1704.
Our attention is now claimed for a time by the Peninsula, where the War of the Spanish Succession was to be carried forward on Spanish soil. In January 1704 the Imperial claimant to the throne, the Archduke Charles of Austria, otherwise King Charles the Third of Spain, arrived in England, and was sent away with an English fleet and an English army to possess himself of his kingdom. Portugal had offered to help him with twenty-eight thousand men, to which the Dutch had added two thousand under General Fagel, and the British six thousand five hundred men,[313] under Mainhard, Duke of Schomberg, a son of the old marshal. The campaign of 1704 need not detain us. It was speedily found that the Portuguese army was ill-equipped and inefficient, the magazines empty, the fortresses in ruins, the transport not in existence. To add to these shortcomings, Schomberg and Fagel quarrelled so bitterly that they went off, each with his own troops, in two different directions.
The result might have been foreseen. King Philip, sometime Duke of Anjou, and the Duke of Berwick with twelve thousand French, marched down to the fortresses on the Portuguese frontier, and took them one after another without difficulty. So ready and eager were the Portuguese to surrender these strongholds that they made over not only themselves as prisoners of war, but also to their extreme indignation two British regiments, the Ninth and Eleventh Foot, which had the misfortune to be in garrison with them. Marlborough, in all the press of his work on the Danube, was called upon to nominate a successor to the incompetent Schomberg and selected the Huguenot Ruvigny, Earl of Galway, for the post. With this appointment we may for the present take leave of the Peninsula.
July 26
August 6.
Meanwhile, however, the fleet under Sir George Rooke, and a handful of marines under Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt, brought a new and unexpected possession to England by the surprise of Gibraltar, which, though captured for King Charles the Third, was kept for Queen Anne. The intrinsic value of the Rock in those days was small, and its value as a military position was little understood in England; but it was at any rate a capture and very soon it became a centre of sentiment.
Sept. 23
October 4.
After the surrender of Gibraltar the fleet sailed away, leaving Prince George with a good store of provisions and about two thousand men to hold it. These troops, though now numbered the Fourth, Thirty-first, and Thirty-second of the Line, were at that time Marines, a corps which, despite brilliant and incessant service by sea and land in all parts of the world, still contents itself with the outward record of a single name, Gibraltar. Prince George lost no time in repairing the fortifications, and with good reason, for at the end of August a Spanish force of eight thousand men marched down to the isthmus, while a month later four thousand Frenchmen were disembarked at the head of the bay. These joint forces then began the siege of Gibraltar.
December.
The operations were pushed forward with great vigour, and the besieged were soon hard beset. At the end of October Admiral Leake contrived to throw stores and a couple of hundred men on to the Rock, together with an officer of engineers, one Captain Joseph Bennett, whose energy and ability were of priceless value. The siege dragged on for another month, the British repulsing an attack from the eastern side with heavy loss; but by the end of November the garrison had dwindled to one thousand men, exhausted by the fatigue of incessant duty. At last, in the middle of December a stronger reinforcement of two thousand men,[314] having first narrowly escaped capture by a French fleet, was successfully landed on the Rock; and then Prince George turned upon the besiegers, and by a succession of brilliant sorties almost paralysed further progress on their side.
1705.
Jan. 27
Feb. 7.