one. He determined to move up the river Rench, to cross it, and to cut off Montecuculi's communications. The question was how and where to cross that river. Fortunately he found a shepherd, who showed him a little-known ford in the woods of the picturesque valley of the Rench, in a desolate place, stated by Ramsay to have been only " 500 paces " above Monte- cuculi's camp, a ford unknown to the Imperial staff, and quite unguarded. When it became dark, on the 15th of July, Turenne led a brigade towards this ford on the Rench. His men had to cut their way through a wood, for there was no road to the ford, the ground was very marshy, and they had to pass through some brooks in which they were up to their waists in water. It was mid- night when they reached and crossed the ford in the Rench, and then they instantly began to make a bridge, with a redan at the end of it. Three days were spent in completing these works, and Napoleon says : " When Montecuculi allowed his antagonist to employ himself three days in constructing a bridge, he ought to have raised entrenchments on the Rench : although so near his camp, he suffered himself to be cut off from Caprara's corps and from OfTenburg". As Turenne was going to leave a comparatively small force at his camp at Freistett, he had it en- trenched during his absence ; and when the redan by the bridge was finished, he sent for Count Hamil- i67S ^T. 63] THE REDAN ON THE RENCH 381 ton ^ with three battalions to occupy it ; he also ordered two Irish battalions to guard a valley a little higher up in the wood. Then he crossed the Rench with the main body of his army, and when all were on the opposite side he said: "Really I think that this has not been badly done, and it is my firm belief that M. de Monte- cuculi will be of the same opinion ". Montecuculi was thus cut off both from Offenburg and from that part of his army which was under Caprara, as well as from some detachments which were observing- the French at the bridge of Altenheim. From this embarrassing position he decided to attempt an escape by making a grand night attack upon Turenne on the 23rd of July. The plan he made was that he himself with his main army should attack Turenne's camp at Freistett ; that Caprara, summoned from Offenburg, should attack the French rear ; that Lorraine should attack the French right flank ; and that 4,000 men should attack Hamilton in his redan on the Rench. The officer in command of those 4,000 men, as soon as he arrived in front of the redan, was to have four o-uns fired as a signal, and, at that signal, but not before, all the Im- perial forces were to make their attacks simultaneously. That signal was never given ! The 4,000 men were misled by their guides, who possibly may have been bribed by Turenne ; and although it was so near, they never found the redan, consequently they never ' According to Sir Walter Scott, this was Count Anthony Hamilton, the compiler of the Grammont Memoirs. He was a great-grandson of the first Duke of Abercorn. 382 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 fired the four guns, but returned to their camp at daybreak. Caprara, hearing no signal, also returned to his camp, at Offenburg ; and Montecuculi, impatiently awaiting the four booms of the cannons, concluded that something had gone wrong, did not venture to make his grand attack upon the French camp at Freistett, and finally returned to his camp in anxiety, anger, and bitter disappointment. Lorraine, however, came in for some fighting. Turenne was on the move that night, as well as Monte- cuculi ; with his usual activity he had learned of Monte- cuculi's proposed attack, and he intended to cut off his retreat. While the Imperial generals were awaiting the signal for the general engagement, Turenne was encamped at a tile-kiln, on the farther side of the Rench, near the redan, with the greater part of his army. Soon after midnight he was on the march, and, in a thick mist, some of his advanced cavalry came into contact with Lorraine's. At first Lorraine's soldiers had much the best of the encounter, which began before daybreak ; but towards five o'clock, as it was getting lighter in spite of a fog, Turenne sent up some cavalry and four battalions which lined the hedges and repulsed the enemy. Lorraine, when he learned that Turenne was before him in person, with