The Prodigious Marshal: Being the Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Maurice De Saxe, Marshal of France: Son of the King of Poland, Conqueror of the English, Pretender to the Dukedom of Kurland, and Universal Lover

By Edmund B. D’Auvergne

Few military leaders have been as successful or as flamboyant as Maurice Marshal de Saxe, who reigned supreme in the tangled wars that raged across Europe during the early-Eighteenth Century. In this pithy biography, Edmund d’Auvergne traces the ascent of the future marshal from his lowly roots as an illegitimate son of Augustus II of Poland. He fought in many uniforms, serving the Army of the Holy Roma Empire, Imperial Army and most famously at the head of the French Army. Winning many battles in his career, he is best remembered for winning the decisive battle of Fontenoy which established French supremacy in the War of Austrian Succession.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Jun 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787205178

Edmund B. D’Auvergne

Edmund Basil D’Auvergne (c. 1876-1968) was a Scottish-born English writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was born in Glasgow around 1876 and later lived in London. He is the author of a number of historical books, including An ABC Guide to the Great War (1918), Napoleon the Third: A Biography (1929) and John, King of England: A Modern History (1934). He also wrote a novel, The Beloved Adventuress: A Novel (1930). D’Auvergne died in Midhurst, Sussex in 1968.

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Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.

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THE PRODIGIOUS MARSHAL

BEING THE LIFE AND EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF MAURICE DE SAXE, MARSHAL OF FRANCE, SON OF THE KING OF POLAND, CONQUEROR OF THE ENGLISH, PRETENDER TO THE DUKEDOM OF KURLAND, AND UNIVERSAL LOVER

BY

EDMUND B. D’AUVERGNE

AUTHOR OF

NAPOLEON THE THIRD, LOLA MONTEZ, A QUEEN AT BAY, ETC.

Illustrated

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

PREFACE 5

ILLUSTRATIONS 7

BOOK I 8

CHAPTER I 8

Maurice’s birth and parentage—The Königsmarks—The nymph Aurora and the lusty King—Prim princesses are scandalized by the morals of a canoness. 8

CHAPTER II 14

Childhood—The Elector acknowledges his son—Education—Maurice a stupid scholar—Apprenticed to soldiering—First smell of gunpowder. 14

CHAPTER III 20

Maurice follows in his father’s footsteps—A young Hercules—A daredevil and a rake-hell—His unfortunate marriage and still more unfortunate wife—Gallant feat of arms at Krosniec—Divorced—His relief at his emancipation. 20

CHAPTER IV 27

Having made Saxony too hot for him, Maurice goes to Paris—The speculation mania—Enters the service of France—Rumoured intrigue with the Princesse de Conti—Sobered by the death of an old duchess—Visits England—Writes his memoirs—Sighs for a better world. 27

CHAPTER V 34

Maurice falls in love—Adrienne Lecouvreur—Her chequered career and wretched youth—A creature of exquisite sensibility—Their love pursues anything .but a smooth course—Tortures of jealousy—Maurice’s infidelity revealed by a wrongly addressed letter. 34

CHAPTER VI 40

The Duchy of Kurland—Its curious history—Fat Nan, its ugly duchess—Maurice prepared to marry her if he can get the duchy as her dowry—Prepares to marry Princess Elizabeth instead of Nan—Starts for Kurland in defiance of his father’s orders. 40

CHAPTER VII 47

The fight for a dukedom—First stage—Maurice elected by the Kurlanders—Poland forbids the banns—Anger of Menshikov—Maurice drives a bargain with him—Entertaining story of Maurice’s defence and a distressed damsel. 47

CHAPTER VIII 53

Which princess does Maurice want?—His plans for the government of his duchy—King Augustus plucks up courage—Loses it again—Friendly attitude of the Czarina—Maurice is placed under the ban—Another bride for Maurice—Forfeits Fat Nan’s favour by his indiscreet gallantries—Dreary exile—Maurice pays a flying visit to Paris. 53

