William III & Mary II
By the Grace of God
King and Queen of England, Scotland, France and Ireland,
Stadtholder of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands,
Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau, Defenders of the Faith, etc.
JE MAINTIENDRAI
Chapter V: The War Continues
All of these domestic problems, however, were overshadowed by the ongoing, desperate wars in Europe. The Hapsburg Empires were besieged on every side. In the east, of course, the war with the Ottoman Empire continued; indeed, only one mere decade had passed since their rivals of old had last attacked Vienna itself, striking at the very heart of their lands. France encroached both on traditionally Hapsburg dominions in Germany and Italy, not to mention their attacks on actual Hapsburg territories in Catalonia and the Netherlands. Even their age-old dominance of the Western Hemisphere was challenged by concerted French attacks on Hispaniola and Cuba.
These were of minimal concern to King William, however, except as a question of strategy. For him, the Hapsburgs and their lands were of little consequence. France’s threat, to William, fell much closer to home. His native land was threatened by the French armies wintering that year in Flanders. French navies were rumored to be preparing a new army of Jacobites to restart the war in Ireland, Scotland, or even in England itself. The French invasions of Hispaniola and Cuba were a threat to Jamaica and the other English territories in the West Indies, while Canada hung, it seemed, like a sword of Damocles over England’s eleven small colonies on the continent. It is difficult to imagine, today, the force which France and its sole ally were able to assert in this period, despite all of Europe arrayed against it.
As 1693 dawned, the first news was of the complete collapse of Spanish defenses in northern Hispaniola, with Santo Domingo now standing alone against the French. Disputes between the Spanish, Dutch and English colonial governors in the West Indies continued unabatated, leading to an almost total lack of coordination on this vital front of the war. Though, in other news, the French invasion of Cuba had been repulsed, this fact was not at the forefront of the Allies’ minds; the question, in their mind, was, in America, whether Santo Domingo would fall, and, in Europe, what Louis planned for the coming period.
William, surprisingly, at the advice of Kinross, started out the campaign season by taking the initiative, commanding a combined English, British, Dutch, German and Spanish force in an asserted strike at the Spanish Netherlands, managing to take much of Flanders before Luxembourg was able to react. In a largely inconclusive engagement in the Battle of Brussels in April, Luxembourg attempted to dislodge the English king from the city, and failed, being forced to pull his army back into Wallonia due to his continuing supply problems. Worsening the situation for this army, the flow of Irish troops to France, something which had been a vital resource for Louis XIV early in the war, was effectively stopped by the excommunication of James II; indeed, a small, but significant, number of Irishmen in regiments in the Spanish Netherlands began to desert, reversing the flow of men back to Ireland.
Louis’ supply issues were worsened by the beginning of a famine, which Louis ignored in the hopes of trying to force the Allies to the negotiating table. Against advice, he kept Luxembourg’s army deployed in the Spanish Netherlands, with orders to attempt to retake Flanders. Three further large, pitched battles were fought in the region in the course of the year, but accomplished little; William had firmly secured the territory against French attack, though Luxembourg had also prevented William’s concerted attempt in August to take back the rest of the territory. On the German front, the French managed to seize several more fortified cities, but, on the whole, achieved very little apart from their capture.
It was in Italy, though, where Louis was passionate; the French king had taken his greatest interest in that land when he, quite rightly, saw the excommunication of James II as a general denouncement of Gallicanism and the whole of the traditional French Church under Rome. The excommunication was a complete and total rejection of Louis’ entire style of government, and, as Louis saw it, a gross power grab on the part of the Church’s corrupt bureaucracy, who had corrupted the Pope (who had, it should be remembered, been supported by Louis’ cardinals in the 1691 Conclave). Clearly, as Louis saw it, the see of Rome had been thoroughly corrupted, and the new Pope brought under French influence. As a result, the Italian front saw incredible French gains; after an unbelievably total French victory in the Battle of Marsaglia in October, Louis’ forces managed to seize control of the critical city of Turin. Additionally, earlier in the year, Louis’ navy achieved a massive victory with their victory in the Battle of Lagos in June, stopping an Anglo-Dutch convoy as it rounded the Cape of St. Vincent, just off the Portuguese coast.
