Marshal Schomberg (1615-1690), 'The Ablest Soldier of His Age': International Soldiering and the Formation of State Armies in Seventeenth-Century Europe

ISBN-13: 9781903900611 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 249 str.

Matthew Glozier

Opis

Schomberg held high command in British, Portuguese, and French armies. But it is as second-in-command to William of Orange during the Glorious Revolution that he is chiefly remembered. He died at the famous battle of the Boyne, a fitting end to a very public, international and honourable career that highlights so many of the problems and changes of the age in which he lived. Frederick Herman von Schomberg was born into a prominent noble family in the Palatinate in 1615. He was a truly international figure: his father negotiated the marriage of Britain s Princess Royal (James I s daughter, Elizabeth) to the Elector Palatine of the Rhine. Having an English mother and a German father, he would go on to marry a French Huguenot lady, and fight in the armies of more than six nations. His career spans the mercenary system of the Thirty Years War (161848) through to the formation of Europe s first true standing national armies during William III s wars in the 1690s. He was involved in the international politics and diplomacy of Louis XIV s reign, and that king s relations with Britain and the Netherlands in particular. He was also deeply concerned in the plight and exile of the Huguenots in France, and their later international presence in the armies of William of Orange. As a committed Protestant, he suffered the same prejudices in France as they, and his feeling for them is a vital comment on the strength of religious feeling among many high-ranking military leaders at the time. This is the first book-length, scholarly appraisal of the man since 1789, and the first ever in English based on new research."