CHAPTER NINE

The European War Begins

While frontier settlements burned and Oswego fell, as Shirley’s planned campaigns stalled out in confusion and disarray, war between France and Britain finally began in Europe. The occasion was a French attack on Minorca, Britain’s main naval base in the Mediterranean, in May—a target, and a moment, that Versailles chose with care. The ministers of Louis XV had been building up France’s armed forces as rapidly as possible in anticipation of a war that they believed, in light of British aggressions in America since 1754, his Most Christian Majesty had every right and reason to declare. By the spring of 1756 France had approximately eighty ships of the line (vessels mounting between fifty and a hundred guns on two or more decks) either on active service or ready to join the fleet. More were on the stocks, and being completed at a rate that suggested France might achieve parity with the British navy’s hundred line-of-battle ships in the foreseeable future. The French army, with 150,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry, and nearly 4,000 artillerymen, was by far Europe’s largest. Fully half of its regiments were stationed along the English Channel with an intent made unmistakable by the six hundred troop transports that lay at anchor in the Channel ports. Britain’s fleet, while still larger than France’s, was widely scattered. Its army numbered only about thirty thousand men—so few that it had to respond to the invasion threat by importing twenty thousand German mercenaries from Hanover and Hesse to man its Channel defenses. Taking all this into account, Versailles thought it unlikely that Britain could assemble enough ships and troops to relieve Minorca once French forces blockaded Port Mahon and laid siege to its citadel, Saint Philip’s Castle.

In order to launch the expedition, all that the French decision-makers needed was to be certain that Austria would abandon its half-century-old alliance with Britain in favor of a new alignment with France. Disillusioned with the British as they had been since the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the Austrians hesitated to cut the cord until British diplomats began making overtures to King Frederick of Prussia—the mortal enemy who had annexed the Austrian province of Silesia during the previous war. The duke of Newcastle and his ministers, worrying that King George II’s other realm, the north German state of Hanover, would be overrun in case of war, had thought it prudent to conclude a treaty of friendship with Frederick. On January 16, 1756, at the Convention of Westminster, Britain and Prussia pledged to unite their forces against any aggressor who might disturb the peace of “Germany,” a term vague enough to include both Hanover and Prussia. This was entirely too much for the empress-queen of Austria, Maria Theresa, to stomach. On May 1 the Austrian and French crowns laid old enmities aside in the Convention of Versailles, a pledge by each to come to the other’s aid in the event that either should come under attack on the continent of Europe. (The specification of a land attack was crucial to Austria, which intended to strengthen its position while still avoiding war; France’s planned attacks on British maritime interests would not require Austria to take up arms against the United Kingdom.)

The Convention of Versailles completed the inversion of the alliance system that had structured European diplomacy for a half-century, and gave France the insurance it needed to launch an attack on Port Mahon in May. The British frantically dispatched a relief squadron under Admiral John Byng, declaring war on May 18. Byng encountered a French squadron under the marquis de La Galissonière off Minorca on May 20, fought an inconclusive action, and prudently withdrew to Gibraltar for repairs. Byng’s withdrawal doomed the garrison of Saint Philip’s Castle. Even so, its eighty-four-year-old commandant, General William Blakeney, held out until June 28 before surrendering. Blakeney’s resolve made him a hero, a Knight of the Bath, and a baron; Byng’s prudence made him a scapegoat. Recalled to England, he was tried by a court-martial for failure to do his utmost in the face of the enemy, found guilty, and executed by firing squad on the quarterdeck of his flagship on March 14, 1757. Widely understood as a travesty of justice even at the time, Byng’s execution spoke clearly of Britain’s desperation and fear. Parliamentary politics descended into a kind of numb impotence; for more than three months after the admiral’s death it seemed as if no one in the government was actually in charge of policy, or the larger war effort.

The Shooting of Admiral Byng, unknown engraver, 1757. The British admiral John Byng was tried by a court-martial and condemned to death for having failed to prevent the French from seizing Britain’s Mediterranean naval base on Minorca in the spring of 1756. His execution, on the quarterdeck of H.M.S. Monarque on March 14, 1757, prompted Voltaire to observe that the British found it desirable to shoot an admiral on occasion “pour encourager les autres” (“to encourage the others”). (National Portrait Gallery, London)

France, meanwhile, was prepared to fight a war that, its leaders believed, would consist mainly of actions against Britain’s main source of commercial strength, its empire. There was no real intention to use the troops stationed in Brittany and Normandy to invade England, only to tie down Royal Navy and army units in coastal defense, making it safer and easier to attack British overseas possessions in North America and the Caribbean, and perhaps to seize the British East India Company’s trading factories at Calcutta and Madras. Chances seemed excellent that a weakened Britain would beg for peace in three or at most four years’ time. At that point concessions could be extracted to limit British expansionism and render Canada and France’s other New World colonies permanently secure. Had it not been for two unpredictable developments, things might well have worked out in exactly that way.

