12

From the Peace of Nystad to the French Revolutionary Wars

1721–87

DYNASTIC PROBLEMS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PENTARCHY

The treaties of the second decade of the eighteenth century might have ushered in a peace as durable as that which followed the Congress of Vienna at the very end of this period. Alas, Utrecht-Rastadt-Nystad turned out to be more like 1919 in their fragility. Even before the Great Northern War had been brought to a close, the western powers were at it again. However, this was rather different from the earlier war, for Great Britain and France were now on the same side. Just how this remarkable volte-face–in its way just as radical a diplomatic revolution as that of 1756–came about tells us a lot about the continuing importance of dynastic, as opposed to national, considerations in determining foreign policy. Of course Louis XIV, for example, had always been concerned to press the interest of the Bourbon family; indeed this has been something of a leitmotiv of recent historiography. Yet he was always careful to identify family and national interests, in the same way that he identified his person with the state. Even if he never actually said ‘I am the state’, he did say much that amounted to the same thing. And he did write in The Craft of Kingship in 1679:

Kings are often obliged to act contrary to their inclination in a way that wounds their own natural good instincts. They should like to give pleasure, and they often have to punish and ruin people to whom they are naturally well disposed. The interests of the state must come first…When one has the State in view, one is working for oneself. The good of the one makes the glory of the other. When the State is happy, eminent and powerful, he who is cause thereof is covered with glory, and as a consequence has a right to enjoy all that is most agreeable in life in a greater degree than his subjects, in proportion to his position and theirs.

If he conceded on his deathbed that he had liked war too much, and if even his most adulatory biographers allow that his early wars were motivated primarily by a search for personal gloire, his strengthening of the frontiers did benefit the whole nation.

Purely dynastic, on the other hand, was the policy adopted by Spain, which proved to be the rogue elephant of international politics. Or rather one should write: the policy adopted by the Queen of Spain, for the driving force was supplied by Elizabeth Farnese of Parma, whom Philip V had married as his second wife in 1714. Dominating her husband to a degree that very few consorts have achieved, she used the resources of her new country to carve out a patrimony for the two sons she bore–Don Carlos in 1716 and Don Philip in 1720. Neither seemed likely to succeed to the Spanish throne, as Philip V already had two surviving sons by his first marriage, so she turned her attention to Italy. In this she was aided and abetted by Giulio Alberoni, a turbulent priest originally from Piacenza who had first gone to Spain as secretary to the duc de Vendôme, had then become the envoy of the Duke of Parma and had been responsible for the selection of Elizabeth as Philip V’s new wife. An adventurer by temperament, he also appears to have harboured a strong antipathy towards the Austrians, the new masters of the Italian peninsula, and so was an enthusiastic accomplice.

In 1717 the ambitious duo despatched a mighty armada (the largest Spain had assembled since Lepanto in 1571) comprising 300 ships bearing 33,000 troops and 100 pieces of artillery to conquer Sardinia from the Austrians. As the latter were preoccupied with their latest war against the Turks, this proved to be a soft target. So too did Sicily, to which the victorious Spaniards moved the following year. This violent revision of the peace settlement then attracted the hostility of the other great powers, notably France and Great Britain. Both wished to see the status quo preserved, mainly for dynastic reasons. The Regent of France, the duc d’Orléans, naturally still entertained hopes of becoming king if the infant Louis XV were to die and so, equally naturally, was at daggers drawn with Philip V, the only other possible claimant. It was in pursuit of a possible Orleanist succession that he sought a rapprochement with Britain against Spain. George I was turned into a responsive listener to his overtures by the thought that an alliance would both neutralize the threat from the Stuart pretender and secure Hanover. The latter looked especially vulnerable in 1716 when Peter the Great went into winter quarters with a large army in the Duchy of Mecklenburg, next door to Hanover. So it was that the ‘natural and necessary enemies’ (as the British envoy to the French court, Lord Stair, put it in 1717) sank their differences and combined to put a stop to Elizabeth Farnese’s Mediterranean adventures. On 11 August 1718 a British fleet commanded by Admiral Byng destroyed the Spanish fleet off Cape Passaro, the southernmost point of Sicily, capturing seven ships of the line in open waters and then destroying the remaining seven that sought refuge inshore.

Two years of horror followed, both for the marooned Spanish army and their involuntary hosts, until the inevitable surrender was signed. Meanwhile, in 1719 a British expeditionary force landed in Galicia, taking Vigo and Pontevedra, and a French army invaded the Basque country, taking San Sebastian. Alberoni was dismissed and expelled. As John Lynch has written, ‘rarely has a war been so resoundingly lost, or a fall from favourite to scapegoat been so precipitate’. France and Britain now imposed a settlement to tidy up and stabilize the Utrecht-Rastadt treaties: Philip V was to renounce any claims to Italy or the southern Netherlands, but the succession to the duchies of Parma and Tuscany was assigned to his son by Elizabeth Farnese, Don Carlos; Charles VI finally abandoned his claim to the Spanish throne but received Sicily; Victor Amadeus II of Savoy had to give up the latter but received Sardinia in exchange and kept his royal title.

The complete package took a very long time to be implemented. Even the most gifted narrator would find it difficult to construct an account of the 1720s both coherent and interesting, or indeed either of those things. Only intense concentration and repeated reference to the chronology can reveal which abortive congress was which, which short-lived league brought which powers together, who was allied to whom, who was double-crossing whom, or whatever. Suffice it to say that this was a period when Great Britain enjoyed a preponderant influence on the European states-system that was as rare as it was brief. Among other things, the British succeeded in forcing the Spanish to recognize the commercial concessions granted at Utrecht and the Austrians to abandon their project for a commercial empire based at Ostend. One lucky beneficiary of all this hustling and bustling was Elizabeth Farnese, for whom sixteen years of scheming finally paid off when Don Carlos entered Parma in March 1732 as its new duke. The Spanish troops sent to assist him were transported across the Mediterranean in British ships, as was the garrison sent to Tuscany to protect his claim against the day when the current childless Grand Duke died.

By 1730 the French had recovered sufficiently from the exertions of the War of the Spanish Succession to contemplate resuming what they believed to be their rightful position at the apex of the European states-system. Not only had Louis XV survived childhood and adolescence, he was now a hale and hearty adult, who had sired a male heir in 1729 and gave every sign of producing many more. In 1726 he had sacked the incompetent duc de Bourbon and announced–in conscious imitation of his predecessor–that he would henceforth be his own first minister, although adding almost in the same breath that Cardinal Fleury would be present at all meetings with his ministers. Fleury was indeed the new director of French policy, bringing to foreign affairs an impressive combination of subtlety and resolution. He disliked the high-handed manner in which Sir Robert Walpole had imposed a pax britannica on the Mediterranean in 1731 and he was also alarmed by the Austro-Russian axis: ‘Russia in respect of the equilibrium of the North has mounted too high a degree of power, and its union with the House of Austria is extremely dangerous.’ So he began to distance France from the entente with Britain and to resume the leap-frog relationships with Denmark, Sweden, Poland and the Ottoman Empire.

Opportunity for the French to flex their muscles came from the succession problems that were afflicting several of their rivals. In Great Britain, the Stuarts were still a threat. Peter the Great’s failure to establish primogeniture destabilized the Russian state every time a Tsar or Tsarina died; indeed his decree that the incumbent should designate the successor positively invited instability. Most importantly, Charles VI had proved unable to produce a male heir, thus calling into question the succession to the Habsburg Monarchy. To guard against its partition, in 1713 Charles issued a ‘pragmatic sanction’ proclaiming that, in the event of his dying without a male heir, all his possessions in their entirety would pass to his elder daughter, the Archduchess Maria Theresa. This was bound to be problematic, not least because it involved passing over the daughters of his predecessor, his elder brother Joseph I. Charles now set about gaining international recognition for the pragmatic sanction and not without success, for Spain in 1725, Bavaria, Cologne and Russia in 1726, Great Britain and the Dutch Republic in 1731, and Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire in 1732 all gave their consent. It was not given freely, of course, but had to be bought by concessions of one kind or another. Whether it was worth all the diplomatic effort involved is doubtful. It is hard to disagree with Prince Eugène’s opinion that a large army and a well-stocked treasury would have been more help than these paper promises.

In the event, the next major European war was precipitated not by the Austrian but by the Polish succession. When Augustus II of Saxony-Poland died on 1 February 1733, Austria and Russia supported the election of his son as Augustus III, while France resurrected the candidature of Stanislas Leszczyski, who had been briefly King of Poland from 1704 until 1709 as the puppet of Charles XII. In the meantime, Stanislas had secured French support by the marriage of his daughter Maria to Louis XV in 1725. However, his son-in-law gave him only token support in Poland, choosing instead to campaign on the Rhine and in northern Italy. Here the French were uniformly successful and by 1735 were ready to dictate terms to the hapless Charles VI. Their diplomatic position had been greatly strengthened by an alliance with Spain, the ‘First Family Compact’ of 7 November 1733. The war was finally brought to an end by the Treaty of Vienna in May 1738, three years after the actual fighting had stopped. Its terms showed once again how important were dynastic considerations in determining the map of Europe. Augustus III was confirmed as King of Poland, with Stanislas Leszczyski receiving as compensation the Duchy of Lorraine, which on his death was to pass to France. The current Duke of Lorraine, Francis Stephen, who had married Charles VI’s heiress Maria Theresa in 1736, was to receive Tuscany, whose last Grand Duke had died in 1737. The Habsburgs were also to take the Duchy of Parma from Don Carlos, who was to receive Naples and Sicily, where he was to become ‘King of the Two Sicilies’. Although for the time being his brother Don Philip was not provided for, Elizabeth Farnese’s dream of setting up her boys as independent rulers had taken another giant step forwards.

So the pax britannica had been short-lived. It was the French who directed the peace-making of 1735–8 and it was they who seemed in control, for they had established a solid axis with their Spanish relations and extended Bourbon control over southern Italy. Their victory over Charles VI seemed all the more complete when financial exhaustion and military failure forced him to accept French mediation to bring to an end the war he had been fighting against the Turks since 1737. By the Peace of Belgrade of September 1739, the Turks regained most of the territory they had lost in 1718, including Belgrade, although the Austrians kept the Bánát of Temesvár. In the east, however, the situation was less encouraging, for the new King of Poland, Augustus III, was under no illusions that he owed his crown to Russian and Austrian support and was also married to a Habsburg. French leap-frog diplomacy was still intact, but was going to be more problematic in the future.

Another long-term problem that loomed ever larger was colonial competition with the British. The latter had gained enough at Utrecht to whet their appetite for more. They now controlled the entire Atlantic seaboard of North America, with the exception of Spanish Florida, and also claimed a vast swathe of territory to the south of Hudson Bay. In between were the French, whose first expedition to the St Lawrence river had been made as early as 1534 and who now controlled the river-valley to the Great Lakes and beyond. More recently, the French had also laid claim to territory far to the south, at the mouth of the Mississippi, naming their new possession ‘Louisiana’ after their king and founding New Orleans in 1718. Their obvious strategy was to link up these new acquisitions with their older colonies in the north via the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys. It was in the latter that increasingly they collided with settlers from the British seaboard colonies moving west across the Appalachians in search of new land. By the 1730s it was clear that armed struggle was inevitable.

So was a war between Britain and Spain. Spanish hostility to Britain was determined by the loss of Gibraltar and Minorca at the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 and by the obligation to allow the British to supply Spanish colonies in America with African slaves. In the course of the 1730s war became increasingly likely, as growing numbers of enterprising and unscrupulous British merchants flouted Spanish commercial restrictions. A more specific bone of contention was the formal settlement of Georgia, which intensified disputes about the northern limits of Spanish Florida. The war which eventually broke out between Britain and Spain in 1739 is known to the British as ‘The War of Jenkins’ Ear’. The owner of the ear was Captain Robert Jenkins of the British merchant marine, who displayed it, pickled in a jar, to a committee of the House of Commons in 1738. He claimed that it had been amputated by a sword swipe from a Spanish coastguard, who had boarded and looted his ship off Havana. No matter that the alleged incident had occurred seven years earlier, together with other horror stories it was enough to galvanize British public opinion by triggering all those powerful anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic associations, from the Inquisition to the Armada. Hispanophobia had been given a recent impetus by the assistance given by Spain to an abortive Jacobite invasion in 1719. The war-party inside and outside Parliament made the most of popular indignation, pressuring a reluctant Walpole to declare war.

