Before these hostilities were ended, another "war of
succession," more serious than any before it, was wickedly
brought upon Europe. The Emperor, Charles VI., died in 1740,
leaving no son, but transmitting his hereditary dominions to
his eldest daughter, the celebrated Maria Theresa, married to
the ex-Duke of Lorraine. Years before his death he had sought
to provide against any possible disputing of the succession,
by an instrument known as the Pragmatic Sanction, to which he
obtained, first, the assent of the estates of all the
provinces and kingdoms of the Austrian realm, and, secondly,
the guaranty by solemn treaty of almost every European Power.
He died in the belief that he had established his daughter
securely, and left her to the enjoyment of a peaceful reign.
It was a pitiful illusion. He was scarcely in his grave before
half the guarantors of the Pragmatic Sanction were putting
forward claims to this part and that part of the Austrian
territories. The Elector of Bavaria, the Elector of Saxony (in
his wife's name) and the King of Spain, claimed the whole
succession; the two first mentioned on grounds of collateral
lineage, the latter (a Bourbon cuckoo in the Spanish-Hapsburg
nest) as being the heir of the Hapsburgs of Spain.
While these larger pretensions were still jostling each other
in the diplomatic stage, a minor claimant, who said little but
acted powerfully, sent his demands to the Court of Vienna with
an army following close at their heels. This was Frederick II.
of Prussia, presently known as Frederick the Great, who
resuscitated an obsolete claim on Silesia and took possession
of the province (1740-41) without waiting for debate. If,
anywhere, there had been virtuous hesitations before, his bold
stroke ended them. France could not see her old Austrian rival
dismembered without hastening to grasp a share. She contracted
with the Spanish king and the Elector of Bavaria to enforce
the latter's claims, and to take the Austrian Netherlands in
prospect for compensation, while Spain should find indemnity
in the Austro-Italian states. Frederick of Prussia, having
Silesia in hand, offered to join Maria Theresa in the defense
of her remaining dominions; but his proposals were refused,
and he entered the league against her. Saxony did the same.
England and Sardinia were alone in befriending Austria, and
England was only strong at sea. Maria Theresa found her
heartiest support in Hungary, where she made a personal appeal
to her subjects, and enlarged their constitutional privileges.
In 1742 the Elector of Bavaria was elected Emperor, as Charles
VII. In the same year, Maria Theresa, acting under pressure
from England, gave up the greater part of Silesia to
Frederick, by treaty, as a price paid, not for the help he had
offered at first, but barely for his neutrality. He abandoned
his allies and withdrew from the war. His retirement produced
an immense difference in the conditions of the contest. Saxony
made peace at the same time, and became an active ally on the
Austrian side. So rapidly did the latter then recover their
ground and the French slip back that Frederick, after two
years of neutrality, became alarmed, and found a pretext to
take up arms again. The scale was now tipped to the side on
which he threw himself, but not immediately; and when, in
1745, the Emperor, Charles VII., died suddenly, Maria Theresa
was able to secure the election of her husband, Francis of
Lorraine (or Tuscany), which founded the Hapsburg-Lorraine
dynasty on the imperial throne. This was in September. In the
following December Frederick was in Dresden, and Saxony--the
one effective ally left to the Austrians, since England had
withdrawn from the war in the previous August--was at his
feet. Maria Theresa, having the Spaniards and the French still
to fight in Italy and the Netherlands, could do nothing but make
terms with the terrible Prussian king. The treaty, signed at
Dresden on Christmas Day, 1745, repeated the cession of
Silesia to Frederick, with Glatz, and restored Saxony to the
humbled Elector.
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
France and Spain, deserted the second time by their faithless
Prussian ally, continued the war until 1748, when the
influence of England and Holland brought about a treaty of
peace signed at Aix-la-Chapelle. France gained nothing from
the war, but had suffered a loss of prestige, distinctly.