At the close of 1693’s campaigning season, then, Louis clearly held the upper hand, despite his significant losses in the Netherlands. However, this was not the only question of importance, as, during the same season, several engagements in the east had clearly given the Holy League an advantage against the Turks, with Russian, Polish and Austrian forces making forceful advances into Ottoman territory with the seizure of Belgrade that year, with attendant Russian advances at Ottoman territories in the Ukraine. During the winter, Louis sent missives to Vienna and various German states seeking a settlement, only to be rebuffed at every turn. The excommunication had as good as been a Papal denouncement of France, which was all the excuse the Emperor, emboldened by his and William’s successes in the previous year, needed to continue the war with his French rival. Even embassies to Spain were totally rejected out of hand, the Spanish Hapsburgs setting aside their traditional rivalries with the House of Orange and England out of righteous anger over France’s collaboration with the infidels in Constantinople, and its continued intransigence against the (Austrian-supported) Pope.
1693 turned into 1694, and the war, as before, continued. The French, however, were now at a disadvantage. Despite their massive successes in Italy and at sea in 1693, these could not be maintained as what had previously hampered the French as “supply issues” turned into a full-blown famine throughout the kingdom. An early attack by Luxembourg, attempting the same as William had the year before, floundered at the Second Battle of Brussels, and the combined Allied army under his command not only defeated the French, but forced them further back. Further attacks by William forced Luxembourg onto the defensive, though the latter performed magnificently in several defensive actions with his outnumbered force. Despite these, however, Luxembourg was outmaneuvered over the rest of the season, and forced to ultimately cede the critical Walloon of Huy to the Allied forces in October.
Further maneuvers on the Rhine were just as useless as the year before, and the French army’s supply lines in Italy were effectively broken; though they held Turin firmly, they were unable to move forward, and Savoyard forces were able to move freely in the rest of the country, finally laying siege to the city with German support toward the end of the campaign season. In Catalonia, things proved far more eventful: a renewed French attack there moved surprisingly quickly, their supply lines secured due to better-than-average harvests in northern Spain, toward the city of Barcelona. After a disastrous attempt at taking Puerto Principe in the early part of the year, alongside renewed French attacks up and down the Spanish Main (which, against their obligations, Dutch and English officials throughout the region ignored due to longstanding rivalries with one another and the Spanish), the threat to Barcelona proved too much. Charles II’s government threatened to sue for peace, going so far as threatening to hand the whole Spanish Empire to the Bourbons on their monarch’s death.
These threats led to William’s immediate action to relieve the attack, by launching a twofold counterstrike against France: first, a coordinated Anglo-Dutch naval force would make for Brest, destroy the French fleet there and, if possible, seize the city, forcing the French to redeploy; second, another Anglo-Dutch fleet would make for Barcelona, to end French naval superiority in the area and, hopefully, force Louis to withdraw the troops from Catalonia, rather than Italy or Germany, back to Brest. Though the first part of the strategy was a disastrous failure in June, the second part was mildly successful; an Allied fleet, partly made up of surviving elements of the disaster at Brest, forced the French fleet to withdraw to Toulon. With their cover thus destroyed, the French in Catalonia were forced to withdraw to Torroella at the end of the season, lifting their siege on Barcelona and keeping Spain in the war.
The continued threat in Italy, however, had forced the Pope, fearing (without much reason, apart from his lack of understanding of military affairs) a French attack on Rome, began to openly speak of Gallicanism as an “misled doctrine,” and classified it along with nepotism as a practice to be abolished; when some in Rome were angered, Innocent, shortly after New Years Day in 1695, all French clergymen who would not explicitly accept the doctrine as “misled” were expelled from the from the Papal States, bringing the issue ever closer to a final confrontation with the Sun King.