the greater part of his army, prudently retired, leaving more than 100 of his men dead on the field. The mist greatly assisted his retreat. Turenne did not think it prudent to pursue Lorraine through the fog ; but, when it cleared off, he followed in the direction which Lorraine had taken and i675 ^T. 63] THE ENEMY ENCLOSED 383 arrived at nine o'clock near Gamshurst, a village on the river Acher, some little distance to the east of Schertzheim and Freistett. Of Turenne's position at this time Ramsay says : "Thus the French army, divided in six different posts within the compass of a league and a half, enclosed the front and left wing of the enemy, and was itself in security, because the several parts could with ease assist one another ; while the Imperialists being shut up on their right by the Rhine, could extend themselves no way but towards the places behind them, and the French were near enough to cut off their retreat". Although he had been in the saddle since soon after midnight, the whole of the 24th of July was spent by Turenne in riding about and examining the country, which, with its spurs of the Black Mountains, its brooks, and its valleys, required very careful recon- noitring, a duty in which he never spared himself CHAPTER XXVII. On the operations described in the last chapter Napoleon says: " Turenne proved himself in this campaign, infinitely superior to Montecuculi : ist by compelling him to follow his lead : sndly by preventing him from entering Strasburg : 3rdly by cutting off the bridge of Strasburg : 4thly by cutting off the enemy's army on the Rench." On the morning of the 25th of July there was a skirmish near Gamshurst, between a body of Turenne's troops and 2,000 of Lorraine's infantry, supported by some cavalry, and it ended in the retreat of Lorraine. The same day Montecuculi, seeing that, by their continuous positions between Freistett and Gamshurst, the French threatened to enclose him, decamped from Schertzen at night, and marched by Lichtenau to Biihl, a place about five miles to the north of Achern and about six from Baden. Turenne heard of this move- ment the same night, sent some of his staff to observe it, and, shortly after four o'clock in the morning of the 26th, marched his army from its camp at Gamshurst to Achern, a small town about two and a half miles from Gamshurst, on the edge of the Black Forest, and 384 i675 ^T. 63] SASBACH 385 situated amidst some of the most beautiful scenery of the Schwartzwald. Montecuculi might have retired across the Black Forest by the pass over the mountains from Biihl ; but he was anxious to join and take with him Caprara and Lorraine ; and, for this reason, he skirted the edge of the Black Forest, by the road from Biihl to Sasbach, a small town three miles south of Biihl, and with success, at any rate to the extent of effecting a junction with Caprara, who, on receiving his orders from Monte- cuculi, had marched north with his infantry along the edge of the Black Forest, over the spurs of the mountains, under the cover of woods and hedges. Having arrived at Sasbach, Montecuculi flattered himself that he had now rounded Turenne's right ; and it must have been a very unpleasant surprise to him to find that Turenne had already arrived at Achern, only about a mile to the south-west of Sasbach. For the moment, however, Montecuculi was pretty safely protected at Sasbach itself, as he had sent some infantry to occupy a church surrounded by a ditch, which effectually blockaded the very narrow valley leading to the town. On the morning of the 27th, after hearing Mass, at which he received communion, Turenne went to look again at the position which the Imperialists had occupied in the defile leading to Sasbach, and he came to the conclusion that the defence round the church was im- pregnable. Then he went on to some high ground to reconnoitre the enemy's right, and found it effectively 25 386 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 covered by brooks, hollows, woods and entrenchments. Afterwards he rode to his own right, to view the enemy's left, where, to his surprise, he observed that Montecuculi had taken no precautions. Moreover, he noticed a defile a little beyond the enemy's extreme left, by which he could obtain an entrance for some of his own troops into the head of the valley occupied by Montecuculi, a