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Robert SoutheyThe Battle of Blenheim
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1798A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: The Romantic Ballad
Southey wrote many ballads, especially during the period in which he penned “The Battle of Blenheim.” His 1799 poetry collection contained eight ballads, including “The Sailor Who Served in the Slave Trade,” which, like “The Battle of Blenheim,” shows Southey’s social conscience. “The Sailor Who Served in the Slave Trade” is a denunciation of the trading of enslaved people; the sailor is haunted by his participation in it. On one voyage he was forced by the captain of the ship to flog an enslaved woman. She was so badly hurt that the next day she died; her body was tossed into the sea. The sailor is haunted by his memory of that sight, and now the Devil follows him everywhere he goes. Other Southey ballads such as “Jaspar” and “Sir William” were inspired by the popularity of an English translation in 1796 of a German ballad, Lenore, by Gottfried August Bürger, which featured horror and the supernatural.
Ballads were thus popular in the Romantic era in England. They ranged from Sir Walter Scott’s “Proud Maisie” to John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and the many ballads that appeared in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s collection Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798. Indeed, Southey’s poem about the sailor borrowed heavily from one of the era’s most powerful ballads, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which appeared in Lyrical Ballads. That was not the only poem in Lyrical Ballads that Southey adapted in his own work. Southey’s poems “The Idiot” and “The Sailor’s Mother” were inspired by Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy” and “Old Man Travelling,” respectively.
“The Battle of Blenheim” was significantly influenced by Wordsworth’s ballad “We Are Seven.” In the poem, an adult asks an eight-year-old girl how many siblings she has. She says they are seven in all, including herself. It turns out that two of them lie in the churchyard. When the adult tries to point out that if that is the case, they are only five, the girl will not acknowledge it, insisting that they are seven. The young girl seemingly has a spiritual awareness of the continuity of life that the adult, for all his logic and common sense, does not possess. Southey’s “The Battle of Blenheim” adopts this framework of an adult discussing an important issue with children who have a radically different point of view from the adult, which to the adult likely appears naïve and childish.
Historical Context: The War of the Spanish Succession
The battle of Blenheim took place in August 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). The war resulted from a dispute over who would succeed the childless King Charles II of Spain. The wider issue was who would gain control of the Spanish empire. Charles II named as his heir Philip of Anjou, a grandson of French king Louis XIV. England, however, did not want France and Spain to be united in this way; instead, England wanted to hold the balance of power in Europe and prevent Catholic France from interfering with the Protestant succession of kings in England. England therefore entered into an alliance with Austria and Holland to counter the French threat to its security and trade. One goal of the English war effort was to keep the thrones of France and Spain separate.
At Blenheim, the French and Bavarian armies numbered about 60,000 (although some estimates put the number higher, at about 72,000) and they were in a strong position. The combined forces of England’s Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene, who commanded the Austrian forces, amounted to about 56,000 men. Marlborough’s skillful generalship ensured that the English won the battle decisively. French and Bavarian casualties were very high, amounting to 30,000-40,000 killed, wounded, or captured. French commander Marshall Tallard was taken prisoner and transported to England. The English and their allies lost an estimated 12,000 killed and wounded. The English victory saved Vienna, Austria, from falling to the French and threatening the entire coalition of English, Dutch, and Austrian forces. France entirely lost its position in Germany, shattering the myth of French invincibility.
Such are the facts that lie behind Kaspar’s refrain in “The Battle of Blenheim” that it “‘twas a famous victory” (Line 36). Southey intended this line as part of a satirical, antiwar ballad, but by the time he became Poet Laureate in 1813, his thinking had changed. No longer the youthful antimilitarist, Southey now described Blenheim as “the greatest victory ever done honour to British arms […] had it been lost by the allies, Germany would immediately have been at the mercy of the French, and their triumph would have been fatal to the Protestant Succession in England” (Speck, W. A. Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 180).
The War of the Spanish Succession ended with the Treaty of Utrecht. Britain and its allies achieved most of their goals, and the power of France and Spain was much reduced. The Spanish empire was partitioned, while Britain secured its trade routes and further built its colonial empire.
