1757, 1758
Pitt
The war kindled in the American forest was now raging in full
conflagration among the kingdoms of Europe; and in the midst stood
Frederic of Prussia, a veritable fire-king. He had learned through
secret agents that he was to be attacked, and that the wrath of Maria
Theresa with her two allies, Pompadour and the Empress of Russia, was
soon to wreak itself upon him. With his usual prompt audacity he
anticipated his enemies, marched into Saxony, and began the Continental
war. His position seemed desperate. England, sundered from Austria, her
old ally, had made common cause with him; but he had no other friend
worth the counting. France, Russia, Austria, Sweden, Saxony, the
collective Germanic Empire, and most of the smaller German States had
joined hands for his ruin, eager to crush him and divide the spoil,
parcelling out his dominions among themselves in advance by solemn
mutual compact. Against the five millions of Prussia were arrayed
populations of more than a hundred million. The little kingdom was open
on all sides to attack, and her enemies were spurred on by the bitterest
animosity. It was thought that one campaign would end the war. The war
lasted seven years, and Prussia came out of it triumphant. Such a
warrior as her indomitable king Europe has rarely seen. If the Seven
Years War made the maritime and colonial greatness of England, it also
raised Prussia to the rank of a first-class Power.
Frederic began with a victory, routing the Austrians in one of the
fiercest of recorded conflicts, the battle of Prague. Then in his turn
he was beaten at Kolin. All seemed lost. The hosts of the coalition were
rolling in upon him like a deluge. Surrounded by enemies, in the jaws of
destruction, hoping for little but to die in battle, this strange hero
solaced himself with an exhaustless effusion of bad verses, sometimes
mournful, sometimes cynical, sometimes indignant, and sometimes
breathing a dauntless resolution; till, when his hour came, he threw
down his pen to achieve those feats of arms which stamp him one of the
foremost soldiers of the world.
The French and Imperialists, in overwhelming force, thought to crush him
at Rosbach. He put them to shameful rout; and then, instead of bonfires
and Te Deums, mocked at them in doggerel rhymes of amazing indecency.
While he was beating the French, the Austrians took Silesia from him. He
marched to recover it, found them strongly posted at Leuthen, eighty
thousand men against thirty thousand, and without hesitation resolved to
attack them. Never was he more heroic than on the eve of this, his
crowning triumph. "The hour is at hand," he said to his generals. "I
mean, in spite of the rules of military art, to attack Prince Karl's
army, which is nearly thrice our own. This risk I must run, or all is
lost. We must beat him or die, all of us, before his batteries." He
burst unawares upon the Austrian left, and rolled their whole host
together, corps upon corps, in a tumult of irretrievable ruin.
While her great ally was reaping a full harvest of laurels, England,
dragged into the Continental war because that apple of discord, Hanover,
belonged to her King, found little but humiliation. Minorca was wrested
from her, and the Ministry had an innocent man shot to avert from
themselves the popular indignation; while the same Ministry, scared by a
phantom of invasion, brought over German troops to defend British soil.
But now an event took place pregnant with glorious consequence. The
reins of power fell into the hands of William Pitt. He had already held
them for a brief space, forced into office at the end of 1756 by popular
clamor, in spite of the Whig leaders and against the wishes of the King.
But the place was untenable. Newcastle's Parliament would not support
him; the Duke of Cumberland opposed him; the King hated him; and in
April 1757, he was dismissed. Then ensued eleven weeks of bickering and
dispute, during which, in the midst of a great war, England was left
without a government. It became clear that none was possible without
Pitt; and none with him could be permanent and strong unless joined with
those influences which had thus far controlled the majorities of
Parliament. Therefore an extraordinary union was brought about; Lord
Chesterfield acting as go-between to reconcile the ill-assorted pair.
