Battle of Almansa, 1707: the day Spain chose its Bourbon king

Almansa is a battle full of paradoxes. The army of the French and Spanish Bourbons was led by an Englishman, James FitzJames, Duke of Berwick, the natural son of the deposed King James II. The army of England and its allies was led by a Frenchman, Henri de Massue, Earl of Galway, a Huguenot exile. In a few hours on a spring afternoon they decided who would be King of Spain.²

A war for the Spanish crown

When the childless Charles II of Spain died in 1700, he left his crowns to Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV. England, the Dutch Republic, Austria and later Portugal backed a rival, the Habsburg Archduke Charles. The war in Spain swung back and forth. The allies took Barcelona and Valencia, and in 1706, while Philip failed to retake Barcelona, an allied force even entered Madrid, though it could not be supplied so far from its bases and withdrew.³ › Battle of Málaga, 1704

The allied victories at Ramillies and Turin in 1706 put France on the defensive, and Galway, based on the Valencian coast, planned a new offensive for 1707. His army had wintered around Alicante, where fresh troops from England had landed after a terrible voyage: of 8,000 men who embarked, the Queen's Royal Hussars Museum records, only 4,400 came ashore alive.⁴

A race against reinforcements

Berwick had placed his army at Almansa and was in no hurry. In the account of the nineteenth-century historian Modesto Lafuente, he was waiting for the Duke of Orléans, who was coming from France with more troops and the supreme command, and he knew that much of his infantry was raw. His Spanish officers grumbled that he was avoiding battle, and some whispered that, as the half-brother of Queen Anne of England, he had a secret understanding with the English. Berwick heard the talk and ignored it.⁵

Galway, for his part, wanted to fight before the reinforcements arrived. Reports from deserters spoke of 8,000 more men only hours away. The allies broke off the siege of the castle of Villena and, early on 25 April, set out on a long, tiring march across country toward Almansa. They found Berwick drawn up in front of the town in the usual two lines, infantry in the center and cavalry on the wings.⁶

The battle

The odds were heavy. Berwick had about 25,000 men, roughly half Spanish and half French; Galway had 15,000 to 16,000, mostly Portuguese and English, with Dutch, German and Huguenot units. An allied order of battle in the Royal Collection notes 46 battalions and 61 squadrons, and adds that some of the best troops had gone to Aragon with Archduke Charles, so the first line was stretched and the second line was weak. At the insistence of the Portuguese, their troops took the post of honor on the right, while English and Dutch cavalry with English battalions between them held the left.⁷

After a short artillery exchange Galway attacked in the afternoon. On his left the English and Dutch horse were driven back by weight of numbers, rallied and charged again; Brigadier General Killigrew was killed in the second charge. In the center the British infantry did well. They drove back the Bourbon center and, by Lafuente's account, killed the three brigadiers who led it and pushed on to the gates of Almansa. Berwick fed in cavalry and infantry from his reserve and restored the line.⁸

The decisive blow fell on the allied right. As the allied center advanced, a gap opened between the British and the Portuguese under the Marquess of Minas, and the Franco-Spanish cavalry rode into it. Accounts of what followed differ. The Mercian Regiment Museum says the Portuguese fought bravely for some time before they collapsed and fled, while the Queen's Royal Hussars Museum repeats the older British charge that most of their cavalry ran at the first shot. Either way the allied center was now attacked on three sides. Alnutt's Regiment, later the 36th Foot, was nearly destroyed and its colonel captured. Both Galway and Minas were wounded.⁹

Surrender at Caudete

Galway used his remaining cavalry to get part of his infantry away. Thirteen battalions, however, lost touch with the rest of the army. Under the Dutch Count Dohna they fell back in the dark to high ground near Caudete, some eight miles from the field, and the next morning, surrounded by Bourbon troops under d'Asfeld, they surrendered. The Oxford Companion to British History counts more than 3,000 English and Dutch soldiers forced to give up.¹⁰

The scale of the defeat depends on whom one reads. The Mercian Regiment Museum gives 3,000 Franco-Spanish dead and as many wounded, against 4,000 allied casualties and 5,000 prisoners. Lafuente, following Bourbon accounts, claimed 12,000 prisoners, 5,000 allied dead, all the artillery and 100 colors for barely 2,000 Bourbon losses. A recent study by the historian Aitor Díaz Paredes puts the allied loss at more than 7,000 dead and about 10,000 prisoners, and Berwick's at 5,000 killed and wounded.¹¹

What Almansa decided

Almansa ended Archduke Charles's real hope of winning Spain and confirmed the Bourbon succession everywhere except Catalonia. In Díaz Paredes's words, it moved the front from Calatayud and Elche back to Lleida and Tortosa, and it had immediate political consequences through the Nueva Planta decrees, after which a return to the old order was impossible. Valencia and Aragon lost their ancient fueros, their own laws and institutions, in reprisal for supporting the Habsburg claimant.¹² › Battle of Saragossa, 1710

Berwick received the Golden Fleece and the Spanish title of Duke of Liria and Jérica, and a monument rose on the battlefield. Years later the young Infante Charles, the future Charles III, stopped at Almansa to see it, and his mother Elisabeth Farnese reminded him that the family owed the throne of Spain to that day. Philip V's descendants still sit on it.¹³