Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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will continually harass our colonies by the Indians, and impede, if not prevent their growth; your progress will at best be slow.”11 This was from a letter to Lord Kames but was reprinted in what became known as Franklin’s The Canada Pamphlet.
Franklin was certainly prescient, but he was essentially sketching out the future of America, not Britain. There is no doubt that he thought America would surpass Britain, and given his frequent bouts of irritation with the British regime in America, it is hard to doubt that he at least had a two-track option: Britain and America together become unquestionably the greatest power in the world and sort out governance between them; or America, the mortal threat of France to strangle English-speaking America in its cradle having been graciously removed, would achieve the same prodigies without the British. What he did not know, and was not generally known, was that Pitt would have fought to the last musket ball himself to keep Canada, and Louis XV and Choiseul felt themselves well shot of the unprofitable, inaccessible, unremitting New France that Jacques Cartier had allegedly called, on discovering it, “The land God gave to Cain,” and that Frederick the Great’s (and Catherine the Great’s) friend Voltaire dismissed as “a few acres of snow” (a description that rankles yet in Quebec, 250 years later). Even more improbably, the bountiful fisheries of Newfoundland caused Pitt to say that he would rather give up his right arm than a share of the fishing off the Grand Banks to France, and that he would surrender the Tower of London before he would give up Newfoundland. Pitt was not just concerned with fish, because access to fisheries was what bred sailors and created the personnel for a navy, and cutting France off from such fisheries would have severely crimped its ability to rebuild its shattered navy.12
11. THE END OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR
Military fatigue and diplomatic confusion settled and thickened until the war finally ended. King George II died on October 25, 1760, and was succeeded by his young grandson, the preternaturally headstrong George III, who had no interest at all in Hanover and was opposed, partly from sharing his father’s dislike of his grandfather, to any British assistance there. It was to appease George II that Walpole and Pelham had propped up Hanover. George III achieved the appointment of his former tutor, the Earl of Bute, as northern secretary in charge of European continental relations (for which post he was completely unqualified), assuring friction with Pitt, who retained the Southern Department (all foreign affairs except Europe). Bute wanted to wind the war down and shared his master’s opposition to any involvement in continental wars.
In Europe in 1761, essentially the same familiar armies continued to mill about on the edges of Prussia in an increasing state of depletion and exhaustion. Choiseul managed in 1762 to bring Spain into the war against Britain, convincing the Spanish that now that Britain held the scepter of the seas, she would be poaching on the Spanish interests in Latin America next. (If true, that was all the more reason for Spain to have entered the war earlier, when she could have joined forces with a still navally viable France.) Faithful to a centuries-old alliance, Portugal rallied to England and declared war on Spain, which invaded its smaller neighbor. Again, the British sent an expeditionary force to help their protégé. Pitt had learned of the French-Spanish arrangement, and advocated a preemptive strike against the Spanish. The advice was rejected as improper under international law (which scarcely existed and when invoked was almost always pretextual), and from war-weariness. Pitt resigned from the government, leaving Bute preeminent under the mighty survivor, Prime Minister the Duke of Newcastle, now 36 years in cabinet. He was now having severe problems paying for the war, as the government was charged, in effect, 25 percent interest and was still two million pounds short on the last year, facing the possible requirement simply to print banknotes and endure inflation, a horrible political and social nightmare. Newcastle, too, was abruptly turned out by George III and Bute on May 26, 1762, ending the very long (41 years) dominance of the Walpole-Pelham Whigs, years of vast success for Britain, in war and peace, and all over the world.
The French army, in one of the longest droughts of victory in its history, was unable to get by or through the Hanoverians; Czarina Elizabeth died, and was replaced by her dull-witted German nephew, Peter III, who worshipped Frederick the Great and abruptly withdrew from the war, mediated peace between Prussia and Sweden, and threatened Austria, before being overthrown, imprisoned, and murdered, in 1762, with the presumed complicity of his formidable wife, Catherine the Great, in one of history’s most lop-sided marriages. She quickly restored the anti-Prussian slant of Russian policy.13 Frederick, who was a man of considerable culture, wrote a couplet about Catherine: “The Russian Messalina, the Cossacks’ whore, Gone to service lovers on the Stygian shore.”14
As negotiations dragged desultorily on, the well-traveled Monckton seized Havana on August 14, 1762. Once again, there were celebrations in the streets in England. Peace was finally secured by the craftiness of Choiseul, a clever negotiator and diplomat, if an unsuccessful war strategist. Spain would fight to the death rather than acquiesce in the permanent loss of Havana. Britain would have to be bought off with something comparable. An insufficiently generous peace could produce a parliamentary revolt, and bring back Pitt, who would trim France back to the Ile-de-France, if he could bribe enough European armies to do it. The national debt of Great Britain had increased from 74.5 million pounds in 1755 to 133.25 million in 1763; 10 times the year’s budget which was half deficit. This was almost more debt than Britain could bear without provoking taxpayers’ revolts in both the home islands and America, and a default and rampant inflation were both completely out of the question.
It had been a brilliant but almost Pyrrhic victory for Pitt. France was a larger and richer country than Britain, but it too had a financial problem, so the pressure was on Choiseul to produce a peace that would be accepted by Spain, which he had induced late into the war and was not gasping for money and was prepared to delay peace to get Havana back. Choiseul gave Louisiana to Spain, in exchange for Spain ceding to Britain the territory from Mississippi to Georgia in return for Havana. Since Louis and Choiseul had no interest in North America, that worked for everyone, and France took back her sugar islands, as well as the little Gulf of St. Lawrence islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, from which to service her fishing fleet, which was guaranteed access to Newfoundland fishing. France gave back Minorca but kept Pondicherry in India and the West African slave trading stations. Britain ruled North America and India. Everyone had what he wanted most and the Peace of Paris was signed on February 10, 1763. Britain had the winning strategy, but in a perverse pattern that would be followed with other leaders who rescued it from wars that were going badly with Great Powers, it dispensed with the father of victory Pitt, as it would with his son for a brief peace with Napoleon, Lloyd George in 1922, and Churchill in 1945 (though not Palmerston after Crimea).
Five days later came the Treaty of Hubertusburg. Frederick the Great kept Silesia and Maria Theresa took back Saxony. Not for the last time, Germany had unleashed aggressive war, and not for the last time gained nothing tangible from it. Frederick promised to support Maria Theresa’s son as next head of the Holy Roman Empire. But he had established Prussia as a Great Power, and had given the world an astonishing and minatory demonstration of Germany’s military aptitudes and national tenacity. Furor Teutonicus was foreseeable (if not much foreseen). In Eastern Europe, Prussia was a doughty contender, but hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost in a war that, though it made Prussia a Great Power and enabled America to start thinking of independence, effected no significant changes to anything else in Europe. The 22-year-old George Washington had ignited a fateful conflict.
The Seven Years’ War had been an utterly stupid war for everyone except the British and the Americans. They had gained a world, with a debt time bomb attached to it, and had perfected the technique, soon to be absolutely vital for compensating for France’s much larger population and greater national wealth. France had surrendered much of the prestige she had enjoyed from Richelieu to Louis XIV. The zigzag of French decline had begun, with the most dismal war in its history, prior to the severe beatings it would suffer (110 and 180 years later) in two out of three contests with a united Germany. William Pitt had been the great war statesman, Frederick the Great the great commander, and the whimsical Philadelphian printer and scientist, Benjamin Franklin, the great strategic prophet.
12. ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS AFTER 1763
The removal of France from North America made Britain dispensable to the American