One of them brought to the alliance the confidence and support of the
people; the other, Court management, borough interest, and parliamentary
connections. Newcastle was made First Lord of the Treasury, and Pitt,
the old enemy who had repeatedly browbeat and ridiculed him, became
Secretary of State, with the lead of the House of Commons and full
control of the war and foreign affairs. It was a partnership of magpie
and eagle. The dirty work of government, intrigue, bribery, and all the
patronage that did not affect the war, fell to the share of the old
politician. If Pitt could appoint generals, admirals, and ambassadors,
Newcastle was welcome to the rest. "I will borrow the Duke's majorities
to carry on the government," said the new secretary; and with the
audacious self-confidence that was one of his traits, he told the Duke
of Devonshire, "I am sure that I can save this country, and that nobody
else can." England hailed with one acclaim the undaunted leader who
asked for no reward but the honor of serving her. The hour had found the
man. For the next four years this imposing figure towers supreme in
British history.
He had glaring faults, some of them of a sort not to have been expected
in him. Vanity, the common weakness of small minds, was the most
disfiguring foible of this great one. He had not the simplicity which
becomes greatness so well. He could give himself theatrical airs, strike
attitudes, and dart stage lightnings from his eyes; yet he was
formidable even in his affectations. Behind his great intellectual
powers lay a burning enthusiasm, a force of passion and fierce intensity
of will, that gave redoubled impetus to the fiery shafts of his
eloquence; and the haughty and masterful nature of the man had its share
in the ascendency which he long held over Parliament. He would blast the
labored argument of an adversary by a look of scorn or a contemptuous
wave of the hand.
The Great Commoner was not a man of the people in the popular sense of
that hackneyed phrase. Though himself poor, being a younger son, he came
of a rich and influential family; he was patrician at heart; both his
faults and his virtues, his proud incorruptibility and passionate,
domineering patriotism, bore the patrician stamp. Yet he loved liberty
and he loved the people, because they were the English people. The
effusive humanitarianism of to-day had no part in him, and the democracy
of to-day would detest him. Yet to the middle-class England of his own
time, that unenfranchised England which had little representation in
Parliament, he was a voice, an inspiration, and a tower of strength. He
would not flatter the people; but, turning with contempt from the tricks
and devices of official politics, he threw himself with a confidence
that never wavered on their patriotism and public spirit. They answered
him with a boundless trust, asked but to follow his lead, gave him
without stint their money and their blood, loved him for his domestic
virtues and his disinterestedness, believed him even in his
self-contradiction, and idolized him even in his bursts of arrogant
passion. It was he who waked England from her lethargy, shook off the
spell that Newcastle and his fellow-enchanters had cast over her, and
taught her to know herself again. A heart that beat in unison with all
that was British found responsive throbs in every corner of the vast
empire that through him was to become more vast. With the instinct of
his fervid patriotism he would join all its far-extended members into
one, not by vain assertions of parliamentary supremacy, but by bonds of
sympathy and ties of a common freedom and a common cause.
The passion for power and glory subdued in him all the sordid parts of
humanity, and he made the power and glory of England one with his own.
He could change front through resentment or through policy; but in
whatever path he moved, his objects were the same: not to curb the power
of France in America, but to annihilate it; crush her navy, cripple her
foreign trade, ruin her in India, in Africa, and wherever else, east or
west, she had found foothold; gain for England the mastery of the seas,
open to her the great highways of the globe, make her supreme in
commerce and colonization; and while limiting the activities of her
rival to the European continent, give to her the whole world for a
sphere.
To this British Roman was opposed the pampered Sardanapalus of
Versailles, with the silken favorite who by calculated adultery had
bought the power to ruin France. The Marquise de Pompadour, who began
life as Jeanne Poisson,--Jane Fish,--daughter of the head clerk of a
banking house, who then became wife of a rich financier, and then, as
mistress of the King, rose to a pinnacle of gilded ignominy, chose this
time to turn out of office the two ministers who had shown most ability
and force,--Argenson, head of the department of war, and Machault, head
of the marine and colonies; the one because he was not subservient to
her will, and the other because he had unwittingly touched the self-love
of her royal paramour. She aspired to a share in the conduct of the war,
and not only made and unmade ministers and generals, but discussed
campaigns and battles with them, while they listened to her prating with
a show of obsequious respect, since to lose her favor was to risk losing
all. A few months later, when blows fell heavy and fast, she turned a
deaf ear to representations of financial straits and military disasters,
played the heroine, affected a greatness of soul superior to misfortune,
and in her perfumed boudoir varied her tiresome graces by posing as a
Roman matron. In fact she never wavered in her spite against Frederic,
and her fortitude was perfect in bearing the sufferings of others and
defying dangers that could not touch her.
