1606-1611 Binding and Loosing
Generals and Kings Youtube Channel: ‘Battles of Antwerp and Tommel’
Welcome to the Generals and Kings Channel, and our ongoing series on the Twenty Years War. Europe, May 1606: the continent stood on the brink. The Battle of Rip Mountain and the ascension of Albert-Henry of Pembroke-Prussia to the Bohemian throne had once again declared open hostilities in Europe. However the conflict may have been contained to the east if it were not for Jean Tserclaes, Count Tilly. The French general had for years planned his return to his homeland of Brabant at the head of a Catholic army but the Britannic sentinels had made this an impossible dream. Yet after Rip Mountain, and the Duke of Oudenberg was recalled to London to explain his actions to his Emperor, Tilly saw his chance.
The Count went before Henry IV, King of France and used Rip Mountain as justification for war. If the Protestants were not going to abide by their spheres of influence, then the Catholic Holy League would be mad to allow them to go unpunished. France declared war on the Kingdom of the Netherlands on the 31st of May and Spain joined them a week later. Even before the official declaration, Tilly had planned well. Since the middle of winter, Charles Bonaventure, Count of Bucquoy had been in Brussels with 3000 French soldiers disguised as Walloons to ferment rebellion. This had drawn out the Dutch who lost their King William II to dysentery in the subsequent siege and were forced to pull back.
Brabant was still in rebellion, but Richard II’s inaction allowed Tilly to set his sights even higher. On the 4th of June Tilly himself crossed into Brabant with 20,000 French soldiers behind him and the Seigneur de Villeroy raising the Dixiem Levee en Masse back in France. Within a week Brussels had been joined by Mons, Namur and Liege in rebellion against the Dutch King. The Low Countries had been badly served by the French and Spanish Kings in the Low Countries War some 30 years previously, having been abandoned to their fate once their tactical use was spent. Now though, Tilly’s presence at the head of the army, not to mention the support of Bishop Jean Richardot of Liege, encouraged a general rising. Tilly marched into Brussels on the 8th of June to a hero’s welcome.
In the Netherlands, King Edvard I responded to this news with grim determination. He may have been King for only a few months but was almost 50 and had spent a lifetime at court and on the battlefield. The Dutch King had been desperately trying to cajole the stadtholders and burghers into supporting a renewed campaign into Brabant with little success. The French declaration of war and Tilly’s invasion gave Edvard the justification he needed to gather an army. Unfortunately, the majority of the Dutch strength lay at sea, and without Britannic help they were exposed on the battlefield.
The Netherlands only had around 15,000 men to hand and these included around 5,000 Englishmen under Johan of Bruges and the Orange Free Company. Franck of Hesse, though dithering over a final decision on what to do, sent a further 2,000 men and the states of Westphalia and Hannover together provided another 3,000 mercenaries. By mid-June Edvard thus had 20,000 men to throw into the fray but they were not a united force, and he was still gathering men.
Tilly had known this, and had already begun a swift advance north towards Antwerp, leaving Bucquoy to guard his rear. Tilly arranged his army around the city walls and began negotiating with the Burghers to surrender the city. Antwerp had always been Catholic, and even after 30 years under Dutch control had remained so. More importantly Antwerp was an all important harbour on the channel. France had lost all ports north of La Rochelle through the last century of war and Antwerp would be a crucial coup for them. Therefore Tilly chose the diplomatic route whilst his army dug emplacements at Schoten east of the city facing north and east.
