The Army of Flanders was one of the pre-eminent
military formations of early modern Europe, a pillar
of Spanish Habsburg power as well as the military academy of successive
generations of European aristocrats. As such it has naturally attracted the attention
of scholars; in the English speaking world most notably the classic works
of Geoffrey Parker and I A A Thompson. Much of this scholarship
has however focussed on issues of grand strategy and logistics. Fernando
Gonzalez de Leon offers a view from a slightly different angle, examining
the Army’s high command structures from a social and military perspective.
The tale Gonzalez de Leon tells is one of largely
uninterrupted decline from a foundational golden age under the command
of the Duke of Alba in which promotions to senior command positions were
made on merit and even Spanish grandees were proud to do time in the ranks
of the infantry. What
he terms “the School of Alba” retained an influence in the
years up to the 1609 truce with the Dutch but an increasingly diluted
one as even such talented generals as the Duke of Parma and Ambrogio Spinola
struggled to contain abuses. With the coming of peace the
army became increasingly a creature of court patronage
for the Archduke Albert and his wife Isabella.
When war resumed in 1621 command problems rapidly
became visible. The dominant figure in the government of King Philip
IV, the Count (later Count-Duke) of Olivares, a man convinced that “lack
of leadership” was the main issue Spain’s armies faced, tried
to remedy the situation. His first response, the establishment of
military academies, fizzled out. His next one was to add “lustre” to
the command structures in Flanders by systematically appointing representatives
of the Spanish higher aristocracy to senior positions in the expectation
that they would learn on the job (appointments were made on a temporary
basis with confirmation in principle dependent on merit), a process culminating
in the choice of the king’s brother Fernando, Cardinal-Infante as
supreme commander.
Olivares’ initiatives turned out to have
unintended consequences. Grandees scorned infantry service,
so the Army of Flanders’ cavalry was increasingly composed of untrained
blue bloods who proved unreliable in the field. Aristocrats expected
senior posts (preferably independent ones) so there was a proliferation
of detached commands with unclear lines of authority between them, a tendency
for command by committee and rampant rank inflation. Men who held
temporary positions were disinclined to take much interest in their units
outside the campaign season. Grandees, often reluctant soldiers,
were more comfortable leading parades in Brussels than manning the siege
trenches at Breda. The situation was further complicated by
fragmentation on national lines. Spanish units represented at most
some 20% of the Army of Flanders but Spaniards expected to hold all the
senior command positions; the claim that local noblemen were unreliable
became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Genuinely combined
operations with allies proved virtually impossible-the 1636 Corbie campaign
fizzled out through lack of co-operation with Piccolomini’s Imperial
forces while in 1654 the siege of Arras was undertaken by three
separate armies which scarcely communicated and ended in a predictable
fiasco.
The net result was a lumbering army, grossly over-officered
(by the 1650's the officer to men ratio was about one
to four) yet under-commanded, sluggish out of winter quarters and slow
in its response to threats. It
was also backward in its structures and armament (the Spanish infantry
remained wedded to the pike with the result that the Army became increasingly
deficient in firepower by comparison with its Dutch and French foes). The
battlefield heroism of the Spanish infantry could move
even the enemy to tears but was increasingly deployed in despairing last
stands which snatched some honour from crushing defeat as at Rocroi and
Lens.
Gonzalez de Leon’s account of developments from
the resumption of the Dutch war in 1621 (the main focus of his book) is
generally persuasive. At times one loses sight of the
wood among the trees in the rather dense presentation of command appointments
and structures while a clear time line of operations would have been helpful
since the book is not organised on strictly chronological lines. His
focus on the high command means that there is little
sense of how the forces he describes played out at unit level though he
implies that a de
facto “glass ceiling” confined long serving but socially
low ranking officers to junior positions.
More seriously, the overall “decline and fall” model
is problematic, especially as the Army’s pristine condition under
Alba is asserted rather than demonstrated in detail- the chapters on the
years 1567-1621 are at times sketchy and even they tend to focus on the
forces leading to degeneration from an assumed high point. “Promotion
on merit” is a slippery concept which requires more deconstruction
than it receives, especially since the upholders of “the School
of Alba” writing in the 1580's and 90's did not view merit and experience
as synonymous. It is interesting to find that Alba, hammer of Protestant
heretics, was prepared to promote men with converso ancestry but
surely there was more to merit than this. It is also worth noting
that the post-1621 Army of Flanders was never guilty
of the atrocities committed by its predecessor in the 1570's (in fairness
Gonzalez de Leon recognises this issue) nor did it disintegrate into mutinous
inaction as had happened in the 1590's.
There is also a certain fuzziness over what Gonzalez
de Leon characterises as the forcible remilitarisation
of the Castilian nobility. He makes a persuasive case for the detachment of
Spanish social, and indeed cultural, elites from military values from
at least the 1640's- certainly by comparison with their French counterparts. He
argues that aristocrats were not being appointed to senior positions on
the basis that they would assume financial responsibility for their commands;
instead they had to be bullied and bribed to undertake command roles with
funding diverted from functions like intelligence gathering to subsidise
them and promotion structures loaded in their favour. On the other
hand he points to the financial costs of service as a factor discouraging
aristocrats from serving, cases of men appointed to command positions
in Flanders spending more time in Madrid lobbying for pensions than with
their units and very low military participation by the top ranks of the
aristocracy. This sits awkwardly with the picture painted elsewhere
of almost total Spanish aristocratic dominance of senior ranks even into
the war-weary 1650's. Clearly additional factors were at work
which require further elucidation.
Despite these conceptual issues, Gonzalez de Leon
has provided a fascinating case study of the decline of an army which
had once been at the forefront of military quality to mediocrity and worse
due in part to misguided appointment policies. As usual with Brill
publications, the book is handsomely produced but has a fair sprinkling
of misprints and typos- including the startling assertion that Walloon
units were equipped with the arquebus
“since there were not sufficient local recruits corpulent enough
to handle the musket” (323), which throws an interesting light on
logistical issues.