James Francis Edward Keith (in later years Jakob von
Keith; 11 June 1696 – 14 October 1758) was a Scottish soldier and
Generalfeldmarschall of the Royal Prussian Army. As a Jacobite he took part in
a failed attempt to restore the Stuart Monarchy to Britain. When this failed,
he fled to Europe, living in France, and then Spain. He joined the Spanish and
eventually the Russian armies and fought in the Anglo-Spanish War and the
Russo-Swedish War. In the latter he participated in the conquest of Finland and
became its viceroy. Subsequently, he participated in the coup d’état that put
Elizabeth of Russia on the throne.
He subsequently served in the Prussian army under Frederick
the Great, where he distinguished himself in several campaigns. He died during
the Seven Years’ War at the Battle of Hochkirch. He received the Black Eagle
Order and is memorialized on the Equestrian statue of Frederick the Great.
The overthrow of James II and the subsequent attempts of the
exiled Jacobites to restore the Stuart dynasty led to many Scots seeking refuge
on the Continent. Several of these ‘attainted’ political exiles found a living
through military service, and a prime example of the breed was James Keith.
Born in June 1696 at Inverugie Castle near Peterhead, Keith came from a
privileged and honourable background. For centuries the Keiths had been the
hereditary earls marischal of Scotland, and James’s elder brother George was
the tenth to bear the title. George served in the British army under
Marlborough but on the death of Queen Anne he stayed loyal to the Stuarts and
joined the Jacobites. The brothers were both present in 1715 at the shambolic
defeat of the Earl of Mar’s rising at Sheriffmuir and both had to flee the
country. In May 1716 they stepped ashore at Paul de Leon in Brittany. James
went to Paris to seek service with the exiled king, the would-be James III,
but, as he was just seventeen years old, he was told by the king’s mother to
stay in Paris to complete his education, for which the exiled royal household
would pay. Unfortunately, nothing came forth from the treasury for some time
and James Keith, too proud to borrow from friends, had to get by through
selling ‘horse furniture . . . and other things of that nature which an officer
commonly carries with him’. At last, however, the Stuart promise was fulfilled
and James began his studies. A plot in 1717 for the king of Sweden to invade
Scotland on behalf of the Jacobites brought James a commission as a colonel of
horse before the scheme was abandoned. In June 1717 Peter the Great visited
Paris and James tried in vain to secure a post in his service: ‘I thought it
high time (being about 20 years old) to quitte the Academy, and endeavour to
establish myself somewhere, where I might again begin my fortune.’
Some friends advised James in 1718 to offer his services to
Spain, said to be about to invade Sicily in a war with the Holy Roman Empire,
but now he had a reason to be reluctant. ‘But I was then too much in love to
think of quitting Paris, and tho shame and my friends forced me to take some
steps towards it, yet I managed it so slowly that I set out only in the end of
that year, and had not my mistress and I quarrel’d, and that other affairs came
to concern me more than the conquest of Sicily did, it’s probable I had lost
many years of my time to very little purpose, so much was I taken up with my
passion.’ Early in 1719 George and James Keith took a ship from Marseilles to
Palamos on the Catalan coast, only to be arrested by the local commandant on
suspicion of being agents of the French enemy. The confusion was sorted out
with the help of the Duke of Liria, none other than a fellow Jacobite, James
Fitzjames, an illegitimate grandson of James II. The Keith brothers now became
intimately involved in the planning for a Jacobite invasion of Britain via the
Highlands, the enterprise we know as the 1719 Rising, and James sailed with the
invasion force. The mixed force of Spaniards and Scots reached Loch Duich in
mid-April 1719 and set up their headquarters in Eilean Donan Castle. For the
Jacobites the campaign came to an inglorious end after a skirmish in Glen
Shiel, on the back of which the Spanish surrendered and the others had to look
to their own safety. ‘As I was then sick of a feavour,’ wrote Keith, ‘I was
forced to lurck some months in the mountains, and in the beginning of September
having got a ship I embarcked at Peterhead, and after 4 days landed in
Holland.’ A perilous journey through France, then at war with Spain, followed
for the Keith brothers before they reached safety in Madrid.
