Sale: Triton XIII, Lot: 2084. Estimate $2000.  Closing Date: Monday, 4 January 2010.  Sold For $1600. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

ORANGE. Anne. 1702-1714. AR Medal (46.33 g, 12h). Commemorating the Capture of Douai. Dies by J. Croker. Dated 1710. Laureate bust left / In foreground to left, Victory standing left, attaching shield, inscribed SALVS PROVIN, to column with French trophies at base; in background to right, Britannia pursuing fleeing French warrior, who drops a shield emblazoned with the arms of France. Hawkins 213; van Loon V 165; Eimer 443. Superb EF, wonderful gray toning with golden iridescence around the devices.

This medallion was struck to commemorate the capture of Douai in northern France during the late middle and final phases of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). Following the crushing defeat of the French by the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy at Oudenarde in 1708, France was near ruin and Louis XIV was compelled to negotiate. Hoping to achieve leniency, he agreed to surrender Spain to the allies and offered to fund the expulsion of Philip V from the throne. The allies, however, demanded that Louis use the French army to remove Philip V. Rejecting these terms, Louis appealed to the French nation, raised thousands of new recruits, and chose to continue the fight to the bitter end.

Beginning in 1709, the allies began three invasions of France, but proved unsuccessful. In mid June, the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy launched an intensive campaign to take Paris. Taking Tournai and Mons, they moved toward Malplaquet, where in one of the bloodiest battles of the eighteenth century, the Allies defeated the French. The political fall out from the battle’s Pyrrhic victory (as well as his wife’s problems) diminished the Duke of Marlborough’s influence and negotiations with France were reopened, though with the same terms as those following Oudenarde. When these negotiations failed, in part because he privately expressed doubts about pressing the French to accept the terms, which, in turn, caused Marlborough’s detractors to claim he was prolonging the war for his own profit, he reluctantly began campaigning in the spring of 1710. In June he took Douai, commemorated by this medal, followed by Béthune, Saint-Venant, and Air-sur-la-Lys . However, the landslide defeat of pro-war Whigs by the Tories in October of that year. Although Marlborough would return to France to pursue his strategy (one that would have one last great success at Bouchain), he was nevertheless dismissed as commander in 1712.