ask. Newcastle pooh-poohed the idea,1 and, fed with the ordinary fair words of diplomacy, persisted for seven years more in endeavouring to galvanise and fortify "the old system". But in the argument: France and Britain must stand opposed; Austria must regain Silesia; for this purpose Britain can give less help than France, there lay too much of truth to perish, and the ever-famous Revolution in Alliances of 1756 was the result.

3

If indeed "the old system" were not moribund beyond hope, the conduct of the British Government during the six years after 1748 cannot be called unwise. The sluggishness or ill will of Austria, the mainstay of "the old system", was overlooked, and every opportunity of propitiating her was eagerly accepted. To spare her susceptibilities, Britain shunned a new entente with France.2 George II laboured unceasingly to secure the succession of Maria Theresa's firstborn to the imperial crown and actually procured the marriage of her second son to a Modena princess. The great object of reconciling the Habsburgs with the Dutch was in part at least accomplished. Sardinia, invaluable to Austria in Italy, was secured so far as such a term could ever be appropriate to her inconstant and shifting alliance. It was hardly less important to Austria than to Britain that Spain should stand aloof from France, and the cleavage between these Bourbon Powers was happily maintained. Above all Britain prepared to follow the advice given by Kaunitz in October 1749 by securing Russia, "a power raised up by Providence to supply the losses the alliance had suffered in the late wars, and to bring things to their ancient equality". Within four years the rumour ran that 30,000 Russians had been brought into Livonia, with the plain intent of forbidding Frederick to move. France threatened in that case to despatch an equal force to Flanders, 5 but no long time elapsed before Britain returned to the idea. If "the old system" meant that Prussia might be paralysed by a British-paid Russian army, Vienna would not lightly let it go.

In March 1754, then, when "Pelham fled to heaven", and Newcastle, unchallenged alike in the Foreign Office and in Parliament, succeeded, the peace of eastern Europe seemed unstable. Armed beyond all precedent, the conqueror of Silesia could hardly be expected to remain contented with a single acquisition, or to view with passive tolerance the hostile entente with which he was confronted. "Have I", he once exclaimed, "a nose intended to be pulled?" and his attitude, uninfluenced by niceties of law save when they favoured him, was well displayed when in 1752 he suspended the

1 F.O., Germany, 180, to Keith, 3 March 1749 O.S.

2 Ibid., 1749, passim.

3 Ibid., 191, 14 Aug. 1753.

4 Conversation with Keith; cf. F.O., Germany, 30 Oct. 1749.

5 F.O., Germany, 191, 21 Sept. 1753.

payment of

FRENCH AND BRITISH IN AMERICA

465

his debts to individual Britons in order to convert their Government to his view. The populations and resources of his enemies were perhaps eight times superior to his own and their comparative efficiency was growing. If Frederick lived, a preventive war, if not a war of retribution, could hardly be long delayed.

Yet, as posterity knows well, war broke out first between France and Britain and forced itself upon their reluctant statesmen as the result of local quarrels outside Europe. In the Britain of 1754, King, premier, chancellor, secretaries of state, heads of the Army and Navy -each seemed less likely than the other to design a great war about America, and the Commons at that time existed only to register the ministers' decrees. The late war had been one "in which Great Britain and France gained nothing but the experience of each other's strength and power".2 France had been the more exhausted and remained in the feebler hands. Puysieulx, the author of the peace, had even proclaimed a vision of the two States, supreme by sea and land respectively, united as in 1717 to dictate peace to Europe. The local and spontaneous strife of their nationals in India was stifled at any cost. So pronounced was the novel accent of his ally, and so clear the signs of her degeneracy, that Frederick came to regard her alliance as of doubtful value. Beyond the Atlantic, however, a different tone prevailed. When the history of colonial expansion, British and Russian alike, throughout the nineteenth century is reviewed, the folly of ascribing conscious duplicity to Louis XV and his ministers becomes apparent. On the North American mainland the French continued as they had begun, preferring the fur trade to axe and plough, ranging far afield rather than pursuing intensive development, organising empire instead of multiplying homes. Since Canada, theirs by every title, was severed from the mother country by waters often inpassable and always commanded by British coasts and islands, it would have been strange if they had not sought to connect that province with their sally-port at New Orleans. Always more intelligent and often more humane than the New Englanders towards the Indians, they were strengthening this connection by building forts and expanding their empire by conversion and by annexation. Year by year, while the French and British commissioners at Paris vainly strove to determine boundaries, these accomplished facts grew more numerous. La Galissonière, who as Governor of Canada had in 1749 initiated the aggressive defensive of French America against the instinctive expansion of the British masses, enjoyed the luxury, two years later, of rending asunder the juridical cobwebs spun by our statesmen to veil some of these proceedings. With regard to Nova Scotia, he declared, the boundary claims of Britain rested on the assumption that France had never possessed

1 Satow, op. cit. passim.

F.O., France, 233, Feb. 1749.

