Good morning, readers.
Today we return to the French wars against the Palatine and the campaign of 1688 that in all likelihood left my ancestors’ lives in ruins. This is the second part of a series where I work to uncover the origins of one specific line of my heritage, the Tombs, stretching back to decades of war capped with a cruel winter that drove many out of the region—and ultimately to America.
King Louis XIV at the Siege of Namur, 1692 (By Pierre Mignard, Bridgeman Art Library: Object 96283, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1266450)
I’m not a deep military historian, nor a political one, and so it is difficult and complex to relate what led to the invasion of 1688. There were innumerable intrigues going on between many countries—Spain and England among them. Instead, I’ll limit to what happened.
In September of that year, at the beginning of the autumn, French troops crossed the Rhine and marched into Germany. Their plan was to occupy towns in the Rhineland, as well as leading another siege against Phillipsburg, in order to compel the German states to accept French demands that Louis had sent in a manifesto. The Duke of Duras led a force of about 30,000 men. Over the course of only a few months, the French gathered towns into their control. One resistant town, Koblenz, was bombarded so that the town burned within its own walls.
The German princes, however, did not give in to the demands. Several factions declared war on the French. German cavalry arrived, and the French, who thought this would be an easy win, again contended with guerrilla warfare. Louis ordered a scorched-earth campaign, which became known as the “Devastation of the Palatinate.” By December 20, Louis had marked the cities, towns, villages, and châteaux fated for destruction on a map.
In the winter of 1689 and into the spring, destruction began in earnest. Towns were entirely leveled by fire, the fortified walls torn down, ditches filled in. Villagers were used as forced labor, threatened with death if they tried to return to their homes. In some cases, even French officers balked at the outrages, but it had no effect on the overall plan. In some towns, not a single structure stood standing. The towns were, as one officer wrote, leveled like a field. The countryside, too, was torched.
The king expected discipline from his soldiers, but this didn’t happen. In his book, The Wars of Louis XIV, John A. Lynn writes, “While Louis and Louvois instructed soldiers to carry out their work in a disciplined manner, the line between purposeful destruction and outright pillage blurred. It proved nearly impossible to command a soldier to burn down a house but not to steal any of its contents or abuse its occupants.” They drank wine stolen from cellars and committed “awful excesses,” to which the Germans retaliated by murdering the soldiers.
“The savage character of the devastation of the Palatinate stood out at the time,” writes Lynn, “even though seventeenth-century Europe witnessed the horrors of war on a grand scale.” It was a war on civilians, even as it was meant to be an obstacle for the German armies, depriving them of sustenance. Its memory would linger a long time.
We have to imagine how long it might have taken for these villagers to restore their lives, if ever. Their economy would have suffered, and this would have been enough for them to consider moving out of the Rhineland. In 1709, insult followed injury in the form of a ruinous winter.
That year, the temperature plummeted to below freezing and stayed there. Much of Europe suffered this frigid weather. The Rhine River froze, and the people of the Palatine were starving. This was known, among other things, as The Great Frost, and it spread across Europe. When Queen Anne sent word to the Palatinate that England would accept German Protestants, refugee camps would bloom outside London and, later, in Ireland. By October, more than 13,000 Palatinates were in England. Only Protestants were allowed to remain; any Catholics were sent back to Germany.
From these camps, the Germans were shipped to English colonies with the promise of land and sustenance, including the colony of Pennsylvania, where my own ancestors landed in the mid-1700’s. On Christmas Day, some three or four thousand Palatinates were loaded onto ships, which sailed in January but didn’t arrive to New York’s harbor until July. Over the course of more than a century, these Germans would flood into, especially, Philadelphia.
It is interesting to note that in 1677, William Penn himself—along with George Fox and other Quakers—visited Germany. Penn specifically went to the Rhine Valley. He visited Mennonites, who were persecuted, and invited them to join what he called the Holy Experiment in what would be Pennsylvania. In 1682, thirteen families from the Rhine Valley crossed the Atlantic to join Penn, and they founded Germantown. Over the years, letters from the Americas reached relatives in Germany, telling them of the religious freedoms, the generous land grants. It would open the doors to even more emigrants.
If you’re like me, your name may not even reflect this heritage. It took years until I realized my grandmother on my mother’s side was born a Herrick, let alone that the name itself was German. And on my father’s side, because he talked so much about the Irish heritage, I had no idea that one of these Irish men, my great-grandfather, married a woman who was, so far as I can tell, almost entirely German.