At last Charles managed to find a boat willing to take him back to France via Skye, and he bade a grateful farewell to Flora. The famous song ‘Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, over the sea to Skye, carry the lad that’s born to be king over the sea to Skye’ refers to this moment. But the prince, who was emphatically not born to be king, would live on for another forty-two years until he died at last in 1788 in Rome. By then a sad drunkard, full of fond reminiscences of his adventures, he was a curiosity to travellers doing the Grand Tour. But in his gross, swollen features the observer could see no trace of the youth who had fired a nation to arms.
Old age was something few of Prince Charles’s followers lived to enjoy. This time, as far as the Hanoverian government was concerned, the Jacobites had come far too close for comfort. Severe measures were taken to deal with them and make sure such a threat never arose again. The Highland way of life was proscribed. The wearing of tartan to mark clan memberships was forbidden; the chiefs’ important hereditary sheriffdoms and jurisdictions which had made them a law unto themselves were abolished. No Highlander was allowed to carry or own a sword, small arms or rifle, and where there was even the remotest suspicion that they had been Jacobites they were thrown off their land. Although some of these holdings were returned forty years later, that did not help those who lost their homes and had to rely on the goodwill of relatives for their daily bread. The leaders were all executed on Tower Hill, including the wily old Lord Lovat. He had hedged his bets, pretending to be loyal to King George II while sending his son to fight for the prince. Though he was eighty-three years old, Lovat managed to escape to a mountain cave in a glen leading to the west coast before he was betrayed.
But though the last of the Stuart threats to the Hanoverians had been conclusively dealt with, abroad the war went on. Though the Austrian Netherlands had been completely overrun by the French, they had not succeeded in breaching the United Provinces defences. At the same time, under Admirals Anson and Hawke Britain had regained supremacy of the seas. The French lost Cape Breton, the eastern tip of Canada, and its capital Louisburg to Britain; they had been captured by the American colonists. By now it was clear that the two chief protagonists of the War of the Austrian Succession were France and Britain, with Maria Theresa’s Austria playing a poor third and minor role. In all this the war with Spain had been forgotten. In fact the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which at last ended the war in April 1748, did not even mention the original cause of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the Spanish right to search British boats.
The treaty restored most of Austria’s territories to Maria Theresa. Nevertheless the empress was outraged by the way she had been treated. Frederick of Prussia kept her Silesian duchies, while Sardinia took some of the Milanese, and she had to give Parma to the King of Spain’s younger son. Though the war had been fought on her behalf, Austria had come off worst of all the countries.
Prime Minister Henry Pelham presided over a country growing ever more prosperous. The Old Pretender was expelled from France, whose rulers once again recognized the Protestant Succession. The Battle of Culloden had truly ended the threat of the old dynasty supplanting the new. When the Old Pretender died in 1766 even the pope did not hail the once bonnie prince as King Charles III. By his tact Pelham held together the old coalition of the Whigs as before. His premiership saw Britain in 1752 adopt the improved Gregorian calendar and lose eleven days in the process. The calendar had been calculated in the sixteenth century by Pope Gregory XIII, to correct errors in the old Julian calendar–it had taken Britain only one and a half centuries to join the rest of western Europe.
But if the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty and thus Parliament and the Revolutionary Settlement were at last secure–the next Hanoverian would have an English accent and pride himself on being British–the threat from France had not vanished. The rivalry was intensifying in two different arenas: among the trading posts of the two great powers in India, several oceans away, and in the colonies of North America. In the coming world war France and Britain would battle it out for colonial supremacy–and Britain, though she was a quarter the size of France, would emerge the victor. By the end of the Seven Years War she would control immense territories on two of the seven continents, and have become an empire encircling the globe.
While Pelham’s government cut back the army for peacetime conditions, in India the struggle continued between France and Britain to fill the power vacuum caused by the death of Aurangzeb, the last Mogul emperor of India, some forty years before. Previously the European settlements which had been founded round the coast of India since the sixteenth century had been no more than trading stations within the local rulers’ territories. The companies which went out to India saw themselves as merchants only. They were not conquistadores, a role which would in any case have been impossible under Mogul rule.