When Pitt took office it was not over France, but over England that the
clouds hung dense and black. Her prospects were of the gloomiest.
"Whoever is in or whoever is out," wrote Chesterfield, "I am sure we are
undone both at home and abroad: at home by our increasing debt and
expenses; abroad by our ill-luck and incapacity. We are no longer a
nation." And his despondency was shared by many at the beginning of the
most triumphant Administration in British history. The shuffling
weakness of his predecessors had left Pitt a heritage of tribulation.
From America came news of Loudon's manifold failures; from Germany that
of the miscarriage of the Duke of Cumberland, who, at the head of an
army of Germans in British pay, had been forced to sign the convention
of Kloster-Zeven, by which he promised to disband them. To these
disasters was added a third, of which the new Government alone had to
bear the burden. At the end of summer Pitt sent a great expedition to
attack Rochefort; the military and naval commanders disagreed, and the
consequence was failure. There was no light except from far-off India,
where Clive won the great victory of Plassey, avenged the Black Hole of
Calcutta, and prepared the ruin of the French power and the undisputed
ascendency of England.
If the English had small cause as yet to rejoice in their own successes,
they found comfort in those of their Prussian allies. The rout of the
French at Rossbach and of the Austrians at Leuthen spread joy through
their island. More than this, they felt that they had found at last a
leader after their own heart; and the consciousness regenerated them.
For the paltering imbecility of the old Ministry they had the
unconquerable courage, the iron purpose, the unwavering faith, the
inextinguishable hope, of the new one. "England has long been in labor,"
said Frederic of Prussia, "and at last she has brought forth a man." It
was not only that instead of weak commanders Pitt gave her strong ones;
the same men who had served her feebly under the blight of the Newcastle
Administration served her manfully and well under his robust impulsion.
"Nobody ever entered his closet," said Colonel Barre, "who did not come
out of it a braver man." That inspiration was felt wherever the British
flag waved. Zeal awakened with the assurance that conspicuous merit was
sure of its reward, and that no officer who did his duty would now be
made a sacrifice, like Admiral Byng, to appease public indignation at
ministerial failures. As Nature, languishing in chill vapors and dull
smothering fogs, revives at the touch of the sun, so did England spring
into fresh life under the kindling influence of one great man.
With the opening of the year 1758 her course of Continental victories
began. The Duke of Cumberland, the King's son, was recalled in disgrace,
and a general of another stamp, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, was
placed in command of the Germans in British pay, with the contingent of
English troops now added to them. The French, too, changed commanders.
The Duke of Richelieu, a dissolute old beau, returned to Paris to spend
in heartless gallantries the wealth he had gained by plunder; and a
young soldier-churchman, the Comte de Clermont, took his place. Prince
Ferdinand pushed him hard with an inferior force, drove him out of
Hanover, and captured eleven thousand of his soldiers. Clermont was
recalled, and was succeeded by Contades, another incapable. One of his
subordinates won for him the battle; of Lutterberg; but the generalship
of Ferdinand made it a barren victory, and the campaign remained a
success for the English. They made descents on the French coasts,
captured; St.-Servan, a suburb of St.-Malo, and burned three ships of
the line, twenty-four privateers, and sixty merchantmen; then entered
Cherbourg, destroyed the forts, carried off or spiked the cannon, and
burned twenty-seven vessels,--a success partially offset by a failure on
the coast of Brittany, where they were repulsed with some loss. In
Africa they drove the French from the Guinea coast, and seized their
establishment at Senegal.