There now ensued a string of unsatisfactory years for the
younger Keith, when he found that a bureaucratic mix-up seemed to have deprived
him off his commission in Spain and he had to kick his heels and rely on the
sympathy of friends. He thought of going home but was advised it would be
unsafe to return to Britain. Instead he went to Paris and stayed for two years,
pretending to be still receiving treatment for a tumour he had had removed from
his shoulder, making half-hearted attempts to join French service, and, it
seems, having another love affair. When hostilities erupted in 1726 between Britain
and Spain, his offer to join any invasion force was turned down; but he did
take part in the siege of Gibraltar in 1727 before he concluded that no further
advancement in Spanish service was possible for a Protestant. Hoping for
promotion to the command of a regiment of Irish mercenaries, Keith ‘received
the answer I expected: that His Majesty assured me that howsoon [as soon as] he
knew I was Roman Catholick, I shou’d not only have what I asked, but that he
would take care of my fortune’. The Duke of Liria, newly appointed as the
Spanish ambassador to the Russian court, agreed to help him and successfully
obtained for the young Scot an offer of a post from Tsar Peter II. At the
beginning of 1728, Keith set off across Europe to a bright new future.
Reaching Moscow in October, he ‘received orders from the
Felt Marechall Prince Ivan Dolgorusky to take command of two regiments of foot
belonging to his division, but being as yet entirely ignorant both of the
language and manner of service, which I already saw was very different from
that of other countries, I desired a delay of three months in which I might
inform myself both of the one and the other, which he readily granted me.’ The
Russian court was as full of intrigue as it had ever been but, as a newcomer,
Keith stayed clear of close involvement with the cabals and cliques, a wise
stance in view of the constitutional upsets that took place soon after his
arrival. Peter II, the grandson of Peter the Great, fell ill and died, probably
of smallpox, in 1730, at the young age of fifteen, and was succeeded by Anna,
the Duchess of Courland. The powerful Dolgorusky family hoped to retain the
power behind the throne but underestimated the mettle of the new tsarina. Anna
won over the loyalty of her troops, and the leading Dolgoruskys were banished
to Siberia. Not long after these changes, Keith was surprised to receive a
letter one evening informing him that Count Levenwolde, the adjutant general of
the army, wanted to see him. ‘I reaved all night what cou’d be the meaning of
such a message . . . I concluded I might have some enemy at court.’ The
interview, in fact, was to offer Keith the rank of lieutenant-colonel in a new
guards regiment, a post he accepted ‘in an instant’. ‘All Mosco was as
surprised as I was myself’, recalled Keith, ‘I received hundreds of visits from
people I had never seen nor heard of . . . who imagined that certainly I must
be in great favour at Court, in which they were prodigiously deceived.’
Early in 1732 he received further promotion, being appointed
as one of three inspectors of the army under an inspector-general. Assigned the
frontier districts along the Volga and the Don and part of the Polish frontier
at Smolensk, he set out on a long journey, travelling more than ‘1,500 leagues’
to visit around thirty-two regiments. He arrived in St Petersburg at the New
Year to find everything ‘in mouvement’ because the king of Poland had died and
the supporters of the claimants for the elected monarchy were competing for
Russian support. The candidates were Augustus, the Elector of Saxony and son of
the late king, and Stanislaus Leczczynski, the father-in-law of Louis XV of
France; the majority of the Poles favoured the latter but the Russians
preferred Augustus and mobilised the army to ensure his ascendancy to the
throne. Keith was ordered to lead 6,000 foot soldiers to Ukraine to be ready to
cross the frontier. In August, with the election likely to go against Russian
desires, troops under the command of the Limerick-born soldier Count Peter Lacy
headed for Warsaw. Stanislaus departed from the capital for Danzig, where Lacy
hemmed him in. Keith moved to combat pro-Stanislaus forces in the province of
Volinia, now the west-central region of Ukraine. In mid-December he led his
troops, which now included 4,000 Cossacks, across the frozen Dnieper and spent
ten fruitless days in search of the enemy before the Cossacks captured a troop
of cavalry on Christmas Eve. Rumours that the Volinian force was increasing in
strength prompted the transfer of command to Lieutenant-General Prince
Schahofski, who had orders to disrupt the province. Keith found dishonourable
the prince’s instruction to ruin the enemy’s estates and tried in vain to avoid
such action. ‘In my march I assembled some thousands of cattel, and some
hundreds of miserable bad horses, which I sent immediately to the army, and at
the same time reported to him [the prince], that the whole inhabitants were
abandoning their villages, and most of them retiring into Moldavia; that if he
continued to ravage the country it wou’d very soon become a desert, and our own
troops wou’d be in hazard of dying of hunger.’