Under the auspices of the East India Company, the English settled at Madras on the south-east coast, at Bombay and at Calcutta, which was founded at the end of the seventeenth century as Fort William, beside a branch of the Ganges. Interspersed with these English ‘factories’ or trading stations were those of other nations: the French in particular had factories at Pondicherry in the south near Madras, and in the north-east near Calcutta they founded another one named Chandernagore. But by the 1740s the many warring Indian principalities into which the Mogul Empire had disintegrated had become a battleground for English and French influence. The Marquis de Dupleix, the French governor-general, had embarked on a programme of training the local Indian peoples, who were known as sepoys. Dupleix’s schemes for a few French leaders with guns and money gradually to dominate India’s immense continent was about to bear fruit. His candidate for the nawabship of the vast Karnatic region of southern India, which contained both Madras and Pondicherry, was poised to take the throne. Most of southern India would now be in effect a French colony.
At the same time the enormous, unpopulated tracts of virgin land in North America lying to the west of the eastern seaboard became another flashpoint between France and England. From 1749 onwards the French built forts along the Rivers Ohio and Mississippi and the Great Lakes, to pen in the English colonists and prevent new settlers moving west into the empty prairies beyond the Ohio Valley. When Pelham died unexpectedly in 1754, the covert enmity between the French and English settlers in North America had just erupted into a frontier war. The Virginians, led by Major George Washington, a young Virginian plantation-owner, tried to destroy Fort Duquesne. It was the opening move in their campaign to prevent the French putting limits to their expansion.
Over the next two years the fighting grew so furious that it became clear that it would have to receive official recognition from the two mother countries, and reinforcements were sent out by Britain and France, before war was declared once more in May 1756. In India, too, the undeclared race to control the great subcontinent was given official sanction by the French and English governments. There British morale had been hugely improved since 1751 by the astounding exploits of a former clerk of the East India Company called Robert Clive. Clive had foiled Dupleix’s attempt to control the Karnatic by capturing its capital, Arcot. He had had no military training whatsoever, but he was a voracious reader who spent all his spare time learning about battle tactics, and from Arcot onwards he put his studies to amazing effect. Clive had audacity, charisma and strategic judgement in equal quantities. With only 200 British soldiers, many of whom were raw recruits just arrived from England, and 300 sepoys, he gave such heart to his troops that they marched fearlessly into enemy country and captured Arcot without losing a man.
Although General Dupleix returned with massive Indian and French reinforcements to besiege Arcot, under Clive’s indomitable leadership, the British and their sepoy allies kept the army of 3,000 men at bay for fifty days. In the end Dupleix had to retire, because Clive’s men simply refused to give in. Notably heroic was the behaviour of the sepoys, who declined to drink any of the last supplies of water, believ
ing that Europeans had more need of it than they. The siege of Arcot passed into legend. Dupleix was disgraced and left for France, and Britain controlled most of the Karnatic.
Not only was Britain at war in India and America, she had also begun very unsuccessful hostilities in Europe. The three wars together are known as the Seven Years War. The underlying cause of the European war was Maria Theresa’s continued obsession with the duchies of Silesia. Outraged at the way she had been treated by her former ally England, in order to retrieve the duchies from Frederick II she allied herself with her old enemy France, as well as with Russia and the Elector of Saxony. Although George II disapproved of his aggressive nephew Frederick, he saw intense danger in the new line-up of Catholic powers on the continent. Accordingly, in January 1756 the king agreed to a defensive alliance between Great Britain and Prussia.