At first it looked as though the hawks’ optimism was well-founded, for in November 1739 Admiral Vernon, commanding a fleet of just six ships, took Porto Bello on the Atlantic coast of Panama by storm. But the Royal Navy flattered to deceive. It simply did not have the resources or the bases to operate with success in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and home waters. One dramatic exception to a depressing tale of abortive expeditions was the success in July 1742 of Captain William Martin in bringing Charles VII of Naples ‘to a just sense of his errors’ in assisting the Spanish campaign in northern Italy. Striking anchor with his squadron within easy firing range of defenceless Naples, Martin gave Charles half-an-hour to withdraw from the war, which he did. As Nicholas Rodger observes’ ‘no more economical demonstration of naval power has ever been given’. Other British succeses were few and far between, but they did include the capture of the great French fortress of Louisbourg in Canada and two small-scale victories over the French off Cape Finisterre in May and June 1747.

‘The War of Jenkins’ Ear’ had been underway for little more than a year when it was subsumed in a much greater conflict with a much more portentous title–the War of the Austrian Succession. At one level, this represented a resumption of the centuries-old conflict between Bourbon and Habsburg for the domination of continental Europe, but it was accelerated by the fortuitous death of three monarchs in 1740. The first to go was Frederick William I of Prussia on 31 May. This brought to the throne his mercurial son as Frederick II, as complex as he was intelligent and with quite a different approach to the assertion of his kingdom’s interests. Although brutal to the point of madness, Frederick William I’s foreign policy was unassertive, timid even. He was restrained by three kinds of loyalty–to the Hohenzollern dynasty, to the Holy Roman Empire and its Emperor, and to his terrible Calvinist God. His son, on the other hand, never cared anything for his family, demanding that the interests of the Hohenzollern dynasty be subordinated to the interests of the Prussian state; he had only contempt for the Holy Roman Empire, despising its ‘antiquated, fantastical constitution’; and he dismissed Christianity as ‘an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with fables, contradictions and absurdities: it was spawned in the fevered imagination of the Orientals, and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, where some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and where some imbeciles actually believed it’.

Frederick William I had nursed many grievances against the Emperor Charles VI, who had ignored his interests in Poland in 1732, snubbed him over Mecklenburg in 1733 and disregarded his claims to the duchies of Jülich and Berg in 1738, but apart from a brief period of alienation in the mid 1720s he had remained loyal. He concentrated his demonic energies preparing for rather than waging war, leaving his son an army 81,000-strong, which in terms of quality was the best in Europe, supported by a great treasure-chest. Although he had every reason to hate his father, Frederick II hailed his achievement, writing in The History of My Own Times:

The fame to which the late king aspired, a fame more just than that of conquerors, was to render his country happy; to discipline his army; and to administer his finances with the wisest order, and economy. War he avoided, that he might not be disturbed in the pursuit of plans so excellent. By these means he travelled silently on towards grandeur, without awakening the envy of monarchs.

It was these tools that his son was now to put to such devastating use. There is no reason to doubt his own candid admission that, first and foremost, he wanted to make a name for himself and Prussia, to wipe the sneer off the face of George II of England, for example, who had derided Frederick William I as ‘the corporal’, ‘king of the high-roads’ and ‘arch-dustman of the Holy Roman Empire’. Despite the formal elevation to royal status in 1701, Prussia was still ‘a kind of hermaphrodite, rather more an electorate than a kingdom’, as Frederick put it. To make its masculine identity unequivocal, he first cavassed the possibility of acquiring Jülich and Berg, but got nowhere. It was then that the grim reaper came to his assistance, carrying off the Tsarina Anna of Russia on 23 October 1740 and Charles VI three days later. On hearing the news, Frederick resolved ‘immediately’ to ‘reclaim’ Silesia. Writing of himself in the third person, he went on: ‘this project accomplished all his political views; it afforded the means of acquiring reputation, of augmenting the power of the state, and of terminating what related to the litigious succession of the Duchy of Berg’. Unmentioned but probably also important was the thought that if he did not claim Silesia, someone else would. He was especially anxious to keep it out of the hands of the Saxons, for the province would form a territorial link between the Electorate and Poland. The almost simultaneous death of the Tsarina was crucial, for on past form Russia would be disqualified from giving the Austrians any assistance by a struggle over the succession. Indeed Frederick claimed that ‘the death of Anna…finally determined [me] in favour of this enterprise’. He was proved to be right, for Anna was succeeded by the infant Ivan VI, who was deposed a year later in favour of Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great by his first marriage.

On 16 December 1740 the Prussian invasion of Silesia began. Frederick received important assistance from religion–‘that sacred prejudice among the vulgar’–for about two-thirds of the Silesians were Protestants anxious to escape the vigorous persecution inflicted on them by the late emperor. The capital, Breslau, surrendered without resistance early in January 1741. There were only just over 7,000 Austrian troops in the whole province, so it was not long before the Prussians completed their occupation. It was not until 10 April 1741 at Mollwitz that an Austrian army under General von Neipperg mounted a military challenge. This was certainly not Frederick’s finest hour. With the superior Austrian cavalry apparently winning the day, he was persuaded by his second-in-command, Count Schwerin, to leave the battlefield. In his absence, Schwerin rallied the apparently defeated Prussians and won the day with the infantry. As Frederick recorded ruefully: ‘it is difficult to say who committed the most faults, the King or Marshal Neipperg’, giving all the credit to his army: ‘the battle was one of the most memorable of the present century; because two small armies then decided the fate of Silesia, and because the troops of the king there acquired that fame of which they can never be deprived, either by time or envy’.

Mollwitz was no more decisive militarily than any other battle of the period, but it did have an extremely important political consequence. By showing that Prussia could defend its new conquest, it encouraged the war-party in France, led by the marquis de Belle-Isle, to conclude an alliance with Frederick and join the war. Louis XV and his chief minister Fleury thought Frederick was ‘a fool’ and ‘a cheat’ respectively, but that low opinion did not stop them following the rush to settle accounts with the Habsburgs once and for all. If the war had gone according to plan and they had been in a position to dictate terms to the new ruler of the Habsburg Monarchy, the twenty-three-year-old Maria Theresa, they would have enforced a radical reconstruction of central Europe. The cunning French plan was to create four roughly equal states, by giving Lower (northern) Silesia to Prussia; Bohemia, Upper (western) Austria, the Tyrol, Breisgau and the imperial title to Bavaria; part of Lower Austria, Moravia and Upper Silesia to Saxony, and leaving the Habsburgs with just their remaining Austrian territories and Hungary. France, of course, would hold the balance between these four, and would take the Austrian Netherlands into the bargain. The Habsburg lands in Italy would be divided between Sardinia and Spain.

Unfortunately, they could neither achieve the necessary degree of military supremacy, nor could they control the mercurial Frederick. As the latter wrote, he had no intention of creating a yoke for his own neck, so instead of behaving like a loyal ally of France, he rather sought to maintain a balance between France and Austria. Intercepted despatches had revealed that the French would desert him at once if the Austrians agreed to cede Luxemburg and Brabant. So in October 1741 Frederick signed a secret truce with the Austrians at Klein-Schnellendorf, by which he ceased hostilities and the Austrians evacuated Silesia. Maria Theresa badly needed this respite, for the Saxons and the Bavarians had moved smartly to assist the French military effort. By early 1742, the Elector of Bavaria, Charles Albert, had been crowned King of Bohemia and Archduke of Austria and had also been elected Holy Roman Emperor. In the north, French diplomacy had encouraged the Swedes to attack Russia, thus ensuring that Maria Theresa could expect no help from that quarter. With a French puppet on the imperial throne–the first non-Habsburg for three centuries–and a Franco-Bavarian army occupying Prague, French influence in Europe had reached a point far in excess of anything achieved by Louis XIV.

This success was short-lived. Although Frederick briefly re-entered the fray late in 1741, he left it altogether in June 1742 after victory at Chotusitz in May allowed him to negotiate the Treaty of Breslau, which fulfilled his essential aim–the cession of most of Silesia. Almost all of Frederick William I’s treasure-chest had been spent, but, as Frederick recorded, ‘provinces that do not cost more than seven or eight millions are cheaply purchased’. Meanwhile Maria Theresa had succeeded in raising sufficient troops, mainly from Hungary, to expose the French and Bavarian armies as paper tigers–‘sybarite courtiers’ was Frederick’s derisive comment on the quality of the French. By the end of 1742, the Austrians had regained control of Bohemia and had occupied Bavaria. The diplomatic situation was also improving, for in Britain the fall of Sir Robert Walpole in February 1742 led to the appointment of Lord Carteret as secretary of state and a much more forward policy on the continent. British subsidies financed the formation of a ‘Pragamatic Army’ of British, Hanoverians, Hessians and Dutch, which in June 1743, led by George II, scored a major victory over the French at Dettingen near Frankfurt am Main. This was to be the last time that a British sovereign commanded his troops in battle personally.

This revival of Austrian fortunes was not to the liking of Frederick of Prussia at all. By the beginning of 1744 he was becomingly increasingly anxious that Britain and Austria might force a peace settlement on France that would cost him Silesia. He claimed to have in his possession a copy of a letter from George II to Maria Theresa stating ‘Madam, that which is good to receive is good to return’. Also alarming was the defection of Saxony to the enemy camp in December 1743, which revived the nightmare of a Saxony-Silesia-Poland bloc. On the other hand, Frederick had not rested on his laurels, using the period of peace to bring his army up to 140,000, to improve the cavalry and to form a war-chest of 6,000,000 talers, or enough–so he (wrongly) thought-for two campaigns. Only too well aware that his thinly resourced state must be at a disadvantage in any prolonged war of attrition, his strategy was to deliver sharp shocks to gain limited objectives in short wars. On this occasion, the war began brilliantly with the invasion of Bohemia and the capture of Prague on 16 September 1744 but nearly ended in disaster, as he greatly underestimated the dangers of a winter campaign in hostile territory. With his army melting away through desertions, he was forced to retreat back into Silesia, there to await the inevitable Austrian retribution.

The decisive battle came on 4 June 1745 at Hohenfriedberg when Frederick’s army of about 55,000 routed roughly the same number of Austrians and Saxons in four-and-a-half hours of savage fighting, capturing 7,000 and killing 4,000 for the loss of just over 1,000 Prussians. It was enough to save Silesia and to secure peace with Great Britain but not yet enough to bring the Austrians to the negotiating table. Only after further Prussian victories at Soor on 30 September, at Katholisch-Hennersdorf on 22 November and at Kesselsdorf on 15 December, which led to the capture of Dresden, could Maria Theresa be persuaded that, for the time being at least, Silesia would have to be abandoned. On Christmas Day 1745 the Peace of Dresden was signed, by which Frederick gained Silesia from Austria and a million talers from Saxony. In return, he recognized the election of Maria Theresa’s husband Francis as Holy Roman Emperor, which had occurred without Prussian participation the previous May. Frederick returned to Berlin to a hero’s welcome; it was from this time that he acquired the sobriquet ‘the Great’. He himself knew that he owed his triumph more to the army created by his father than to his own leadership, although an unusually favourable international situation helped, not to mention a good slice of luck. ‘From now on I shan’t hurt a fly, except to defend myself’, he wrote. It was to prove easier said than done.