King Edvard had to move, and was heartened by the news that Tilly seemed to only have 20,000 men himself. Gathering his own force of 20,000, Edvard crossed the Meuse and marched for Antwerp. If he could reach the city before they capitulated he could still maintain his realms’ integrity. The Dutch reached Hoogstraten on the 29th of June a dozen miles from Antwerp and immediately moved to the attack. Edvard’s army may have been cobbled together, but it did not lack for firepower, the majority of the soldiers were armed with Snelbus or Dutch copies. Nor did it lack experienced commanders. Edvard himself was no slouch but his right wing was commanded by the veteran commander Anthony Schetz, Baron Grobbedonk, his centre – including the Germans – by Phillip de Hohenloe-Neuenstein and his left, the Orange Free Company, by Johan of Bruges, brother to the Earl of Oudenberg. Where Schetz was cautious, Johan was champing at the bit and Phillip in the centre was just trying to forge a coherent command from his units. Nonetheless Edvard trusted them to break the French line and was in reserve with a further 2,000 himself
The Dutch army’s hasty preparations meant that they were light on heavy cannon and heavy cavalry but they had brought around 3,000 light cavalry commanded by Giovanni II Hartson in the manner of his great grandfather; fast fierce and brutal. Accordingly, the Dutch army drew up in double lines on the morning of the 30th of June in sight of the French earthworks east of Antwerp. These earthworks would have prevented a cavalry charge at any rate and so Edvard planned to mount a general advance with infantry hoping to sweep the French from the field, prove his worth to the citizens of Antwerp and gain their help with a flank attack from the city itself.
Count Tilly had chosen his defensive positions well. The flat land around Antwerp offered few vantage points but he had found a shallow rise running south east from the village of Schoten and had drawn his men up along this more or less parallel to the modern Nord Canal which now stands on this spot. Tilly gave himself the left flank and fortified Schoten itself. The central redoubts, studded with light cannon built on the Brittanic model, Tilly gave to the Duc de Lesdiguières, Francois de Bonne who had been his mentor earlier in life. Finally Tilly took a risk on his right; lacking in cavalry as the Dutch were, Tilly treated his right flank like his cavalry wing and gave it to his heavy Grenadier companies under the command of the relatively inexperienced but headstrong Henri de Chivre, Marquis de Barre. Tilly admired the young man’s fearlessness and ferocity in the face of enemy fire and trusted him to make his own decisions of when to move.
Given their lack of cannon, the Protestants moved first. The open and marshy ground meant that they were dangerously exposed to de Bonne’s cannon in the centre and the Westphalian infantry suffered casualties before they could close. Fired up for battle, the Orange Free Company saw this difficulty and moved to their right as they charged catching the far eastern end of the French earthworks unexpectedly in the flank. This brave move by Johan of Bruges allowed for the Dutch centre to close and engage at point-blank range. Tilly may have dug earthworks and trained his men, but the French soldiers were outmatched by their Protestant opponents and soon de Bonne’s men began to buckle.
Henri de Chivre saw his chance and charged left into the Orange Free Company. Johan of Bruges had miscalculated, he had taken the French right flank for auxiliary forces, having never encountered Grenadiers in the field before. The white-crossed straps of the Grenadiers may have made them appear to be Engineers, but the English mercenaries soon discovered that they were anything but. Tilly’s new Grenadier tactics, using Grenades and hand to hand weapons such as axes, worked wonders on the English rear and soon they began to break just as the French centre had. On the French left, Tilly continued to hold Schoten; he had placed his best marksmen and a further five cannon in the village and they turned the streets into rivers of blood as Anthony Schetz’s men were ground down and the Baron himself was killed in the hail of fire.
For all of this time Giovanni II Hartson had prowled the battlefield with his light cavalry, Schragbus primed and ready, but had been unable to spot the reported French Cavalry. Late in the afternoon Johan of Bruges signalled to his cousin for aid and Hartson took his men into close quarters, blowing holes in the Grenadiers of the French Right. These caused grievous wounds, but the short range of the weapon brought Giovanni’s cavalry into Grenade range which badly unsettled the horses and caused some to bolt.