At the end of January the army advanced to Vinnitz on the
Bug river. Keith was lodged in the village of Litin when word came in that the
enemy was in camp about 12 miles away and preparing to confront the Russians
when their westward march brought them through the forest near a place called
Latitchef. According to Keith, Prince Schahofski dismissed this warning brought
by a spy and refused to countenance a change in the order of the march to meet
the threat. In the event, the Poles sprang the ambush too soon, attacking a
quartermaster’s party moving ahead of the main army. This allowed Keith to lead
some Cossacks and dragoons to the attack and, finding the enemy numbers much
lower than feared, routed them for the loss of only twenty on their own side.
Prince Schahofski was now recalled to the Ukraine to attend to internal
business and command reverted to Keith.
Advancing to Medziboz, Keith was invited to enter the castle
where, he was assured by the governor who had met him outside the town,
everything had been prepared for his arrival. Leaving his army to make camp and
with only twenty-four dragoons as an escort, Keith accepted the invitation. The
castle garrison was on parade with drums beating and colours flying. ‘I soon
perceived the folly I had committed,’ wrote Keith, ‘but it was too late to
retreat, and my only way was to put a good face on the matter.’ He sent his
adjutant to bring in his equipage in all haste and to mix grenadiers among the
wagons, and then waited fretfully until they came. Ironically, as he had only
light artillery, he could not have taken the castle if the garrison had shut
the gates in his face, but now he was able to turn the tables on the foe and
order the protesting governor to march his garrison out.
Keith’s memoir goes on to describe a series of manoeuvres
and small battles across the plains and woods of Ukraine until the text peters
out at the end of 1734, with the army going into winter quarters. The War of
the Polish Succession came to an end in 1736 and by then Keith’s reputation had
grown in stature, bringing a promotion to lieutenant-general. Russia now
embarked on another war with the Turks. Keith had a narrow brush with death or
at least disability; wounded in the knee at the siege of Ochakov on the Black
Sea on 2 July 1737, he was saved from undergoing amputation of the shattered
limb only by the intervention of his brother George, who hurried to his aid and
brought him away for better treatment than army surgeons could provide. This
was good news for the Tsarina Anna, who is reputed to have said she would
rather lose 10,000 of her best soldiers than Keith. A two-year convalescence
gave the Scot the opportunity to visit Paris and London where, to his surprise,
he was acclaimed a hero and received by George II, his Jacobite youth clearly
forgiven if not forgotten. He returned to Russia to be the governor of Ukraine.
During peace negotiations with the Turks in 1739 there
occurred an incident that has acquired some legendary status in the annals of
the Scots who fought in Europe. At the end of a session of talks conducted
through interpreters, the Turkish vizier bowed and, taking the astonished Keith
by the hand, said in a broad Scots accent that it made him ‘unco happy’ to meet
a fellow countryman so far from home. The vizier was the son of a bellringer in
Kirkcaldy.
The death of Anna in October 1740 let loose the usual
intrigues and attempts to establish power until Elizabeth, the youngest
daughter of Peter the Great, emerged the winner in November 1741. Keith at once
declared his loyalty to her. By now he was once more in the field, commanding
in the war that had broken out against Sweden. At the siege of Willmanstrand he
came across an orphan prisoner called Eva Merthens. It was an odd way in which
to meet a lover but Keith’s mistress is who Eva became, and to her and their
children he left what little wealth he managed to accrue. She died in 1811.
Once hostilities with Sweden ended, Keith was appointed to head a
military-diplomatic mission to the former foe. Honours now came his way in
dizzying fashion: ceremonial swords from Sweden and Russia, the Order of Saint
Andrew and an estate in Livonia among them. The former Jacobite ignored the
1745 Rising back home.
By this time, however, dissatisfaction was beginning to
cloud the mind of the general. Once again there was an animus against
foreigners in the Russian government. George Keith, still seen as a Jacobite,
was refused permission to enter the country to visit him and James’s letters to
his brother seem to have been intercepted. He should not have been surprised
that his position at Elizabeth’s court invited jealousy and resentment – the
tsarina paid him a great courtesy when she reviewed the troops at Narva in 1746
– but he felt aggrieved when he sensed he was being passed over and was falling
out of royal favour. There was a rumour that the plump, attractive monarch had
amorous desires for her general, a delicate problem for Keith, for if he
refused her advances he might find himself travelling to Siberia. At last, in
1747, he obtained permission to leave Russian service.