Meanwhile, on the western front the Austrians were also finding the war heavy going. Although George II’s victory at Dettingen in 1743 had expelled them from Germany, the French found campaigning in the Austrian Netherlands much more congenial. Beginning in 1744 their armies, commanded by the maréchal de Saxe, an illegitimate son of Augustus the Strong of Saxony, won one victory after another, most spectacularly at Fontenoy near Tournai on 11 May 1745 in the presence of their king. When the battle was over, Louis XV and the Dauphin made a triumphal procession from one regiment to another to be fêted. It was undoubtedly the high-point of the reign. Shortly afterwards, the outbreak of the second great Jacobite rising sent most of the British contingents rushing back across the Channel. In the course of the next two campaigns Saxe’s army completed the conquest of the Austrian Netherlands and set about invading the Dutch Republic.

All this success should have allowed Louis XV to impose the sort of settlement his predecessor had achieved in 1678–9. Unfortunately, in other theatres, the war did not go so well. In Italy the Austrians and their Sardinian allies had achieved total control by the end of 1746, while in Great Britain the Jacobite rising came to an abrupt end at Culloden on 16 April 1746. Overseas, the capture of Madras by the French East India Company was counterbalanced by the loss of Cape Breton Island and Louisbourg. Growing British maritime supremacy brought a blockade of French trade and fears that the French sugar-islands in the Caribbean would be conquered. With neither side able to land a knockout blow and all combatants suffering from varying degrees of financial exhaustion, a settlement was painfully worked out and eventually signed at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) on 18 October 1748. Almost a decade of fighting across the globe did not yield a commensurate amount of territorial change. Outside Europe, Britain and France exchanged their Canadian and Indian conquests. On the continent, the French restored to the Dutch and the Habsburgs all their conquests in the Low Countries. Their only territorial gain was by proxy, Louis XV’s son-in-law Don Philip of Spain acquiring the Italian duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla. So at long last, after thirty years of scheming, Elizabeth Farnese had succeeded in setting up her two sons by Philip V as independent sovereigns. Not surprisingly, a settlement that left France empty-handed, despite all Saxe’s great victories, was deeply unpopular, ‘bête comme la paix’ (as stupid as the peace) passing into everyday speech as an expressive simile.

Some consolation might be drawn from the humbling of the Habsburgs, indeed one French envoy at the Aachen peace conference proclaimed that ‘France has achieved her great aim, the humiliation of the House of Austria’. Certainly Maria Theresa was very bitter about her treatment at the hands of her notional allies, the British-as bitter as her father had been back in 1714. A longer-term perspective would have yielded some consolation to soothe her wounded pride. At least she had survived the dark days of 1740–1 when the very existence of the Monarchy was in doubt. If she had had to give up Silesia to Prussia, Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla to Don Philip, and a small portion of the Duchy of Milan to Sardinia, the great bulk of her bulky empire had been preserved, despite the adverse military verdict. With her husband given international recognition as Holy Roman Emperor, there was every reason to hope that the house of Habsburg-Lorraine would be as long-lived as its predecessor.

On the other hand, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the loss of Silesia to Prussia, for it was populous (about 1,000,000 inhabitants), economically advanced (a flourishing textile industry and excellent water communications) and fiscally productive (yielding about 25 per cent of the total tax revenue of the Austrian and Bohemian lands). To lose all that was bad enough, but the damage did not stop there. As Silesia had formed an integral part of the economies of the neighbouring provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, they too suffered serious and lasting damage. Moreover, the fact that this great asset had passed to Prussia doubled the depth of the wound: if all the various resources of Silesia were added together and expressed by the algebraic symbol ‘x’, then the power relationship between the Habsburg Monarchy and Prussia changed as a result of its transfer not by ‘x’ but by two times ‘x’, for what had been taken away from the one was added to the other. The same applied to its strategic position. In the hands of the Habsburgs, Silesia was a tongue of territory stretching into northern Germany; its loss not only reduced Habsburg influence there, it also put Prussian armies within 100 miles (160 km) of Prague and 130 miles (210 km) of Vienna. The great victor of the War of the Austrian Succession was undoubtedly Frederick the Great. He had established his supremacy over his great rivals for the domination of northern Germany-Hanover and Saxony-and was now challenging Austria for the mastery of the whole German-speaking world. As Spain and the Dutch Republic had clearly forfeited their great-power status, Prussia joined France, Great Britain, Austria and Russia to form a pentarchy of states capable of acting independently in international affairs.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF FRANCE: THE SEVEN YEARS WAR

In the aftermath of the Aachen treaties, both groups of allies were heartily fed up with each other. Maria Theresa deeply resented the peace that had been dictated to her by the British, who clearly welcomed the rise of Prussia as a bulwark to any renewal of a Habsburg bid for hegemony in the Holy Roman Empire. For their part, the British complained with equal venom about an Austrian greed for subsidies that was matched only by their failure to meet their commitments. On the other side, not only were the French alienated from Frederick by what they saw as his recurring acts of treachery but Louis XV also harboured a personal dislike for this agnostic upstart with a taste for making obscene jokes about the royal mistresses. For his part, Frederick was well aware that the French would have been just as negligent of his interests if it had suited them. In short, the way was clear for a fundamental reorganization of the alliance system. It probably would have happened anyway, but in the event the catalyst proved to be the reappraisal of Habsburg policy undertaken by Count Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz. He was well-placed to carry out this task, for he had served in senior diplomatic positions in both Italy and the Netherlands during the 1740s and had been the Austrian representative at the Aachen peace negotiations. Direct experience had taught him that neither Italy nor the Austrian Netherlands could be defended successfully against a determined French attack and that in every other respect too their value was greatly inferior to that of the central provinces. Habsburg policy, therefore, had to be reorientated from periphery to centre and its primary objective had to become the recovery of Silesia. That was easier said than done: the pitiless exposure of the Monarchy’s military weakness during the previous two decades made this an impossible task without powerful allies. But where were they to be found? The traditional alliance with the maritime powers had proved a broken reed, the Dutch being neutral and the British being perfidious. There was the additional consideration that Silesia was land-locked. Even if the maritime powers were to put their best feet forward, there was little they could do to help Austria regain the lost province. A continental target required continental allies. Russia was already an ally, indeed it had been Charles VI’s anxiety to preserve that alliance that had prompted him to participate in the disastrous war against the Turks of 1737–9. There was nothing less certain than the quality and quantity of Russian assistance, however, as Maria Theresa had discovered to her cost in 1740. Immobilized by palace revolution and diverted by Swedish invasion, Russia had played no part in the Silesian wars of 1740–5. So it was essential that the Monarchy should obtain at least the benevolent neutrality (and preferably the active assistance) of the greatest continental power-France.

This was the analysis presented by Kaunitz to Maria Theresa and her senior ministers in the spring of 1749. Not surprisingly, so radical a proposal aroused scepticism, if not hostility. Nevertheless, Kaunitz was sent to France as ambassador in 1750 and allowed to make his case. What eventually turned the French into a receptive audience was the likelihood and then the certainty that war with the British would resume for the domination of North America. There the French were adopting a forward policy. In 1752 a new governor, the marquis de Duquesne, was sent to Canada, with instructions to reassert possession of the Ohio Valley and thus the geographical link with Louisiana. In 1754 he built a fort at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, which together form the Ohio river, and named it after himself. By that point it was only a matter of time before the undeclared war with Great Britain was made official. With Anglo-French interests also clashing with ever-increasing vehemence in the Caribbean, Africa, India and on the high seas, French policy-makers now faced a choice: should they continue to concentrate on maintaining the domination of continental Europe against the Habsburgs (‘to play in Europe that superior role which suits its seniority, its dignity and its grandeur’, as the abbéde Bernis complacently put it), should they switch the emphasis to challenging the British for domination of the world outside Europe, or should they try to do both? If the French chose the second of those options, it made good sense to seek a rapprochement with Austria which would neutralize Germany and the Austrian Netherlands and allow them to devote most of their resources to a naval war.

In Austria the crucial decision was taken at two meetings of the Council of State held on 19 and 21 August 1755, attended by Francis I, Maria Theresa, their senior counsellors and, of course, Kaunitz, who had become foreign minister in 1753. It was agreed to pursue an alliance with France, Russia, Sweden and Saxony that would reduce Prussia to its frontiers of pre-1618. In return for benevolent passivity, France would be rewarded by the cession of Luxemburg to Don Philip, who would of course be a French puppet. Austria would also help the French to secure the election of their candidate, the prince de Conti, as King of Poland when there was a vacancy. On 3 September 1755 the Austrian envoy Prince Starhemberg had a first meeting with the abbéde Bernis of the French foreign office at Bellevue, the château of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress-in-chief. The French were hesitant, not surprisingly perhaps, as they were being asked to abandon nearly three centuries of hostility.

Their reservations were eventually overcome by a chapter of accidents. The British too were anxious to neutralize continental Europe, to avoid Hanover being seized by Prussia, still of course France’s ally, and then being used to offset any British colonial conquests. Unable to get any sort of undertaking from Austria, they turned instead to Russia, concluding a convention in September 1755. This had the effect of frightening Frederick the Great, who was only too pleased to sign the Convention of Westminster on 16 January 1756, guaranteeing the neutrality of Germany. As the name suggests, this was in no sense a treaty of alliance, just an ad hoc agreement with a specific purpose. However, it proved to be the last straw for the French, who now decided to drop Frederick once and for all. He had blithely supposed that France and Austria must always be enemies, forgetting-as Friedrich Meinecke pointed out-that even oil and water can mix briefly when shaken. But this left the French isolated in Europe with war looming, so at long last they accepted the Austrian offer of an alliance. Even then, the first Treaty of Versailles, signed on 1 May 1756, which effected the ‘diplomatic revolution’, was purely defensive: only if Austria were attacked by a third party would the French be obliged to respond.

It was now that the consequences of a British miscalculation became apparent. They had seriously underestimated the strength of anti-Prussian feeling in Russia, where both main factions shared a fierce determination to cut Frederick the Great-‘a second Charles XII’-down to size. So the Russian response to news of the Convention of Westminster was a proposal to Austria to launch a joint attack on Prussia later that year. On 22 May the Austrians informed their Russian allies that they would not be able to mobilize in time for a campaign in 1756 and so the assault on Prussia would have to wait until the following year. But the Russian mobilization had already begun and news of it reached Berlin on 17 June. Frederick the Great had not been unduly concerned by the news of the Treaty of Versailles, for that was a defensive alliance, but this latest news was really alarming: if the Russians were arming despite Frederick’s agreement with Britain, then the Austrians must be at the back of it. The awful possibility of a two-front war loomed. He also knew that Saxony-Poland was part of the conspiracy and was making a major military effort to maximize its share of the spoils when Prussia was partitioned. As if that were not enough, it was very likely at least that Sweden, now firmly under the control of the French, would also join the predators. As he wrote to his sister, the Margravine of Bayreuth: ‘I am in the position of a traveller who sees himself surrounded by a bunch of rogues, who are planning to murder him and divide up the spoils among themselves.’

It had taken Frederick some time to wake up to the deadly peril he faced, but by June 1756 he was getting reliable information from a mole in the Saxon foreign office. It was from that source that he learnt of the postponement of the Austro-Russian offensive. Knowing that it would be coming the following year, he decided to launch a pre-emptive strike at Austria through Saxony, hoping to knock the Habsburgs out of the war before the Russian steamroller could be launched. On 29 August 1756 his army marched into Saxony. His intended Blitzkrieg was to last seven years. At first all went well. By October, the Saxon army had been forced to surrender, the King-Elector was sent off to exile in Poland along with his officers, while the 20,000-odd rank-and-file were simply incorporated into the Prussian army (from which most of them deserted as soon as possible, it need hardly be added). But although he won a hard-fought victory over the Austrians commanded by Field Marshal von Browne at Lobositz on 1 October, Frederick was not able to force them out of the war. As his strategy had failed, he appeared to have the worst of all worlds, for his attack on the Habsburg Monarchy had activated the Treaty of Versailles, obliging the French to enter the war. On the other hand, it could be said in his defence that at least he had knocked Saxony out of the war and had put a stop to any invasion of his territory down the River Elbe. In any event, by the spring of 1757 he was confronted by perhaps the most formidable coalition ever assembled in Europe: France, Austria, Russia, Spain, Sweden and most of the German princes, against which he could only count on Great Britain, Hanover, Brunswick and Hessen-Kassel. It could be said, however, that Louis XV would very likely have joined the war anyway, lured by the prospect of the Austrian Netherlands becoming a France satellite and outraged by Frederick’s unprovoked assault on his close Saxon relation-for the Dauphin was married to a daughter of Frederick Augustus III. Moreover, the unfortunate Saxons now found themselves making by far the biggest single contribution to the Prussian war effort, albeit involuntarily, for they supplied about 40 per cent of the total cost of the war in levies and requisitions.