It was towards America that Pitt turned his heartiest efforts. His first
aim was to take Louisbourg, as a step towards taking Quebec; then
Ticonderoga, that thorn in the side of the northern colonies; and lastly
Fort Duquesne, the Key of the Great West. He recalled Loudon, for whom
he had a fierce contempt; but there were influences which he could not
disregard, and Major-General Abercromby, who was next in order of rank,
an indifferent soldier, though a veteran in years, was allowed to
succeed him, and lead in person the attack on Ticonderoga.[573] Pitt
hoped that Brigadier Lord Howe, an admirable officer, who was joined
with Abercromby, would be the real commander, and make amends for all
short-comings of his chief. To command the Louisbourg expedition,
Colonel Jeffrey Amherst was recalled from the German war, and made at
one leap a major-general.[574] He was energetic and resolute, somewhat
cautious and slow, but with a bulldog tenacity of grip. Under him were
three brigadiers, Whitmore, Lawrence, and Wolfe, of whom the youngest is
the most noteworthy. In the luckless Rochefort expedition, Colonel James
Wolfe was conspicuous by a dashing gallantry that did not escape the eye
of Pitt, always on the watch for men to do his work. The young officer
was ardent, headlong, void of fear, often rash, almost fanatical in his
devotion to military duty, and reckless of life when the glory of
England or his own was at stake. The third expedition, that against Fort
Duquesne, was given to Brigadier John Forbes, whose qualities well
fitted him for the task.
[Footnote 573: _Order, War Office, 19 Dec. 1757._]
[Footnote 574: _Pitt to Abercromby, 27 Jan. 1758. Instructions for our
Trusty and Well-beloved Jeffrey Amherst, Esq., Major-General of our
Forces in North America, 3 March, 1758._]
During his first short term of office, Pitt had given a new species of
troops to the British army. These were the Scotch Highlanders, who had
risen against the House of Hanover in 1745, and would raise against it
again should France accomplish her favorite scheme of throwing a force
into Scotland to excite another insurrection for the Stuarts. But they
would be useful to fight the French abroad, though dangerous as their
possible allies at home; and two regiments of them were now ordered to
America.
Delay had been the ruin of the last year's attempt against Louisbourg.
This time preparation was urged on apace; and before the end of winter
two fleets had put to sea: one, under Admiral Boscawen, was destined for
Louisbourg; while the other, under Admiral Osborn, sailed for the
Mediterranean to intercept the French fleet of Admiral La Clue, who was
about to sail from Toulon for America. Osborn, cruising between the
coasts of Spain and Africa, barred the way to the Straits of Gibraltar,
and kept his enemy imprisoned. La Clue made no attempt to force a
passage; but several combats of detached ships took place, one of which
is too remarkable to pass unnoticed. Captain Gardiner of the "Monmouth,"
a ship of four hundred and seventy men and sixty-four guns, engaged the
French ship "Foudroyant," carrying a thousand men and eighty-four guns
of heavier metal than those of the Englishman. Gardiner had lately been
reproved by Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty, for some alleged
misconduct or shortcoming, and he thought of nothing but retrieving his
honor. "We must take her," he said to his crew as the "Foudroyant" hove
in sight. "She looks more than a match for us, but I will not quit her
while this ship can swim or I have a soul left alive;" and the sailors
answered with cheers. The fight was long and furious. Gardiner was
killed by a musket shot, begging his first lieutenant with his dying
breath not to haul down his flag. The lieutenant nailed it to the mast.
At length the "Foudroyant" ceased from thundering, struck her colors,
and was carried a prize to England.[575]
[Footnote 575: Entick, III. 56-60.]
The typical British naval officer of that time was a rugged sea-dog, a
tough and stubborn fighter, though no more so than the politer
generations that followed, at home on the quarter-deck, but no ornament
to the drawing-room, by reason of what his contemporary, Entick, the
strenuous chronicler of the war, calls, not unapprovingly, "the ferocity
of his manners." While Osborn held La Clue imprisoned at Toulon, Sir
Edward Hawke, worthy leader of such men, sailed with seven ships of the
line and three frigates to intercept a French squadron from Rochefort
convoying a fleet of transports with troops for America. The French
ships cut their cables and ran for the shore, where most of them
stranded in the mud, and some threw cannon and munitions overboard to
float themselves. The expedition was broken up. Of the many ships fitted
out this year for the succor of Canada and Louisbourg, comparatively few
reached their destination, and these for the most part singly or by twos
and threes.
Meanwhile Admiral Boscawen with his fleet bore away for Halifax, the
place of rendezvous, and Amherst, in the ship "Dublin," followed in his
wake.