GENERAL JOHN RICHMOND WEBB, CAPTAIN AND GOVERNOR OF THE ISLE OF WIGHT, 1710-1715.

IN the first decade of the eighteenth century General Webb was Governor of the Isle of Wight and Captain of Carisbrooke Castle. From the fact of his holding these important offices it may be inferred that he was a notable man in his day. All recollection of General Webb would have faded away from this generation had it not been for his good fortune in having attracted the notice of a man of genius of our own times the late Mr. Thackeray. Readers of Esmond, perhaps the most highly finished and the most elaborate of all the compositions of the great novelist, will remember the life-like way in which Harry Esmond's honoured and beloved commanding officer, General Webb, is brought before them. Mr. Thackeray, who at one time had thought of writing the history of the reign of Queen Anne, had made a careful study of the Duke of Marlborough and his campaigns. Webb's most famous exploit in the battle of Wynendaal is told in the pages of Esmond with all the skill of a master in the art of historical composition (Book II, ch. xv). Readers of Esmond will recollect that young Mr. Esmond was gazetted to a lieutenancy in Brigadier Webb's regiment of Fusiliers, then with their colonel in Flanders.

The success of Marlborough in the siege of Lille was mainly owing to Webb's dauntless courage in repulsing La Mothe's attempt to relieve that besieged fortress at Wynendaal. The siege of Lille in Marlborough's second period occupies with many of the biographers of the victor of Blenheim and of Ramillies the position of a kind of lesser siege of Troy. Without adopting this exaggerated view of the once famous siege of Lille it may be kept in mind that not only did numbers gather together at the time to witness this great duel between the military sciences of defence and attack, conducted by some of the most advanced proficients in the game of war, but that it was also a turning-point in the career of the great

duke, who, as our forefathers said, 'beat the French thorough and thorough.'

The last work of King William III, a new alliance of England, Holland, and the Emperor against the French Louis XIV and his grandson, survived him. 'The master workman died,' wrote Edmund Burke, but the work was formed on true mechanical principles, and was as truly wrought.' Anne became queen, March 8, 1702, and the war which William had commenced was proclaimed by concert at Vienna, at London, and at the Hague, and was vigorously prosecuted by the queen's favourite, Marlborough. Already had the war been marked by the crowning victories of Blenheim and of Ramillies, when in October, 1707, Marlborough and the French commander, Vendôme, after facing each other in the Netherlands, went early into winter quarters. Louis, Duke of Vendôme, a descendant of one of the bastards of Henry IV, was, as Lord Macaulay has pointed out, a man sunk in indolence and the foulest vice, yet capable of exhibiting on a great occasion the qualities of a great soldier.

Taking advantage of the temporary lull of hostilities, Marlborough went into the Hague, where he was met by the Prince Eugene, the Grand Pensionary, and the Deputies of the States General. Having concerted the plan for the campaign of the year 1708, Eugene went to Vienna to bring up reinforcements, and Marlborough took the field. On the other side were the Duke of Burgundy (the grandson of Louis), the Duke of Vendôme, Marshal Boufflers, and the Duke of Berwick, son of James II and Arabella Churchill, the sister of Marlborough. Eugene did not keep Marlborough waiting long, but when they joined they had scarcely more than 83,000 men, and the French had 100,000. Emboldened by their superiority in numbers, the French began on the offensive, and, favoured by the Flemings, who disliked the English and hated the Dutch, they took Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, and invested Oudenarde. Here their momentary success ended; they were presently obliged to raise that siege, and to retire across the Scheldt. Marlborough and Eugene, with one will and one settled purpose of attack, followed them, and upon July 11 they fell upon the French army between the

Lys and the Scheldt, opposite Oudenarde, while the Dukes of Burgundy, Vendôme, and Berwick were quarrelling about what ought to be done, and gave them the bitterest and most complete defeat they had as yet sustained in this long war. Fifteen thousand men and about a hundred standards and colours were lost, and such was the confusion of the French that the troops were neither aware whither they fled nor by whom they were commanded. Vendôme and Berwick managed to retreat with some skill, but they could never face Marlborough nor Eugene, who, after recovering several important fortresses, laid siege to Lille, which was considered as the key to Paris and one-half of France.