But the dynamic Frederick the Great, as he became known, was not going to wait to be attacked by the great powers now surrounding him. In August 1756, he once again started a war in Europe. He invaded Saxony, seized the war-plans detailing Prussia’s dismemberment and published them in the newspapers as justification for his own behaviour. As Prussia, Britain’s only ally, struggled against the invading armies of France, Austria, Saxony and Russia, bad news came from every part of the globe. Though Clive in India followed up Arcot with a series of victories, the situation seemed to be turning in favour of the French; the same was true in America. News had just arrived of the tragedy of the Black Hole of Calcutta, in Bengal in north-east India: the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, one of the chief allies of the French, had overrun the English trading post and shut up its defenders in a tiny jail. One hundred and forty-seven prisoners had died of suffocation overnight. In America the French forts on the St Lawrence and Ohio were holding the line against the English colonists, and inflicting serious damage on them.
In Europe the situation was yet more alarming. Hanover had been overrun: the king’s second son, the Duke of Cumberland, had been forced to sign the Capitulation of Klosterzeven, handing over George II’s beloved electorate to the French. The French fleet had triumphed over the English navy, traditionally its superior. It had captured Minorca, the best harbour in the Mediterranean, owing to the incompetence of Admiral Byng, who had been sent with a fleet to relieve it. Though Byng was the son of the man who had won the great victory of Cape Passaro, he was cast from a less glorious mould. Flushed with success, the French were now mustering boats at the Pas de Calais to invade England. The country was on the brink of catastrophe, and no one seemed able to take control, as the government had been riven by faction ever since the death of the tactful Henry Pelham in 1754.
The new prime minister was his brother Thomas Pelham, Duke of Newcastle. Despite his reputation for being the great fixer of elections, Newcastle did not have his brother Henry’s social gifts and could do nothing to smooth relations among the Whigs. His rudderless government drifted hopelessly from crisis to crisis, with the whole previously secure basis for British life unravelling. The country was thrown into what can only be described as a blind panic: the City of London and many other cities sent deputations to the king begging him to do something about Britain’s grave lack of defences. The government, desperate to be seen in control and to find a scapegoat for their hopelessness, had Admiral Byng shot on the quarterdeck of his own ship. As Voltaire said dryly, it was ‘pour encourager les autres’.
There was just one man who the nation believed could save them, and that was the universally popular Pitt. As Dr Johnson observed, while Walpole was ‘a minister given by the king to the people’, Pitt was the ‘minister given by the people to the king’. Pitt had been harping on for twenty years about the need to increase the numbers and training of the militia at home and to stop relying on German mercenaries. But he was still only a minor minister and, as far as the king was concerned, one who had irredeemably blotted his copybook by his past attacks on British involvement in the War of the Austrian Succession. Pitt’s Parliamentary speeches decrying money spent on continental quarrels had guaranteed his sovereign’s unrelenting hatred. ‘It is now too apparent that this great, this powerful, this formidable kingdom is considered only as a province of a despicable electorate,’ Pitt had memorably said, and George II could not forget it.
Pitt never bothered to dress up his contempt for George II’s Hanoverian commitments nor to conceal his belief that Britain should be absolved from having any part in them. The taxpayers’ money would be much better employed on defending the American colonists from the French. Pitt had been furious when the war against Spain had been superseded by the War of the Austrian Succession. Britain’s war should be on the sea, traditionally her most successful element, and the battles fought for trade.
Despite the almost insuperable enmity of the king, it began to be clear as the government’s reputation disintegrated that only Pitt could restore its authority. Pitt alone, the Great Commoner, as he was nicknamed for calling ministers to account in the House of Commons, still possessed a reputation, as he had done since he first denounced Walpolean jobbery and sleaze. Though cities all over the country were calling for Pitt, still the king hesitated. He gave in only when his sensible mistress Lady Yarmouth, on whom the sight of mobs drilling in London had a chilling effect, said that he must choose Pitt or lose his throne. Pitt’s terms were quite unpalatable to George–he insisted that he personally be responsible for policy–but the resignation of Newcastle over Minorca in 1756 forced the king’s hand. The Duke of Devonshire took over the government, but it was Pitt who in effect became head of it.