manoeuvre by which he hoped and ex- pected to cut off that general's retreat nto the Black Forest, and to enclose his army. BATTLE OF Having given all his orders, at twelve o'clock SASBACH, *= ^ 1 r 1 , i_ T^- 1 27th July, 1 urenne wrote a very cheerful letter to the Kmg, de- scribing the position and his plan of attack, and promis- ing to send off a courier, as soon as the battle should be over, to report the result ; adding that he had ordered the Catholic service, known as The Forty Hours, to be conducted in the church at Breisach to the God of battles. He then mounted his horse and rode to a hill commanding a view of the scene of action. Before an engagement Turenne had usually been very reserved as to his hopes of success ; never had he declared himself sure of it. But, that afternoon, he said to some ot his generals : " It is done! I have them ! They cannot escape me. I shall now reap the fruit of this fatiguing campaign." While his own men were marching towards the defile leading into the valley in which Montecuculi was encamped, Turenne dismounted, sat down under a tree, took his midday meal, and rested until he was MARSHAL TURENNE. 1675 ^T. 63] SASBACH 387 told that the enemy's infantry were moving to their own left, a sign that Montecuculi had discovered the French troops to be entering the upper part of the valley. Then Turenne again mounted his horse to watch the action, which soon began in earnest. Certain as he was that he had his enemy in a trap, he was at least as certain that Montecuculi would make a des- perate effort to escape from it. Possibly, during the engagement, his own tactical skill might yet be put to some unexpected test, and it was necessary that he should observe the progress of the battle very closely. For this purpose he rode towards a piece of rising cfround from which he would be able to get a grood view of it. Anxious to keep his young nephew, the Duke of Elboeuf, out of the way of danger, he said to the boy : " Stay where you are : you are known to be always riding with me ; so, if you accompany me, I shall be recognised ". He also forbade the rest of his staff to follow him. Fighting soon began in earnest. A very heavy musketry fire rattled on the right, at the upper end of the valley, where the Imperialists had suddenly found themselves enclosed ; and guns were booming close at hand ; for Turenne's batteries, not far from where he was standing, had now opened fire, and those of the enemy were replying to them vigorously. " Pray come back, Sir," exclaimed Count Hamil- ton, "they are firing in the direction in which you are riding!" "Then I will gladly come back," replied 25 * 388 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 Turenne, as he turned his horse, " for I particularly wish not to be killed just now." Du Buisson (p. 464) says that Turenne, who always had to trust to longer-sighted eyes than his own for distant objects, asked St. Hilaire and another officer to tell him the exact positions of the enemy. Then he ordered some guns to be placed on an eminence a little way from where he was standing. St. Hilaire, who was entrusted with this order, returned to Turenne when it had been accomplished ; and, as he came, a red cloak which he was wearing attracted the attention of Montecuculi's ofunners and drew their fire. Pointing with his hand to his own guns, St. Hilaire was asking Turenne whether he approved of their position, when the hurtling sound of a passing round shot drowned his words, and immediately Turenne was seen to be leaning forward upon the pommel of his saddle. His charger, unguided, carried him back to the place where he had left his nephew. When the horse stopped, Turenne fell out of the saddle into the arms of his attendants. Twice he opened his eyes, and then he closed them for ever. Great efforts were made to conceal the death of the Marshal. But a boy of fifteen (the Duke of Elboeuf) was lying weeping beside a cloak covering something on the oTfOund, and the faces of the staff were ominous of a catastrophe. The sad fact soon became known. " Our father is dead ! " cried the soldiers, as the news spread from rank to rank. Presently another cry arose : i675 ^T. 63] SASBACH 389 " Lead us to battle, we will avenge our Father, our General, our Protector, our Defender ". Alas ! There was no one to lead them. The generals