His fame had preceded him and he was at once welcomed into
the service of the ruler whom Elizabeth viewed with most suspicion: Frederick
II of Prussia. Left broken and wasted at the end of the Thirty Years War, the
economy, prestige and administration of Prussia had been restored by the
energetic Hohenzollern ruler Frederick William to such an extent that it had
become a major power in northern Europe. In 1675 the Prussian army, trained
under French officers, had even defeated the more powerful Swedes at
Fehrbellin. Frederick William’s skilful foreign policy had extended his rule
over East Prussia, and his son Frederick I consolidated the advance by making
Prussia a kingdom in 1701, encompassing most of northern Germany and extending
east beyond Königsberg, much to the concern of the Holy Roman Emperor.
Frederick II showed every inclination to build on the achievements of his
father and grandfather to extend Prussia’s reach. In 1740 he ordered an
invasion of Silesia, then part of the weakened Habsburg Empire. Other European
leaders took their cues and their sides, and the result, the War of the
Austrian Succession, lasted on and off for eight years. It was thoroughly
natural that the bellicose Frederick should wish to draw James Keith into his
circle of advisors. With the newly conferred rank of field marshal, and
comfortable with a monarch he found affable and polite, James wrote to his
brother George, then in Venice, to join him in Berlin, where both began to
participate in the cultural and social life of the Prussian capital. In 1749
James became governor of Berlin; he is also credited with the invention of the
Kriegsschachspiel, or war-game, as an exercise.
The war with Austria came to an end. Silesia remained in
Prussian hands and Austria, fearing Frederick would now descend on Saxony,
sought an alliance with France. Prussia formed an alliance with Britain. The
flurry of diplomatic shadowboxing and alliances resulted in the Seven Years
War, which broke out in 1756 with Prussia’s expected attack on Saxony.
Frederick was in a precarious position, with France, Austria, Russia and Sweden
ranged against him, but he had, as well as senior officers of Keith’s calibre,
an extremely well-drilled, fiercely disciplined army, practised, for example,
in a manoeuvre labelled oblique order that allowed the troops to march across
the enemy’s front, wheel and exert increasing pressure on the enemy flank. The
Prussian fusiliers could fire between three and seven rounds per minute, and
the cavalry could sustain a charge over a great distance. These attributes
enabled the Prussians to overcome the Saxons in the autumn of 1756 and invade
to Bohemia to lay siege to Prague in the following spring. The Austrian army,
equipped with new artillery, held them at Kolin in central Bohemia in June 1757
and a few weeks later near Königsberg the Russians overcame the Prussians and
swept west along the Baltic coast. Frederick showed that he still had to be
reckoned with when his army defeated the advancing French at Rossbach in
November 1757, wheeled about and dealt a blow to the Austrians a month later at
Leuthen, 250 miles to the east near Wroclaw. In the following year the Russians
were checked at Zorndorf on the Oder.
At the beginning of October 1758 Frederick had his army
positioned in an elongated formation stretching over 4 miles of countryside in
eastern Saxony, facing the Austrians. The central command post lay at the
village of Rodewitz. The end of his right flank, 2 miles to the south, under
the command of Keith, rested in the village of Hochkirch, a small place huddled
on a hilltop around its church. Densely wooded hills, now taking on the colours
of autumn, stretched away to the south. ‘The Austrians deserve to be hanged if
they don’t attack us here’, Keith is reported to have said. Frederick
recognised his vulnerability and intended to move to stronger ground as soon as
possible. This proved to be the coming Saturday, the fourteenth. On the night
of the thirteenth, however, the Austrians launched a bold and effective move.
Cutting a route through the woods during the dark hours, they managed to insert
infantry around Hochkirch, ready to attack before five in the morning. The
Prussians were caught unawares but they responded quickly and a firefight
ensued in thick mist and semi-darkness. The struggle swirled around the
churchyard in Hochkirch. In the confusion Keith had mounted his horse, shouting
desperately for his aides to assist him to regain control of their predicament,
when shots hit him in the right side. Then, as a cannonball knocked him from
the saddle, a final fatal bullet struck his heart and he fell into the arms of
his servant, an English cavalryman called John Tebay. By 7.30 the Austrians had
Hochkirch and Frederick was pulling back. Keith was buried on the following day
in the village churchyard with full military honours. Some months later
Frederick had the remains brought to Berlin to lie in the crypt of the garrison
church, but a memorial urn was placed in the village church in 1776 by the
general’s kinsman, Robert Keith, who was British ambassador to Vienna at the
time. If one had to summarise the character of all the Scots who sought their
fortunes as soldiers in Europe, then perhaps James Keith or Sir Alexander
Leslie would emerge as the embodiments of the best.