CHBE I

2 Coxe, W., Memoirs of Horatio, Lord Walpole, p. 359. 4 Satow, pp. 34, 181; Koser, 1, 569 seqq. 30

it save by her gift, and upon an interpretation of the Treaty of Utrecht invented some forty years afterwards and contradicted by the documents which she herself produced.1 The French claims on the Ohio doubtless lay open to an equally destructive analysis. But in the whole collision2 English critics, like those of every country and of every age, saw clear proof of the unscrupulousness of the foreign Government and of the incompetence of their own. To the younger Horace Walpole the sins of the French in evading the due evacuation of Tobago and other islands and in disturbing Nova Scotia seemed to be but part of a scheme of general aggression overseas. "In the East", he declared, "they were driving us out of our settlements, and upon the coast of Africa seizing our forts, raising others, inveigling away our allies, and working us out of our whole negro and Gold Coast trade."3 Although the French king was at this time steeped in pleasure, his ministers of foreign affairs transient phantoms, and his diplomatists parodies upon their predecessors, it is true that the interests of France and Britain overseas clashed so sharply that in many regions desultory fighting had gone on unchecked by peace in Europe. Louisbourg had been refortified and, early in 1751, news reached Whitehall that no fewer than 7800 troops had left Rochefort for the colonies.5 In America French reinforcements found a field where though the British residents might be twenty times the more numerous, expeditionary forces were reckoned only by hundreds, while bands of cannibals stood ready to join the victors. To maintain French claims on the Ohio the mere show of local force might be enough.

In other disputes meanwhile the French were trying British patience but by no means challenging to war. After discussions prolonged over several years, it was arranged that the four disputed West India islands, St Lucia, Dominica, St Vincent and Tobago, should be evacuated until the question of right could be determined. The method seemed drastic, and the Governor of Martinique protested that he could not hunt the settlers out like wild boars, but the pacific Puysieulx gave way. In 1753, moreover, the dreaded works at Dunkirk, which were supposed to contravene the Treaty of Aix-laChapelle, were actually submitted to inspection, though the result proved that British suspicion was well founded. More inflammatory and no less juridically obscure were the unending quarrels with regard to Nova Scotia. Here boundaries, allegiance and development were all contested. In 1749 the town of Halifax had been created, and in three years its population, mainly of disbanded soldiers, passed 4000. This challenge to Louisbourg impelled the 1 Mémoires des commissaires sur les possessions et les droits respectifs des deux couronnes en Amérique (Paris, 1755), 1, 181. 2 Cf. Carlyle, Frederick the Great, bk xvi, chap. xiv. 4 Williams, 1, 218.

3 Memoirs (finished Oct. 1759), 1, 82. 5 F.O., France, Feb. 1751 (Paris). Ibid. 248, 29 Nov. and 30 Dec.

WASHINGTON AT FORT NECESSITY

467 local French to fresh endeavours to reduce the British power. Their clergy were conspicuous in persuading the inhabitants to quit the country rather than suffer British rule, and even in hounding on the Indians to make life near the disputed frontier impossible.1 If it was difficult for the French to explain away their own doings by land they could at least charge the British with illegalities by sea. In 1750 the Governor of Cape Breton Island declared that for the French there was no safety, since their ships, cargoes and sailors were constantly seized by the English.2 British ships were seized wholesale by way of reprisal, while each nation accused the other of building forts on ground which was not its own.