CHAPTER IX 61

The fight for the ducal crown—Last stage—Maurice in a shipwreck—Maurice’s Isle of the Proscribed—Longing for Adrienne—Takes to flight—Offers to sell a seaport to England in exchange for her support—Reply of the British Government—Collapse of Maurice’s matrimonial projects—Death of Aurora von Königsmark. 61

BOOK II 69

CHAPTER I 69

Adrienne welcomes back Maurice—Unlikely story of her infidelity—He takes pleasure in tormenting her—A quarrel behind the scenes of the Comédie Française. 69

CHAPTER II 74

The alleged poison plot—The Duchesse de Bouillon, the actress and the hunch-backed Abbé 74

CHAPTER III 81

Adrienne Lecouvreur dies protesting her love for Maurice—Suspicions of poison—Her ignominious burial—The attitude of the Church of Rome (Gallican branch) towards the mummer—Bouret retracts his allegations—Death of the Duchesse de Bouillon. 81

CHAPTER IV 86

The camp at Mühlberg—Maurice turns author—His Rêveries—Reflections on the art of war—Also on the propagation of the human species—Advocates temporary marriage and compulsory divorce. 86

CHAPTER V 92

Death of Augustus the Strong—The Empress Ann frowns upon her old suitor—War of the Polish Succession—Maurice gets the better of Prince Eugene—Gazetted lieutenant-general—Turns journalist—Conversation with Louis XV. 92

CHAPTER VI 98

Beginning of the war of the Austrian Succession—The magnificent Comte de Belle-Isle—Maurice takes command of a division on the Danube—The Escalade of Prague. 98

CHAPTER VII 104

Maurice visits Moscow—Meeting between him and the Empress Elizabeth—Gargantuan banquets. 104

CHAPTER VIII 109

The French lose ground—Fall of Prague—Maurice wins the confidence of the army—Operations in Franconia—The King promises promotion. 109

CHAPTER IX 114

Louis XV determines to assist the Pretender—Maurice placed in command of an expedition to invade England—Army and flotilla assembled at Dunkerque—Maurice meets Prince Charles Edward—Hopes of an invasion wrecked by the tempest—Mysterious behaviour of a Jacobite agent—The enterprise abandoned—Maurice gazetted Marshal of France. 114

BOOK III 119

CHAPTER I 119

Maurice takes command of an army in Flanders—Il ne s’agit pas de vivre, il s’agit de partir—Defeats an Allied army in the Battle of Fontenoy—An Irish account of the victory. 119

CHAPTER II 127

Maurice takes Brussels—Organizes a theatrical company to accompany the army—Triumphal reception in Paris—Dangerous rivalry of the Prince de Conti—Maurice again defeats the Allies at Raucoux—Negotiates marriage of his niece with the Dauphin—Ceremonies at the wedding. 127

CHAPTER III 134

A third victory at Laufeld—Peace negotiations opened—Lowendahl takes Bergen-op-Zoom—His extraordinary career—The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle—Plight of discharged soldiers. 134

CHAPTER IV 140

Maurice de Saxe falls in love with an actor’s wife and succeeds in seducing her—She returns to her husband—The husband is ruined and compelled to go into hiding—Maurice causes the wife to be arrested and imprisoned—Her appeals to him—She surrenders to him at last and is set at liberty. 140

CHAPTER V 150

Revenant de la revue—Maurice welcomed at Dresden and Berlin—Frederick the Great’s opinion of him—Maurice granted the Isle of Tobago—The connexion of that island with Kurland—This scheme and other projects of kingship frustrated—The Marshal’s manner of life at Chambord. 150

CHAPTER VI 158

Maurice dies—Sensational rumours about his death—His funeral—Panegyrics—His will—His daughter, Aurora de Saxe—Estimate. 158