Extracting the pith from the Seven Years War is not easy, for it was both complex and fast-moving. With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that the first full year of conflict was decisive, for it was then that the great coalition had its best chance of destroying Prussia. By the autumn of 1757, indeed, it looked very much as though success was within their grasp. In the spring Frederick had launched a sudden invasion of the Habsburg Monarchy from the north, through Bohemia, hoping to eliminate at least one of his numerous enemies before the remainder could close. Catching the Austrian army off guard had been no more difficult than usual, but inflicting a mortal wound on this soft but infuriatingly slippery target had proved beyond him. Although he had managed to win a hard-fought victory outside Prague on 6 May, the city itself had held out and the ensuing siege had taken more time than he could afford. Turning east to confront a relieving force under Marshal Daun, Frederick had been defeated decisively at Kolin on 18 June and forced to retreat back north into Saxony.

Now the bad news came thick and fast. On 26 July Frederick’s Hanoverian and other German allies, commanded by the Duke of Cumberland, were defeated at Hastenbeck, on the Weser near Hamelin, by the French, who then advanced eastward towards the Elbe. On 8 September they imposed the Convention of Kloster Zeven on Cumberland, which in effect neutralized his army and opened up Frederick’s flank in the west. It also released the duc de Richelieu’s forces to march south to join the main French army advancing from the south-west under the command of the prince de Soubise. Meanwhile in the east, a huge Russian army had invaded East Prussia, inflicting a bloody defeat on the Prussians at Grossjägersdorf on the Pregel river on 30 August. As if that were not enough, the Austrians now sent a raiding party against Berlin, briefly occupying the city on 16 October.

Frederick’s only chance was to prevent the French and the Austrians uniting their armies, so he hurried west to meet the former. On 5 November he found them at Mücheln, some 15 miles (25 km) west of Leipzig. They were 30,200 strong, an imposing total swelled further by 10,900 imperial troops under the command of Prince Joseph Friedrich of Saxony-Hildburghausen. Although outnumbered almost two to one, Frederick was anxious for battle and took up position facing west between the villages of Bedra and Rossbach, about four kilometres from the French camp. What followed was one of the most decisive victories against the odds in military history. Unnerved by a bombardment from the Prussian artillery cleverly positioned above them, the advancing French and imperial infantry were demoralized further by having to watch their cavalry being routed. So when the dreaded Prussian infantry advanced into view in battle-order, there was little resistance. So quick, easy and complete was the Prussian victory that most of the French infantry never even got the chance to fire their weapons. Prussian casualties amounted to 23 officers and 518 soldiers, of whom just 3 and 162 respectively were killed. Their opponents’ losses comprised 700 dead, 2,000 wounded and more than 5,000 prisoners of war, including 5 generals and 300 officers. The results were far-reaching. The suitably impressed British now repudiated the Convention of Kloster Zeven and kept their purse-strings untied for subsidies to their Prussian ally. For their part, the French withdrew into winter quarters to lick their wounds, never again to play a major part in the continental campaign. From then on, their effort was confined to north-western Germany, where the wounds inflicted at Rossbach were regularly reopened by defeats at the hands of the combined forces of Hanover and Brunswick, now under the command of Frederick’s brother-in-law, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick.

At Rossbach Frederick managed to pull one foot out of the mire, but the other was still firmly stuck. Indeed it sank deeper when the Austrians moved into Silesia in force and took its capital, Breslau (Wroclaw) on 24 November. Outnumbering the Prussians by at least two to one, they allowed themselves to be drawn out of the city to offer combat at Leuthen, to the east of the River Oder. Here, on 5 December 1757, Frederick won perhaps his greatest victory, all the more meritorious for being gained at the expense of a much better trained and motivated army than the undisciplined rabble he had blown away at Rossbach. It was after this battle that the grateful survivors sang the Lutheran hymn ‘Now thank we all our God’. With the Austrians now forced to evacuate Silesia, including Breslau, the first year of full campaigning in what was to become the ‘Seven Years War’ ended very much in Prussia’s favour.

For contemporaries, of the two battles it was Rossbach which made the greatest impact. Austrian defeats, after all, had scant rarity value in the history of warfare. The rout of a major French army was something else again, especially in view of the numerical superiority it had enjoyed and the upstart nature of its opponent. A story was soon making the rounds that, on the eve of the battle, French officers had observed loftily that they were doing ‘great honour’ to the ‘margrave of Brandenburg’ by condescending to fight him. So Voltaire was not alone in thinking that Rossbach represented a greater humiliation for his country than Crécy, Poitiers or Agincourt. When news of the battle reached France, it had a predictably chilling effect on a public that had never shown any enthusiasm for the war. Earlier in 1757, a government ordinance had sought to intimidate newspapers denouncing royal foreign policy by threatening the death penalty for anyone convicted of writing seditious publications. Rossbach completed the alienation. In April 1758 Bernis, now foreign minister, lamented: ‘Our nation is now more hostile than ever to the war. The King of Prussia is loved here to the point of madness, because those who organize their affairs effectively are always admired. The court of Vienna is detested, because it is regarded as a bloodsucker battening on France and there is very little enthusiasm for seeing it-or indeed France-gaining territory.’

Although France was now neutralized and the German princes were losing interest, Frederick still faced a two-front war against Russia and Austria. The next four years were spent in a desperate struggle to keep them apart. In the spring of 1758, bolstered by a new subsidy treaty with the British, he tried to conquer Moravia, with a view to threatening Vienna and forcing Maria Theresa to make a separate peace. No sooner had that failed than he had to rush to the eastern front, where the Russians had conquered East Prussia and were now moving into Brandenburg proper. At Zorndorf on 25 August 1758, Frederick fought them to a standstill in one of the bloodiest encounters of the war. Then it was time to move south to face the Austrians again, but this time he suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of Marshal Daun at Hochkirch on 13–14 October. Increasingly on the defensive, as his opponents began to make their crushing numerical superiority count, in 1759 Frederick was unable to prevent the Russian and Austrian armies combining. At Kunersdorf on 12 August 1759 they won their greatest victory of the war. More than half the Prussian army was killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Frederick contemplated suicide, acutely aware that his tactical miscalculations had lost the battle. He wrote to his minister Count von Finckenstein: ‘I have no more resources and, to tell the truth, I think all is lost. I shall not survive the ruin of my country. Adieu for ever.’

What then followed illustrates very well the importance of that unity of command that Napoleon was to put to such effective use. Frederick pulled himself together and, combining as he did both political and military authority, was able to stumble to safety. He was helped by the disunity of command that impeded his opponents from co-operating effectively. Count Saltykov and the Russians, who had also suffered terrible casualties, first paused to lick their wounds and then withdrew east from the Oder to the Vistula. Their Austrian allies also hesitated, worried that an army to the south, commanded by Frederick’s brother, the enterprising Prince Henry, would cut their lines of communication. So they too moved back towards Saxony. Meanwhile better news had arrived from the western theatre, where on 1 August Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, commanding an international force of British, Hanoverians, Hessians and Prussians, had defeated a Franco-Saxon army under the marquis de Contades, which led to the reconquest of Hanover, Hessen-Kassel and most of Westphalia.

Kunersdorf proved to be the best and possibly the last chance of a decisive outcome to the war. In 1760 Frederick again managed to keep his enemies at bay, defeating Daun and his Austrians at Torgau on 3 November, although the Russians did occupy Berlin briefly in October. In 1761, it was the same pattern of marches and counter-marches, with the allies never quite managing to make their numerical superiority tell. But the circle was narrowing: at the end of the campaigning season, the Austrians wintered in Silesia and the Russians in Pomerania. Very welcome relief for Frederick came on 5 January 1762, when the Tsarina Elizabeth finally succumbed to the series of strokes she had been suffering. As was well known, her successor, Peter III, greatly disapproved of Russian participation in the war and promptly put a stop to it. On 23 February he renounced all conquests and advised his allies to make peace. A formal peace with Prussia followed on 5 May. As an added if modest bonus, Sweden also made peace. On the debit side, British subsidies now ceased. Significantly, now that Frederick could concentrate exclusively on the Austrians, he began to gain the upper hand, reconquering Silesia by the end of the year. Financially exhausted and close to collapse, even Maria Theresa-‘an ambitious and vindictive enemy, who was the more dangerous because she was a woman, headlong in her opinions and implacable’, as Frederick put it with his characteristic misogyny-had to accept that Silesia could not be regained. On 15 February 1763 the Peace of Hubertusburg was signed between Austria and Prussia on the basis of the status quo ante bellum.

Prussia’s success in holding on to Silesia, and with it great-power status, was no fluke. It is sometimes suggested that it was the death of the Tsarina which saved Frederick. Indeed, he himself lent support to this myth by writing in his History of the Seven Years War that Prussia was on ‘the brink of ruin’ at the end of 1761: ‘yet one woman only dies, and the nation revives; nay is sustained by that power which had been the most eager to seek her destruction…What dependence may be placed on human affairs, if the veriest trifles can influence, can change the fate of empires? Such are the sports of fortune, who, laughing at the vain prudence of mortals, of some excites the hopes, and of others, pulls down the high-raised expectations.’ But a myth it was. Contrary to popular belief, when Frederick wrote of the ‘miracle of the house of Brandenburg’, he was referring not to the death of Elizabeth but to the failure of the Austrians and the Russians to follow up their victory at Kunersdorf. By 1760 at the latest, all the combatants in the continental war were suffering from exhaustion. By the close of the following campaign they resembled boxers who had fought themselves to a standstill, still able to stand upright but unable to land a punch that was anything more than a gentle pat. Frederick believed that it was over confidence which had prompted the Austrians to reduce their armed forces by 20,000 at the end of 1760: in fact it was impending bankruptcy. During the closing stages of the war, it was the Prussian administration that was raising men, money and supplies and it was the Prussian army that was winning battles.

The simultaneous war between France and Great Britain began badly for the latter, not least because of one of those recurring bouts of political instability that persuaded continental Europeans that a parliamentary constitution prevented the maximization of a country’s power. In the administration led by the Duke of Newcastle (‘a child driving a go-cart on the edge of a precipice’ according to the Elder Pitt), the doves led by the Earl of Hardwicke struggled with the hawks led by the Duke of Cumberland. It was not until the summer of 1757 that George II grumpily allowed Pitt to take control of the war. In the meantime, the French under the marquis de Montcalm had captured a string of forts in Ontario, while in the Mediterranean Admiral John Byng’s squadron had lost a sea-battle against de la Galissonière and with it the island of Minorca. The luckless Byng was court-martialled and executed-‘to encourage the others’, as Voltaire put it in Candide. Although very unlucky to lose his life, Byng’s execution really did remind his fellow officers that the one cardinal sin in the Royal Navy was not to attack the enemy: ‘Byng’s death revived and reinforced a culture of aggressive determination which set British officers apart from their foreign contemporaries, and which in time gave them a steadily mounting psychological ascendancy’ (Nicholas Rodger).

