The Old Roman: James FitzJames, Duke of Berwick, and the Art of War in the Age of Louis XIV
Born illegitimate in a French provincial town in 1670, James FitzJames spent his first eighteen years accumulating titles he would lose and learning loyalties he would be forced to redefine. He was the natural son of King James II of England, the nephew of the Duke of Marlborough, and the heir to a dynastic cause that was already beginning to sink. By the time the Glorious Revolution of 1688 destroyed his father's throne and his own English career in a single season, he had been formed by Jesuit schools, tested by the siege lines of Hungary, and left with nothing but his formation and his character.
What he made of that inheritance is one of the most remarkable stories the early modern military world produced. From the catastrophic Irish campaigns of 1689 to 1691 through the great defensive operations of the Nine Years' War, from the decisive triumph at Almanza in 1707 that permanently established the Bourbon dynasty in Spain to the systematic mastery of the Alpine frontier that contained Prince Eugene for three years without a major battle, James FitzJames built a career of the first order, as a Marshal of France, a Grandee of Spain, and the most complete embodiment available of the transition from personal dynastic loyalty to professional institutional service.
This is the life of a soldier who supported a sinking cause and made himself, in doing so, into one of the most significant military figures of his age.