Princes of Savoy-Carignan - Service With Spain

Service With Spain

The first recorded military service of Thomas Francis is as a commander in the Piedmontese army under his father against France during the War of the Mantuan Succession in 1630. Cardinal Mazarin induced him to become, in effect, a French agent at the Piedmontese court between 1630 and 1632. When the new Duke Victor Amadeus I was forced to accept French occupation of Pinerolo in the Peace of Cherasco in 1631, there was widespread dissatisfaction in Piedmont, and Thomas Francis, with his brother, Prince Maurice, withdrew from the duchy to join the forces of Spain, prompting Victor Amadeus to confiscate his uncles' Italian revenues. Though his kinship to both the French and Spanish royal families suggested that he could be useful to Spanish interests, Thomas Francis was not entirely trusted, and was obliged to send his wife and children to Madrid as hostages.

When France launched the (Franco-Spanish war of 1635-59), Thomas Francis served under the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, brother of Philip IV in the Spanish Netherlands. Piedmont was reluctantly dragged into the fighting alongside the French, consequently Thomas Francis was, strictly, fighting against his own homeland. He was completely defeated and his army entirely killed, captured or scattered - the first in an unbroken career of military defeats. He managed to rally the remnants at Namur, then retreated before the numerically-superior French and Dutch forces; and he probably served the rest of the campaign with Ferdinand. Late in the year, the refugee Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine arrived in Brussels and met Thomas Francis; they may have formed a joint court, and Thomas certainly participated in jousts organised by the Duke.

In 1636, Thomas Francis served with the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand who organised a joint Spanish-Imperialist army for a major invasion of France from the Spanish Netherlands. The invasion was initially very successful, and seemed capable of reaching Paris, where there was a great panic; if Ferdinand and Thomas had pushed on, they might have ended the war at this point, but they both felt that continuing to Paris was too risky, so they stopped the advance. Later in the campaign, Thomas had problems with the Imperialist general Ottavio Piccolomini, who refused to accept orders from the Prince as a Spanish commander, arguing that his Imperialist troops were an independent force.

In this year, when his brother-in-law Louis de Bourbon, comte de Soissons fled from France after his failed conspiracy against Cardinal Richelieu, Thomas Francis acted as intermediary between Soissons and the Spanish in negotiations which led to a formal alliance between the count and Philip IV of Spain concluded 28 June 1637 - although within a month Soissons had reconciled with France. In 1638, Thomas served in Spanish Flanders, helping to defend the fortress-city of Saint-Omer against a French siege; in mid-June, he managed to get reinforcements into the place, then with the rest of his small army entrenched about 15 km. to the north-west at Ruminghem, opposite the French army under Jacques-Nompar de Caumont, duc de la Force at Zouafques; after being joined by Imperialist reinforcements under Ottavio Piccolomini, he marched to attack La Force, and was defeated with the loss of 2,000 men killed or captured at Zouafques. However, he then marched back with his remaining troops to the continuing French siege of Saint-Omer, where he put in more reinforcements and then entrenched himself so securely in the vicinity that the French found it impossible to continue the siege and gave up. Thomas Francis and Piccolimini subsequently stuck so close to La Force that the French were unable to undertake any serious operations.