hesitated, disputed, even quarrelled. Then some soldiers, in despair, said: "Let Pye loose" — Pye was Turenne's favourite horse. " He will lead us ! " To Montecuculi, who had a narrow escape the same day, as his horse was killed under him by a cannon-shot, the death o( Turenne meant rescue from dire defeat, and even a hope of possible victory. Yet, when the news reached him, he exclaimed: "A man has been lost who was an honour to humanity ! " One more incident before we leave Turenne's last battlefield. When the cannon-ball struck his side it had already carried away St. Hilaire's arm, with which he had been pointing, hat in hand, to the battery. His young son, who was with him, thinking that his father was mortally wounded, began to cry. " Hold your peace, my child," said St. Hilaire in his agony, as he pointed with his remaining arm to the body of Turenne. "See! There is something for which the whole world should weep — and weep for ever." The great opportunity so long waited for, and obtained by Turenne, when death carried him ofl", was lost through the distraction caused by that death, and by the hesitation and divided counsels of his generals. The next day a great battle took place ; but although the Imperialists lost 5,000 men, and the French only 3,000, the army with which Turenne had been on the 390 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 very point of capturing the enemy, when he died, was driven back by that enemy across the Rhine into Alsace in little more than twenty-four hours. Two days after the death of Turenne, the sad news was brought to Louis XIV. by the courier who had been expected to bring the news of his triumph. "His Majesty," wrote Madame de Sevigne,i "was going to take his diversion at Fontainbleau : the design was immediately laid aside. Never was man so sin- cerely regretted : all Paris was in trouble and emotion, and all the people flocked together, every one lamenting the Hero." " It can hardly be credited," says the Abb6 Arnauld in his Mdmoires, "what consternation the death of Turenne created in Paris. And this consternation speedily developed into such a panic, that the enemy might have been at the very gates of the city." The letters of Madame de S^vigne for many days are full of the profound sorrow caused by the death of Turenne. In one of them she says : " M. de Barillon supped here, last night. He spoke of nothing but M. de Turenne. He is terribly unhappy. He talked to us of the solidity of his virtues, of his strict adherence to truth, of how much he loved virtue for its own sake, of how greatly he thought himself rewarded by it alone : and then he concluded by saying that a man could not love him, nor even be touched by his merit, without 1 The Marquise de Sevigne, whose letters to her daughter (of which this is one) rank among the finest monuments of the French language. 1675 ^T. 63] ST. DENIS 391 being the better for it. M. de Turenne's conversation communicated a horror of base actions and of double dealing." Louis XIV. insisted upon Turenne's body being laid in the Abbey of St. Denis, in which were the tombs of the French Kings, and St. Evremond said that the reason why he did so was because he felt himself as much indebted to Turenne, who had saved his kingdom as he did to those who had left it to him. That sarcastic writer added : " If singularities are a kind of failings, M. de Turenne had two, of which few people can be accused : a too great disinterestedness, in an age when a spirit of self-interest was universal, and a too pure probity, at a period of universal corruption. . . . Those who were with him in his last campaigns say that he showed more spirit and vigour in them, than in the preceding ones ; that he was more bold in enterprise and in exposing his person latterly, than even formerly. A cannon-ball put an end to so glorious a life : a death to be desired (since death is unavoidable) by so great a man. His loss was lamented by all Frenchmen, re- gretted by all people unbiassed by interest : his person was praised by his enemies, his virtue was admired by all the world." The President, at the opening of the French Parliament in 1675, said of Turenne: "Insensible to gain and recompense, he delighted in nothing but making others happy. Far from heaping up treasures in the command of armies, he often borrowed consider- able