With Pitt’s energy and control of Parliament allowing a massive expansion of the army to 150,000 and the navy to 400 vessels, the tide began to turn rapidly in 1758. In July Louisbourg, handed back to the French in 1748, was captured again, this time for good. In May 1759 the immensely rich sugar-island of Guadaloupe was taken. A less immediately lucrative but strategically far more important prize was the capture of Quebec on 12–13 September by an amphibious force led by General James Wolfe, mortally wounded during the engagement, as was his opponent Montcalm. Although there was more fighting to come-Montreal did not fall until 1760-this marked the end of French Canada. Also in 1759, ‘the year of victories’, on 20 November Admiral Hawke, with twenty-three ships of the line, chased the comte de Conflans’ fleet of twenty-one into Quiberon Bay, capturing one, sinking six and scattering the survivors up and down the coast. This marked the end of a French bid for naval domination in home waters, in preparation for an invasion. As one French captain lamented, ‘the battle of the 20th has annihilated the navy and finished its plans’. With half of its budget diverted to the land war in Germany, there could be no recovery. In January 1762 Admiral Rodney captured the other great Sugar-island, Martinique, commenting sourly, ‘we are highly obliged to the inhabitants for their pusillanimous defence’. In the same month that Martinique fell, Spain belatedly entered the war in the ‘Third Family Compact’, but this only served to provide the British with more targets for their combined operations. Havana fell in August 1762 and Manila in the Philippines in October.

In India the war was fought by proxy between the French and British East India Companies. Here the French had a deserved reputation for being the more dynamic and enterprising. They had captured the great trading centre of Madras on the south-eastern coast in 1746, handing it back only at the peace of 1748 in exchange for Louisbourg. British policy received fresh impetus in the 1750s when Robert Clive, who had been in India in the service of the East India Company since 1743, pushed himself into the front ranks, combining political manipulation of the viceroys of the Mughal emperor with military action to browbeat them into submission. It was this combination which allowed him to take control of Bengal and its capital Calcutta, together with the adjoining state of Bihar, in 1757. Direct military confrontation between the two European powers began when the newly arrived comte de Lally sought to reconquer Madras in 1758. The decisive battle here was at Wandiwash near Pondicherry in January 1760, when de Lally was defeated by a British force led by Sir Eyre Coote. Pondicherry itself fell a year later after an eight-month siege, Lally’s capitulation marking an end to French hopes of dominating the subcontinent. Given his lack of naval support, the unfortunate commander’s task was next to impossible, but that did not prevent his execution for dereliction of duty when he returned to France. Unfortunately, his fate was too late to give courage to the French commanders in the Seven Years War.

At first sight, the degree of military supremacy achieved by the British was not reflected in the peace settlement eventually signed at Paris on 10 February 1763. This was due in part to the upheaval in domestic politics occasioned by the accession of the twenty-two year-old George III in 1760 and his reliance on the Earl of Bute. If Pitt had still been in office, much harsher terms would at least have been demanded. But Pitt had resigned in October 1761 over the refusal of his king and colleagues to agree to a pre-emptive declaration of war on Spain. The French retrieved their West Indian islands, some of their Indian enclaves (Chandarnagar in Bengal, Yanam, Pondicherry and Karaikal on the Coromandel coast, and Mahe on the Malabar coast) and their fishing rights in Newfoundland and on the St Lawrence. On the other hand, their presence in North America vanished, their Canadian possessions going to Britain and Louisiana to Spain as an inducement to make peace. The implications of this loss were not apparent at the time. In Voltaire’s Candide, immediately before the passage quoted earlier, the eponymous hero discusses Anglo-French relations with the philosopher Martin:

‘You are acquainted with England,’ said Candide; ‘are they as great fools in that country as in France?’

‘Yes, but in a different manner,’ answered Martin. ‘You know that these two nations are at war about a few acres of barren land in the neighbourhood of Canada, and that they have expended much greater sums in the contest than all Canada is worth. To say exactly whether there are a greater number fit to be inhabitants of a madhouse in the one country than the other, exceeds the limits of my imperfect capacity; I know in general that the people we are going to visit are of a very dark and gloomy disposition.’

Voltaire can hardly be criticized for failing to spot that Wolfe’s victory at Quebec and the subsequent expulsion of the French from north America was a world-historical moment. Indeed, if he had lived long enough to witness the granting of American independence in 1783, he might well have gone further and concluded that the British victory in the region had brought them only a poisoned chalice. Only gradually did it become apparent that it also marked the beginning of a process that made English the world-language in place of French. In view of their defeats at the hands of the British, the Spanish did well to win Louisiana, not to be confused with the present-day state of that name, for it embraced the entire drainage basin of the Mississippi, from the Rockies to the Appalachians, and so complemented nicely the existing ‘Vice-Royalty of New Spain’ which included, in theory if not in actual settlement, everything to the west of Louisiana, from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Pacific coast. Spain returned Minorca to the British but regained Havana and Manila.

It was France that had been damaged most by the war. By seeking to wage war simultaneously at sea, in the colonies and on the continent, France was defeated in all three theatres. Unwilling to recognize that their country was suffering from a decline that was both absolute and relative, most French people looked for a scapegoat and found it in the diplomatic revolution of 1756. If it had performed its main task and had allowed the French to defeat the British, it might have proved acceptable to French public opinion-although even then many would have preferred a continental to a ‘blue water’ strategy. But, as we have seen, in fact it was followed by disaster. From the rich stock of contemporary accounts, the following brief extracts will give some impression of the depth and bitterness of feeling it aroused: ‘The treaties of 1756 and 1757 with Austria were regarded by all the powers as the disgrace of Louis XV…These treaties transformed France from being a great and victorious power into being the auxiliary of Austria’ (Soulavie); ‘The Seven Years War was a war undertaken without reason, conducted without skill and ended without success…The wound which the defeats inflicted on national pride was sharp and deep…The French monarchy ceased to be a first-rank power…The sense of shame evoked by this royal lethargy, this political decadence, this monarchical degradation, both wounded and aroused French national pride. From one end of the kingdom to the other, to oppose the Court became a point of honour’ (Ségur); ‘The treaty of 1756 demonstrated the first law of international relations-that there can never be a sincere and solid alliance between natural enemies. This treaty was monstrous in principle and disastrous for France in practice’ (Peyssonnel).

THE FIRST PARTITION OF POLAND AND THE EASTERN QUESTION

The Peace of Paris of 1763 did not put an end to France’s suffering. In the following year, the collapse of her once-dominant influence in eastern Europe was revealed by the election of Stanislas II Poniatowski as King of Poland. By imposing her own candidate-and superannuated lover to boot-the new Tsarina, Catherine II, demonstrated that Poland was now a Russian satellite. When the last vacancy had occurred, in 1733, France had gone to war to try to impose her candidate. She had failed in that object, but at least had gained Lorraine from the resulting imbroglio. In 1764 she stood helplessly by. Worse was to come, when in 1768 a great upheaval in the affairs of eastern Europe began. The outbreak of war between the Ottoman Empire and Russia in that year posed the great ‘Eastern Question’. The scale of Russian victories, which included the astonishing feat of sending a fleet from the Baltic to the Mediterranean to destroy the Turkish fleet at Chesme in June 1770 (a battle to compare with Lepanto or Trafalgar), raised the possibility of a Russian conquest of the entire Balkan peninsula and the expulsion of the Turks from Europe.

That was a threat the Habsburg Monarchy was obliged to counter, especially because Russia had been allied to Prussia since 1764. With every Turkish defeat, military intervention to prevent a total Russian victory became more likely. To no one was this more unwelcome than Frederick the Great, who had no real interests at stake in the Balkans and was still preoccupied with the reconstruction of Prussia after the devastation of the Seven Years War. It was to avoid being dragged into the war that he came up with what Hamish Scott has called his ‘diplomatic masterpiece’: the partition of Poland. Joseph II later rightly claimed that it had all been the work of Frederick, who had set about his task ‘with as much shrewdness as malice’. The proposal was that the three great powers of eastern Europe should settle their differences at the expense of Poland. In return for moderating her demands against the Turks, Catherine the Great of Russia was awarded a huge slice (35,500 square miles/92,000 km²) of eastern Poland. Frederick took little more than a third of that, but for him it was very much a question of ‘never mind the width-feel the quality’. By linking East Prussia to the central core of the Hohenzollern territories and by gaining control of the lower reaches of the River Vistula, this acquisition brought to Prussia colossal strategic, economic and fiscal advantages.

For the Austrians, the advantages were much less obvious. The province of Galicia which they obtained was four times as populous (2,650,000 inhabitants) as the Prussian share and almost as extensive (32,000 square miles/83,000 km²) as the Russian, but its value was certainly far less than that of either. Strategically, Galicia was a liability, lying to the north of the Carpathian mountains which formed the natural frontier of the Monarchy in the north-east. Economically and socially, it was primitive, destined to become a burden rather than an asset. When he visited Galicia for the last time, in 1787, Joseph II lamented that not all the vast sums lavished on the province had made it a going concern. Politically, it posed a constant irredentist threat, as the Polish there nobles never ceased to look for an opportunity to achieve reunion with Poland. As the events of 1789–90 were to show, this could prove to be a serious problem. In any case, it is difficult to appreciate what benefit accrued to the Habsburgs from the expropriation of a Catholic country which was traditionally pro-Austrian, mainly to the benefit of Protestant Prussia and Orthodox Russia. It had been a Polish king-John Sobieski-who had led the army which relieved the siege of Vienna in 1683. Yet Maria Theresa and Joseph II, who were joint rulers of the Habsburg Monarchy after the death of Francis I in 1765, really had little choice once Frederick had won Russian approval. As Joseph II complained, the only way to stop the partition was to go to war-a war that Austria could not afford and was unlikely to win. Frederick’s comment on Maria Theresa’s reluctant acceptance of what she called ‘this cruel necessity’ was characteristically pithy: ‘she wept-but she took’.

The partition of Poland did not end the war. On the contrary, the Russians continued to push the Turks back across the Danube and beyond, so that when peace was concluded by the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardja on 10 July 1774, they made important gains around the northern coastline of the Black Sea: to the east control of the entrance to the Sea of Azov, to the west control of the Bug-Dniester estuaries, and in between ‘independence’ for the Khanate of the Crimea from the Turks. Freedom of navigation and the right to send merchant ships into the Mediterranean meant that the Black Sea was no longer a Turkish lake. No one supposed for a moment that this represented the limit of Catherine’s ambitions in the region. Turkish vulnerability was further exposed when in 1775 Joseph II exploited their helpless state to annex the Bukovina on the grounds that it had been a dependency of Podolia, which the Habsburg Monarchy had acquired in the partition of 1772. The massive re-adjustment of the frontiers of eastern Europe that took place between 1772 and 1775 dramatized a long-gestating eastward shift in the location of power. It was the first major war in the region to be concluded without any kind of western mediation. The latter was eagerly offered, but just as enthusiastically rejected. Well might the British and French rage against the criminal rapacity of ‘the barbarians, the Goths and Vandals of Germany and Russia’ (David Hume) or ‘the most impudent association of robbers that ever existed’ (Horace Walpole), but there was nothing to be done. At least Walpole could console himself with the thought that it was France that had suffered the greatest loss of prestige, crowing about ‘the affronts offered to France, where this partition treaty was not even notified. How that formidable monarchy is fallen, debased.’

In fact, France had a lot further to fall before it reached rock bottom. As its star waned in central and eastern Europe, so did that of Russia rise. The next episode to illustrate this seismic shift was the Bavarian succession crisis, occasioned by the death of the Elector Maximilian III without an heir. There was no shortage of other Wittelsbach lines, but the incorrigibly acquisitive Joseph II took the opportunity to negotiate a settlement with the next in line-Karl Theodor of the Palatinate-which ceded a substantial part of Bavaria to the Habsburg Monarchy in return for uncontested succession to the remainder. Frederick the Great’s prompt response was to invade the Habsburg Monarchy through Bohemia. The war which followed-the grandly named War of the Bavarian Succession-is always described in dismissive or derisive terms, and understandably so. As the last major encounter between two great powers before the French Revolution, it was appropriately the apotheosis (or perhaps caricature) of old regime warfare. There were no battles, only sedate manoeuvring at a safe distance, while diplomats hurried to find a peaceful solution. The result of their labours was the Treaty of Teschen of 13 May 1779, which was undeniably a defeat for Joseph. All Bavaria had to be abandoned, apart from a modest strip of territory on the River Inn. It also represented the climax of Russian influence in Europe. For the first-but not the last-time, Russia had a decisive say in German affairs. Not only had the Russian threat to enter the war on the Prussian side played a major part in forcing Joseph to abandon his forward position, it was Russian mediation which shaped the peace settlement. The reward of Catherine the Great was to become a guarantor of the status quo in the Holy Roman Empire and thus to achieve parity with France. For the next decade, Russia took the place of France as the dominant foreign power in the Holy Roman Empire.

