Ramillies 1706: the battle that buried the Black Legend

Ramillies 1706: the myth of Charles II's defenceless Spain

When did Spain lose Flanders? The uncomfortable answer is that it lost it in 1706, at the Battle of Ramillies, not at Utrecht, where all that peine was the signing off of a political corpse. For centuries the official narrative has sold the image of a Spanish army in ruins, incapable of defending its possessions. The facts tell a different story.

In June 1700, an expedition set out for Darién with 8 warships and 3,000 soldiers to expel the Scots. It was no Spanish Armada, but it showed that the military machine was still working. In Flanders, around 1680, Spain kept some 35,000 troops. The "Black Legend" spread by Louis XIV's propaganda has hidden the fact that Spanish units held out successfully in the peninsula until 1708, practically on their own.

Ramillies was the collapse. The defeat came in an unfavourable context: the capture of Nice in January 1706 forced the Austrians to divert troops to Italy, leaving the Allies at a disadvantage. After the battle, the road to definitive loss lay open. Anglo-Saxon historiography focuses on Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy, but Charles II's will hides another detail: Philip V was required to swear respect for the laws and institutions of the various kingdoms. A forgotten condition, like almost everything in this episode.

Ramillies' true legacy is twofold: the material loss of the Netherlands and the consolidation of a myth. The Spanish armies were not the dying ember they were described as; they were the perfect excuse to explain a defeat caused by strategy, not by a lack of gunpowder. Almost three centuries later, the narrative lives on because it suits two schools of historiography: the French and the Spanish, both too fond of the epic of decline.