“When Marshal Turenne attacked the castle in question”
(MS VIII; Works [1903])—The larger context of this particular attack on the castle lay in the
wars waged by
Louis XIV (
1638–1715) to secure borders and achieve glory in the aftermath of the declining
Hapsburg Empire,
which was now divided between its
Spanish line and its
German line—the latter represented by
Louisʼs rival, the Holy Roman Emperor,
Leopold I (
1640–1705).
On one border,
France was threatened by the
Spanish Netherlands. From this region, rivers flowed southward into
France; and to guard against that path of invasion,
France maintained a series of fortresses.
On another border,
France was threatened by the German Hapsburgs via the
Rhine and
Moselle valleys. In this region, the French did control
Alsace as a legacy of the
Thirty Yearsʼ War,
and additional security had been secured through the diplomacy of
Louis XIVʼs boyhood minister,
Cardinal Mazarin (
1602–61), who forged an alliance with neutral
German states
that countered the rival Hapsburg influence in the
Rhine valley. On reaching maturity,
Louis abandoned
Mazarinʼs diplomacy, however,
and sought instead to secure this northern border militarily
(
Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1–16).
Within this larger context, the conflict to which
Ruskin refers was the second of
Louisʼs wars for glory, the
Dutch War (
1672–78),
in which
Henri de la Tour dʼAuvergne, Vicomte Turenne, the Marshal of
France (
1611–75), distinguished himself. In a conflict prior to the
Dutch War,
the
War of Devolution (
1667–68),
Louis had laid claim to parts of the
Spanish Netherlands on the grounds that these holdings had “devolved”
on his Spanish queen. To the immediate north of the
Spanish Netherlands, the
Dutch Republic became alarmed by
Louisʼs aggression;
and although the
Republic had been warring with the English navy, broke off that contest to sign a treaty with
Britain and
Sweden, forming a Triple Alliance (
1668).
Louis regarded this alliance as a betrayal by the
Republic, which had stood as a longtime ally against the Hapsburg power in
Spanish Netherlands;
and therefore, he avenged himself by launching the
Dutch War directly against the
Republicʼs territory.
Meanwhile, he undermined the Triple Alliance of
England, the
Dutch Republic,
and
Sweden by making a secret treaty with the king of
England,
Charles II (
1630–85).
For this reason, English troops joined in the French assault on the Dutch, including the young
John Churchill, the future duke of Marlborough (
1650–1722), who made a name for himself in the successful breach of the Dutch fortress of
Maastricht.
Although the English Parliament forced
Charles II to make peace with the
Dutch Republic in
1674, motivated both by mercantile interests and by sympathy for Protestant
Holland,
some English troops under
Churchillʼs command remained with the French, and they joined with the army led by
Turenne,
which was stationed in
Alsace and the
Palatinate
(
Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 105–22).
In this year,
Louisʼs attention turned to the German theater in order to protect
Alsace while, if possible, capturing
Franche‐Comté to the immediate south of
Alsace.
Louis treated Franche‐Comté, like the
Spanish Netherlands, as a Spanish Hapsburg inheritance that was owing to him.
But
Louis met resistance in the region from
Leopold I, who was allied with the Dutch, and who
turned Imperial forces against
France. Meanwhile, the German Protestant
Palatinate, which
Mazarin had drawn to the French side against the
Empire,
was turning against
Louis and his armies owing to
Turenneʼs occupation of the region between the
Neckar and the
Rhine.
In
June 1674,
Turenne led a battle against Imperial forces up to the gates of
Heidelberg, the seat of the Elector of the
Palatinate.
In the summer months following, he laid waste to the
Neckar valley, pillaging to supply his troops, and burning villages that refused to cooperate
(
Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 122–35).
In
Louisʼs ongoing wars, the suffering of the
Palatinate continued to stand as symbol for the perceived ruthlessness of the French.