In 1753 these local incidents were eclipsed by a conflict which was deliberately provoked and which pointed less obscurely towards war. In the summer of that year the new Governor of Canada, Duquesne, established two forts to the south of Lake Erie, with the plain intention of following exploration in the valley of the Ohio by effective occupation. In British eyes these forts stood on Virginian soil. Dinwiddie, the Governor of Virginia, was directed by the British Government to build forts on the Ohio and if necessary to remove the French by force. On 11 December, therefore, George Washington, a young Virginian surveyor in the public service, summoned the Commandant of Fort-le-Bœuf to depart. A firm refusal left him no alternative but a toilsome and perilous retreat. The local superiority of the French became apparent when Dinwiddie attempted to follow words by deeds. Of the remaining colonies, North Carolina alone consented to help Virginia. In 1754, however, Fort Necessity, a stockade nearly 150 miles south of Fort-le-Bœuf, was built as the preliminary to the expulsion of the French from their new position on the Ohio at Fort Duquesne. In May, at Great Meadows, a little expeditionary force under Washington killed a French lieutenant and ten of his men who were bringing a letter from the governor. On 3 July the brother of the slaughtered officer with 1500 men received from Washington the surrender of Fort Necessity. The French forward movement had triumphed in the face of merely local opposition. Would the British Government acquiesce, negotiate or fight? Acquiescence was plainly impossible. As Newcastle declared to Albemarle, our ambassador in Paris, the French were claiming "almost all N. America except a lisière to the sea to which they would confine all our Colonies and from whence they may drive us whenever they please". Such strangulation we could not suffer, even if the French had not clearly broken the agreement by moving while the commission still sat. Negotiation, on the other hand, might not seem hopeless. For a colonial struggle, indeed for any struggle against

1 Parkman, F., Montcalm and Wolfe, vol. 1, chaps. i-iv, and App. B.

2 Germiny, M. de., Les brigandages maritimes de l'Angleterre, 1, 88.

3 Newcastle to Albemarle, 5 Sept. 1754, cit. Charteris, Cumberland, p. 125.

Britain, France must fit out a fleet, but early in 1754, Albemarle reported that no activity was visible at Brest, and at Rochefort and Toulon a palpable reduction.1 Louis, as usual, showed himself inert; Madame de Pompadour, conciliatory; the ministers, so pacific as to recall Dupleix from India. The crushing superiority of our Navy and the countenance of Austria, Holland, Russia, Sardinia and Spain, might well indispose the French Government to court disaster for the sake of far-distant acres of wilderness and snow. Considerations of higher statesmanship, however, seldom restrain the actions of remote consuls and pioneers. Boundaries in unknown regions based on speculations as to the rights of savage nomads simply invited disputes. Report after report of French encroachment reached Whitehall. Within two years of the peace our statesmen were convinced that for all her fine promises in Europe France sought to keep all she could overseas. "If that be the case, it must be seen who is the strongest and best able to defend their rights."2 Time and negotiation seemed to bring only an aggravation of the offence. On 26 June 1754 seven ministers, assembled at Newcastle House, resolved that, as the French had destroyed our fort on the Ohio, invaded our territory with a thousand regulars, and endangered all our northern colonies and their trade, most effectual measures should be forthwith taken.3 The most obvious effectual measure, since war was neither expected nor desired, would have been to organise a sufficient colonial defence force from the British American population. Fourteen years before, Sharpe, the Deputy-Governor of Maryland, had proposed to take one man in twenty-five, in all more than 20,000, and conquer the French possessions. Now with a contest for the future of America clearly ripening, men like Franklin turned to thoughts of voluntary union.5 American authorities, from Halifax downwards, advocated compulsion. British statesmen, however, alive to a "mobbish turn" across the ocean,' feared that colonial union might lead to thoughts of independence, while the remoter colonies shrank from any sacrifice for the good of those immediately concerned.

8

The British Government, however, was firmly resolved that if, as there seemed reason to believe, the French were negotiating only to gain time for naval preparations, they should not profit by their previous aggression. For 1755 it designed, according to the plan of the victor of Culloden, a fourfold offensive against the Canadian positions. In November 1754 Braddock, a stiff, rough, elderly MajorGeneral, was ordered overseas with a thousand men, to repel force by force, but to do nothing that might be construed as an infraction. of the general peace. His mission was explained to the French by Albemarle, whom a love affair enchained to Paris, with such tact 1 F.O., France, 249, Jan and Feb. a Ibid. 1750.

Newcastle Papers, Brit. Mus., Add. MSS, 33029. 5 Bancroft, Hist. of U.S., IV, 91, 123 seqq. Shirley to the Board of Trade, cit. ibid. IV, 39.

Ibid. 7 Nov. 1740. 6 Ibid. iv, 165 seqq.

8 Charteris, pp. 127 seqq.