Meanwhile Catherine was also extending her influence over the notionally independent Khanate of the Crimea. She was helped by the fact that Joseph II had learnt the wrong lesson from the events of the 1770s. What (relative) success in the first partition of Poland and (relative) failure in the Bavarian imbroglio seemed to show was that it was Russia which held the ring. When the Russians co-operated, the Habsburg Monarchy had acquired the huge province of Galicia; when the Russians opposed, the Habsburg Monarchy had been obliged to hand back Bavaria. As Joseph told his man in St Petersburg: ‘Russia with us, and we with Russia, can achieve anything we like, but without each other we find it very difficult to achieve anything important and worthwhile.’ Those words were written less than a month after his mother’s death in November 1780. While Maria Theresa was alive, there was no prospect of an Austro-Russian alliance, although Joseph had been allowed to visit Catherine earlier in the year. Now that the apron-strings had been severed, Joseph could initiate a closer relationship. Catherine felt the same way, for it was Austrian opposition that had prevented her exploiting fully Russian military superiority at Kutchuk-Kainardja. By 1780 she had been persuaded by Potemkin, her ambitious ex-lover, favourite adviser and probably husband too, that the best way forward was in alliance with the Austrians. With both partners so eager, consummation was not long delayed: by an exchange of letters in May 1781 the alliance was sealed.

Its first fruit was Catherine’s famous ‘Greek plan’. This envisaged nothing less than a partition of the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Russia’s own share would be relatively modest-more land to the north-west of the Black Sea and ‘one or two islands’ in the Aegean. However, Catherine also proposed the creation of two new states, both of which would be Russian puppets: a new ‘Kingdom of Dacia’, comprising Moldavia, Wallachia and Bessarabia, to be ruled by a Christian prince (Potemkin was not mentioned by name but he was the most likely candidate); and a new Byzantine kingdom with its capital at Constantinople, to be ruled by the younger of Catherine’s two grandsons, who had been equipped at birth with the auspicious name of Constantine (the elder was christened ‘Alexander’). This kind of armchair map-making was not taken seriously in Vienna, but they had to sit up and take notice when, shortly afterwards, Catherine struck again, not with a project this time but with action. In April 1783 she announced the annexation of the Crimea, an acquisition of colossal strategic and economic importance for Russia.

No other power was more outraged by this latest act of international piracy than was France. For two-and-a-half centuries the French had regarded the Ottoman Turks as their natural allies in eastern Europe and were horrified by the Russian seizure, which seemed to herald the end of Turkey as a European power. When launching a diplomatic offensive to induce the Russians to withdraw, they demanded-and had every right to expect-the assistance of their Austrian ally, and so were suitably angry when they discovered that not only was Joseph doing everything he could to support Catherine but that he had been secretly allied to her for the past two years. No wonder that the unfortunate Austrian ambassador at Versailles, Count Mercy, was subjected to several ‘lively exchanges’ with the French foreign minister, Vergennes.

The French initiative was toothless, for the good reason that they had just concluded a ruinously expensive war with the British over America. The architect of this policy was the comte de Vergennes, who became foreign minister on the accession of Louis XVI in 1774. He was a career diplomat with wide and deep experience of foreign courts, especially Stockholm and Constantinople. The central conviction of his policy was that the power of the two countries on the periphery of Europe-Great Britain and Russia-had increased, was increasing and ought to be diminished. As a member of Louis XV’s clandestine parallel diplomatic service, the ‘secret du roi’, since 1755, he was concerned to defend France’s traditional allies-Sweden, Poland and the Turks-against the new breed of predators, led by Russia. In the immediate aftermath of the first partition of Poland, there was nothing he could do in the east, but the growing conflict between the British and the American colonists was an opportunity not to be missed.

When that became a shooting war in 1775, Vergennes began to edge towards participation. Money and weapons were sent to the colonists and the navy was got ready for war. The trigger proved to be the surrender of General Burgoyne to the Americans at Saratoga in October 1777, which made it clear that there would be no quick and easy victory for the colonial power, as had seemed likely the previous year. Years later, after the outbreak of revolution in France, Louis XVI expressed regret that he had authorized the American intervention, complaining that his advisers had taken advantage of his youth, but all the evidence suggests that his approval was given willingly at every stage. Without the assistance of the French, not to mention the Spanish, who joined the war in April 1779, and the Dutch, against whom the British launched a pre-emptive declaration of war in December 1780, the Americans could not have won their independence in the manner and at the speed they did. The decisive battle took place in the autumn of 1781 at Yorktown in Virginia, where a British army of 8,000 under Lord Cornwallis found itself trapped on a peninsula between a Franco-American army commanded by George Washington and the marquis de Lafayette and a French fleet of twenty-four ships of the line commanded by the comte de Grasse. When news of the inevitable surrender reached London, the reaction of the prime minister, Lord North, was ‘Oh God, it is all over’. Although George III was determined to fight on, on 27 February 1782 a motion in the House of Commons calling for an end to war passed by 234 votes to 215.

Yet it proved to be darkest before dawn, for if 1781 had been the worst year for the British, 1782 was the best. On land, they held on to New York and Charleston and went on the offensive in Connecticut. At sea, the combined forces of Rodney and Hood won a crushing victory over the French at the Saintes on 12 April, winning back control of the Caribbean and the Atlantic. A triumphant Rodney told the Earl of Sandwich, the secretary of state, that the French fleet had been given ‘such a blow as they will not recover’, concluding: ‘you may now despise all your enemies’. In the autumn of the same year, the final attempt by the combined Franco-Spanish force to capture Gibraltar failed comprehensively. In India, de Bussy’s major expedition to achieve French control of the subcontinent, as part of a grand scheme for national economic regeneration, was delayed by British naval action and did not get going until after the peace preliminaries had been signed. Fortified by these successes, early in 1783 the British delegation were able to negotiate a peace better than anything that could have been imagined even a year earlier. The independence of the United States of America was recognized, of course, but Canada, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia remained British. The French secured Tobago, a share in the Newfoundland fishing and a few trading stations in Senegal and India. The Spanish did rather better, regaining Minorca and Florida. In India the status quo ante bellum was restored.

The most common reaction in Europe to the news of this Treaty of Versailles, however, was the exclamation: ‘Finis Britanniae!’ Crippled by debt, immobilized by political instability, with not a single ally to offset the abundance of declared enemies and hostile neutrals, it is not surprising that most contemporaries believed that the loss of America would prove to be only the first stage of a total dissolution of the British Empire. Joseph II, for example, offered the following analysis of Britain’s international standing in the spring of 1783: ‘England’s position beggars description; it shows just how much this nation has degenerated. If France had gained from the late war nothing beyond her demonstration to the rest of Europe of the desperate and pitiable condition of her rival she would have still achieved a great deal.’ Nor was he untypical in his belief that Great Britain had suffered more than France in a financial sense, that her material base was more brittle, that her power, prestige and prosperity had all been shattered and that the all-pervading corruption of her public life would impede if not prevent her recovery.

In France, a more jaundiced-and more realistic-view was taken. Yet again, it seemed, the French had expended their blood and their gold for the sake of third parties, in this case the Americans and the Spanish. Vergennes complained: ‘Neither the expulsion of the English commissioner resident at Dunkirk nor a little less restriction in fishing off Newfoundland, nor the recovery of the little islands of Dominique and Grenada were great enough reasons for us to go to war and yet these are the only objectives which the King would propose after a successful war.’ Moreover, if the British had failed to win the war, they certainly won the peace. As Jonathan Dull concluded, ‘ironically, the European state that ultimately benefited most from the war was Britain’. Every passing year confirmed the accuracy of the prediction of Shelburne, one of the British opponents of the war, that loss of political control over America would be followed by a compensating expansion of commerce between the two nations. British trade with the rest of the world, especially with the East, quickly regained, and then exceeded, pre-war levels. Industrial output grew in proportion, benefiting especially from the resumption of uninterrupted supplies of raw cotton. In Europe, the impotence revealed by Catherine the Great’s unilateral seizure of the Crimea was compounded by a similar inability to control events in the Holy Roman Empire when Joseph II renewed his Bavarian project in 1784. It was not France but Prussia which intervened to form a league of German princes to defend imperial integrity (or so Frederick the Great claimed).

‘THE SINEWS OF WAR ARE INFINITE MONEY’-WAR AND PUBLIC FINANCE

In August 1786, little more than three years after the end of the war, the minister in charge of French finance (the ‘controller-general’), Charles Alexandre de Calonne, was obliged to inform Louis XVI that his monarchy was facing bankruptcy. The terminal agony of the old regime was beginning. In the same year, the British prime minister, William Pitt, introduced his ‘Sinking Fund’ for the progressive reduction of the National Debt and was counting on an annual surplus of £1,000,000 to finance it. In the view of his most penetrating and succinct biographer, Lord Rosebery, it was this achievement of Pitt ‘which his contemporaries regarded as his highest claim to renown’. These contrasting fortunes exemplify an underlying national difference. The ‘Second Hundred Years War’ was not won at Quebec or Trafalgar or Waterloo, or even on the playing fields of Eton, but in the Treasury in London. In August 1786, little more than three years after the end of the war, the minister in charge of French finance (the ‘controller-general’), Charles Alexandre de Calonne, was obliged to inform Louis XVI that his monarchy was facing bankruptcy. The terminal agony of the old regime was beginning. In the same year, the British prime minister, William Pitt, introduced his ‘Sinking Fund’ for the progressive reduction of the National Debt and was counting on an annual surplus of £1,000,000 to finance it. In the view of his most penetrating and succinct biographer, Lord Rosebery, it was this achievement of Pitt ‘which his contemporaries regarded as his highest claim to renown’. These contrasting fortunes exemplify an underlying national difference. The ‘Second Hundred Years War’ was not won at Quebec or Trafalgar or Waterloo, or even on the playing fields of Eton, but in the Treasury in London.

To understand why British public finance was so resilient and that of their hereditary enemy so fragile, we need to go back to the different ways in which the two countries emerged from their simultaneous political crises in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. As we have seen, the Frondes of 1648–53 ended with a victory for the monarch, now ‘absolute’ at least in the sense that he exercised undisputed control over public finance. In England a more prolonged struggle produced a very different result, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 confirming that here public finance would be subject to regular parliamentary control. Indeed this was seen as the central achievement of the constitutional conflicts: ‘The Security of our Liberties are [sic] not in the Laws but by the Purse being in the Hands of the People’ (Carteret). That might seem to make the raising of revenue more difficult, but in reality it proved to be the decisive step towards the maximization of the country’s resources. Just because the political nation controlled public expenditure, and just because so many of its members benefited from it, Parliament was that much more willing to give its consent to new or enhanced taxation. Moreover, in its direct form, it was taxation that was both national and local: national in the sense that it was applied equally to all parts of the kingdom, local in the sense that it was assessed and collected by representatives of those who paid it-the landowners.

