Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
The Nine Years War, which lasted from 1688 to 1697, is one of the least remembered conflicts in which the British army took part. The fighting was mostly concentrated in the area known then as the Spanish Netherlands – equating approximately to modern Belgium and Luxembourg – and the Rhineland. It was the first time that large-scale British – or English – armies had been deployed to the Continent in a sustained campaign since the Hundred Years War, two and a half centuries earlier. Clashes also took place at sea and in the Caribbean and North America, where the conflict was known as King William’s War.
Britain fought as part of a ‘Grand Alliance’ with the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, the Dutch Republic, Savoy (in north-west Italy), and several German states. The common enemy was the overweeningly ambitious Louis XIV of France, whose territorial designs threatened the balance of power in Western Europe.
The reasons why the war has never captured the popular imagination are not far to seek. It did not culminate in a clear-cut victory – there was no dramatic ‘Agincourt’ or ‘Waterloo’ moment. The Peace of Ryswick (Rijswijk), which brought an end to hostilities, was in effect a truce. Four years later, the European powers were to clash once again over the future of the Spanish dominions. In the War of the Spanish Succession, British forces were led by one of the country’s most outstanding generals of all time: John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. By contrast, William III, who determined British strategy throughout the Nine Years War, lacked the operational flair and glamour of the great Captain-General who triumphed at Blenheim in 1704.
A war of attrition
Yet the Nine Years War was of great significance for Britain’s future. After almost a century in which it had played a largely ineffective role in Great Power politics, the conflict reorientated British policy towards Europe. It was a personal success for William III, who had taken the crown in a coup d’état in November 1688 and then had to assert his control over Scotland and Ireland, while also waging war on the Continent. By the end of the war, he had won grudging French acknowledgement of his claim to the British throne.
The war was important in other ways. It led to a sizeable expansion of British forces, placing an extraordinary strain on the country’s material resources. In a struggle where neither side possessed an advantage in terms of weaponry, tactics, or training, it was numbers rather than quality that made the critical difference. At its peak, the British contingent in the Low Countries numbered more than 58,000 men. To put this in context, the estimated population of Britain at the turn of the century was 6.5 million.
Success would ultimately go to the side that could outlast its opponent.
The conflict absorbed a staggering 80% of national revenues. To finance Britain’s campaigns, in 1694 the government set up the Bank of England, whose shareholders lent money to the government at interest – the origin of the National Debt.
Logistics imposed a major restriction on all participants’ chances of success. This was a slow-moving war of manoeuvre, dominated by prolonged sieges rather than pitched battles. Much time was spent in marching and counter-marching to secure necessary resources – often by imposing taxes on reluctant civilian populations. The availability of fodder for horses effectively limited the campaigning season to the months from April to October.
A series of formidable fortifications safeguarded key communication routes – especially the waterways of the Spanish Netherlands – and acted as immense storehouses for food and munitions. They also provided winter quarters where armies defeated in battle could recover, making it difficult for the victors to achieve a decisive result. Success in this war, however defined, would ultimately go to the side that could outlast its opponent by avoiding economic collapse.
Stalemate
Although the Grand Alliance originated in a treaty signed in Vienna, William III was the supreme commander throughout the Nine Years War. His long experience of European conflict and diplomacy meant that even the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, the most senior coalition figure, recognised him as best qualified for the role. As a 22-year-old in 1672, William had successfully resisted an earlier French invasion of his native Dutch Republic. Following the Glorious Revolution – discussed in the companion piece to this article on p.26 – he and his wife Mary had become joint sovereigns of Britain. This had enhanced his status among European sovereigns and given the alliance access to Britain’s military, naval, and financial resources.
For William, participation in the war entailed vital geopolitical interests. First, the security of his Dutch homeland was at stake. The Spanish Netherlands – a compact area, barely 100 miles at its widest from north to south – was a critical buffer zone between Dutch and French territory. William was also conscious of Louis XIV’s support for the restoration of the exiled James II to the British throne. Tying up its forces in the Low Countries was the most effective way of diverting France from sponsoring a Jacobite invasion of Britain. Although normally a coolly rational individual, William felt a strong personal animosity towards Louis. This was heightened by the latter’s persecution of William’s Protestant co-religionists, the French Huguenot population.
