1757, conscious of perfect readiness for war and unconscious of the deeper realities of the position, Frederick reckoned that a swift offensive would overwhelm the Austrians and perhaps leave Polish Prussia or Saxony within his hands. The seeming climax of British good fortune was therefore swiftly followed by collapse. In January 1756 Newcastle could pride himself upon the triumphant convention with Prussia and upon the rise of our land and sea forces to some 80,000 and some 50,000 men.1 February brought the news that Vienna had received the convention with a displeasure which offers of British and Russian protection against Frederick could not remove. Their court, said the Austrian public, might soon engage with France.2 In March, while the French continued to threaten invasion, they were reported to be preparing a great expedition against Minorca and to be hopeful of winning Spanish help against Gibraltar.3 In May, when at last open war was declared against France, and ominous convulsions were reported in Sweden, it became apparent that the greatest diplomatic revolution in history had been effected. Protesting that the Convention of Westminster had smitten her like a stroke of apoplexy, Maria Theresa declared that she must seek to secure herself from the risk of war, and the Franco-Austrian Treaties of Versailles followed. June brought the alarming news that Russia was declaring that she was bound only to resist an attack upon Hanover by Prussia, while it became clear that Byng's inexplicable failure had lost Minorca to the French and that the nation would not condone it. "Shoot Byng or look out for your King "5 was a cry to cowe Newcastle if not his master. "We are not able to carry on the war", lamented old Horace Walpole, “nor can we tell how to make peace.' ." In August, despite all British admonitions, Frederick invaded Saxony, and a war of incalculable dimensions had begun. In September, therefore, when news arrived that Oswego, "of ten times more importance than Minorca", had fallen to Montcalm, Newcastle's system had almost everywhere collapsed. Spain, indeed, disillusioned by French co-operation in the last war, and governed by friendly hands, refused French offers to return Minorca, and for the time being bore with those practices at sea by which Britain always irritated neutrals. But Austria, by tradition our principal ally, was now engaged in a life or death struggle with her successor, the most faithless of princes and the enemy of all Europe. Far from defending Hanover, it was not long before Frederick was explaining to Britain the necessity for evacuating his own western possessions which lay between Hanover and France, and bidding her send a 1 Charteris, pp. 203, 237. 2 F.O., Germany, 4 and 11 Feb. 1756. 3 Ibid. Spain, 150, 17 March 1756 (Keene). Ibid. Germany, 17 May 1756. 5 Besant, Sir W., London in the eighteenth century, p. 22. Coxe, p. 456 (to the Archbishop of Canterbury). 7 Horace Walpole, Memoirs, III, 41. 8 Politische Correspondenz, XIV, 4 Nov. 1756. 8 THE ADVENT OF WILLIAM PITT 473 large and vigorous army to oppose the French. Thus the old cleavage between George II, with whom Hanover stood first, and his subjects, who cried, "Sea war, no continent, no subsidies", seemed likely to return, and with it the half-paralysis of Britain. Byng's failure had aroused suspicions that the Navy, however large, lacked spirit, while the American campaign proved that the colonists were disunited, and suggested that neither they nor the regulars were of much account in border warfare. The bad beginning and worse prospects of the struggle made a change of ministry inevitable. During the two-and-forty years of Georgian rule, no real transfer of power from one party to another had yet been made. The Whigs remained the only servants whom a Hanoverian King could trust. Even the fall of a Walpole or a Carteret had changed the tempo of policy rather than its direction. Such changes caused little more than a reshuffling of high offices among those members of the great Whig families of whom, as likely to do his business, the King could be persuaded to approve. Such persuasion might come from a premier, a relative or a mistress, but the candidate must not be too distasteful to the Commons, placemen though half the members were. An aspirant upon whom the invincible load of royal displeasure fell could in normal times hope only for a change of King. Such a man, at this time nearly forty-seven years of age, was William Pitt. Conscious of powers incomparably greater than his rivals', he was far from concealing his superiority from them or from the public. "When he was angry or speaking very much in earnest", said his granddaughter, "nobody could look him in the face."1 The Duke of Bedford was perhaps the only man in England whom an eye as terrible as Frederick's failed entirely to subdue. Newcastle confessed that he dared not approach him on distasteful