Lille, the capital of what was once French Flanders, stands in the midst of gloomy marshes and deep waters. It had been just lately fortified by the great engineer, Sebastian Leprestre de Vauban, who was born in 1683, and died in 1707. The citadel was one of the finest in Europe, and the garrison, which was commanded by Marshal Boufflers, a gallant and skilful soldier, who through life was distinguished for his humane endeavours to alleviate the horrors of war, steadily resisted the allies. who kept raining upon it shell, shot, and red-hot balls. That denationalized Englishman, James Fitz James, Duke of Berwick, who had been appointed Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire, ranger of the New Forest, governor of Portsmouth, and who afterwards, in 1703, was naturalized as a subject of France, tells us in his Memoirs that the Duke of Marlborough (his maternal uncle), during the siege of Lille, sent him a private letter, signifying that the present occasion was a very favourable one to set on foot a negotiation for peace; and that if the proposals were properly made by France to the field-deputies of Holland, Prince Eugene, and himself, he would do all in his power to get them accepted. As this statement rests upon the single assertion in Berwick's Memoirs, it has been doubted. It appears however that there was really some talk of negotiating; but Lord Hardwicke asserts, in his very reliable notes on Burnet, that the overture came from the Duke of Berwick, through whose hands the French Court offered the Duke of Marlborough a large sum of money if he would procure a peace for them. During the protracted siege of Lille both Marlborough and

Eugene were involved in considerable difficulties, as Vendôme cut off their communications with Brussels, and for some time kept them short of provisions and ammunition. It is not improbable that, under these circumstances Marlborough may have proposed or listened to overtures. Besides, as he was constantly informed by his duchess of the growing boldness of his political rival Harley's intrigues, he may have felt that his presence at St. James's was desirable; or he may even have conceived a disgust at the whole war, and a desire to end it. It is evident from his correspondence that he had rather frequently such visitations of wounded feeling, and that he sighed for peace and repose in the pleasant grounds of Blenheim Palace and Park.

After the manner of party politicians, his opponents both in Parliament and in the Press exercised considerable and malevolent ingenuity in misrepresenting the whole of this brilliant campaign, and in trying to show that Marlborough had several times got into situations of extreme peril, and that he had been set free from them rather by good luck than by his own military genius. At the beginning of the campaign these unpatriotic politicians revelled in the successes obtained by the French, and predicted that the English general would lose in one summer what it had cost him so many years to gain. Matthew Prior, the poet, who had sold his wit and his pen to the party against Marlborough, was among his assailants. Marlborough disconcerted these prophets by his brilliant and decisive battle at Oudenarde, but when he sat down before Lille they recommenced their sinister predictions and exaggerated the losses inevitable in such a siege.

One of the main difficulties experienced by the allied commanders was the provisioning of their army. Since the land communication with Brussels had been entirely cut off, all provisions had to be brought from Ostend, whither they were conveyed by sea. The French determined to interrupt this line of communication. General Webb, marching from Ostend with a great convoy, was attacked by De La Mothe at Wynendaal with 24,000 men. The French were defeated, and Webb gained well-deserved honour by this victory, the enemy being nearly treble his number. It has been suggested

that Marlborough was at one of his old tricks, and that in his jealousy of Webb he wished for his destruction, and had intentionally exposed him to danger. The very slight notice in the dispatches of this gallant action of Wynendaal gave colour to this notion. Readers of Mr. Thackeray's Esmond will recollect how Marlborough was blamed for having given the credit of this decisive battle to his favourite Cadogan, the best divisional general in the English army, and tried to wrest it from Webb, who had borne the burden and heat of the day. The battle of Wynendaal was fought September 27, 1708, and Lille surrendered December 8 of the same year. The loss of that important place caused a panic in France. In England a medal was struck to commemorate its surrender; on the obverse Victory is shown taking a civic crown from the head of a prostrate woman, intended to represent the city of Lille, while the reverse represents Britannia with the ægis striking France with terror.

After the victory of Oudenarde Marlborough, breaking through the pedantry of the military rules of that age of formal tactics, had proposed to Eugene, by masking Lille and Tournay with a corps of observation, to penetrate into the heart of France, a plan which, instead of consuming the remainder of a victorious campaign in the siege of two fortresses, might have triumphantly ended the war. But this bold proposal seemed too hazardous even to Eugene, and the glory of the surrender of Lille belongs to Wynendaal and Webb.

The English administration which had begun the war against the House of Bourbon was an administration composed of Tories, but the war was a Whig war. It was the darling scheme of the hero of the Whig party-William III. John Churchill, afterwards Duke of Marlborough, who in the reign of Charles II had sat as M.P. for Newtown, I. W., was the ablest general and statesman of his time, though he owed his influence with Queen Anne to his wife's influence. Though his wife sided with the Whigs, Marlborough in spite of his life-long devotion to that imperious woman pas-ed for a Tory, and thereby gained greater influence with the Queen, who loved the Tories, whom she preferred to call the 'Church party.' The great Duke of Marlborough in truth belonged