‘He saw and examined, and gave his orders with the utmost calmness and precision; but his ardour for the great end he was pursuing carried him to all places where there was anything to be done, that he might push the execution of it, and by his example support his orders.’ So wrote his secretary, Sir Everard Fawkener (Foreign Office Papers). He was on the field before 6 A.M., inquiring of Brigadier Ingoldsby why his orders for the capture of a redoubt had not been executed, and giving fresh verbal orders, as to the tenor of which he and Ingoldsby afterwards differed. He insisted on accompanying the British and Hanoverian infantry in their attack upon the French centre between this redoubt and Fontenoy, and remained with them throughout. Philip Yorke, whose brother was his aide-de-camp, wrote: ‘He was the whole day in the thickest of the fire. When he saw the ranks breaking, he rode up and encouraged the soldiers in the most moving and expressive terms; called them countrymen; that it was his highest glory to be at their head; that he scorned to expose them to more danger than he would be in himself; put them in mind of Blenheim and Ramillies: in short, I am convinced his presence and intrepidity greatly contributed to our coming off so well’ (Coxe, i. 236). John (afterwards Earl) Ligonier [q. v.], in a letter to the British minister at the Hague, said: ‘Ou je suis fort trompé ou il se forme là un grand capitaine’ (Trevor Papers, p. 113).
The allied army fell back on Ath, and made no further attempt to relieve Tournay. The British blamed the Dutch for their defeat, and their respective commanders were at variance, Cumberland being most concerned about the protection of Flanders, and Waldeck about the places of Hainault. Saxe, as soon as he was master of Tournay, took advantage of this divergence. He threatened Mons, and at the same time sent Löwendahl to surprise Ghent. It was taken on 10 July, and the allied army, now only half the strength of the French, retreated behind Brussels. Saxe was left to complete the conquest of Flanders without interruption, and by the middle of October he had done this, had taken Ath, and had placed his troops in winter quarters.
By that time the British troops were needed elsewhere. The defeat of Fontenoy and the call for reinforcements from England had helped to decide Charles Edward to make his venture in the highlands. He had landed on 25 July (O.S.), and on 21 Sept. he had routed Sir John Cope [q. v.] at Prestonpans. Three days afterwards ten battalions of British infantry, recalled from the Netherlands, arrived in the Thames. The rest of the infantry and most of the cavalry followed later, and the duke himself reached London on 18 Oct.
At the end of October an army of fourteen thousand men was formed at Newcastle under Wade; but this included six thousand Dutch troops, which had capitulated at Tournay and elsewhere, and which, on account of French remonstrances, were not allowed to serve in the field. In the middle of November, when the rebel army had entered England by the west coast, a second army was formed in Staffordshire under Ligonier. He fell ill; the duke was allowed to take his place, and arrived at Lichfield on 28 Nov. He had nominally 10,500 foot and 2,200 horse, really about two-thirds of those numbers (Blaikie, p. 94). They were distributed between Tamworth and Stafford, with a vanguard at Newcastle-under-Lyne. It was uncertain whether the rebels, who were then close to Manchester, would make for Wales or for London, and, though their number was barely five thousand, their movements were quicker than those of the English.
On 3 Dec. the duke advanced to Stone, hoping to fall in with them; but there he learnt that they had given him the slip, and were marching on Derby, which they reached next day. He hurried back to Stafford, and thence to Coventry, to intercept them; but on the 7th news reached him that they had begun their retreat. He mounted a thousand foot soldiers on horses of the country, and set out in pursuit with them and with his cavalry. On the 13th he was joined at Preston by Oglethorpe, who had been detached by Wade with three regiments of horse. It was not till the 18th that he succeeded in overtaking the rebel army near Penrith. There was a sharp action with its rearguard at Clifton, but the attempt to cut it off failed. As a contemporary ballad put it:
Then the foot got on horseback, the news give account,
But that would not do, so the horsemen dismount.
A fierce fight then ensu'd by a sort of owl-light,
Where none got the day, because it was night.
(Arms and the Man, 1746. The different accounts of the action at Clifton have been carefully collected and compared by Chancellor Ferguson in the Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archæological Society, 1889, pp. 186–228).
On the 20th the rebels re-entered Scot-