Austria, besides giving up Silesia to Frederick of Prussia,
was required to surrender a bit of Lombardy to the King of
Sardinia, and to make over Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla to
Don Philip of Spain, for a hereditary principality. Under the
circumstances, the result to Maria Theresa was a notable
triumph, and she shared with her enemy, Frederick, the
fruitage of fame harvested in the war. But antagonism between
these two, and between the interests and ambitions which they
respectively represented--dynastic on one side and national
on the other--was henceforth settled and irreconcilable, and
could leave in Germany no durable peace.
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Colonial conflicts of France and England.
The peace was broken, not for Germany alone, but for Europe
and for almost the world at large, in six years after the
signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. The rupture occurred
first very far from Europe--on the other sides of the globe,
in America and Hindostan, where England and France were eager
rivals in colonial conquest. In America, they had quarreled
since the Treaty of Utrecht over the boundaries of Acadia, or
Nova Scotia, which that treaty transferred to England.
Latterly, they had come to a more serious collision in the
interior of the continent. The English, rooting their
possession of the Atlantic seaboard by strong and stable
settlements, had been tardy explorers and slow in passing the
Alleganies to the region inland. On the other hand, the
French, nimble and enterprising in exploration, and in
military occupation, but superficial and artificial in
colonizing, had pushed their way by a long circuit from
Canada, through the great lakes to the head waters of the
Ohio, and were fortifying a line in the rear of the British
colonies, from the valley of the St. Lawrence to the valley of
the Mississippi, before the English were well aware of their
intent. Then the colonists, Virginians and Pennsylvanians,
took arms, and the career of George Washington was begun as
leader of an expedition in 1754 to drive the French from the
Ohio. It was not successful, and a strong force of regular
troops was sent over next year by the British government,
under Braddock, to repeat the attempt. A frightful
catastrophe, worse than failure, came of this second
undertaking, and open war between France and England, which
had not yet been declared, followed soon. This colonial
conflict of England and France fired the train, so to speak,
which caused a great explosion of suppressed hostilities in
Europe.
The House of Hanover in England.
If the English crown had not been worn by a German king,
having a German principality to defend, the French and English
might have fought out their quarrel on the ocean, and in the
wilderness of America, or on the plains of the Carnatic,
without disturbing their continental neighbors. But England
was now under a new, foreign-bred line of sovereigns,
descended from that daughter of James I., the princess
Elizabeth, who married the unfortunate Elector Palatine and
was queen of Bohemia for a brief winter term. After William of
Orange died, his wife, Queen Mary, having preceded him to the
grave, and no children having been born to them, Anne, the
sister of Mary, had been called to the throne. It was in her
reign that the brilliant victories of Marlborough were won,
and in her reign that the Union of Scotland with England,
under one parliament as well as one sovereign, was brought
about. On Anne's death (1714), her brother, the son of James
II., called "the Pretender," was still excluded from the
throne, because of his religion, and the next heir was sought
and summoned, in the person of the Elector George, of Hanover,
whose remote ancestress was Elizabeth Stuart. George I. had
reigned thirteen years, and his son, George II., had been
twenty-seven years on the throne, when these quarrels with
France arose. Throughout the two reigns, until 1742, the
English nation had been kept mostly at peace, by the potent
influence of a great minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and had
made a splendid advance in material prosperity and strength;
while the system of ministerial government, responsible to
Parliament and independent of the Crown, which has been in
later times the peculiar feature of the British constitution,
was taking shape. In 1742, Walpole fell from power, and the
era of peace for England was ended. But her new dynasty had
been firmly settled, and politically, industrially, and
commercially, the nation was so sound in its condition as to
be well prepared for the series of wars into which it plunged.
In the War of the Austrian Succession England had taken a limited
part, and with small results to herself. She was now about to
enter, under the lead of the high spirited and ambitious Pitt,
afterwards Earl of Chatham, the greatest career of conquest in
her history.
[Image: Europe 1768 A. D.]
The Seven Years War.