The land campaign did not, however, proceed smoothly for the allied coalition. The winter of 1688-1689 saw the French engage in a brutal war of terror across the Rhineland, burning urban centres including Heidelberg and Speyer in a bid to assert their dominance over the region. An allied victory at Walcourt, near Charleroi, in August 1689 proved to be an isolated success in the opening stages of the war.
Until early 1691, William was focused on dealing with James II’s intervention in Ireland. Even when he was able to devote his full attention to the Low Countries, he struggled to win outright victory. The allies suffered a major blow in June 1692 when the strategically important fortress of Namur, in the south-east of the Spanish Netherlands, fell to a French army. The victorious commander, the Duke of Luxembourg, had achieved his principal objective for the year. He now took up a strong defensive position at Steenkirk, on the edges of the Ardennes, confident that his opponents would not risk an assault.
William, however, wanted to salvage something from this disaster and to lift his troops’ morale. In early August, he decided on a dawn attack to take the French by surprise. However, the king underestimated the physical challenges of the operation. Moving slowly through heavily wooded terrain, his three columns had to deploy on a narrow front. In defiance of William’s instructions to keep the cavalry in reserve, some of them went ahead of the infantry, slowing their advance. Worse, the Anglo-Dutch forces formed their line of battle too far from the French positions.
By early afternoon, when the action began, Luxembourg had taken the opportunity to strengthen the natural defences afforded by the area’s hedges and ditches. Pushing their way uphill over broken ground, William’s forces took heavy casualties. With reinforcements and cannon arriving, the French were able to compel him to withdraw.
The only positive outcome for William was that the French had also suffered serious losses, deterring them from an assault on Liège. At sea, they had been defeated off Normandy’s Cape La Hogue in May, confirming British control of the Channel and lifting the threat of a seaborne invasion. As the 1693 campaigning season opened, despite growing economic pressures, Louis resolved on a major new land offensive.
From setback to success
In July 1693, the French once again menaced Liège and Brussels. To block an attack on either city, William took up a position between Neerwinden and Landen, 30 miles east of Brussels. The allied troops were well entrenched on higher ground, but the site had the disadvantage of being bounded by the Little Geete River to the rear. The French outnumbered them by 70,000 to 50,000 as well. After three assaults, the French finally broke through, forcing William to retreat. Three months later, Luxembourg took Charleroi. Together with their earlier seizure of Mons and Namur, this gave the French a new forward line of defence.
But Landen had been a pyrrhic victory. It was a bloody slogging match in which the two sides took a combined total of more than 25,000 casualties. Luxembourg had good reason not to pursue the defeated allied forces. It was said that the French surgeons were so busy that they measured their work in wagon loads of amputated limbs. By contrast, William was able to replace his losses, and Liège remained untaken.
Allied fortunes hung in the balance at the end of 1693, as the French made progress not only in Flanders but also in the less important theatres of northern Italy and Catalonia. The Holy Roman Empire was distracted by a simultaneous conflict with the Turks, while Savoy began to look for a separate peace with France.
William’s gritty determination to hold the alliance together made a crucial difference. He held regular meetings with his coalition partners at The Hague, making the case for unity as the best way to wear down French resources and willpower. His arguments were vindicated when a severe famine crippled the enemy’s capacity to mount a serious campaign in 1694. French hopes suffered a further blow in January 1695 with the death of Luxembourg, who had undoubtedly been their most effective field commander. Then came William’s most outstanding achievement of the war: the retaking of the fortress of Namur.
Since its capture three years earlier, the city’s defences had been strengthened by the Marquis de Vauban, widely regarded as the greatest military engineer of his age. Namur was a forbidding prospect for a besieging army, described by the commentator Edward D’Auvergne (1660-1737) as ‘the strongest place in the Spanish Netherlands, and a man must say, the very key of it’. It lay at the junction of the Maas and Sambre rivers, which acted as natural moats. Just south of the city, the citadel of Namur occupied a commanding location on a rock some 600ft high.
