On 11 August 1674, near the village of Seneffe in the Spanish Netherlands (today Belgium), Louis II de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, attacked the Dutch, Spanish and Imperial army of William III of Orange as it marched across the front of his camp. Condé fell on the allied rearguard and captured the baggage, but William regrouped and fought on in a battle that lasted about twelve hours, into the moonlight. Condé had stopped the allied advance; William claimed the French had gained not an inch of ground. It was one of the great Condé's last battles.
Louis XIV against a coalition
In 1672 Louis XIV invaded the Dutch Republic, with Condé and Turenne in command of the French army. Over the following years the war turned into a struggle between France and a coalition of the Dutch, the Spanish and a number of German states, and much of the fighting took place in the Spanish Netherlands. William III of Orange, stadholder of the Dutch Republic, was at the center of the coalition and usually commanded its armies in the field.1
In August 1674 William and Condé lay close to one another near Charleroi. The historian Pádraig Lenihan writes that the Dutch and their Spanish allies planned to slip past Condé near Seneffe and threaten his supply routes.2
The rearguard on the track
Instead of making a detour round a thick belt of woodland, Lenihan writes, William took the advice of a senior Spanish officer and sent his army along a track on the inner side of the wood, which could in fact be overlooked from the French camp. Condé, hardly believing his luck, swooped on the allied rearguard as it filed along the narrow track and captured the entire baggage train.3
William regrouped and held his ground. The fighting went on for some twelve hours and did not end until moonlight shone on the carnage. Writing to his grandmother afterwards, William consoled himself that the French had gained not an inch of ground from his army. The Musée de l'Armée, which holds a painting of the battle from the workshop of Adam Frans van der Meulen, describes Seneffe as one of Condé's final combats.4
Victory claimed by both
Each side celebrated. Britannica credits Condé with halting the Prince of Orange's army at Seneffe on 11 August 1674 before he went on to raise the siege of Oudenarde. In the Dutch Republic, prints of the battle were published for years afterward, among them the etching shown above, issued in 1684 after Romeyn de Hooghe. Lenihan uses Seneffe as an example of the mistakes William tended to repeat, and remarks that no one was better at retrieving hopeless situations, or at falling into them.5
The following year Condé was sent to Alsace after the death of Turenne and forced the Imperial commander Raimondo Montecuccoli to raise the siege of Haguenau; it was, Britannica says, his last campaign and victory. Condé's first great victory, won thirty-one years earlier, is told in our article on the Battle of Rocroi, and his great colleague and rival in our biography of Turenne. William's best-known battle, the Boyne, is in our article on the Battle of the Boyne.6 › Battle of Saint Gotthard, 1664
Also on this day
- 1809: Battle of Almonacid. Near Almonacid in the Toledo region, Sébastiani's French IV Corps, which included Polish units, fought General Venegas and his Spanish Army of La Mancha in the Peninsular War.