As before said, it was the anxiety of George II. for his
electorate of Hanover which caused an explosion of hostilities
in Europe to occur, as consequence of the remote fighting of
French and English colonists in America. For the strengthening
of Hanover against attacks from France, he sought an alliance
with Frederick of Prussia. This broke the long-standing
anti-French alliance of England with Austria, and Austria
joined fortunes with her ancient Bourbon enemy, in order to be
helped to the revenge which Maria Theresa now promised herself
the pleasure of executing upon the Prussian king. As the
combination finally shaped itself on the French side, it
embraced France, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Poland, Saxony, and
the Palatinate, and its inspiring purpose was to break Prussia
down and partition her territories, rather than to support
France against England. The agreements to this end were made
in secret; but Frederick obtained knowledge of them, and
learned that papers proving the conspiracy against him were in
the archives of the Saxony government, at Dresden. His action was
decided with that promptitude which so often disconcerted his
enemies. He did not wait to be attacked by the tremendous
league formed against him, nor waste time in efforts to
dissolve it, but defiantly struck the first blow. He poured
his army into Saxony (August, 1756), seized Dresden by
surprise, captured the documents he desired, and published
them to the world in vindication of his summary precipitation
of war. Then, blockading the Saxon army in Pirna, he pressed
rapidly into Bohemia, defeated the Austrians at Lowositz, and
returned as rapidly, to receive the surrender of the Saxons
and to enlist most of them in his own ranks. This was the
European opening of the Seven Years War, which raged, first
and last, in all quarters of the globe. In the second year of
the war, Frederick gained an important victory at Prague and
suffered a serious reverse at Kolin, which threw most of
Silesia into the hands of the Austrians. Close following that
defeat came crushing news from Hanover, where the incompetent
Duke of Cumberland, commanding for his father, the English
King George, had allowed the French to force him to an
agreement which disbanded his army, and left Prussia alone in
the terrific fight. Frederick's position seemed desperate; but
his energy retrieved it.
{1087}
He fought and defeated the French at Rossbach, near Lützen, on
the 5th of November, and the Austrians, at Leuthen, near
Breslau, exactly one month later. In the campaigns of 1758, he
encountered the Russians at Zorndorf, winning a bloody
triumph, and he sustained a defeat at Hochkirk, in battle with
the Austrians. But England had repudiated Cumberland's
convention and recalled him; English and Hanoverian forces
were again put into the field, under the capable command of
Prince Frederick of Brunswick, who turned the tide in that
quarter against the French, and the results of the year were
generally favorable to Frederick. In 1759, the Hanoverian
army, under Prince Ferdinand, improved the situation on that
side; but the prospects of the King of Prussia were clouded by
heavy disasters. Attempting to push a victory over the
Russians too far, at Kunersdorf, he was terribly beaten. He
lost Dresden, and a great part of Saxony. In the next year he
recovered all but Dresden, which he wantonly and inhumanly
bombarded. The war was now being carried on with great
difficulty by all the combatants. Prussia, France and Austria
were suffering almost equally from exhaustion; the misery
among their people was too great to be ignored; the armies of
each had dwindled. The opponents of Pitt's war policy in
England overcame him, in October, 1761, whereupon he resigned,
and the English subsidy to Frederick was withdrawn. But that
was soon made up to him by the withdrawal of Russia from the
war, at the beginning of 1762, when Peter of Holstein, who
admired Frederick, became Czar. Sweden made peace a little
later. The remainder of the worn and wearied fighters went on
striking at each other until near the end of the year.
Meantime, on the colonial and East Indian side of it, this
prodigious Seven Years War, as a great struggle for
world-empire between England and France, had been adding
conquest to conquest and triumph to triumph for the former. In
1759, Wolfe had taken Quebec and died on the Heights of
Abraham in the moment of victory. Another twelve months saw
the whole of Canada clear of Frenchmen in arms. In the East,
to use the language of Macaulay, "conquests equalling in
rapidity and far surpassing in magnitude those of Cortes and
Pizarro, had been achieved." "In the space of three years the
English had founded a mighty empire. The French had been
defeated in every part of India. Chandernagore had yielded to
Clive, Pondicherry to Coote. Throughout Bengal, Bahar, Orissa,
and the Carnatic, the authority of the East India Company was
more absolute than that of Acbar or Aurungzebe had ever been."