Direct taxation-the land tax and taxes on other forms of personal wealth or indicators of status-was not, however, the most important form of revenue, for it yielded only about 42 per cent of the total during the Nine Years War, 38 per cent during the War of the Spanish Succession, and went on falling to 18 per cent in the 1780s. Even the introduction of income tax in 1799 did not raise the share to more than a third. The main burden was carried by customs and excise. After 1660 responsibility for their collection was shifted from private tax farmers to public officials, bureaucratically controlled. The advantages of indirect taxation were twofold. First, although it bore heaviest on the poor, because it was a tax on consumption, the fact that it was paid at the port of entry or in the manufactory and was incorporated in the price meant that it was relatively ‘invisible’. Secondly, it allowed the state to benefit from the expansion of commerce, through customs dues, and from the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century, as excisable commodities such as tea, sugar and tobacco passed down the social scale to become the necessities of the masses. The apparatus grew in proportion. Between the beginning of the Nine Years War and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, the number of customs officials rose by a third and that of excisemen by almost half. By the end of the War of American Independence there were 14,000 revenue officers of all kinds, or in other words there were more tax collectors than Anglican clergymen. This expansion was accompanied by professionalization. As John Brewer has written: ‘Dependent upon a complex system of measurement and book-keeping, organised as a rigorous hierarchy based on experience and ability, and subject to strict discipline from its central office, the English Excise more closely approximated to Max Weber’s idea of bureaucracy than any other government agency in eighteenth-century Europe.’

In short, the fiscal system that evolved in England in the course of the seventeenth century was universal, bureaucratic, professional and public. Consequently, it enjoyed the vital ingredient of trust. As Martin Daunton has written, ‘Taxpayers have little incentive to pay their taxes in the absence of a high degree of “trust” that other taxpayers and the government are fulfilling their obligations.’ The parliamentary dimension also ensured that any war that was fought was a national war. William III may have taken England into his long-standing struggle with Louis XIV but only national interest could keep her there. Sir John Wildman told the House of Commons in 1689: ‘We talk not here for the King, but for the Kingdom. I have heard a doctrine preached here, “Take Care we be not principals in the war against France”, but against King James we are principals in that war to defend us from popery and slavery.’ By supporting the Jacobite pretenders and persecuting Protestants, the ham-fisted Louis XIV ensured that the full weight of the English state would be deployed against him.

Relatively modest in 1689, it quickly became formidable. In the 1680s total annual expenditure was less than £2,000,000; during the 1690s it more than doubled; in the War of the Spanish Succession it reached almost £8,000,000. By that time public spending accounted for 7 per cent of the Gross National Product, having doubled since 1688, and went on increasing steadily to 16 per cent in 1783 and 27 per cent in 1801. Revenue also increased, from £4,300,000 in 1700 to £31,600,000 in 1800, but could not keep up. The only way in which the ‘military-fiscal state’ could be kept afloat was through borrowing. During the Nine Years War the government raised £16,000,000 in loans; during the Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars it raised £440,000,000. State indebtedness grew from £14,200,000 in 1700 to £456,000,000 in 1800. How was this possible? Much of the answer is revealed by what the debt was called, for this was a ‘public’ or ‘national’ debt. In 1712 Robert Walpole wrote a pamphlet, part of whose long title ran The debts of the nation stated and consider’d in four papers: viz: I. A letter to a friend concerning the publick debts. The money was lent not to the monarch but to the nation, with the nation’s entire landed wealth, represented in Parliament, as the collateral. The relationship was institutionalized in 1694, when an Act of Parliament created the Bank of England, with the immediate task of lending the government £1,200,000. As the annual interest of 8 per cent enjoyed a parliamentary guarantee, the money was raised in less than two weeks from 1,268 investors, including the King himself. By the middle of the next century, the number of investors had risen to 60,000 and reached half a million by 1815, including many from continental Europe. As Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations: ‘The stability of the Bank of England is equal to that of the British government. All that it has advanced to the public must be lost before its creditors can sustain any loss…It acts, not only as an ordinary bank, but as a great engine of state.’ This was a far cry from the bad old days when lending to a king was more an act of faith than a rational investment. It was an arrangement that allowed successive British governments to raise all the money they needed at acceptable rates of interest. As confidence in the system grew, so did the rates of interest decline-from 6–8 per cent during the War of the Spanish Succession to half that during the Seven Years War. The dazzling success of the latter could only encourage further investment, for success bred success. As the Reverend Benjamin Newton put it in a sermon in 1758: ‘The event of war is now generally decided by Profusion of Treasure; the richest Nation is victorious and the Glorious Wreath of Triumph is become the Price of Gold.’

This combination of taxes and loans allowed the British state to double, double and double again its war effort. When the Second Hundred Years War began, the Royal Navy had 173 ships of all types; when it ended it had almost 1,000. The average annual size of the British army during the Nine Years War was just over 75,000; by 1809 it exceeded 300,000. Although manpower figures are notoriously unreliable-especially when they appear to be most precise-one good estimate is that in 1809 there were more than three-quarters of a million men serving in the various branches of the armed forces. The participation ratio of men of military age went from 1 in 16 in the 1740s to 1 in 8 in the American War to 1 in 5 or 6 in the Napoleonic Wars.

One significant advantage enjoyed by the English as they set about creating their military-fiscal state in the second half of the seventeenth century was that they were relative newcomers. Despite occasional excitements such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada, they had mainly kept out of continental wars and had engaged in only limited colonial expansion. All their rivals, however, had been hard at it for a century or more, most intensely during the Thirty Years War. As a result, all kinds of concessions had been extracted by particular interest groups that were to prove very resistent to change. Of no country was this more true than France, whose existential struggle with the Spanish Habsburgs had begun in 1494 with Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy and was still underway when this period began. Living from hand to mouth, lurching from one short-term expedient to another, no French king had been able to create an orderly public fiscal system.

Characteristic was the importance of ‘venality’ or the sale of offices, described by its most authoritative historian (William Doyle) as ‘a French addiction’. First marketed in 1522, venal offices were to enjoy a long future because of their popularity with both parties. For the invariably hard-pressed monarch they offered cash in hand; for the purchaser they brought income, privileges (such as exemption from billeting and certain forms of taxation) and, above all, status, in some cases even nobility. And in return for an annual fee (the Paulette) they were hereditary. A survey carried out by Colbert in 1664 revealed that there were 45,780 venal judical and financial offices with a market value of 420,000,000 livres, yielding 2,000,000 for the Paulette but costing 8,000,000 in payments to the holders as fees (gages). Colbert’s attempt to reduce venality, the last made under the old regime, was frustrated by Louis XIV’s need for money for his war against the Dutch. By 1789, Doyle has estimated, there were 70,000 venal offices, or in other words about 1 per cent of the male population held venal office, so perhaps as many as a third of a million people depended on them. Louis XV’s last controller-general, Terray, cheerfully conceded that venality was unjust but the king had to find his money somewhere.

That such a colossal amount of capital should be tied up in non-productive investment undoubtedly had a serious long-term effect on the French economy, but that is not our concern here. What it meant in financial terms was that reform was rendered next-to-impossible. In the neat formulation of J. F. Bosher, the French kings could not change the system because it was not theirs to change. He also identified a related fundamental failing-the collection of taxes in old regime France was not a public responsibility. It was a commercial exercise, undertaken by private entrepreneurs who contracted with the crown to collect certain taxes in certain parts of the country in return for an advance payment. The result was private affluence but public squalor. In the course of the Nine Years War, the contracts concluded between the King and the financiers yielded 329,000,000 livres for the former but a profit of 107,000,000 livres for the latter. No wonder that the price of a position as ‘Farmer General’ in Louis XVI’s reign was 1,500,000 livres, for the post gained admission to a company of the forty richest men in the kingdom, the collectors of indirect taxes. There was a yawning gulf between what their minions collected and what finally found its way into the royal purse. In fact, that should read ‘royal purses’, for there was no central treasury commanding an oversight over revenue and expenditure. Most of the taxes collected went straight to royal payers of one kind or another. There was no hierarchy of officials and no bureaucratic controls. As a result, not even the first step towards financial rationality-a budget-could be taken. Significantly, in 1784 the Encyclopédie methodique defined ‘budget’ as an English parliamentary term. So whereas the Compte rendu au roi (account rendered to the king) presented by the controller-general Necker in 1781 claimed that there was a substantial surplus, his successor Calonne claimed that there was in fact a large deficit-and neither of them could be proved right or wrong. Nor was there a state bank. As J. H. Shennan put it, Louis XIV had preferred to melt down his plate and silver furniture rather than copy the banking practices of his enemies. The ignominious failure of John Law’s national bank scheme in 1720, defeated by the financiers who stood to lose most from a nationalization of the country’s finances, meant there would be no further attempt under the old regime.

It used to be asserted that the financial problems of the French monarchy stemmed from privilege, from the fiscal exemptions enjoyed by the first and second estates. It was certainly the case that the Church only made a modest voluntary contribution (don gratuit) and that nobles were exempt from the main form of direct taxation, the taille. However, it has been argued by John McManners that the Church was in fact paying ‘a fair share’ by the 1780s, and by Betty Behrens that French nobles actually paid more in direct taxation than did their British equivalents, thanks to the imposition of a universal tax of 5 per cent (hence the name vingtième) on landed income in 1749, which was doubled in 1756 and trebled in 1782. However well-founded objectively, these counter-arguments seem rather beside the point, for what mattered most was how the situation was perceived by the great mass of taxpayers. As the flood of pamphlets and prints in the late 1780s revealed, there was a widespread belief that the two privileged estates were carried on the back of commoners.

Consequently, the trust referred to earlier could never inform the French fiscal system. This was all the more serious because of its heavy reliance on direct taxation, which supplied between 48 and 61 per cent of revenue, depending on the period. Unlike in England where the land tax was relatively invisible because it was paid by landowners, who then passed it on to their tenants in the form of increased rents, in France the taille was collected directly from the cultivators. As Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien have observed in a comparative study of the two countries’ fiscal arrangements: ‘Had England been a nation of peasant proprietors paying taille, collected by tax officials, the direct presence of the tax-gatherer would have created an identifiable object of hostility for most families in rural society, creating and focussing political hostility.’ Even the main form of indirect taxation in France-the salt-tax (gabelle)-involved a highly visible direct confrontation between individual household and tax-collector.

Trust was also eroded by the widespread variations in types and rates of taxation. As we have seen, just for the gabelle France was divided into six different regions with six different rates of duty. Quite apart from fostering a sense of injustice, this incoherence made domestic smuggling a major industry, involving hundreds of thousands of people-perhaps even as many as a million, according to Olwen Hufton. Exemplifying the absurdity was the enterprising use of dogs by smugglers to carry salt across the frontier from Brittany into Maine. The same discrepancies could be found in direct taxation too: in the élection of Sens, for example, the ratio of tax to income varied from as little as 5 per cent as much as 53 per cent with no account taken of the value of the land or its actual productivity. Less quantifiable was the belief that public revenue was being squandered on the private delights of the court. Although in fact accounting for only 6–7 per cent of total expenditure, the well-publicized extravagance of, first Louis XV and his harem of mistresses, and then of Queen Marie Antoinette, did nothing to encourage ordinary taxpayers. Even as bankruptcy threatened in the 1780s, Calonne was engaging in some high-profile expenditure, including the purchase of the palaces of Rambouillet for 18,000,000 livres from the Duc de Penthièvre and Saint-Cloud for the Queen, together with a shower of pensions to the latter’s friends at court. On 19 July 1787 Louis XVI’s ministers tried to give him an elementary and belated lesson on the relationship between public relations and fiscal success:

Duc de Nivernais: ‘We cannot hide from Your Majesty that the public mood is bad.’ ‘But why so?’ said the King. No one replied. [Then the marquis de Castries] spoke up: ‘Because the public views with some surprise, Sire, that whilst Your Majesty prepares to place new burdens of taxation on the people, he makes no personal sacrifice; that whereas he has made a bad choice [Calonne] which has led to the ruin of his finances, he seems disposed to make his subjects pay the price; that his building continues on all sides etc.

In François Furet’s shrewd judgement: ‘Had he attacked court wastefulness, Louis XVI would not have saved his finances, but he might perhaps have salvaged even more-the monarchy itself.’