business. His voice, his glance, his biting wit, his lofty and passionate appeal electrified the House of Commons. An actor of majesty in an age to which majesty appealed, his influence came from his power to regard men and causes, himself by no means least, in their nobler aspects and from the loftiest point of view. Where many saw a stupid and pretentious little old man in George II, Pitt always recognised the incarnate majesty of Britain. But he also learned to reverence the British people, invested by the Revolution with the ultimate supremacy over their own affairs. He indeed personified the better Britain of his age, that which to sense added sensibility in no small degree, and which contemptuously rejected the place-hunter's advice, "Strive thy little bark to steer With the tide but near the shore" Britons who instinctively desired a purer administration, wider opportunity for merit as compared with birth, a bolder confrontation of corrupt and reactionary France in the struggle for trade 2 Dodington, Diary, p. 397. 1 Williams, 1, 20. 3 Dodington, cit. Williams, 1, 210. and empire-such found in Pitt a man whose passionate convictions made him the champion of their ideas. Unhappily for his hopes of power, his lack of fortune, his popular principles and his uncompliant personality long closed the Cabinet against him. In November 1755 when he, as Paymaster, opposed the payment of subsidies to foreigners to defend Hanover, he was dismissed. Within a year, however, the collapse of Newcastle's measures had brought the nation into a condition which some thought more critical than that of 1745.1 Newcastle himself was pelted by the Greenwich mob.2 Everything compelled recourse to the impressive reserve-force comprised in the personality of Pitt. Too regal to accept high office save on his own conditions, he demanded that Newcastle, notwithstanding his quarter of a century of office, should resign. In November he became Secretary of State with the Duke of Devonshire as a colleague and figurehead. Pitt's first administration lasted a little less than five months. The time was long enough to prove that his reverence for himself was not ill-founded, and to confirm him in the eyes of the public as indispensable. The Opposition orator turned minister showed amazing capacity for administration, a vision that embraced the globe, and an energy unquenchable by gout and toil. What statesman in that age save Pitt could declare the hearts of Bengal worth more than all the profits of monopolies? The minister of George II, he set Britain above dynasty or party, and rallied to the national cause both the Tories and the camarilla of the future George III. His reluctant master was compelled to declare to Parliament that he relied with pleasure on the spirit and zeal of his people. For that spirit and zeal Pitt prescribed an outlet in a national militia, while striving to sustain them by measures to combat the painful rise in the price of corn. Highlanders, ten years before regarded as inveterate enemies, were to conquer America, and Americans to be enlisted as willing and equal co-operators in the common task. Eight thousand infantry and a powerful fleet might with local aid atone for Braddock's failure and the loss of Fort Oswego, while in India, Africa, the West Indies and the Mediterranean the French were to be steadfastly opposed. Pitt, as he proved later, had the courage to defy all threats of French invasion designed to check these plans. The weightiest among the problems which confronted him, however, was that of our attitude towards Prussia. Was it to the advantage of the nation that the war against France should be single, or that it should be compounded with a struggle on which Frederick, for his own ends, had embarked against the Habsburgs? Hanover, the obvious link between the wars, might declare neutrality as in 1741, and Frederick be abandoned to his fate. That fate, in spite of von Ruville, п, 43. 1 Williams, 1, 262. 3 Hotblack, K., Chatham's colonial policy, p. 96. 2 ANGLO-PRUSSIAN CO-OPERATION 475 his unrivalled army and his conquest of Saxony, was likely to be hard, for a great Russian host was preparing to move against his rear, the Swedes and the German Empire were arming, and France, with her long list of recent victories and vast supplies of men, had pledged her co-operation. Nothing in the Convention of Westminster bound us to partnership in Frederick's aggression. That Pitt, recanting in the stress of war his most consistently upheld opinions, determined to engage Hanover in the fight for Prussia and Britain in protecting her from France, may well be ascribed less to calculation than to instinct-the national instinct to deal generously, at least in the early stages, with our associate in a struggle against France. Nothing was less expected from a proud and intractable statesman who had seemed to accept ruin rather than turn a single into a double