With the Protestant cavalry retreating in disarray, Bishop Jean Richardot made his move. The 36-year old Bishop had been part of Tilly’s delegation in Antwerp and had managed to gather around 500 men of the city, mostly the poor and desperate, but including some poorer artisans sons and the like, into something resembling a fighting force. These men did not officially represent the City government, still undecided, but Bishop Richardot led them out of the city gates on horseback and into the flank of Anthony’ Schetz’s force.
King Edvard was at this point taking his reserve over the bodies of their comrades into the French earthworks hoping to break the line once and for all when he saw the Lion and Griffin banner of the city sally from the gates. For a moment it must have seemed that the city had sided with him, only to have the Antwerpian forces attack his own army. This tiny force scored a huge morale victory as Schetz’s demoralised army cracked and ran with Tilly in pursuit. Fearing the city lost, Edvard ordered the general retreat.
The Battle of Antwerp was a relatively even affair. The Protestant army lost around 7,000 men, mostly to Schetz’s force though the Free Company also took losses on the left. Tilly’s army lost 6000 general infantry and a further 500 Grenadiers from an original count of 3000. Crucially, however, the battle turned into an overwhelming French victory when the city of Antwerp capitulated. Their hand may have been forced by Richardot’s group of vagabonds, but with their nominal King in retreat, the Burghers of Antwerp had little alternative and signed an alliance with Henry IV 'the Good', King of France. With a protestant army beaten for the first time in a generation, and Antwerp in Catholic hands, the rest of Wallonia arose in favour of the Catholic Holy League.
The Summer’s campaign was far from over and Bucquoy arrived in Antwerp in mid-July with another 30,000 French troops. These were from Tilly’s conscripted army, but they still swung the balance of power firmly in Tilly’s favour. Secondly Luxembourg also declared for Tilly and the Holy League with Ernst von Mansfeld pledging 4,000 infantry and 2,000 much-needed cavalry to the cause. Tilly could now field 50,000 men, with more on the way. Never being one to relinquish the initiative, the French commander launched an audacious invasion of the northern half of Brabant centred on the City of Turnhout.
The Battle of Antwerp may have been a crushing morale blow for the Netherlands, but it had not cost them greatly in terms of manpower. King Edvard retreated back towards Hertogenbosch to gather reinforcements which arrived in their plenty. The Dukes William of Guelders and William of Julich-Cleves-Berg and Richard of East Frisia straggled over the Waal and Meuse Rivers throughout July with their forces and Duke Franck of Hesse sent his brother Paul with a few regiments having decided to declare war on France himself. The Dutch contingents numbered around 25,000 men but were mostly relatively inexperienced soldiers, though well-equipped. The Hessians, by contrast, were only 4,000 men but Franck had dispatched some of his finest soldiers of the Dorsten College. These Dorstensoldaten added a much needed kernel of strength to the disparate Protestant army.
King Edvard nonetheless still had two problems. The first was command; his 42,000 men strong army had a number of capable commanders; himself, Johan of Bruges, Giovanni II Hartson, Phillip of Neuenstein, William of Guelders, Richard of East Frisia, William of Cleves and Paul of Hesse, but none of these 8 men really stood out as having the necessary experience or skills to command a disparate and sprawling army. Anthony Schetz had been that man, but his death at Antwerp had left a void of command no one person could easily fill. King Edvard himself took command, though his meetings were often long and fractious.
The second Dutch problem was one of tactics. From Hergotenbosch King Edvard knew that Tilly was marching north east from Antwerp towards Turnhout. He also knew that Tilly had 50,000 men and could go anywhere south of the Meuse: Breda, Rosendaal, Eindhoven, all were open to him. Unsurprisingly Johan of Bruges advocated for an aggressive approach, closing with Tilly and destroying him before he could prepare the ground as he had at Antwerp. The Dukes of Cleves and Guelders, uncertain of the viability of their forces suggested their own defensive positions around Hergotenbosch and Eindhoven to hold Tilly in the south and west of the Netherlands.
