“Had the French triumphed,” he says, “the Protestants might have been driven, like the Pagan heathens of old by the sons of Pepin, beyond the Elbe; the Stuart race, and with them Romish ascendancy, might have been re-established in England; the fire lighted by Latimer and Ridley might have been extinguished in blood; and the energy breathed by religious freedom into the Anglo-Saxon race might have expired. The destinies of the world would have been changed. Europe, instead of a variety of independent states whose mutual hostility kept alive courage, while their national rivalry stimulated talent, would have sunk into the slumber attendant on universal dominion. The Colonial Empire of England would have withered away and perished, as that of Spain has done in the grasp of the Inquisition. The Anglo-Saxon race would have been arrested in its mission to overspread the earth and subdue it. The centralized despotism of the Roman Empire would have been renewed on Continental Europe; the chains of Romish tyranny, and with them the general infidelity of France before the Revolution, would have extinguished or perverted thought in the British islands.” Voltaire summed up the battle of Blenheim which “dissipated for ever Louis the Fourteenth’s once proud visions of almost universal conquest” in the following words: “Such was the celebrated battle which the French call the battle of Hochstet (Höchstäd), the Germans Plentheim (Blindheim), and the English Blenheim. The conquerors had about five thousand killed, and eight thousand wounded, the greater part being on the side of Prince Eugene. The French army was almost entirely destroyed: of sixty thousand men, so long victorious, there never reassembled more than twenty thousand effective. About twelve thousand killed, fourteen thousand prisoners, all the cannon, a prodigious number of colours and standards, all the tents and equipages, the general of the army, and one thousand two hundred officers of mark in the power of the conqueror, signalized that day.”
Recalling the effect of the great battle we may also call to mind the passage in which Addison describes it in his poem in laudation of Marlborough:—
“The rout begins, the Gallic squadrons run
Compelled in crowds to meet the fate they shun.
Thousands of fiery steeds with wounds transfixed
Floating in gore, with their dead masters mixed,
’Midst heaps of spears and standards driv’n around,
Lie in the Danube’s bloody whirlpools drowned.
Troops of bold youths, born on the distant Saone,
Or sounding borders of the rapid Rhone,