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 165

PREFACE

A MAN who had the singular distinction of beating a British Army in three pitched battles and of hanging his castle at Chambord with blood-stained British flags, should be remembered at least by English people. Yet to nine persons out of ten (if this work attains so large a circulation) who open this book, the very name of Marshal Saxe will probably be unfamiliar. The eldest of the three hundred and fifty-four illegitimate sons of a king, he soon achieved a striking pre-eminence in love and war. Ill content with the secondary rank to which his baton sinister assigned him, he restlessly aspired to kingship. Possessing himself of the duchy of Kurland, he held it for a time in the teeth of the opposition of two mighty nations. Two princesses who became in turn empresses of Russia would have married him, and despite a profound repugnance to the married state, he might have sat upon the throne of the Czars but for his inability to resist a pretty face. Women adored him and grovelled at his feet. Adrienne Lecouvreur, the greatest tragic actress of her day, with her dying breath proclaimed him to be her universe, her hope, and her God. Strong as Hercules, valiant as Achilles, lustful as a satyr, he captivated women, was loved by his soldiers, and hated by his peers. For France, at Fontenoy, he won the first great victory over the English she had secured since Joan of Arc’s day. But for the unfriendly winds, he might have marched into London town and placed the Stuart pretender upon the throne of Britain.

His was a versatile genius. Absolutely unlettered and the despair in childhood of his tutors, he thought clearly and anticipated modern developments. Living as the world lived and making the best of life as he found it, he saw through the shams and superstitions on which existing society is founded. Personally heartless in his treatment of women, he denounced their enslavement by men. A prince himself, he saw in European civilization merely a system of oppressors and oppressed. He advocated universal compulsory military service and, more humane than modern commanders, would not suffer spies to be hanged. Attention is particularly directed to the chapter attached to his curious Rêveries, wherein he proposes Term Marriages and the compulsory dissolution of barren unions as the only means of keeping up the population and throws the responsibility for its decline upon the Roman Catholic Church.

A hero he appeared to his contemporaries; in his infamous pursuit of an actress who rejected his suit, he appears in later life as the typical villain of melodrama. My life, he said on his death-bed, has been a beautiful dream. It makes a good stirring story, calculated, let it be admitted, rather to entertain than to edify.

The author believes this to be the most comprehensive life of Marshal Saxe so far published in any language. His campaigns have been described and criticized by officers who took part in them and by later French military men. He left a mass of papers, mostly of a semi-official nature, which were freely drawn upon by St. René Taillandier for the preparation of the biography (the best in French), published about seventy years ago. We owe much to a slightly earlier work, embodying the researches of Dr. Weber in the Saxon archives. For the life of Aurora von Königsmark, the leading authority is Cramer’s Denkwürdigkeiten, used by Paul Burg in his masterly monograph. By an examination of unpublished State papers in our own Record Office, the present writer has been able to throw light on his hero’s fantastic proposals to cede to Great Britain a port on the Baltic; and he is the first to trace the origin of his no less fantastic attempt to secure the sovereignty of the remote isle of Tobago. As last in the field, the author has also been able to avail himself of the letters of Adrienne Lecouvreur, recently brought to light by the Marquis d’Argenson, and of M. Waliszewski’s valuable studies in Russian history, which elucidate many of the queer diplomatic imbroglios of the period. Thanks are due to Miss Vega d’Auvergne for her assistance in comparing and translating from German authorities.

EDMUND B. D’AUVERGNE

ILLUSTRATIONS

Maurice de Saxe

The Countess Aurora von Königsmark

Augustus II, King of Poland, Elector of Saxony

Adrienne Lecouvreur

Elizabeth, Empress of Russia

Maurice de Saxe, Marshal of France

Marshal Löwenthal

Madame Favart

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

Maurice’s birth and parentage—The Königsmarks—The nymph Aurora and the lusty King—Prim princesses are scandalized by the morals of a canoness.