By the 23rd of July, Tilly had reached Turnhout and placed the Protestant town under siege. This forced Edvard’s hand and he marched on the city in force. Unbeknownst to the Dutch, Tilly had planned this. The Catholic guns; a dozen light pieces and 5 heavy guns, had not even been unlimbered outside Turnhout, and siege works had only been haphazardly begun. Instead, Tilly had hoped to catch the Dutch in the field and destroy them. Therefore he immediately broke off the siege and marched north to where King Edvard had chosen to give battle outside the village of Tommel.
Today Tommel stands on the border of the Netherlands and Wallonia, the twin towns of Baarle Hertog and Baarle Nassau speaking to the complex history and borders in this part of the world. To Edvard, Tommel represented an adequate place to hold Tilly’s advance and to break his army. Modern forestry has changed the face of the battlefield but in 1606 the fields south west of Tommel were open and flat, rising gently to the village itself on a low ridgeline. To the western end of this ridgeline the Protestant line was anchored by the Heimolen Forest into which Edvard placed his Britannic contingent; 3,000 Orange Free Company infantry under Johan of Bruges, 6 light cannon and 2,000 light cavalry again commanded by Giovanni II Hartson.
From Heimolen across to the hamlet of Schaluinen Edvard arranged his Dutch infantry, all 30,000 of them. Taking the Dukes Williams’ concern over the quality of these men, Edvard had broken them into two deep lines of infantry. Each line could stand and fire in volleys and in this way Edvard hoped to bring up the second line to support the first when the time was right in order to destroy the French in withering fire. To this he added his dozen cannon interspersed between the ranks to increase the damage at long range. In order to further bolster the line he broke it into four sections and gave command to William of Guelders, Phillip of Neuenstein, William of Cleves and himself in order to allow for closer control. To the Protestant left Edvard sent his trump cards: Schaluinen became the billet of the Dorstensoldaten and Paul of Hesse whilst Richard of East Frisia commanded the 2,000 heavy cavalry which Edvard had been able to scrape together.
When Tilly arrived, he saw Edvard’s depositions and had no intention of playing ball. The obvious decision would be to advance over the flat open ground in front of the Protestant positions and close on them before the hail of gunfire tore the French army to shreds. Tilly did not do that. The French field marshal instead divided his combined forces into two unequal halves. The 30,000 less-experienced conscripts he placed on the left flank under Francois de Bonne who had held the line so well at Antwerp. Here at Tommel de Bonne’s job was again to fix the Protestant right flank and main line whilst the Marquis de Barre, again in command of the Grenadier contingents and a further 10,000 men on the right crushed the Protestant left. In support, de Barre had the Count of Bucquoy and Ernst von Mansfeld further to his right. Mansfeld had the heavy Catholic Cavalry and Bucquoy controlled the 3,000 or so light cavalry and a further 2,000 Luxembourg infantry as a rapid reserve to exploit any gaps with de Barre created. Tilly remained in the centre behind Francois be Bonne’s conscripts with the 12 light cannon, again as a rapid reaction force, the heavy cannon had been left with the baggage train.
The Battle of Tommel began on the morning of the 28th of July as a thin morning mist cleared from the battlefield. The sight which met the Protestant army was a confusing one; Tilly’s army was advancing obliquely and out of line to their own position. Assuming this was a mere mistake brought about by the mist Edvard reordered his right flank moving up Neuenstein and Guelders’ divisions and displacing the Orange Free Company from their forest positions to stand in open country. This was exactly Tilly’s plan, and he ordered his extreme left under Guilliame II de Lamboy – a Walloon declared for his cause – to move up his own cannon and disrupt the Dutch movements. Whilst this was going on the Marquis de Barre had closed the distance to the hamlet of Schaluinen on the right. De Barre had not known that the crack Hessian troops were holding the village until this moment and he immediately swung left to avoid the strong point. Francois de Bonne, in command of the French left now ordered a general advance and for around an hour his forces exchanged volleys with their Dutch counterparts across the open fields.