sums to distribute among^ the soldiers : forgretting^ o 00 392 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 his own private interests : he never exercised those rights of enriching himself, which the customs of war have legalised for Generals." The King made Conde leave his army in Flanders to take the command vacated by the death of Turenne. " How much I wish," said Conde to one of his officers, "that I could have conversed only two hours with the ghost of Monsieur de Turenne, so as to be able to follow the scope of his ideas." ^ As all human lives end in death, the endings of all stories of human lives are necessarily somewhat gloomy ; and the gloom is intensified when the authors wind up with funeral sermons. It is almost inevitable to do so in the present instance ; but although the sermons themselves are long, the extracts to be given from them shall be short. In a funeral oration the Abbot Flechier, Bishop of Nlmes, said: "To begin battles by prayer, to re- strain impiety and blasphemy, to protect holy persons and holy things from the insolence and avarice of the soldiers, to invoke the Lord of Hosts in all dangers, is the duty and the ordinary care of all Generals. But [Turenne] went further ; even when he commanded the troops, he looked upon himself as a soldier of Jesus 'Letter of Madame de Sevigne, 26th August, 1675. In a letter to Louvois, written from Alsace, Conde says : " My health is so uncertain that I much dread its failing me, particularly if the cold sets in before the end of the autumn ". He did little but act on the defensive, though so successfully that the enemy, after two months, retired to the cast of the Rhine. This was Conde's last campaign. i67S] BOSSUET 393 Christ : he sanctified the wars by the purity of his intentions, the desire of a happy peace, and the laws of a Christian discipline. He considered the soldiers as his brethren and thougrht himself oblicfed to exercise charity in a cruel profession, where even common humanity is often forgotten. Being animated by such great motives, he surpassed himself and made it appear that courage becomes firmer when it is supported by religious principles, and that a warrior is invincible when he fights in Faith and offers pure hands to the God of battles who guides them." The next and last quotation, very freely rendered, is from a funeral oration, not on Turenne, but on Conde ; ^ but, as these two great generals have so often figured together in the preceding pages, a contrast drawn between them, by the celebrated historian and orator, Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, may possibly prove of interest. " It has been the wonder of our age to behold, at & ^When Conde had retired from the army soon after Turenne's death and went to live at Chantilly, Voltaire says {Sikle de Louis XIV., chapter ii.), " he very rarely came to Versailles. ... He passed the remainder of his days, tormented with the gout, reliev- ing the severity of his pains, and employing the leisure of his re- treat, in the conversation of men of genius of all kinds, with which France then abounded. He was worthy of their conversation ; as he was not unacquainted with any of those arts and sciences in which they shone. . . . Having consumed the strength of his body, which was naturally rather agile than robust, he declined before his time ; and the strength of his mind decaying with that of his body, there remained nothing of the great Conde during the last two years of his life." He died at the age of sixty-six. 394 MARSHAL TURENNE [1675 the same time and in the same campaigns, two men whom the common voice of all Europe considers equal to the greatest Generals of antiquity, sometimes at the head of separate bodies, sometimes united more by a concurrence of sentiments than by the orders which the inferior received from the superior : sometimes op- posed front to front and mutually redoubling the activity and vigilance of each other, as if it had been the will of God to let us see them in all points of view and to show us at the same time all that great warriors can do. What fine encampments ! What splendid marches ! What bold attempts ! What wise pre- cautions ! What terrible dangers ! What astute strata- gems ! Were there ever seen in two men the same virtues with so different, not to say contrary characters ? " And