Historyzine now moves into the year 1707 in the saga of the War of the Spanish Succession. This year the allies are looking to attack Toulon and hopefully make more gains in the Spanish Netherlands. The Duke of Marlborough has an army of 80,000 in the Low countries facing off against Villars who has 100,000 under his control. Prince Eugene leads an army of 35,000 against Toulon and the Earl Galway is left with only 15,500 in Spain which he uses to bring the Duke of Berwick to battle at Almanza.

Galway, of course, is on to a loser and is soundly beaten by the French in a terrible setback for the allies in Spain. They fair little better at Toulon and after an abortive siege there, they retreat back to Italy. The Admiral supporting this endeavour is Sir Cloudesley Shovel and he returns home only to be shipwrecked in one of the worst naval disasters ever recorded, off the Scilly Isles, only a few miles from port It’s a poor year for the Anglo/Dutch/English and Portuguese alliance and all around they are beset by failure and disaster.

In the magazine portion of the show the Linguistic History Trivia Bit, looks at the words Avatar, Thug and Blighty. As the more perceptive among you will note, all these words have an Indian origin. The Indian theme grows out of one of the History podcast reviews which is of the UCLA series on British India.You’ll find this series at  the UCLA Office of Instructional Development. The other podcast review this time is the series, Stuff you Missed in History Class.

There’s a couple of announcements in the show. I exhort you to visit my online shop at http://historyshopper.com. to take a look at my history themed birthday cards and also to come along to the Marlborough Study Day on march 13th at the Assembly House in Norwich . This will feature the military history writers, James Falkner and Richard Holmes and it’s a Battlefields Trust Event . Tickets are only 15 pounds, with part of the proceeds going to Help for Heroes . Here is the note which appeared in the Early 18th Century Wars mailing list

We have Richard Holmes and James Falkner speaking at Norwich on Marlborough and his battles on Saturday March 13th at 14:00 at The Assembly House.

Tickets available from 20 Rowington Road, Norwich. NR1 3RR.

Please make cheques available to the Battlefields Trust.

The intro music for this episode is Die Valkure Fantasie, composed by Richard Wagner.

Some of the sources I use for this podcast can be found at My Amazon UK Affiliate page
or my United States of America Affiliate page . There are lots of very useful books there if you want to know more about the War of the Spanish Succession and if you decide to buy any of them then using the links from the pages of Historyzine will send a tiny fraction of money my way which will help offset some of the costs of the podcast.

If you wish to comment on the podcasts then please visit the website, historyzine.com or visit the contact page and leave me an email using the contact form there.
Also I wish to draw your attention to the twitter feed we’ve started for the Historyzine History podcast.
You’ll find Historyzine twittering away at http://twitter.com/Historyzine .
I hope you enjoy the podcast. Press the play button below to listen or subscribe (it’s completely free) using one of the two buttons at the top of this post. One will link you to your Itunes program and the other will give you an rss link for your podcast feed aggregator. Happy listening.