Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/71

] to the plans of Louis; and in Savoy the duke and prince Eugene, assisted by young Schomberg, promised to do good service on that side.

But though William managed to just hold his stupid and selfish allies together—too stupid and selfish to perceive their own real interests—he found it impossible to get them into the field. Whilst they were moving like tortoises, each afraid to be before his neighbour, each taking leave to delay because his neighbour delayed, Louis rushed in the arena with his wonted alertness. On the 20th of May he was in his camp at Flanders. He made a grand review of his troops in the neighbourhood of Mons. There a hundred and twenty thousand men were drawn up in a line of eight miles long. Such a circumstance was well calculated to spread a deadening report amongst the allies of the crushing immensity of his army. He was attended by a splendid retinue of nearly all the princes and rulers of France; there was the duke de Chartres, in his fifteenth year only; the dukes of Bourbon and Vendôme; the prince of Conti; and whole troops of young nobles following them as volunteers. Louis appeared in the midst of them with all the splendour and luxury of an eastern emperor. He had brought with him all the courtly throngs and amusements of Paris. There were the singers and dancers of the opera, mistresses and parasites, his court band of musicians, and all the ministers of pleasure and voluptuousness. Racine, the great poet of the age, was there to immortalise the actions of Louis by his muse. Every noble and gentleman appeared with an unheard-of splendour and retinue. The duke de Saint Simon, afterwards so celebrated for his "Memoirs," though then scarcely more than a boy, appeared with a long train of gorgeously-dressed servants, and thirty-five horses and sumpter mules.

From the imposing review Louis bore down directly on Namur. Namur stood strongly at the confluence of the Meuse and the Sambre. It was strong by nature on the sides next the rivers, and made so by art on the land side. The baron de Cohorn, an engineer who rivalled Vauban, was always in William's army to advise and throw up fortifications. Cohorn had made it one of the most considerable fortresses on the continent, and he now lay in the city with a garrison of nine thousand men under the prince de Brabazon. All the other fortresses—Mons, Valenciennes, Cambray, Antwerp, Ostend, Ypres, Lisle, Tournay, Luxembourg, and others, had yielded to the Grande Monarque; Namur alone had resisted every attempt upon it. And now Louis invested it with his whole force. Louis himself laid siege to the place with forty thousand men, and posted Luxembourg with eighty thousand more on the road betwixt Namur and Brussels. Brabazon calculated on the army of William effecting the relief of the place, and Louis resolved to make his approach impossible.

William, joined by the forces of Brandenburg and Liege, and with his army swelled to a hundred thousand men, advanced to the Mehaigne, within cannon-shot of Luxembourg's camp, but there he found himself stopped. Luxembourg's army lay on the other bank of the river, and was so strongly posted, and watched so vigilantly every movement of William, that he saw no means of forcing a way towards the belligerent city. Whilst thus impeded by the river and the vast force of Luxembourg, nature came to complete the chafing king's mortifications. Heavy rains set in on St. Medard's day, the 8th of June, the French St. Swithin. The rivers burst their banks, and the whole country lay under water. If William had the means to cross the river, the drenching torrents and the muddy soil rendered all military operations impossible. Louis with difficulty could keep his men to their posts in the siege. Still the assault was pushed on. Cohorn, the engineer, was disabled by a severe wound while defending a fort on which he greatly prided himself; and from that hour the defence languished. Brabazon was a man of no spirit; Cohorn's fort was taken, and the town surrendered on the 20th of June.

The exultation of Louis and the French on the fall of Namur was unbounded. This triumph had been won in the very presence of William and the allies at the head of a hundred thousand men. He ordered medals to be struck to commemorate this success, which his flatterers, and amongst them Boileau himself, declared was more glorious than the mastery of Troy by the Greeks. Te Deum was sung in Paris; the French nation was in ecstacies, and Louis returned to Versailles to enjoy all the incense of his elated courtiers and mistresses. But he did not return without a sting to his triumph. The news of a signal defeat of his fleet at La Hogue reached him even as he lay before Namur, and the thunder of William's artillery at the great intelligence wounded his vanity though it could not reach his army.

Louis having quitted the Netherlands. Luxembourg strongly garrisoned Namur, despatched the marquis of Boufflers to La Bassiere, and himself encamped at Soignies. William posted himself at Genappe, sent detachments to Ghent and Liege, and determined to attack Luxembourg. That general shifted his ground to a position betwixt Steinkirk and Enghein, and William then encamped at Lambeque. Here he discovered that all his movements had been previously betrayed to Luxembourg by the private secretary of the elector of Bavaria, one Millevoix, a letter of whose to the French general had been picked up by a peasant and brought to the camp. William seized on the circumstance to mislead Luxembourg. The detected spy was compelled to write a letter to the French general, informing him that the next day William was intending to send out a great foraging party, and, to prevent its being surprised, would draw out a large body of troops to protect it. The letter being dispatched to the French camp, William took immediate measures for the engagement. His object was to surprise the camp of Luxembourg, and the story of the foraging party was to prevent his alarm on the approach of the troops. He sent his heavy baggage across the Seine, and by four in the morning his troops were on the march towards Luxembourg's position. The prince of Württemberg led the van with ten battalions of English, Dutch, and Danish infantry, supported by a large body of horse and foot under the command of general Mackay, and count Solmes followed with the reserve.

William's forces reached the outposts of Luxembourg's army about two o'clock in the afternoon, and drove them in with a sudden and unlooked-for onset. A regiment from the Bourbonnais was put to instant flight, and William,