Treaties of Paris and Hubertsburg.
In February, 1763, two treaties of peace were concluded, one
at Paris, on the 10th, between England, France and Spain (the
latter Power having joined France in the war as late as
January, 1762); the other at Hubertsburg, on the 15th, between
Prussia and Austria. France gave up to England all her
possessions in North America, except Louisiana (which passed
to Spain,), and yielded Minorca, but recovered the
Philippines. She surrendered, moreover, considerable interests
in the West Indies and in Africa. The colonial aspirations of
the French were cast down by a blow that was lasting in its
effect. As between Prussia and Austria, the triumphs of the
peace and the glories of the war were won entirely by the
former. Frederick came out of it, "Frederick the Great," the
most famous man of his century, as warrior and as statesman,
both. He had defended his little kingdom for seven years
against three great Powers, and yielded not one acre of its
territory. He had raised Prussia to the place in Germany from
which her subsequent advance became easy and almost
inevitable. But the great fame he earned is spotted with many
falsities and much cynical indifference to the commonest
ethics of civilization. His greatness is of that character
which requires to be looked at from selected standpoints.
Russia.
Another character, somewhat resembling that of Frederick, was
now drawing attention on the eastern side of Europe. Since the
death of Peter the Great, the interval in Russian history had
been covered by six reigns, with a seventh just opening, and
the four sovereigns who really exercised power were women.
Peter's widow, Catherine I., had succeeded him (1725) for two
years. His son, Alexis, he had put to death; but Alexis left a
son, Peter, to whom Catherine bequeathed the crown. Peter II.
died after a brief reign, in 1730; and the nearest heirs were
two daughters of Peter the Great, Anne and Elizabeth. But they
were set aside in favor of another Anne--Anne of
Courland--daughter of Peter the Great's brother. Anne's reign
of ten years was under the influence of German favorites and
ministers, and nearly half of it was occupied with a Turkish
War, in cooperation with Austria. For Austria the war had most
humiliating results, costing her Belgrade, all of Servia, part
of Bosnia and part of Wallachia. Russia won back Asov, with
fortifications forbidden, and that was all. Anne willed her
crown to an infant nephew, who appears in the Russian annals
as Ivan VI.; but two regencies were overthrown by palace
revolutions within little more than a year, and the second one
carried to the throne that Princess Elizabeth, younger
daughter of Peter the Great, who had been put aside eleven
years before. Elizabeth, a woman openly licentious and
intemperate, reigned for twenty-one years, during the whole
important period of the War of the Austrian Succession, and
almost to the end of the Seven Years War. She was bitterly
hostile to Frederick the Great, whose sharp tongue had
offended her, and she joined Maria Theresa with eagerness in
the great effort of revenge, which failed. In the early part
of her reign, war with Sweden had been more successful and had
added South Finland to the Russian territories. It is claimed
for her domestic government that the general prosperity of the
country was advanced.
{1088}
Catherine II.
On the death of Elizabeth, near the end of the year 1761, the
crown passed to her nephew, Peter of Holstein, son of her
eldest sister, Anne, who had married the Duke of Holstein.
This prince had been the recognized heir, living at the
Russian court, during the whole of Elizabeth's reign. He was
an ignorant boor, and he had become a besotted drunkard. Since
1744 he had been married to a young German princess, of the
Anhalt Zerbst family, who took the baptismal name of Catherine
when she entered the Greek Church. Catherine possessed a superior
intellect and a strong character; but the vile court into
which she came as a young girl, bound to a disgusting husband,
had debauched her in morals and lowered her to its own
vileness. She gained so great an ascendancy that the court was
subservient to her, from the time that her incapable husband,
Peter III., succeeded to the throne. He reigned by sufferance
for a year and a half, and then (July, 1762) he was easily
deposed and put to death. In the deposition, Catherine was the
leading actor. Of the subsequent murder, some historians are
disposed to acquit her. She did not scruple, at least, to
accept the benefit of both deeds, which raised her, alone, to
the throne of the Czars.