WITH something of a flourish, not at all after the apologetic manner usual in the case of those born out of wedlock, was Maurice de Saxe introduced to the world. In the register of the ancient town of Goslar, in the Harz, then one of the Free Imperial Cities of Germany, against the date October 28th, 1696, we read: On this day was born to the Illustrious Lady, residing in the house of Heinrich Christoph Winkel, a Little Son, who received in baptism the name of Maurice.{1} At once polite and discreet was the notice, congratulatory almost. In very different terms would such an event have been recorded in the England of that date—Baptized this day, Maurice, the bastard of a strange woman delivered in this parish; or in most European countries at the present day—Born, Maurice, masculine sex, parents unknown.

One is half tempted to credit the clerk (if on such an occasion his duties were not discharged by the burgomaster himself) with prophetic vision—a sense that the child would turn out to be the most illustrious native of Goslar and that his Christian name would be remembered when the styles and titles of his natural parents were forgotten. But it is more likely that the scribe who wrote Illustrious Lady denied himself, only out of deference to some last-minute scruple of hers, the satisfaction of recording her gracious name; for two pins, I hazard, he would have added the rank and name of the father. True, there were hundreds of infants in Saxony who had an equal claim to that paternity; but how noble it would have looked, standing out against the long roll of births in vulgar wedlock, the entry, Maurice, son of the High and Mighty prince, Frederick Augustus, the most serene Elector of Saxony, and of the High and Well-born Lady, Maria Aurora, Countess of Königsmark, of the Abbey of Quedlinburg, spinster.

For everybody knew.

The Königsmarks were a fine old family. They were counts in Sweden, but Sweden had not yet renounced all her claims south of the Baltic, and they were quite at home in Germany. They could point with pride to the Königsmark who had won battles for Venice and wrenched whole provinces from the Turk. A stronger hold perhaps on popular imagination had been taken by that other member of the family who had stopped the rich Englishman’s{2} coach and pistolled him in masterly style. A more dangerous path was followed by his younger brother, Philip Christopher, when he renewed acquaintance with the sweetheart of his childhood, Sophia Dorothea, wife of the Hanoverian heir. For lovers—especially royal ones—there are many eyes—those of an enemy had marked these two down. One day, in all the courts of Germany it was being whispered that Sophia Dorothea had been sent back in disgrace and under arrest to her father’s castle and that a suit for divorce had been filed against her. And the dashing Count Königsmark had vanished as completely as though he had been sucked down into a quicksand.

To that unhappy frustrate love, the great Marshal of France, the conqueror of the English, owed his birth. From the mingled princely and Königsmark strains, it was decreed a hero should arise. The knives of the assassins of Hanover having cut the web begun by Fate, it was left to the sister to mend and to complete it.

For the lost Count had two sisters, one married to Count Löwenhaupt, the younger, Maria Aurora, already pretty well famed as a beauty at the German courts. The youngest of the Königsmarks found herself still unmarried at the age of thirty or thereabouts, with an income of not more than thirty thousand thalers to tempt suitors of her own rank. Lovers, indeed, she had not lacked—all of whom, there is reason to believe, respected her purity. There had been an early girlish affair with Gustav Horn, the nephew of a Swedish field-marshal; he always remained faithful to her and his letters, alone among those she had received, she always cherished. In 1692, she was considering the advances of a seventeen-years-old Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, but perhaps because she was ten years his senior, among other drawbacks, nothing came of it. If he was too young, another ducal admirer, Anton Ulrich of Wolfenbüttel (sworn enemy of the Guelphs of Hanover) was too old—at any rate, while accepting his hospitality, Aurora let it be understood she was engaged to a rich General Maier. But no marriage took place. The lovely Königsmark went on exchanging letters with the Mecklenburger and young Horn, by no means discouraging the interest of a Hohenlohe and a Weidel meantime; but while her brother was watching beneath his princess’s window, she tentatively cast a glance around for some other anchorage than marriage. We find her paying visits to the abbey of Quedlinburg, which continued after the Reformation, to offer a dignified and not too austere refuge to surplus princesses and other ladies of very high degree. Horn did his best to keep her thoughts turned cloisterward, preferring, lover-like, to see her a canoness than the wife of another man.

