Battle of Dettingen, 1743: the last battle led by a British king

Dettingen was a battle the allies should have lost. Their own king had marched them into a trap between a river and a range of wooded hills, with their supplies cut off and a larger French army waiting. What saved them was one French general's impatience, the steadiness of the British infantry and the stubbornness of a few cavalry regiments. The National Army Museum sums it up: the allies missed a chance to inflict a heavier defeat, but they had also had a lucky escape.²

Background: a war over an inheritance

When the Emperor Charles VI died in October 1740, he left his Habsburg lands to his daughter Maria Theresa, as the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 provided. Several powers disputed her right, and France backed her rivals; the War of the Austrian Succession followed. George II, King of Great Britain and Elector of Hanover, took Maria Theresa's side, both to protect the Austrian Netherlands from France and, as BritishBattles.com notes, to guard Hanover.³

In 1742 a British army crossed to the Continent and joined Hanoverian and Austrian troops in what became known as the Pragmatic Army, named for the sanction it existed to defend. Its commander was the veteran Field Marshal the Earl of Stair, who wanted to strike at France from the Low Countries. The king overruled him and ordered the army east into Germany instead. At home, the National Army Museum notes, critics accused the king and his ministers of sacrificing British interests to those of Hanover, a charge BritishBattles.com echoes when it says the army was there as much to protect Hanover as Flanders.⁴

Armies and commanders

The army marched up the Main and camped near Aschaffenburg, where there was little forage for the horses and little food for the men. Across the river moved a larger French army under Marshal the Duc de Noailles. By bridging the Main at Seligenstadt, downstream, the French cut the allies off from their supplies at Hanau. When George II joined the army on 19 June, he found it trapped and close to starving, its soldiers turning to plunder. The Queen's Royal Hussars Museum, heir to one of the regiments that fought there, judges the king intrepid in battle but a ditherer in council: he took a week to order the retreat.⁵

The strength of the armies is uncertain. The Queen's Royal Surrey Regiment gives 40,000 allies against 70,000 French, BritishBattles.com 50,000 against 70,000, and the National Army Museum puts the French camps at about 60,000. Fewer than half of these men were engaged on either side, J. W. Fortescue wrote in his History of the British Army in 1899. The allied generals besides the king included Stair, the Duke of Ahremberg and Marshal Neipperg for the Austrians and General Ilton for the Hanoverians; the French force that crossed the river was led by the Duc de Gramont.⁶

The battle in phases

The trap. At one in the morning of 27 June Noailles learned that the allies were on the move. He sent some 28,000 men over his bridges at Seligenstadt to hold Dettingen and the boggy ravine in front of it, and ordered another force across the river above Aschaffenburg to close in behind. With the Main on one side and the wooded Spessart hills on the other, the allies were caught, as Fortescue put it, in Noailles's mousetrap.⁷

Forming up under fire. The allied column, encumbered by its baggage, had to turn into a line of battle on a narrow plain that, by a dragoon officer's account quoted by the Queen's Royal Hussars Museum and by Fortescue's reckoning, left room for only twenty-two or twenty-three battalions in front. French batteries on the far bank of the Main fired into the left of the line the whole time. BritishBattles.com estimates that deploying took from nine in the morning until noon.⁸

Gramont's mistake. Noailles's plan depended on Gramont staying behind the ravine and letting the allies attack him across it. Instead, around noon, Gramont led his troops forward over the ravine, with the swamp now behind them. The National Army Museum calls it the move that changed the whole battle: the bog that should have stopped the allies became a trap for the French.⁹

The cavalry fight on the left. The elite French household cavalry, the Maison du Roi, charged the allied left by the river. Bland's King's Own Dragoons, two squadrons that had stood for hours under the French guns, met nine squadrons of them. The regiment lost 42 men killed and 106 wounded, and Fortescue reckoned its losses at more than twice those of any other regiment. Trooper Thomas Brown fought his way back through the French ranks with the regiment's lost standard, and the king made him a knight banneret on the field.¹⁰

Turning point

The decisive clash came in the center. George II's horse, frightened by the musketry, bolted and carried him to the rear; he came back on foot and led his infantry from the right of the line. The French Guards advanced against the British foot and were met by platoon fire, a rolling sequence of volleys along the whole battalion front. After three volleys they broke. Fortescue thought the most striking features of the day were the deadly accuracy of the British fire and the poor showing of the French infantry, which Noailles himself censured more severely than anyone.¹¹

As the French infantry gave way, the allies pushed them back through the bog and took Dettingen. The whole French army streamed toward the bridges and fords of the Main. One of the bridges of boats collapsed and many French soldiers drowned; the French Guards, mocked at home as the ducks of the Main, were singled out for blame. The Duke of Cumberland, the king's son, was wounded in the leg, a wound that troubled him for the rest of his life.¹²

Aftermath

Stair begged the king to pursue, but George II, Fortescue wrote, was too thankful to have escaped Noailles's mousetrap to make use of his luck. The allies resumed their march to their magazines at Hanau. BritishBattles.com gives British losses of 265 killed and 558 wounded, and Hanoverian and Austrian losses that bring the allied total to about 2,350; Fortescue put the French loss at not much less than 5,000 killed, wounded and captured, about twice the allied figure, while BritishBattles.com gives 8,000 but calls the figure unreliable.¹³

Strategically little changed. The National Army Museum notes that the battle had little impact on the wider war, whose focus soon shifted to Flanders, and Fortescue that it virtually closed the campaign for the British, though it did stop French reinforcements from reaching the Danube. The war went on for five more years, fought out mostly in the Low Countries.¹⁴› Battle of Rocoux, 1746

Legacy and memory

Dettingen is remembered above all for the king. No reigning British monarch has led soldiers into battle since. In Britain the victory was celebrated in churches and public places, and Handel was commissioned to write the Dettingen Te Deum for the official thanksgiving. Fortescue, less impressed, recalled the endless stanzas of execrable verse written in the king's praise.¹⁵

The battle also left its mark on the regiments. When George II saw a regiment with buff facings advancing, the story goes, he called out to them as the Buffs; told that this was the 31st Foot, he answered, Well done the Young Buffs, and the nickname stuck. After the battle the king revived the old custom of creating knights bannerets on the field: Fortescue notes that Stair was the first of them and Dragoon Thomas Brown the last.¹⁶