now let us take the liberty of substituting their own names for "the one" and "the other" of pulpit phraseology. "Turenne seemed to act from profound reflection and Conde from sudden illuminations : the latter being consequently the most active yet without being pre- cipitate : the former being the most deliberate yet without being dilatory. On first entering the army, Turenne had certainly shown courage and promise, but he had advanced gradually and by degrees to his perfect mastership of the art of war : Cond6, on the contrary, had seemed, from his first battle, to be in- spired with the perfection of military skill. By brisk and unceasing efforts, Turenne compelled the admira- tion of mankind and silenced envy : whereas envy, i675] BOSSUET 395 dazzled by the brilliance of Cond6, had never dared to attack him. Turenne by the profundity of his genius and by the inexhaustibility of his courage, rose above the greatest dangers, and could even make profit out of the faithlessness of fortune : Conde, by the superi- ority of his birth, the brilliance of his warlike inspira- tions, and his wonderful military instinct, seemed destined by nature to enslave fortune and to dictate to fate." "And, as if we were intended always to see differ- ences in the circumstances as well as in the characters of these two great men, Conde was raised like David, to the highest pinnacle of glory and, like David, he died in his bed, praising God, exhorting his family and impressing all by the lustre of his life and by the peacefulness of his death. Turenne, on the other hand, died a violent death on the battlefield, shed his blood for his fatherland, was mourned by his King and by his country, and left a name for faith in God and for courage in war, which will never fade from the memory of mankind." INDEX Abre, Marquis d', 326-7, 334. Achenheim, 348, 355. Adolphus, Gustavus, 3, 42, 107. Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of, 281. Albert, Marshal d', 300. Alessandria, 34. Altenheim, 379. Amsterdam, 305, 308. Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII., 33. 34> 54 ^"7-. ^49 sfg., 158, i86,- 204 seq., 268; death, 279. Antoine, battle of the Faubourg St., 185 seq. Ardres, 256. Armentieres, 280. Arras, 223 seq., 269. Aschaffenberg, 322. Asti, 34. Aubigni, M. d', 285. Augsburg, 106 seq. Bacharach, 78, loo-i. Balzac, Honore de, 3. — Louis Guez de, 3. Bar-le-Duc, 206 seq. Bastille, the, 185 seq. Bavaria, Duke of, 59, 103, 105, 112, 121, 123. Beaufort, Duke of, 55, 148, 151, 158 seq. ; his duel, 193 seq., 294. Beaulieu, M., 284. Beauvau, Marquis of, 106 seq. Belfort, 360-1. Bellefonds, Marshal de, 299. Bergamesco, F. Z., 30. Berthet, 155. Binche, 280. B16neau, 160. Bois-le-Duc, 9. Bonn, 325-6. Bossuet, 287. Bouillon, Duchess of, 5-1 1. — Frederick Maurice, Duke of, 9. 25, 58, 130 seq., 149 seq., 153 seq., 187, 196-7. — Henry de la Tour, Duke of, 4- 7- — Duchess of (wife of Frederick), 138. Bournonville, Duke of, 309 seq., 331 seq., 342 seq., 348 seq. Brandenburg, Grand Elector of, 301 seq., 345, 356, 359, 370. Breisach, 23, 62 seq., 312, 375. Brevin, M., 283-4. Briare, 160. Bristol, Lord, 276. Brunswick, Duke of, 317, 378. lirussels, 267. Buhl, 385. Cambrai, 243, 253, 257. Cambresis, 238. Caprara, Count, 331 seq., 353, 381 seq. Caracena, Marshal, 245 seq. Cardinal Infant of Spain, 23 seq. Castelnau, M. de, 228, 241-2. Cauraont, Armandde N. de, Duke de la Force, 13, 210. — Charlotte de. See Turenne, Mme. de. Chapelle, La, 250. Charenton, 182 seq. Charles IL of England, 177 seq., 273- 329. — of Spain, 279. Chevreuse, Duchess of, 138, 152. 397 398 INDEX Chevreuse, Mile, de, 138, 152. — Duke of, 150. Churchill, John, afterwards Duke of Marlborough, 318-g, 351. Cinq-Mars, Duke of, 32. Cond6, Prince Henri de, 54. — Louis de Bourbon (The Great), birth, 3 ; cruelty as a boy, 8 ; early campaigns, 9-13 ; char- acter, 14 seq. ; appearance, 65 ; battle of Rocroi, 67 ; battle of Freiburg, 6g seq.; battle of Nordlingen, 87 seq. ; quarrel with Mazarin, 133 ; arrest, 134; release 149; 152; heads the Spanish Fronde, 153 seq. ; Bleneau, 160 seq.; battle of St. Antoine, 181 seq.; Villeneuve St. Georges, 197 seq., 207 seq.; campaign of 1653, 211 seq. ; relief of Arras, 228 seq. ; relief of Valenciennes, 241 seq. ; quarrel with Turenne, 242 ; campaign of 1657, 253 seq. ; battle of the Dunes, 237 seq. ; reconciled