And now, from her preoccupation about her own future, Aurora was roused by the report of her brother’s sudden disappearance. She had been at Hanover with him—there can be no doubt she knew of his love for Sophia Dorothea; from the first she must have divined his end. Mingled with natural sisterly devotion was perhaps a certain curiosity as to what had become of his effects. The court of Hanover, as was to be expected, affected entire ignorance of his fate. But Philip Christopher had been a boon companion of the new Elector of Saxony, Frederick Augustus, and a major-general in his army. With perhaps no other purpose than vengeance on her brother’s murderers, Aurora, denied all satisfaction at Hanover, hastened to Dresden.

Frederick Augustus was now in his twenty-sixth year—at the beginning of the long prime of a monstrously lusty manhood. Whatever expectations may have been formed of his abilities as a ruler—which proved to be nil—he had already stirred a blasé Europe to wonder, if not admiration, by his physical strength and the immensity of his appetites. This was the prince who was credited at his death with three hundred and fifty-four children—a figure which certainly represents only a portion of his contribution towards the world’s population. There must be few Germans, at any rate, who cannot count him as an ancestor. Unlike the Minotaur, with whom in earlier times his identity would surely have been confounded, his highness was understood to prefer married women to virgins. But a first glance at the suppliant Countess Königsmark, presented in all the habiliments of woe by his mother, satisfied him that though not another man’s wife, she was worth winning. She was one of those dark Scandinavians, who may have a streak of the Finn or the Lapp in them, with masses of black hair, fine black eyebrows, lovesick eyes, and—which would be noticed first by the expert voluptuary—exuberant breasts. The young Elector, to do him bare justice, had already shown concern at the sinister disappearance of his officer and friend. Now, at the prayer of this most desirable creature, his concern was redoubled. The tone of his envoy at Hanover became every day more insistent; inquiries after the missing Count were backed by threats. Meanwhile, the amiable prince exerted himself to console Aurora for her brother’s loss. The lady was, of course, well aware of his primary motive. But she held out, and when the Emperor, apprehensive of a breach of the peace between his two feudatories, enjoined silence upon them over this dark and doubtful business, she drove away in dudgeon and perhaps real disgust from Dresden. She soon returned. By this time, no doubt remained that her brother had been made away with and that his murderers, though well she knew them, would never be brought to justice. Her sense of desolation may have weakened the value she had so far placed upon herself. At thirty, with her family discredited by the misadventures of both brothers, she may well have despaired of a brilliant marriage. The role of a prince’s mistress must have seemed more inviting than the stall of a canoness; or even if she had no illusions as to the probable term of such a role, she may have determined to drain a loving-cup before she retired into the sanctuary of respectability. Perhaps, her consent was not asked. A fête champêtre at the Elector’s hunting seat of Moritzburg was the occasion of her conquest—his highness appeared costumed in the appropriate garb of Pan, and after the manner of Pan, he may have possessed himself of the noble Königsmark. Still, since she named her son after the place, her memories of it, it may be supposed, were not unpleasant.

She was rewarded—or compensated—with a palace at Dresden. If she had indeed indulged any dreams of playing the Maintenon, these must soon have been dissipated. She had to do with a mere satyr. His lust sated, Augustus seems early in the day to have sought to pick a quarrel with her. At any rate, his complaint that Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion, is said to have drawn from her the retort, The cases are not parallel. I am not your wife and you are not Cæsar. When she knew she was bearing his child, she sought not the shelter of her seducer’s palace, but—ironically, as it seems to us!—the long-meditated retreat of Quedlinburg. The abbess, her friend, a princess of Saxe-Weimar, made her welcome, reckoning, as some allege, that in the Elector’s mistress the Abbey would find a useful protector. But even to these high-born ladies of the seventeenth century, it smacked a little of the unseemly that an unmarried woman should give birth to her child in an asylum of professed virgins. When her time drew near, the Königsmark, accompanied by the Abbess, journeyed to Halberstadt; and then, for a few weeks, disappeared.