In
1688–89, at the onset of the
Nine Yearsʼ War (
1688–97)—the same period in which
Louisʼs old enemy,
William of Orange and Stadtholder of the
Dutch Republic, supplanted his father‐in‐law,
James II,
as king of
England—
Louis took defensive measures against the Dutch‐Imperial alliance by adopting a scorched‐earth campaign in the
Palatinate.
The objective was to prevent an enemy army from being able to support itself in the region. This brutal destruction was not unique in
Louisʼs wars,
but “the devastation of the
Palatinate . . . burned itself into the European conscience”, and became,
according to a modern historian, “one of the influences that inspired Europeans to try to make the conduct of war more restrained and humane in the eighteenth century”
(
Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 199, and see 191–99).
For this reason, combined with entrenched suspicion of
France and support for Protestant
Europe, British feeling could still be stirred in the nineteenth century by signs
of the desolation of the
Palatinate, such as the ruins of
Heidelberg Castle.
Ruskin would first have learned about the human suffering involved in the campaign by reading
“The Cost of a War”
in
Evenings at Home (
1792–96) by
Anna Letitia Barbauld and her brother
John Aikin, in which the attack on the
Palatinate
is used as an exemplary case against “lavish[ing] admiration upon such a pest of the human race as a
Conqueror” or honoring “a profession which binds a man to be the servile instrument of cruelty and injustice”
(
Evenings at Home, 5:63; and see
“The Defiance of War”: Discussion—Pacifism and Domesticity).
In tourism literature, indignation animates
John Murray IIIʼs
1836 guidebook description of the repeated attacks leading to the
castleʼs ruin:
“In
1674, the Elector,
Charles Louis [
1617–80], incurred the displeasure of
Louis XIV; and a French army, under
Turenne, was in consequence let loose
upon the
Palatinate, carrying slaughter and desolation before them.
The Elector beheld with distress, from the castle in which he had shut himself up,
the inroads of foreign troops, and flame and smoke rising up along the plain from burning towns and villages. Unable to oppose the French with equal force
at the head of an army, but anxious to avenge the wrongs of his country, he resolved, in a spirit which some may deem Quixotic, others chivalrous,
to endeavour to end the contest with his own sword; and accordingly he sent a cartel to
Marshal Turenne, challenging him to single combat.
The French general returned a civil answer, hut did not accept it. The ambition of
Louis XIV led him, on the death of the
Elector, to lay claim to the
Palatinate
on behalf of [his younger brother,] the
Duke of Orleans [
1640–1701, whose second marriage was to the daughter of Elector
Charles Louis],
and another French army, more wicked than the first, was marched across the
Rhine.
Heidelberg was taken and burnt,
1688 [the onset of the
Nine Yearsʼ War], by
[Compte de] Mélac [
1630–1704], a general whose brutality and cruelty surpassed that
of
[the Count of] Tilly [
1559–1632, known for the sacking and massacre of the Protestant German city of
Magdeburg in
1631, during the
Thirty Yearsʼ War].
But it was at the following siege under
[the Marquis de] Chamilly [
1636–1715], in
1693, that it was reserved for the French to display the most merciless tyranny,
and practise excesses worthy of fiends rather than men, upon the town and its inhabitants, paralleled only in the
French Revolution,
and which will ever render the name of Frenchman odious in the
Palatinate. The castle was betrayed through the cowardice or treachery of the governor,
with the garrison, and many of the townspeople who had fled to it for refuge. The cruelty of the treatment they met with was, in this instance,
heightened by religious intolerance, and no mercy was shown to the Protestants. On this occasion
the castle was entirely destroyed”
(
Murray, Hand‐book for Travellers on the Continent, 430).
Like Murray, the editors of the Library Edition note that Heidelberg Castle “was in fact taken by Count Mélac, who reduced the castle to ruins in
1689, fourteen years after the death of Turenne”, correcting Ruskinʼs passing reference to the Marshal of France.
But the accuracy of Ruskinʼs knowledge about this military history is less interesting than his deflection of a topic, which drew such indignation from Murray,
into drollery about wine casks.