The first, France’s failure to persuade Spain to enter the war as its ally, was a kind of nonevent, but a crucial one. The addition of the Spanish navy to that of France would have produced a decisive advantage in line-of-battle ships over Great Britain, magnifying the vulnerability of British colonial possessions. As significantly, the ability of Spanish officials in Florida to encourage a slave revolt in South Carolina (as they had done in 1739, when promises of freedom had triggered the largest slave uprising in the colony’s history, the Stono Rebellion) could add much to the uncertainty and travail of the British colonies. Spain’s King Ferdinand VI, however, had proven far more resistant to the overtures that France’s ambassador made on behalf of Louis XV than a fellow member of the Bourbon family might have been expected to be.

French diplomats assumed that Spain would cooperate in their efforts to stymie British expansionism because they knew that the Spanish feared British interlopers in the commerce of the Caribbean Basin and South America. The Anglo-Spanish War of 1739-43 (the War of Jenkins’ Ear) had been fought over just that concern. Yet to the consternation of Versailles, Ferdinand remained steadfastly neutral in the new Anglo-French confrontation until his death in 1759. In part this was a matter of temperament, for Ferdinand was notably timid, and much under the influence of the French-born Anglophile Irishman Don Ricardo Wall, who served as Spanish foreign minister from 1754 onward. While Wall’s Anglophilia was real enough, it explained his commitment to neutrality less well than his meticulous calculations of Spain’s national interest. Because Spain’s control of the Philippines depended on its ability to ship silver by the ton from Mexico to Manila, Madrid feared incursions into the Pacific by other European powers. After Captain George Anson’s capture of the Manila galleon in 1743, it was clear enough that the British had the capacity to conduct naval operations in the Pacific. What Versailles did not realize was that Spain feared that France also had designs on Mexico’s silver, and perhaps on the Pacific itself. Since 1749 fragmentary reports from New Mexico and Panama had given the Spanish foreign ministry grounds to worry that the French had discovered the Northwest Passage. If so, France would pose at least as grave a threat to Spain’s dominance of the Pacific as the English. If two such dangerous powers wished to wear themselves out in a war, Wall and his king reasoned, Spain was best advised to stand aside and let them do it.

Segesser buffalo hide painting (detail), c. 1720-50. Spain’s concern about French imperial designs on the riches of New Mexico influenced its decision to remain neutral when Britain and France declared war in 1756. This was no groundless fear: France and Spain had clashed in the North American interior before. This painted buffalo hide depicts a 1720 skirmish between Spanish and French forces and their Indian allies—Apaches and Pawnees respectively—in what is now Nebraska. (The painting, almost certainly by a Native American eyewitness, was collected by Father Philipp von Segesser, a Jesuit missionary in New Mexico, in the mid-eighteenth century. His family preserved it in Switzerland until 1986, when it was returned to New Mexico.) (Courtesy Palace of the Governors [MNM/DCA], neg. # 158345)

The lack of Spanish naval support made it difficult, though not inconceivable, for France to carry out a series of seaborne strikes against Britain’s colonies. What ultimately did make that impossible, and what altered the nature of the war altogether, was the decision of Frederick of Prussia to launch a surprise attack in August 1756 on Saxony, a component of the Holy Roman Empire and hence under the protection of the empress-queen Maria Theresa. Britain and France had both altered their diplomatic alignments in the hope that these alliances would prevent a European war from complicating their colonial and maritime operations. Now, thanks to the towering ambition of a diminutive Prussian, the Conventions of Westminster and Versailles operated inexorably to bring Britain and France to the aid of their allies.

The explosion of a general war in Europe destroyed France’s plans for a limited Anglo-French confrontation beyond the seas. All the preparation that Versailles had done could do nothing to control the direction of events. As 1756 ended and 1757 began, the gathering momentum of a general war in Europe preoccupied government leaders in France and Britain alike, while the war in North America proceeded according to a violent logic of its own.