With mixed emotions, she contemplated her newborn child. Her name, as we have seen, she did not cause to be entered on the register; and on the very day of his birth, she wrote a letter to her sister at Vienna, as though nothing had happened. But whether she willed it or not, the news at once got abroad. Menken, an agent maintained by the Saxon minister at Wolfenbüttel, wrote to Dresden: A pretty baby, a young adventurer a fortnight old, has just commenced his adventures, travelling in his cradle with his nurse, from Goslar to Hamburg. His romance begins where his mother’s ends. A nice end to a family which has held its head so high in the world!

To none did the scandalous tidings procure more satisfaction than the Electress Sophia of Hanover, she who had heard with complacency of the murder of her daughter-in-law’s lover. In a letter dated December 4th, 1696, she tells a friend: All that I had heard about the Countess of Königsmark so far was mere rumour. But the rumour is confirmed. She has been brought to bed of a boy at Goslar! She is said to have remarked on this occasion, ‘Now I have won my wager.’

Almost certainly, she did not say it.

Sophia’s niece, the Duchess of Orléans, writing from the uncongenial atmosphere of the French court, was deliciously shocked. Aurora Königsmark must be a wonderful creature and quite without shame. Fancy telling the clerk and the burgomaster that she had brought a bastard into the world! It seems to me that Germany must have changed since my time, for never before have I heard of such shameless doings!

To Frederick Augustus the news was less thrilling. Only a few weeks before he had been presented by his wife, for the first and last time, with a son. The birth of an heir would interest the prince; the birth of another child would leave the satyr cold. The mother no longer tweaked his desire. It is said that he made the unpleasant sequelæ of a puerperal fever the excuse for breaking off the sexual relation. Aurora, it is not to be doubted, took the change with good grace. She was the Countess Königsmark, the sister of his electoral highness’s old crony, and continued to esteem herself his friend. She has got nothing out of him but a son, sneered the waspish Sophia. Possibly, she profited by his influence to overcome the opposition raised by certain high-born ladies against her admission to her cloister. But after all, the Abbess may have argued, Quedlinburg was not a nunnery, and as for nuns—well, everybody had read the Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun, reprinted at The Hague that very year. So, though everybody knew she had borne a child out of wedlock, Aurora was admitted to the aristocratic sisterhood; and four years later, became Lady Superior and Coadjutor.

Twice during the troubled years that followed, the Countess emerged into the political arena to offer her mediation between her ex-lover, now King of Poland, and his terrible enemy and her natural lord, Charles XII of Sweden. On both occasions she was rudely rebuffed. With a sigh, she realized that her part was played. Augustus the Strong had but one use for women, and if he ever accepted the counsel of his former mistress it was because it marched with his own determination and the advice of his all-powerful minister, Count Flemming. Having denied herself, even to the man she really loved, during her golden twenties, the beautiful Swedish woman had yielded to the lecherous Saxon only in order to produce his son. Perhaps, she had merely obeyed a long suppressed craving for motherhood. Certainly, she would never have suspected that she had fulfilled the duty assigned to her brother. The Jacobites used to twit Sophia Dorothea’s son with being the little Königsmark. But the House of Hanover continued unleavened and unillumined by that lively dashing strain. The little Königsmark fell to France and Saxony.

CHAPTER II

Childhood—The Elector acknowledges his son—Education—Maurice a stupid scholar—Apprenticed to soldiering—First smell of gunpowder.

So the future marshal started life without knowing the meaning of the words father and mother. He became aware of these relations as other children hear of and subsequently meet uncles and cousins and grandparents. He was denied the milk from his mother’s breasts, denied even, be it observed, her name, and hurried away from the natal chamber like the child of some terrified adulteress. Perhaps the mother was not altogether shameless, as her enemies supposed her to be. A more probable motive may have been the sad suspicion that the father would be more ready to recognize the child if he were detached absolutely from his mother. For Aurora was far from