Around the flanks, Giovanni II led a probing attack against de Lamboy’s flank, but was repulsed by disciplined fire before he could get within Schragbus range. At the opposite flank Mansfeld and Richard of East Frisia’s heavy cavalry drove into each other hoping to annihilate their opponents. Bucquoy committed his own cavalry reserve to this fray and the balance immediately swung towards the Catholics. In the centre, the Marquis de Barre had finally reached a decision. Completely ignoring the entrenched Hessians in the village, he launched his entire command at the Dutch line just to the west of it. This was the Duke of Cleves division, and some of the greenest soldiers in the Dutch army. De Barre unleashed his and Tilly’s new tactic: The Grenadier Column. Infantry columns were not new, Sigismund III had attempted one at Nybro, but Tilly and de Barre had thrown in the Grenadiers as a hardened point supported by mobile artillery.
Tilly was able to bring up his guns to unnerve Cleves’ infantry just as de Barre’s men changed from line to column. The French Grenadiers, in the centre of the line, ran into a trot and the conscripts to their flanks followed behind to create a column. Thus 12,000 angry Frenchmen, with the Grenadiers as a hardened spear-point crashed into the inexperienced Dutch line. The first line was entirely broken and fell back into the second. Seeing the danger, Paul of Hesse sent 3,000 of his own men to fire into the middle of the French column and King Edvard turned his own light cannon on the same spot. Bucquoy’s reserve may have plugged the gap, but he was engaged in the cavalry duel and the opportunity was lost.
With the column’s momentum broken, the Grenadiers were forced to retreat back to their own lines under the Hessian gunfire. The column charge may have failed to break Cleves’ line entirely but he had suffered around 45% casualties and was seriously weakened. However the battle had allowed Mansfeld and Bucquoy to drive off the Frisian cavalry exposing the Protestant’s flank around Schaluinen even more.
Meanwhile, on the left flank, a co-ordianted attack by the Orange Free Company and Giovanni’s cavalry had encircled and destroyed de Lamboy’s division killing the Wallonian exile in the process. His 16 year-old son, Guilliame III would survive to torment the Protestants another day.
Around noon, Tilly pulled his own line back and called in his commanders to decide on their next course of action. King Edvard did the same, but his conference was a good deal less unified. The morning had only confirmed the Duke of Cleves fears, and he wanted to retreat from the field. A shouting match ensued in which Johan of Bruges called the Duke out for cowardice. Edvard, quickly losing control, relieved Cleves of command and had Johan take over the beleaguered Dutch left with around 300 Britannic mercenaries to steady the line. This left the Orange Free Company under the command of Sir Georg Boleyn, son of the Lord of Cambrai. This ill-tempered debate had robbed the Protestants of any chance to change tactics, and the French army began to advance once more causing the commanders to scurry back to their positions.
For his part, Jean Tserclaes, Count Tilly, did not need a debate to decide his next moves; he gave his orders and his army obeyed him. De Bonne again had command of the left and centre, though he had placed the Duc de la Force in the deceased de Lamboy’s position to bolster the left and had also given him von Mansfeld’s Cavalry to hold off Giovanni. To the right Bucquoy and de Barre had their orders and they implemented them to a tee.
Again De Barre sent his Grenadiers towards the Protestant left and what had been Cleves’ division, with Tilly’s cannon to his left and Bucquoy to his right in reserve. However, just outside of Snelbus range, De Barre halted his charge and turned his entire force of 8,000 men to the right to face the Hessian positions in Schaluinen. With the conscripts firing volleys, Tilly firing over their heads, and the Grenadiers now charging into the more lightly defended western edge of the village, Paul of Hesse was caught completely off guard. Concurrently, Bucquoy’s infantry arrived from the south to fix the defenders whilst his cavalry swept around the east and north to encircle the strongpoint.
