Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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lengthy British rule of the great Whigs, Sir Robert Walpole, Henry Pelham, and Pelham’s brother, the Duke of Newcastle, 1721–1762, appeased the kings by using British money and power to secure Hanover. Apart from that, Britain cohered, before the king set up his own Church, to the policy of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (1511–1529), Henry VIII’s chancellor, who devised the practice, followed to recent times, of putting England’s weight against whichever was the strongest of the continental powers (successively, roughly, Spain until the rise of Louis XIII’s great minister, Cardinal Richelieu in 1624; France until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815; Germany until the defeat of Hitler in 1945; and Russia until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991). An unprecedentedly benign Germany then resumed that position to no great consternation in Britain or elsewhere (Chapter 16).
Russia, under Peter the Great, Czar from 1689 to 1725, joined the ranks of the Great Powers at the start of the eighteenth century. For the purposes of this book, the first important Russian leader was the Empress Catherine the Great,1 who reigned from 1762 to 1796, and we are also concerned with the Prussian king Frederick II, the Great (1740–1786), and the Austrian empress Maria Theresa (reigned from 1740 to 1780). These three rulers provided strong military and diplomatic government in Central and Eastern Europe in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
2. THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND EARLY SKIRMISHING IN AMERICA
William Pitt was the first leading British public figure to limn out a vision of a growing and flourishing British civilization on both sides of the Atlantic and in the East and West Indies, arising to give the British the status and strength of an incomparable giant straddling the great ocean. Even he pitched his vision, naturally, mainly in terms of ending, in Britain’s favor, the great contest with France because of the scale and size and wealth the British nationality would grow into, vast and rich, and relatively secure as not having to fend off the invasions of adjoining landward neighbors. In Britain, his philippics against the French went down better than his visions of the New World. But as Pitt gained force and support in Britain, the leading Americans considered that the Thirteen Colonies were coming close to self-sufficiency, if the French threat in Canada could be disposed of, and could indeed then have a splendid autonomous political future, if they could coordinate better between themselves, and agree on their collective purpose. As the formal beginning of the new Anglo-French war approached, the most astute leaders of both Britain and America were groping for a raison d’être of the American project. In London and Westminster, going it alone was unthinkable for the colonies, and so was not given any thought. In America, if France could be driven from Canada, it was an idea whose attractions were bound to grow, and, if it were not headed off by a competing imperial vision, its time would come.
From the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, European diplomacy was a minuet, with the partners constantly changing, but disputing the same adjoining areas, a horribly expensive struggle between hired and often mercenary armies. The only country that had a vision that transcended this pattern of self-inflicted destruction, through the attrition of endless conflict on the frontiers, was Britain, with its concept of manipulating the balance of power while steadily expanding its empire overseas and asserting mastery of the world’s oceans. This was the long-standing British strategy. France oscillated between trying to dominate Germany and trying to contest overseas theaters with Britain, and couldn’t do both simultaneously. Prussia and Russia were trying to expand at the expense of their neighbors, which in Russia’s case meant much of Eurasia. Austria, Turkey, and Spain were trying to hold on to what they had. Sweden and the Netherlands were second-tier opportunists and Portugal was outward-facing from Europe to an empire that was large for the size of the home country (in South America, Africa, India, and the Far East). By opposing larger Spain, Portugal gained the protection of the Royal Navy to maintain its empire, which it would not otherwise have been able to defend from larger predators.
The French, when they finally developed a plan, wanted to distract the British to the nether regions of empire and strike a mortal blow at the home island of Britain. Of these long-standing British and French strategic designs, the British generally succeeded in imposing theirs, and the French, perpetually unsure whether they wanted to make a crossing in force of the Rhine or the English Channel, never really came close to a serious invasion of the British Isles. (The Pyrenees and the Alps were less promising and tempting places of trespass, though they were occasionally traversed.)
By the 1750s there were just the first glimmerings of an American strategy, spontaneously derived but starting to receive direction to work with the British to remove the French from Canada and then favorably alter the relationship with Britain.
There was a loyalty in the colonies to the abstract entity of the Crown, and the impersonal wearer of the crown, but affections between the English and the Americans became frayed (as did relations between the Canadians and the French), and if the Crown (in the one case and the other) was seen as exclusively favoring the mother country, colonial fealty to the overseas king-protector would prove very fungible.
Combat was so routine in North America that even full-scale battles and reductions of opposing forts, involving the deaths of hundreds of men on both sides, did not provoke declarations of war. Until 1756, wars could be generated only by European matters. By the early 1750s, the race was on between the French, pushing down from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River and then to and down the Mississippi, and the English (Americans in practice but constantly seeking British military reinforcement when challenged), settling and exploring ever westward, for control of the Ohio country and the vast hinterland of North America. Alert American landowners, including young George Washington, 21 in 1753, were large land acquirers west of the Alleghenies. The French, who had an entirely developed rival claim, constructed a series of forts connecting Quebec to their traders in Illinois. These forts were at Presque Isle on the south shore of Lake Erie, another on a tributary of the Allegheny River, a third on the Allegheny itself, and the fourth at the meeting of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers to form the Ohio, the site of the modern city of Pittsburgh (whose name gives a hint of the outcome of the Anglo-French rivalry).
The French fort at the forks of the Ohio was called Fort Duquesne, after the builder, a French naval officer who was entrusted with the Canadian military command, and mobilized 11,000 Canadians, trained them thoroughly by colonial standards, and pressed south with them organized into 165 companies, supported by thousands of Indians whom the French had enticed with generous offers of trading rights. The Indians tended to take the promises of the French more seriously than those of the English, because the French seemed much less inclined to people the New World themselves with immigration, rather than just taking what the fur trade and other commerce would yield. The British had planned a fort on the same site and the rivalry, in the names of Duquesne and Pitt, and over the same geography, presaged future conflicts over many colonial places claimed as a matter of right by different nationalities. Duquesne expended the lives of over 400 of his men and spent over four million livres, erecting his forts and developing trails between them, but the effort did wonders to galvanize American colonial opinion, especially in the unison of the chorus it raised up to London to repel the French interloper.
In the autumn of 1753 an enterprising 21-year-old Adjutant George Washington volunteered to carry a letter to the French at the forks of the Ohio, asking them to “desist” and withdraw. The governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, sent 200 men with Washington for this mission. Before Washington got clear of the Allegheny Mountains, one of Duquesne’s officers had repulsed the British contingent that tried to occupy the coveted site, majestic to this day, where the Ohio River begins. Undaunted and showing a boldness, indeed impetuosity, a trait for which he would not be well-known at the height of his career, Washington chose to advance against the French, who greatly outnumbered him. Washington fell upon a 35-man French and Indian scouting party and killed the commander of the French unit, a M. Jumonville, and nine others. Accounts differ and Washington’s own is a truncated and rather self-serving description of a provoked and measured response, rather than, as is claimed by the French and some of the colonial militiamen, a massacre begun by an Indian ally of the Americans who sank his hatchet into Jumonville’s skull, preparatory to relieving him of his scalp. The young Adjutant Washington, after the astonishing precocity