Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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Old World (which was true, but he could have prearranged a buy-off of most of the Indians, if necessary, where appropriate, with the moral reinforcement of the missionaries). But the intensity of the war, and the fervor and determination with which it would be conducted by the British of both the New and Old Worlds, had changed radically.
Between August 7 and August 12, Connecticut and Massachusetts alone mobilized 12,000 militiamen and sent them to Fort Edward to deal a counterblow to Montcalm and, as it was fancied, his blood-stained Indian allies. In fact, Montcalm was exhausted of provisions and his Indian intelligence and logistical and reconnaissance expertise had defected, and he felt he had no alternative but to withdraw toward Montreal. Loudoun, returned from the fiasco in Nova Scotia, at least was heartened by the stiffening of colonial resolve to self-defense and cooperation with the British. There was not, however, such a spirit of solidarity that Loudoun was prepared to accede to Washington’s request to take the Virginia regiment Washington had led and trained to a high standard directly into the British army, nor to give Washington the commission he had certainly earned.
Instead, he placed Washington directly under a British regimental colonel who immediately ordered him to supply immense requisitions for what was clearly outright embezzlement.3 Greater coordination between the colonial assemblies was a great step forward, but Loudoun’s continued oppressive condescensions, faithfully replicated by his subalterns, could only contribute to increased American contemplation of the long-term need for this chronically subordinate relationship. This was especially true when inflicted on a man of Washington’s high character, loyalty, and impending influence on colonial opinion.
5. THE FIRST PHASE OF THE WAR IN EUROPE
The Russians, Austrians, Swedish, and French were all determined to slam the door on Frederick’s effort to force his way onto the European scene as a Great Power, whereas the British were for as many land powers as possible in Europe, to facilitate their manipulation of the balance of power. A war in Europe having been unlikely a few months before, it was now a roaring conflict involving all the major powers. France, Austria, Sweden, and Russia should have been able to subdue Prussia, but the shared Pitt-Newcastle objective of so distracting France in Europe that it would be unable to commit equivalent forces to resist Britain’s overseas ambitions might be attainable.
No American had any experience with European diplomatic affairs, and few were interested. Franklin, as the former and returning representative to London of Pennsylvania and a couple of other of the colonies, must have had some curiosity about these events, but his only recorded interest was in the distraction of France in Europe to facilitate its expulsion from North America. Pitt finally forced Newcastle from office in November 1756, and returned to government the following month as secretary of state for all external matters except the main powers of Europe, under the Duke of Devonshire as prime minister, who had no real support and was just a compromise caretaker acceptable to Newcastle, Pitt, and George II. Newcastle remained the principal influence on the government. Pitt was again dismissed in April 1757, because of his opposition to the continental policy, as he wanted a fight to the finish with France and not the temporizing he imputed to Newcastle, and he continued to accuse Newcastle of murdering Byng to cover his own pusillanimity (with some reason).
By this time, Frederick had prorupted into Bohemia (the Czechs), aiming to knock the Austrians out of the war. In May 1757, he laid siege to Prague, next to Vienna and Budapest and Venice the greatest city in Maria Theresa’s empire, but was defeated in June. Frederick was soon flung out of Bohemia and Silesia was largely recaptured by the Austrians.
With bad news pouring in, Pitt and Newcastle somewhat composed their differences, and formed a new ministry in June 1757. Newcastle was in charge of finances and Pitt of war policy. Cumberland was defeated in Hanover and forced to acquiesce in the withdrawal of Hanover from the war in October. Pitt managed to have this decision revisited at the end of the year (with a huge bribe to the native land of his monarchy, a practice he had always criticized), and Frederick scored two of the greatest victories of his career, at Rossbach against the French on November 5, 1757, and at Leuthen against the Austrians one month later. (This pushed the Austrians out of Silesia permanently, a bitter pill for Maria Theresa.)
In a long and almost unwaveringly unsuccessful military tradition, Pitt organized a series of amphibious “descents” on the French coast. The first of these was at Rochefort in September, and it failed, as did almost all such initiatives up to and including the Canadian landing at Dieppe in 1942 (Chapter 11). The brightest note, early in the war, was in India. Colonel Robert Clive, the deputy commander at Madras, had seized Calcutta, the principal city of Bengal, in early 1757, and made substantial advances from there. And Pitt created a militia, forerunner of the Home Guard, of 32,000, as a back-up force in case England were herself to see for the first time in 700 years the campfires of a real invader. One of the celebrated (but none too bellicose) recruits to this force would be the illustrious historian Edward Gibbon.4 By the end of 1757, Pitt had already energized the war effort.
As 1758 dawned, William Pitt was firmly in control of the British war strategy and was canvassing the ranks of British officers to get aggressive, intelligent commanders for the overseas operations, like the brilliant Clive in India. Frederick’s victories over the French and Austrians, and the return to war of Hanover, had pushed those powers back onto the defensive. In America, the colonies were stepping forward to their own defense more determined than ever to remove the threat to their existence posed by the French. If that goal could be attained, the future of the English-speaking world would depend on whether the war in America forged an unshakable solidarity of national victory between its two great components, or an American recognition that in the new circumstances, colonial subordinacy to Britain was a retardant, and not a spur, to the stirring and increasingly plausible ambitions of the New World. Without the French threat, America’s need for the overlordship of the British would be much less obvious.
William Pitt’s strategy was to tie down as many French as possible in Germany or as they waited for a chance to cross the Channel, which he was confident would not come, while pouring British resources into the Empire he was building. He grasped the importance of sea power and the huge advantage that accrued to Britain with a blue-water policy that put the British flag all around the world while the European powers squabbled and skirmished on their frontiers, as long as none of them became too over-powerful opposite the others. Partly to divert the French and partly, belatedly, to appease King George II, he dispatched the first British troops to the continent in many years, 9,000 regulars under the scion of Britain’s greatest general up to that time (with the possible exception of Cromwell), the Duke of Marlborough, to Hanover.
The Hanoverian commander, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, pushed the French out of Hanover, recaptured the port of Emden in March, and stirred considerable anxiety in France by crossing the Rhine, a bold move for a small state. The French eventually drove him out, but he fulfilled Pitt’s plan of distracting the French on their German frontier while he attacked them around the world. At the behest of an American slave-trader, Thomas Cumming, Pitt sent a force to clear the French out of Goree and Fort St. Louis, near the modern Dakar, and from the nearby mouth of the Gambia, in West Africa, and quickly took over a lucrative slave trade, shipping unfortunate natives to the mercies of the American plantation owners. Following a very modestly successful “descent” at Cherbourg, and the disastrous failure of his third “descent,” at St. Cast, a worse fiasco than Rochefort in 1757, Pitt concluded that the Caribbean would be a more rewarding disposition of these amphibious forces.
Pitt solidified relations with Frederick of Prussia with the Anglo-Prussian Convention of April 1758, and a 670,000-pound annual subsidy to Prussia, at least several thousand times as much in today’s dollars. Frederick demonstrated an astonishing bellicosity as he rushed around the borders of his kingdom battling the Austrians, French, Swedes, and Russians. He showed the advantages of interior lines and demonstrated the weakness of these primitive alliances, as for years there was no coordination at all between the enemies of Prussia. Had they determined to attack from four directions at the same time, Frederick, talented commander though he was, would have been overwhelmed.
Frederick began 1758 with an invasion of Moravia (now the eastern Czech Republic), but the Austrians