The War of the Austrian Succession was in its seventh year, and the Austrian Netherlands had nearly all fallen to France. Marshal Saxe, illegitimate son of the Elector of Saxony and arguably the most gifted general of his generation, had taken city after city between 1744 and 1746. The Duke of Cumberland - second son of George II, victor over the Jacobites at Culloden the previous year - had returned to Flanders hoping to retake Antwerp in early 1747. Bad weather and missing transport delayed him until May, by which time French generals Contades and Lowendahl had captured Fort Liefkenhock and seized Sas van Gent, IJzendijke, and Eekels, threatening the British supply line to Maastricht. The Dutch panic in Zeeland that followed produced an Orangist coup and the elevation of William IV to hereditary Stadtholder of all seven provinces. Cumberland pushed his army east to cover Maastricht. The French got to the Tongeren-Maastricht ridge first.

Cumberland's army of roughly 80,000 stretched across the gentle slopes north of the Meuse with the Austrians under Batthyany on the right, holding the villages of Grote and Kleine Spouwen near modern Bilzen, protected by a steep ravine. The Dutch States Army under Prince Waldeck held the center. The left, around the village of Lauffeld itself, was a mixed force of British, Hanoverian, and Hessian troops - the men who would actually take Saxe's first blow. Heavy overnight rain made the ground slow on the morning of 2 July. The battle opened with an artillery duel from 6:00 to 8:30 in the morning, the gun smoke hanging in the wet air. Then Cumberland burned the villages, then he changed his mind, and then the orders went out late and confused.

Around 10:30, Saxe - reading the abandoned villages as evidence that Cumberland was retreating across the Meuse - sent his infantry forward to occupy them. Vlytingen was indeed empty. Lauffeld, however, had been reoccupied by Frederick of Hesse-Kassel's troops just in time. Over the next two hours the village changed hands four or five times, with both sides feeding fresh infantry into burning streets that had already been wrecked once that morning. The French finally held it around 12:30 in the afternoon. Cumberland ordered a counter-attack. As his infantry formed up, a Dutch cavalry squadron in front of the British line broke and fled, riding through and disorganizing the formations behind them. The Dutch infantry in the center had made two costly attacks across the Meuse-side fields, both shattered by French artillery; 537 Dutch soldiers died in those exchanges. With the left collapsing and the center exposed, the Allied right could only fall back.

Roughly 150 squadrons of French cavalry were assembling around the village of Wilre to roll up Cumberland's exposed flank. Ligonier, with 60 squadrons, charged them first. It was one of the most celebrated cavalry actions in British military history; Saxe later said only that charge prevented him from destroying the Allied army outright. The French Irish Brigade, fighting for Louis XV, took more than 1,400 casualties in the melee. At one point the short-sighted Cumberland mistook the red coats of the Irish for his own troops, rode toward them, and barely escaped being captured. To buy more time for the infantry retreat, Ligonier obtained Cumberland's permission for a second charge - this time with only three regiments. The Scots Greys, one of them, lost close to forty percent of their strength. Ligonier himself was taken prisoner. The Austrians under Batthyany then covered the orderly withdrawal toward Maastricht.

Total casualties for the day ran somewhere between 5,000 and 11,000 on each side. Saxe, as so often, could not exploit the victory; his critics whispered that he was prolonging the war for his own glory. The French did capture Bergen op Zoom that September and Maastricht the following May, but France was already on the edge of bankruptcy. The Royal Navy blockade had cut off the Newfoundland cod fisheries - a staple food for the poor - and the French defeat at Cape Finisterre in October 1747 destroyed any remaining ability to protect merchant convoys. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in October 1748 essentially returned the map to where it had stood in 1740. France withdrew from the Low Countries. Britain handed back the conquered fortress of Louisbourg. The bitter judgment of the British public was captured in the phrase "as stupid as the peace." Ligonier, ransomed and returned home, became commander-in-chief of the British army; Cumberland's reputation as a field commander did not survive a third such performance.