to the Court, 293 ; 304 ; wounded, 305 ; in Alsace, 309; 312; 327; 330; battle of Seneff, 341 ; 392-5. — Princess of, 57. Conti, Prmce of, 134, 220, 289. Cr6qui, Marshal de, 299. Cromwell, Oliver, 244, 252, 257, 268. DiNKELSBULH, 86. Donauwbrth, 87. Douay, 224-5, 238, z8o. Dunes, battle of, 260 seq. Dunkirk, 2ii seq., 274. Dupas, Governor, 321. Duplessis, M. de, 286. Dijtlingen, 59. Elbceuf, Duke of, 387, 389. Emperor Ferdinand, 11, ig, 61. — Leopold, 309, 328. Empire, the, 60. Enghien, Duke of. See Conde. — Duke, son of the above, 304. Ensheim, battle of, 348 seq. foampes, 167 seq. Fargeau, St., 165. Fenwick, Colonel, 262. Ferdinand. See Emperor. Ferte, Marquis de la, 140, 175, 183, 190, 195, 202, 208, 217 seq., 227 seq. Force, Marshal de la. See Cau- mont. Fort Kell, 376. Foucault, General, 353-4, 363. Francis de Sales, St., 3. Frankfurt, loi. Freiburg, 69 seq. Freistett, 378-9. Friedburg, loi seq. Fronde, the, 127 seq. Fuensaldagne, Count, 206, 208 seq. Fumes, 267. Galas, General, 20 seq. Gamhurst, 384. Glein, General, 91 seq., 95. Gloucester, Duke of, 261. Grammont, Count Philibert 35, 231-2. — Duke of, 90, 300. Grandpr6, 250. Gravelines, 211, 256, 367, 269. Grignan, M. de, 289. Guislain, St., 242. Hagenau, 345, 357, 361. Ham, 243. Hamilton, Count, 381, 387. Hamm, 315. Harcourt, Count, 27 seq., 36. Heidelberg, 77. Henrietta, Queen of England, 179. Hesse-Cassel, the Landgravine of, 80. Hilaire, St., 388-9. Hinton, Major, 262. Hockenheim, 331. Hocquincourt, Marquis of, 141, 144, 157 seq., 223 seq., 243 seq. ; death, 259. Hohenloe, Count, 344. Holtzheim, 348, 349, 356. Humieres, Marshal d', 299. Ingolstadt, 124. INDEX 399 Jargeau, 158 seq. John of Austria, Don, 245 sfi/., 253 seq. KlMBERLEY, 227. Kinzig, 375 seq. Konigsmark, 85 seq., 123. Ladysmith, 227. Landau, 76, 374. Landsberg, log seq. LandreQies, 22, 269. Lauingen, no seq. Leganez, General, 39 seq. Lens, 269. Leopold, Archduke, 96 seq., 103 seq., 137, 213 seq., 226 seq. Lignes, Prince of, 281. Ligny, Prince, 255. Lille, 280-1. Lockhart, 258. Longueville, Duchess of, 137 seq., 150, 220, 289. — Duke of, 134, 150. — Duke of, son of the above, 304-5- Lorges, Count, 362. LouisXIIL, I, II, 13-24, 25 ; death, 32- — XIV., birth, 26; Conde's plot to capture him, 158; battle of St. Antoine, 186; enters Paris, 205 seq.; marriage, 271 ; takes the reins of Government into his own hands on the death of Maza- rin, 274-6 ; claims the Low Countries in right of his Queen, 279. His great pre- parations for war, 382 ; hatred of the Dutch, 294 seij. ; enters Brabant, 319 ; follows bad ad- vice of Louvois, 321 ; conver- sations with Turenne, 326 ; unpopularity with other na- tions, 339 ; 342; death of Tu- renne, 390-3. Lourdes, 270. Louvois, Marquis of, 280, 301, 313, 320 seq., 327, 333, 343, 358. Maestricht, 301, 303, 320. Maigrin, Marquis of St., 188. Mannheim, 77-8. Mardyck, 211, 256. Maria Theresa^ Queen of Louis XIV., 269, 271, 279. Marie de' Medici, Queenof France, II seq. Marienthal, battle of, 79 seq., 332. Marlborough, Duke of. See Churchill. Marsin, Count of, 381. Martinet, General, 303. Mayence, 76-8, 99, 312, 324. — Elector of, 312. Mazarin, Cardinal Giulio, 54 ; character, ^yseq.; his offers to Turenne, 98; 105; 115; anxious for peace, 126 ; block- ades Paris, 139 ; letter to Turenne, 131; 141-6 ; 157; worries Turenne at battle of St. Antoine, 187 ; retires to Bouillon, 197 ; prolongs a campaign cruelly to the army, 208-9; Peace of the Pyrenees and marriage of Louis XIV. with Infanta of Spain, 268 seq. ; death, 274-5. — Cardinal Michel, 113 n. Meiningen, 107 seq. Melander, General, 122. Mercy, Gaspard von, 62. — General von, 63-92. Mergentheim. See Marienthal. Michel, St., 308. Middleton, Lord, 367. Monck, General, 285. Montbazon, Duchess of, 138, 154- Montecalvo, 31. Montecuculi, General, 123 seq., 314, 320-8, 370-89. Montmedy, 254. Montpensier Mile, de, 168 seq., 176, 191-3, 195. Motte, La, 13. Motteville, Mme. de, 149. Moussaye, Count, 140, 154. Mouzon, 219, 231, 232. Muiden, 307. Munich, 105, in, 123, 124. Miinster, Bishop of, 301, 313, 315, 329, 370- 400 INDEX Naarden, 305-5, 331. Nantouillet, Marquis of, 188. Nassau, Henry, Prince of, g. — Maurice, Prince of, 9, 372. Nemours, Duke of, 135, 155, 158 seq.; duel and death, 193 seq. Neustadt, 336, 374. Nimes, Bishop of, ago. Nimwegen, 305-6. NordUngen, battle of, 87 seq. Nuremberg, 