war. When, in April 1757, the King, at the demand of Cumberland, drove from office a minister whom he detested, who was often inaccessible through sickness, who, besides commanding no majority in Parliament, had as yet secured no success in war, Frederick congratulated himself that in Pitt a mere spouter and an opponent of action in Hanover had been removed.1 As the campaign developed, however, Britain's need for Pitt and Frederick's amazing talents were both made clear. Three theatres of war stood out pre-eminent-Bohemia, Hanover and the American mainland. In these, it seemed at the outset, the chief issues must be determined. The Indian struggle, pregnant as it proved to be, was a distant affair of merchants which could not reverse the verdict nearer home. A Prussian conquest of Bohemia, however, might make the continental coalition harmless, unless a French conquest of Hanover should restore its offensive power. The mere defence of Hanover, on the other hand, could not save Frederick from the consequences of disaster in Bohemia, since the victorious Austrians would be assisted by both Swedes and Russians if not by an auxiliary army of the French. Failure in both Bohemia and Hanover would pave the way for the partition of Prussia and the extension of the French littoral to Ostend, perhaps to Antwerp. The American struggle and the European could affect each other only in so far as they exhausted in a greater or less degree the energy and resources of the sole American combatants, France and Britain. When winter was drawing near, the course of events in every theatre had proved such that the cause of Britain and Prussia might well seem lost. Frederick, after a costly victory at Prague, had been driven from Bohemia by a crushing disaster at Kolin. A lieutenant, striving to shield East Prussia, had discovered to his cost that the invading Russians were something more than the strong but headless body of Frederick's imagination. The Austrians were reconquering Silesia, while the French and Imperialists threatened to wrest 1 von Ruville, п, 112, 113. Saxony from his grasp, and without Saxon resources he could hardly continue to make war. In Hanover, meanwhile, Cumberland's prescribed defensive had for a time embarrassed the superior French, the more so as they were far from home, and 1757 a year of widespread dearth. After Kolin, however, Frederick could send him no assistance; Britain preferred to attack the coasts of France; and the French, using methodically their superiority of nearly two to one, drove him from Hastenbeck in flight towards the sea (26 July). When the news of Kolin and Hastenbeck reached England, Hardwicke, the wise Chancellor, thought that both Hanover and Prussia would come to terms.1 Kolin had indeed moved Frederick to make overtures to France; Hastenbeck increased his eagerness for "the old system"; on 6 September his envoy sought the victors' camp. Four days later, Cumberland did in fact sign the Convention of Klosterzeven, which saved his so-called Army of Observation, but resigned the Electorate to the victorious French. While five months of the campaign seemed thus to have brought Hanover and Prussia to ruin, news only less disastrous had been reaching Britain from overseas. In the subordinate theatre of India, it is true, Clive had already regained Calcutta, and, by the miracle of Plassey (23 June), had secured Bengal for Britain. That news, however, could not reach Britain for many months. Meanwhile all that could be known was that in 1756 Calcutta had been lost and the hideous tragedy of the Black Hole enacted. Tidings from America arrived more promptly and were uniformly bad. The capture of Minorca, setting free Toulon, and a gale which scattered our blockading force off Brest had enabled French fleets to win the Atlantic race, thus rendering Loudon's great attack on Louisbourg impossible (July 1757). Early in August, Montcalm took from us Fort William Henry, exposing Albany to French and Indian attack. French squadrons cruised securely off the coasts of Africa and the West Indies, while in September Pitt's great coastal attack upon Rochefort, the naval base for supplying Canada, merely alarmed the French. "We are no longer a nation", wrote Chesterfield in July. Nothing had since occurred to stem the tide of disaster. "The Empire", wrote Pitt in August, "is no more, the ports of the Netherlands betrayed, the Dutch Barrier treaty an empty sound, Minorca and with it the Mediterranean lost, and America itself precarious." To win over Spain and thus regain Minorca, he was ready to sacrifice Gibraltar and the logwood coast, but the offer was of no avail.4 In September the King declared that he was ruined, while the yokels of seven counties were opposing the Militia Act by force. From Bristol to the City men suspected that the national struggle with France was being 1 Charteris, p. 204. 2 Koser, II, 114 seqq. Miscellaneous Works, IV, 198. |