that they be not too forward in delivering up places committed to their charge; nor yet too foolhardy in standing out till an attack is begun, for then it will be too late. I mean, the attacking a breach, or such works as may be easily carried, especially when there is not a considerable force to oppose.
In 1695 the Allied governors of Dixmude and Diest were court-martialled for premature surrender. Nobody expected ‘that they should stand a general assault, for the design … was only to keep the enemy employed as long as they could’. The Danish Major General Elnberger, governor of Dixmude, admitted that ‘a panic seized him, which he could not get over, nor account for’, and he was beheaded ‘by the common executioner of the Danish forces’ in November, after William of Orange had confirmed his sentence. He had served blamelessly for forty years until this single error of judgement cost him his life. The commanding officers who signed the capitulation with him lost their commissions, as did Brigadier O’Farrell, ‘a man of long service, who had always behaved well’ but had surrendered tiny Diest without even a show of resistance.70
Besiegers had their own hierarchy, with a general of the trenches doing duty for a day at a time, assisted by a trench major to oversee daily routine. The French, with their British allies, opened their trenches before the Tongres gate of Maastricht on the night of 17–18 June 1673, and a week later they were ready to assault a hornwork and ravelin in front of the gate. The Duke of Monmouth was trench general that day, and his contingent took part in the assault: Captain Churchill, it was said, planted a colour on the ramparts of the outwork. The night was spent consolidating the captured position, and Monmouth’s men had scarcely retired to their tents after dawn the next day when the thud of a mine and an outbreak of firing announced that the governor, Jacques de Fariaux, a French gentleman in Dutch service, had mounted a sortie and recaptured the ravelin. Monmouth at once sent word to a nearby company of the French king’s Mousquetaires Gris, commanded by Charles de Batz de Castelmore, comte d’Artagnan, and set off hot-foot for the ravelin.
Colonel Lord Alington was an eyewitness to what happened next, as he told Lord Arlington.
After the duke had put on his arms [i.e. body armour], we went not out at the ordinary place, but leapt over the bank of the trenches, in the face of our enemy. Those that happened to be with the duke were Mr Charles O’Brien, Mr Villiers, Lord Rockingham’s two sons, and Capt Watson their kinsman, Sir Tho Armstrong, Capt Churchill, Capt Godfrey, Mr Roe and myself, with the duke’s two pages and three or four more of his servants, thus we marched with our swords in our hands to a barricade of the enemy’s, where only one man could pass at a time. There was Monsieur d’Artagnan with his musketeers who did very bravely. This gentleman was one of the greatest reputation in the army, and he would have persuaded the duke not to have passed that place, but that being not to be done, this gentleman would go along with him, but in passing that narrow place was killed with a shot in his head, upon which the duke and we passed there where Mr O’Brien had a shot through his legs. The soldiers at this took heart the duke twice leading them on with great courage; when his grace found the enemy begin to retire, he was prevailed with to retire to the trench, the better to give his commands as there should be occasion. Then he sent Mr Villiers to the king for 500 fresh men and to give him an account of what had passed. When those men came, the enemy left us without any further disturbance … Some old commanders say, this was the bravest and briskest action that they had seen in their lives, and our duke did the part of a much older and more experienced general, and the king was very kind to him last night.71
Fariaux was a wily campaigner, and had stood siege five or six times before. Louis, in overall command, noted that he ‘was used to dealing with narrow approach trenches which were untenable against the smallest sortie’ – which had probably encouraged his sortie against the Tongres gate outworks – but saw that he could not cope with Vauban’s new technique of moving forward in sweeping parallels ‘almost as if we were drawn up for a field battle’. Having secured the outworks in front of the Tongres gate the French allowed Fariaux to capitulate, and on 1 July his 3,000 survivors marched out with the honours of war – drums beating, colours flying, musketeers with their slow-matches alight and bullets in their mouths, and all ranks with their ‘bag and baggage’ – with safe conduct to the nearest Dutch garrison.72
On their return to Whitehall at the close of the campaigning season that autumn Monmouth presented John Churchill to the king as ‘the brave man who saved my life’, which seems to have been instrumental in restoring him to royal favour. As succeeding events were to show, Monmouth was not the brightest of Charles’s bastards. Although Monmouth was the monarch’s eldest son, by the ‘actress’ Lucy Walter (who even Charles could not bring himself to ennoble), when Gilbert Burnet asked the king if it might not be wise to legitimise him and make him his successor instead of his Roman Catholic brother James, Charles ‘answered him quick that, well as he loved him, he had rather see him hanged’.73 However, Monmouth’s approval strengthened Churchill’s hand. Barbara Castlemaine had borne him a daughter the previous summer and, we may conclude, was now helping him financially; the Duke of York, already favourably disposed to his former page and having an affair with his sister, had seen him fight bravely at Southwold Bay; and now Monmouth told his indulgent father that John Churchill had saved his life. This was interest in full spate, and it would have been astonishing had our hero not been swept onwards by it.
There was, though, a sudden faltering in the flood. Early in 1673 Charles had to summon his Parliament to ask it for money to fight the Dutch War. He found it in a predictably curmudgeonly frame of mind. The war and the French alliance were unpopular, and the Declaration of Indulgence, which Charles had issued by virtue of his royal prerogative, was seen (perfectly rightly, in view of what we now know of the Treaty of Dover) to be giving encouragement to Roman Catholics. Although Parliament was prepared to grant him funds for the war, it did so at the price of his withdrawal of the Declaration of Indulgence and, even worse from the royal standpoint, passed the Test Act. The Corporation Act of 1671 had already prescribed that all members of corporations, besides taking the Oath of Supremacy, were to take communion according to the rites of the Church of England. The Test Act compelled all office-holders, military or civil, to ‘declare that I do believe that there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’, and to take Anglican communion within three months. In 1678 the Act was extended, compelling all peers and MPs to make a declaration against transubstantiation and invocation of saints.
The Duke of York was an early casualty, and resigned all his offices. Prince Rupert headed the commission which took on his work as lord high admiral, and was already at sea with the fleet. He had failed to defeat the Dutch in two clashes in the Schoonevelt, and on 11 August his Allied fleet had the worst of a two-day battle against de Ruyter off Texel. Rupert had never much liked the French alliance, and lost little time in telling his countrymen what they already believed: that the French were useless at sea. Admiral d’Estrées had let him down, and the spectacle of d’Estrées blaming failure on his own second in command (who, in the great tradition of punishing the poorly-connected guiltless, was promptly clapped into the Bastille) made matters worse. The alliance was dead on its feet, but it was not until early 1674 that peace was made, although its terms allowed British troops who were serving as French-paid auxiliaries to remain on the Continent.
While all this was in progress the cabal fragmented, and by the end of the year Charles’s new chief minister was his lord treasurer, Sir Thomas Osborne, known to posterity, by the title he soon acquired, as the Earl of Danby. Parliament, irritated by James’s marriage to Mary of Modena, a Roman Catholic princess, and by the news of his conversion to Catholicism, debated a Bill for securing the Protestant religion by preventing any royal prince from marrying a Catholic without