79, 322. Oberhausbergen, 373. Offenburg, 376 seq. Orange, Henry, Prince of, 9, 35. — William, Prince of, 299 seq., 321, 324-5, 341, 370. Oratory, the, 369-70. Orleans, 168 seq. — Gaston, Duke of, 26, 54, 157, 168, 180 seq. ; scene with De Retz, 203-5 ; death, 273. — Henrietta, Duchess of, 273, 295-8. — Philip, Duke of, 373. Ormonde, 267. Oschenfurth, 323. Ottenheim, 375 seq. Oudenarde, 267, 280. Palatine, Elector, 312, 339. — Princess, 138, 143, 155. Peronne, 217, 243. Philip IV. of Spain, 19, 271 ; death of, 277. Philippsburg, 75-6, 118 seq., 331, 340, 374-. Plessis Praslin, General, 142 seq., 205 n, 300. Port Arthur, 227. Portugal, King of, 276-7. Prague, 124. QuENTiN, St., 217. Quesnoy, 238, 241, 249. Rain, io6 seq. Rakoczy, Prince, 328. Ratisbon, 124. Rethel, 142 seq., 211, 212. Retz, Cardinal de, 37, 128 seq., 152, 155- 203, 205 seq., 289, 371- Reynac, General, 24. Richelieu, Cardinal, 2, 10-12, 19 seq., 24 ; death, 31-2, 55, 58, 61. Rochefoucauld, Duke of, 135, 139, 140, 147. Rocroi, 67, 211, 219, 221. Rosen, General, 81 seq., 115 seq. Rottenburg, 80. Royer, General, 107. Sasbach, battle of, 385 seq. Saverne, 21, 331, 345, 357, 361. Savoy, Christine, Duchess of, 27. Saxe-Weimar, Bernard, Duke of, 19-23- 36, 59- Saxony, Duke of, 321. Schertzheim, 378. Schomberg, Count, 175, 273, 330. Sedan, 4, 5, 219, 284. Sevigne, Mme., 289. Sintzheim, battle of, 332 seq. Sobre-sur-Sambres, 23. Soest, 315. Solis, Fernando de, 238 seq. Spires, 76, 79. Stenay, 137, 219, 223 seq. Strasburg, 125, 312, 343 seq., 347, 348, 356, 372 seq- Sweden, Queen of, 93, 125-6. Tavannes, General, 164, 171 seq., 202. Tellier, 365. Temple, Sir W., 381. Thomas, Prince, zqseq., 33. Tott, General da, 207. Traci, De, 116. Treves, 98, loi, 311. Trino, 33 seq. Turckheim, battle of, 363 seq. Turenne, birth and boyhood, 3-9 ; joins the army in Holland, 9 ; goes to Paris, 11 ; campaigns under La Valette, 20 seq. ; campaigns in Italy, 28-35 ; only known occasion of show- ing fear, 37 ; battle of Frei- burg, 63 seq. ; battle of Ma- rienthal, 79 seq. ; battle of Nordlingen, 87 seq. ; cam- paign against Bavaria and the Empire, 1646, 103 seq.; INDEX 401 a mutiny, 115 s«/.; campaign of 1648 in Bavaria, 122 seq. ; Turenne and the Fronde, 131 seq. ; joins the Fronde, 136 seq.; his gallantries, 138-9; Mme. de Longueville, 139; battle of Rethel, 143 seq. ; return to loyalty and serving under the King, 154 ; Jargeau, 159; Bleneau, 160 seq.; his tomb at St. Denis, 133 foot- note ; operations before Et- ampes, 167 seq. ; Villeneuve St. Georges, 177 ; battle of St. Antoine, 181 seq.; opera- tions at Villeneuve St. Georges, second time, igS seq.; marriage, 210; cam- paign of 1653, 211 seq. ; relief of Arras, 223 seq. ; relief of Valenciennes, 241 seq. ; quar- rel with Conde, 242 ; cam- paign of 1657, 253 ; battle of the Dunes, 257 seq. ; offered the Constableship, 271 ; Mile, de Montpensier, 276-7 ; death of his wife, 278 seq. ; cam- paign of 1667, 280 seq. ; be- comes a Catholic, 283 seq. ; stories of his quiet life in Paris, 291 ; in love without knowing it, 296 ; campaign against Holland, 1672, 301 seq.; campaign of 1673, 315 seq. ; campaign of 1674, 329 seq. ; blamed for allowing his troops to ravagethePalatinate, 337 ; battle of Ensheim, 349 ; a masterly retreat, 356 ; criticised in Paris, 358-9 ; brilliant manceuvre to reach Southern Alsace, 360 seq. ; battle of Turckheim, 362 ; return to Paris, 369 ; cam- paign of 1675, 371 seq. ; battle of Sasbach, 386 ; death, 388. Turenne, Mme. de, 210, 278-9. Turin, siege of, 29. Ulm, 109. Unna, siege of, 315. Valenciennes, relief of, 241 seq. Valette, Cardinal de la, 36 seq. Vallon, General, 202. Vauban, S. le Prestre de, 52, 283, 320. Venant, St., 254-5. Vendome, Duke of, 55. Villeneuve St. Georges, 177 seq., 197 seq. Villeroy, Marshal de, 300. Voltaire, 288. Wanzenau, 347. Wert, John de, 83, 92. Wertheim, 324. Wetzlar, 320-1. Wiesloch, 331. Willstadt, 375 seq. Witt, Cornelius de, 298-9, 308. — John de, 298-9, 308. Wolfenbiittel, 317. Worms, 76, 94-5. Wrangel, General, 102 seq., 370. Wiirzburg, 323 seq. — Bishop of, 322 seq. York, Duke of, 174 seq., 235, 260 seq. Ypres, 267, 283. Yvree, 31. Zabern. See Saverne. Zell, Duke of Luneburg-, 317. Zusmerhausen, 122. THE ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS LIMITED. 26 ^ 4^fc-l-^SK^^T^P^\?§ in/line /(C . ''/j, i ,;E AL £i-^^^*CM¥^*^.