In the tight confines of the village, Tilly’s new weapons and tactics paid dividends. The use of Grenades and hand to hand weapons prevented the elite Dorstensoldaten from forming infantry lines of fire and allowed them to be picked off piecemeal. As Paul of Hesse’s command was hacked apart his call for aid was answered by Johan of Bruges. Bruges had the Dutch conscripts engage their French counterparts and silence their flanking fire whilst he took his own 300 men from the Orange Company into Schaluinen to try and salvage the situation.
As the battle hung in the balance on the right flank, the left was grinding into stalemate. The Duc de la Force continued to fix Georg Boleyn’s infantry while von Mansfeld dealt with Giovanni’s cavalry. Mansfeld knew he need to close to defeat Giovanni, which his heavier cavalry could not do. Instead he settled for drawing Giovanni away from the battlefield which allowed la Force to close on the remaining infantry with impunity.
By early evening the battle was balanced on a knife-edge, with both lines of infantry locked in a bloody tussle. Edvard had long ago committed his second line to the fray but the French conscripts were proving more resilient than he had believed possible and de Bonne’s competent command kept them in the fight. Meanwhile, Tilly sensed his opportunity. The over-stressed and leaderless remains of Cleves’ command were successfully holding the 5,000 conscripts of De Barre’s column, but they were vulnerable after their commander had run off into the fire of Schaluinen. Tilly turned his cannon on them, and commanded de Bonne’s right division, under the command of Guilliame III de Lamboy, to charge into the leaderless Dutch flank. The young man, eager to avenge his father, did just this, and with Tilly’s support, broke this wing entirely.
King Edvard’s own division, the next one in line, saw this but were themselves engaged and could do little to stem the tide. With Giovanni off chasing Mansfeld, Johan of Bruges and Paul of Hesse in the village, and the rest of the line in combat, there was no-one left to commit to the hole in his line. Accordingly, Edvard ordered that his infantry disengage and retreat, sending frantic orders for Giovanni and the remnants of the Frisians to cover him. By now Schaluinen had been entirely surrounded, and the most experienced elements of the Protestant army were left trapped inside, and were being slowly strangled by Bucquoy and de Barre. Edvard had no choice but to leave them to their fate. With darkness looming, and their army in retreat, the Protestant forces in the village finally surrendered.
Paul of Hesse was taken into custody but Johan of Bruges would die of his wounds within two days of the battle. If the Battle of Antwerp had been a setback for the Protestant cause, then the Battle of Tommel had been a complete disaster. King Edvard had lost 19,000 men from his army, including most of his cavalry and experienced infantry as well as three of his best commanders; one dead, one captured, and one in disgrace. The Dutch King left garrisons in Maastricht, Eindhoven and Hertogenbosch before withdrawing all the way back to Utrecht with only 15,000 men.
In contrast, for Tilly, Tommel had been the vindication of all of his efforts. It had proven the value of the Dixiem system of conscription, the power of Grenadiers and column tactics, but most of all the Brabant Campaign had given hope to the entirety of Catholic Europe. Antwerp had joined their cause, the whole of the Netherlands below the Waal, save a few cities, had been captured, and the Protestant armies had been forced into retreat. Tommel had cost Tilly 9,000 men, but this still left him with over 40,000 men with yet more on the way from France, Spain, Portugal, Savoy and the Italian cities. The battle had also confirmed the positions of a number of commanders. Henri IV made Tilly Duke of Brabant for his efforts and the Marquis De Barre became Duc de Liege. The young Gulliame III de Lamboy had avenged his father and regained his ancestral territory near Liege itself as well as the title Seigneur de Lamboy. Most of all Tilly had become the undisputed Catholic Marshall; it had been his plan and tactics which had regained Brabant for the Holy See, and there were none now in Christendom, save the Pope himself, who could argue with him.
Thanks for watching the Generals and Kings channel and we will catch you again on the next one.