William prepared carefully for the siege. An army under the Austrian Prince Vaudémont was detached to hold off the new French theatre commander, the Duke of Villeroi. The besieging forces were divided into three, headed by William himself, his German Brandenburger allies, and the Elector of Bavaria. Allied engineers linked the separate corps with pontoon bridges across the rivers, while trench works ringed the city. It came under heavy artillery fire, against which the French retaliated with a sortie from within. William led one attack in person, seizing control of a counterscarp (the outer edge of the fort’s ditch) at a cost of 44 men killed and 95 wounded.
In early August the city surrendered, leaving the citadel still intact. In a vain attempt to draw allied forces away from the siege, Villeroi bombarded Brussels, a purely civilian target, with cannon- and mortar-fire. The commercial centre went up in flames in an action that was widely condemned as a war crime. Namur’s citadel surrendered in September. The siege had cost the defenders some 8,000 casualties, while the allies had suffered 18,000. Nor did Namur’s capture mean that the end of the war was imminent.
All the same, Namur was a signal victory. Earlier criticism of William’s generalship was forgotten amid celebrations in England and the Dutch Republic. The preacher at a service in London was applauded for comparing him to King David, the Old Testament saviour of Israel. With both sides nearing exhaustion, 1696 saw limited offensive activity as peace feelers were now put out in earnest.
British infantry in the Nine Years War
The red-coated troops of the Nine Years War were very different from their forebears who had taken part in the British Civil Wars, half a century earlier. The 1690s was a transitional decade for infantry weapons. The pike was disappearing from the battlefield, to be replaced by improved firearms. The flintlock musket – more accurate and less cumbersome than the older matchlock – was making its first appearance. To maximise firepower, musketeers were drawn up in battalions six lines deep. This compensated for the slowness of the reloading procedure and gave the troops the greater security of close formation.
The socket bayonet, which fastened around the musket’s muzzle, was introduced in place of the older plug bayonet. The disadvantage of the latter was that it had to be pushed down the barrel, making it impossible to fire the weapon at the same time. Its drawbacks had been illustrated in the Battle of Killiecrankie (July 1689) in Perthshire, Scotland. There, Williamite troops who were trying to fix their plug bayonets had been overwhelmed by the speed of charging Highlander rebels.
A temporary peace
The Peace of Ryswick, concluded in October 1697, represented a check for Louis XIV’s seemingly limitless territorial ambitions. The French ruler retained some of his wartime gains but had to give up Lorraine, along with land that he had taken on the east bank of the Rhine. Border fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands offered the Dutch Republic increased security against renewed French aggression.
But the treaty was only a temporary cessation of hostilities, made possible because France was even more financially drained than its opponents. The death in November 1700 of the ailing, childless Charles II of Spain raised the prospect of Louis XIV’s grandson succeeding him as king. This presented the threat of a formidable French power bloc in western Europe, enjoying access to the resources of the Spanish overseas empire.
The Nine Years War had never been very popular in Britain. Public opinion viewed an extended military commitment to the Low Countries as primarily serving the interests of Britain’s Dutch ruler. In September 1701, however, Louis reneged on his recognition of William and instead announced his support for the claim of James II’s son, Prince James Edward Stuart. This vindicated William in the eyes of Parliament and people by reviving historic fears of Catholic absolutism.
Concern for the security of the Protestant succession now meshed with a desire to prevent French continental hegemony and to promote Britain’s overseas commercial and colonial interests. As a result, William took a united country into the War of the Spanish Succession. His unexpected death in March 1702, however, meant that the conduct of this new war would fall to others to undertake.
Graham Goodlad has taught history and politics for more than 30 years. He is a freelance writer and a regular contributor to MHM.
Further reading:
• The Nine Years’ War and the British Army, 1688-97 (John Childs, Manchester University Press, 1991)
• The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667-1714 (John A Lynn, Routledge, 1999)
All images: Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise stated
You must be logged in to post a comment.