Partition of Poland.
Peter III., in his short reign, had made one important change
in Russian policy, by withdrawing from the league against
Frederick of Prussia, whom he greatly admired. Catherine found
reasons, quite aside from those of personal admiration, for
cultivating the friendship of the King of Prussia, and a close
understanding with that astute monarch was one of the earliest
objects of her endeavor. She had determined to put an end to
the independence of Poland. As she first entertained the
design, there was probably no thought of the partitioning
afterwards contrived. But her purpose was to keep the Polish
kingdom in disorder and weakness, and to make Russian
influence supreme in it, with views, no doubt, that looked
ultimately to something more. On the death of the Saxon king
of Poland, Augustus III., in 1763, Catherine put forward a
native candidate for the vacant throne, in the person of
Stanislaus Poniatowsky, a Russianized Pole and a former lover
of her own. The King of Prussia supported her candidate, and
Poniatowsky was duly elected, with 10,000 Russian troops in
Warsaw to see that it was properly done. The Poles were
submissive to the invasion of their political independence;
but when Catherine, who sought to create a Russian party in
Poland by protecting the members of the Greek Church and the
Protestants, against the intolerance of the Polish Catholics,
forced a concession of civil equality to the former (1768),
there was a wide-spread Catholic revolt. In the fierce war
which followed, a band of Poles was pursued across the Turkish
border, and a Turkish town was burned by the Russian pursuers.
The Sultan, who professed sympathy with the Poles, then
declared war against Russia. The Russo-Turkish war, in turn,
excited Austria, which feared Russian conquests from the
Turks, and another wide disturbance of the peace of Europe
seemed threatening. In the midst of the excitement there came
a whispered suggestion, to the ear of the courts of Vienna and
St. Petersburg, that they severally satisfy their territorial
cravings and mutually assuage each other's jealousy, at the
expense of the crumbling kingdom of Poland. The whisper may
have come from Frederick II. of Prussia, or it may not. There
are two opinions on the point. From whatever source it came,
it found favorable consideration at Vienna and St. Petersburg,
and between February and August, 1772, the details of the
partition were worked out.
Poland was not yet extinguished. The kingdom was only shorn of
some 160,000 square miles of territory, more than half of
which went to Russia, a third to Austria, and the remainder,
less than 10,000 square miles, to Prussia. This last mentioned
annexation was the old district of West Prussia which the
Polish king, Casimir IV., had wrested from the Teutonic
Knights in 1466, before Brandenburg had aught to do with
Prussian lands or name. After three centuries, Frederick
reclaimed it.
The diminished kingdom of Poland showed more signs of a true
national life, of an earnest national feeling, of a sobered
and rational patriotism, than had appeared in its former
history. The fatal powers monopolized by the nobles, the
deadly "liberum veto," the corrupting elective kingship, were
looked at in their true light, and in May, 1791, a new
constitution was adopted which reformed those evils. But a few
nobles opposed the reformation and appealed to Russia,
supplying a pretext to Catherine on which she filled Poland
with her troops. It was in vain that the patriot Kosciusko led
the best of his countrymen in a brave struggle with the
invader. They were overborne (1793-1794); the unhappy nation
was put in fetters, while Catherine and a new King of Prussia,
Frederick William II., arranged the terms of a second
partition. This gave to Prussia an additional thousand square
miles, including the important towns of Danzig and Thorn,
while Russia took four times as much. A year later, the small
remainder of Polish territory was dismembered and divided
between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and thus Poland
disappeared from the map of Europe as a state.
Russia as left by Catherine II.