By this time it was too late. Even the limited success achieved in the American War had been won at too high a price, for it had cost as much as the three previous wars put together. The cost of the navy alone had quadrupled between 1778 and 1783. By the time Calonne went to see Louis XVI on 20 August 1786, the situation was desperate. The monarchy was now locked in an interest-deficit spiral-the cost of servicing the debt had grown to the point at which it could only be financed by raising more loans, which increased the deficit, which increased the need for more loans, and so on. The annual deficit was thought to be currently in excess of 100,000,000 livres on what was thought to be a total revenue of about 475,000,000 livres-although no one could be sure about any of these figures-and debt repayments were consuming about half of income. The third vingtième, which had been imposed with so much difficulty in 1782, was due to expire in 1787. Over a billion livres had been borrowed since 1776 and loans could now be filled only slowly and at escalating rates of interest. It was now that the earlier failure to make the King’s finances public and national proved to be so damaging, for it was a credit-strike that forced a reluctant Louis XVI to convene the Estates General.

HOW TO WIN ON LAND UNDER THE OLD REGIME

In military terms, the three great success stories of the period 1648-1815 were France 1648–97 and 1792–1809, Russia and Prussia. The Habsburg Monarchy had its moments, especially against the Turks before 1718, but suffered too many defeats to merit inclusion in the first division. This pattern would suggest that force of numbers was the key to success.

Table 9. Army numbers during the eighteenth century

Source: Walter Demel, Europäische Geschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2000)

Apparent confirmation is provided by Table 10, which demonstrates the intensification of warfare during this period.

Table 10. The intensification of warfare 1648-1815

Explanation of columns:

I. Average size of an army in battle, computed where possible from thirty battles in each war II. Number of cannon per 1,000 combatants III. Number of battles in which the opposing armies together numbered over 100,000 IV. Average number of battles per month

Source: R. R. Palmer, ‘Frederick the Great, Guibert, Bülow: from dynastic to national war’, in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of modern strategy from Machiavelli to the nuclear age (Oxford, 1986)

Yet even a moment’s consideration reveals the inadequacies of a quantitative approach. The colossal armies raised by Louis XIV at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession could not prevent Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet. Nor could the colossal numerical advantage enjoyed by the coalition of France, the Habsburg Monarchy, Russia, most of the Holy Roman Empire and Sweden in the Seven Years War be translated into military victory over Great Britain and Prussia. The population of Great Britain and Ireland was less than half that of France alone in 1756, that of Prussia less than one-eighth.

Demographically, Prussia was a third-rate state when Frederick came to the throne in 1740, yet by the treaty of Hubertusburg in 1763 it had its feet firmly thrust under the top-table of European powers. Expressed most generally, the key to its success lay in the ability to maximize resources. By seizing Silesia in 1740 and then defending it successfully against all-comers, Frederick demonstrated that the God of battles was not always on the side of the big battalions. With understandable complacency he observed in the preface to The History of My Own Times: ‘I have seen small states able to maintain themselves against the greatest monarchies, when these states possessed industry and great order in their affairs. I find that large empires, fertile in abuses, are full of confusion, and only are sustained by their vast resources, and the intrinsic weight of the body.’ As a summary of the relationship between Prussia and the Habsburg Monarchy, that is hard to beat.

Frederick’s three predecessors had created a system which rested most fundamentally on close co-operation between ruler and landed nobility. By an agreement concluded in 1653 (the ‘Rezess’), the latter were given freehold tenure to their land (previously held as revocable fiefs), the sole right to own estates, and control over their peasants. But in return they guaranteed the taxation necessary for a standing army. There was still a long way to go. The Brandenburg army remained relatively small (about 30,000 in 1688), dependent on foreign subsidy and unable to translate military performance into territorial gain. As we have seen in the previous chapter, most of the land won in the successful war against Sweden between 1675 and 1679, for example, which had taken the Brandenburgers to the gates of Riga, had to be handed back at the Peace of Saint-Germain at the behest of Louis XIV. A deeply resentful Great Elector had a memorial struck, inscribed with a menacing motto from Virgil: ‘exorietur aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor’ (may an avenger one day arise from our bones). The instrument of his vindictive appeal was to be his great-grandson.

However, it was his grandson, Frederick William I, who forged the instrument. Part of his achievement was social. By a deft combination of stick and carrot, he made the Junkers synonymous with the Prussian officer corps. If young nobles were backward in coming forward to volunteer their services, military search parties were sent to fetch them to the cadet schools. Their training was brutal, their early years in the service penurious, but once they rose to the rank of captain and the command of a company, their financial future was assured. By the time Frederick II came to the throne, the Junkers were well and truly assimilated. Part of Frederick William’s achievement was cultural. Through personal example he raised the status of the military profession to paramountcy. Never seen out of uniform (of the Potsdam Life Guards) after 1725, he led from the front-and made his children follow suit. Part of his achievement was military. Although a timid player on the international stage, it was he who supervised the transformation of the Prussian army into the most effective in Europe, as his son duly acknowledged:

The late king, by his infinite assiduity, introduced a wonderful order and discipline among his troops, and a precision before unknown in Europe in their motions and manœuvres. The Prussian battalion became a walking battery; the quickness of the charging of which tripled the fire, and made a Prussian equivalent to three adversaries…So many new inventions transformed the army into a moving fortress, the access to which was formidable and murderous.

Moreover, quality was matched by depth. In 1740 Frederick William left an army with a peacetime strength of 80,000, raised from a population of just 2,240,000. This was made possible by the ‘canton system’ introduced in 1732–3, by which each regiment was allocated a district for recruiting. This marked an important step towards the nationalization of recruiting, for all able-bodied males were obliged to register on the cantonal rolls. If the quota could not be met by volunteers, then conscripts were taken. This limited form of conscription was not a Prussian invention-Sweden had been the first country to organize a permanent army based on the principle of military obligation-but it was the Prussians who pushed it furthest. Ludwig Dehio estimated that if the Habsburg Monarchy had made the same effort in 1740, it would have had an army 600,000 strong instead of the 108,000 actually available.

Frederick William also completed the process of social militarization which turned Prussia into ‘not a country that has an army but an army which has a country, in which, as it were, it is just billeted’, as his son’s adjutant von Berenhorst famously put it. This primacy of military policy influenced government policy in every sector. The main beneficiary, of course, were the nobles, who provided the officers. They were given control over their serfs, control of local government, a monopoly of landed estates (so that a Junker could sell his land only to another member of his class), cheap mortgages and subsidies to repair war damage. They also benefited from the preferential treatment given to rural interests when fiscal and commercial policy was determined. The peasantry benefited too, for a regular supply of cannon fodder depended on a tolerable level of existence. In Otto Büsch’s lapidary formulation: ‘Protection of peasants was protection of soldiers’.

It was a militarism which suffused all sections of society. The Junkers and Frederick went through fire together in the three Silesian wars between 1740 and 1763, in which some 1,550 officers perished. If the von Kleist clan was exceptional in losing twenty-three members, including the distinguished poet Ewald, who died of wounds sustained at Kunersdorf, there were several other families whose losses reached double figures. As the wars had ended with Prussia achieving great-power status against all the odds, the survivors were now tied to their war-lord like blood-brothers: as one of his veterans put it, it was a relationship similar to that between a Scottish chieftain and his clan. Frederick set the example of selfless devotion to duty from the top, sharing the privations of his soldiers and requiring the same from the members of the royal family, all of whom were obliged to serve. As Count Lehndorff boasted: ‘what distinguishes our army from all others is that our princes are soldiers themselves, and put up with the same hardships as the private soldiers’. It was a pride shared by civilians, as a French visitor found: ‘The common people in Prussia, even the lowest classes, are permeated with a militarist spirit, they speak with respect of their army, recite the names of their generals, recount their victories and the times they have covered themselves in glory.’ It was an impression confirmed by Prussians themselves, such as Ludwig Tieck, who recorded in his memoirs:

The King appeared at military parades and reviews as the great war-lord, who had defied successfully a coalition of all the rest of Europe, and at the head of his troops, who had won so many battles. When there were military exercises or manœuvres outside one of Berlin’s city-gates, perhaps the Hallesche or the Prenzlauer, then the citizens of Berlin streamed out in their hordes to watch. My father [a master-carpenter] also used to take his children out to these popular festivals. Among the pressing crowds of people, the rush of artillery-trains and the marching soldiers, we were prepared to put up with the dust and the heat for hours on end, just to catch sight of our old Fritz surrounded by his dazzling retinue of celebrated generals.

In short, in the course of the eighteenth century Prussia became a militarized state supported by a militarized society. There was nothing inevitable about this. In 1610 the Berlin militia had refused to obey their ruler’s order to conduct a training exercise on the unheroic if sensible grounds that firing their muskets with real gunpowder would frighten their pregnant wives. It was the Thirty Years War which taught the hard lesson that on the North German Plain, with its lack of natural frontiers, it was a case of ‘eat or be eaten’. It was the series of remarkable Hohenzollern rulers who made sure that it was the Prussians rather than the Poles, Danes, Swedes, Saxons, Bavarians or Austrians who called for the menu. Indeed, even as the eighteenth century began, it was by no means certain that it would be the new kingdom of Prussia rather than some other German principality which would pose the main challenge to the Habsburgs in the Holy Roman Empire, as the following table of troop strengths and their subsequent development, compiled by Peter Wilson, eloquently shows.

Table 11. Militarization of the German Principalities during the 1700s

But militarization was not enough. Prussia could not achieve great-power status until two adjacent rivals had been eliminated: Sweden and Poland. As we know what was to come, it is easy to forget what power the Swedes had wielded in the seventeenth century, when their empire covered much of the Baltic littoral and their armies ranged deep into southern Germany. It is even easier to underestimate the potential of Poland, given its disappearance from the map of Europe as a result of the three partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1795. Yet the combination of the Electorate of Saxony with the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania in 1697 as a result of the election of Frederick Augustus of the former as king of the latter seemed to offer the perfect match of quality with quantity: Saxony was perhaps the most advanced state in central Europe, while the Polish lands stretched from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea. In both cases it was Russia which did Prussia’s work for her. By reducing Sweden to a third-rate power and taking control of Poland in the Great Northern War (1700–21), Peter the Great inadvertently also created the conditions for the rise of Prussia.

As we saw earlier in this chapter, the international situation was unusually favourable for Frederick in the autumn of 1740 but nothing could have been achieved without his intervention. No war has just ‘happened’ simply because the circumstances have been favourable. An act of the will is always required. Frederick’s decision to use the weapon his father had forged and to exploit the wonderfully favourable international situation was, if not the primal deed, then certainly a world-historical moment, after which nothing would be the same again. In his treatise General principles of warfare, written in 1746 and based on his experiences during the first two Silesian wars, Frederick impressed on his commanders the need for ‘short and lively’ wars. As he enjoyed the priceless advantage of unity of command, being both commander-in-chief and head of state, he was able to seek a decisive engagement with a speed denied to his enemies. He also brought to combat a ‘do-or-die’ nihilism which gave Prussian warfare a desperate aggression which more than compensated for any numerical deficiency. On 20 September 1806, just three weeks before Napoleon’s crushing victories at Jena and Auerstadt, Captain Carl von Clausewitz wrote to his fiancée that when Frederick marched off after Rossbach to confront the Austrians at Leuthen in December 1757, ‘he was just like a desperate gambler, determined to lose everything or to win everything back, and (if only our statesmen would take note of this fact!) it is in this passionate courage which is nothing more than the instinct of a mighty character that the highest form of military wisdom resides’. In fact, Frederick’s aggression diminished as the war progressed and the numerical superiority of his numerous enemies began to tell. Rushing from one front to the next in a desperate effort to keep them at bay, he sought to fight a war of position, of manœuvre and small gains. As he himself put it: ‘to win a battle means to compel your opponent to yield you his position’ and so ‘to gain many small successes means gradually to heap up a treasure’. During the campaigns of 1761 and 1762, and again during the War of the Bavarian Succession of 1778, he fought no major battle. As we shall in the next chapter, the French revolutionaries and Napoleon took a great deal from Frederick the Great’s military practice and consequently conquered most of Europe; but they fatally failed to imitate his subordination of military means to political ends.