Though Pitt’s weakness was that he did not command a sufficiently large faction in the House of Commons, as Newcastle did, his strength was the overwhelming personal support for him in the country at large. He had complete confidence in himself and in his ability to breathe that confidence back into the nation. ‘I know that I can save the country and that no one else can,’ he said.
Unlike the rest of the government, Pitt had a comprehensive plan for the war. For the previous eight years he had been paymaster-general under Henry Pelham, because the king would not have him as war minister. Traditionally this post was a way, as Walpole expressed it, of ‘putting a little fat on your bones’: in other words, the paymaster-general made money by creaming a percentage off each government transaction. But Pitt had refused to take anything other than a ministerial salary. Instead he used the office to accrue information about British trade and settlement abroad. Everything he read over those eight obscure years consolidated his beliefs about the need for war with France to defend Britain’s trade.
If Walpole was the great eighteenth-century minister for peace, Pitt was the great minister for war. In his breadth of knowledge, his daring and his success, he is comparable only to leaders on the scale of Marlborough or Churchill. It was Pitt’s vision that pulled a triumphant war effort out of a country which had forgotten how to fight after years of reliance on German mercenaries. Pitt breathed new life into services that had decayed under Walpole’s placemen in ministries, whose neglect long after he was gone had left Britain’s ships rotting at quaysides.
A Bill for a National Militia was passed to raise soldiers to defend the country against the French invasion and beef up the numbers of an army which was pitifully small compared to the French, thanks to the British fear of a standing army in peacetime. Pitt ignored question-marks over the Scots’ loyalty in order to take advantage of the fact that they were the best natural soldiers in the country and raised two Highland regiments. He believed that, if their native aggression was given an outlet against Britain’s enemies, it would prevent a repeat of the Forty-five. These new troops should be used to assault the coast of France to distract the French from their fierce attacks on Prussia. Prussia herself was to be given an enormous subsidy for troops, as well as a British army in Hanover to protect her from the French. Under the generalship of Frederick the Great, Prussia was the one power which could keep the French at bay and the only German s
tate worth subsidizing.
However, one of the army’s most senior commanders, the Duke of Cumberland, was, like his father the king, allergic to Pitt. When told that he was to take the orders of a man who had spent twenty years insulting the sacred name of Hanover, he refused to serve under him. This gave George II the excuse he needed to get rid of Pitt, whom he continued to loathe. But when the king attempted to form a ministry without either Pitt or Newcastle, he found that it was impossible, for the one was supported by the voice of the people and the other by a majority in the House of Commons. As George prevaricated for eleven weeks, from all over Britain the most important corporations sent Pitt boxes of gold as symbols of their support.
In the end the king bowed to the inevitable. Pitt was back in, with Newcastle running the House of Commons for him with his patronage and his majority. Technically Newcastle was prime minister and Pitt secretary of state, but the real prime minister who took all the decisions (frequently over the heads of the chiefs of staff) was the Great Commoner himself. It was not a moment too soon for Pitt to return to the helm. Finally his plans began to pay off. The King of Prussia rewarded Pitt’s faith in him when he heroically defeated the assembled might of those European colossuses the French and the Austrians, and held off the Russians. Ferdinand of Brunswick, meanwhile, in charge of the allied forces in Hanover, protected his western flank. To those who now complained about the vast expense of the German continental campaign, Pitt replied that it was for once justified: the French had to be tied down in Europe so that they could not send too many troops to America and India. ‘I will conquer America for you in Germany,’ he told the House of Commons.
Pitt believed that with sufficient encouragement Britain’s much larger colonial population in America could even the odds vis-à-vis France, which was four times her size and whose army was in mint condition. In order to drive the French off the North American continent, every colony should be organized for total war. All the state assemblies from Georgia to New England would be encouraged to raise their own militias and send men to fight. Tactfully Pitt gave high commands to American soldiers, though they had had none of the professional military training of the British. A propaganda campaign was launched at the American colonies to create a spirit of mutual endeavour between them and the mother country, without which Pitt knew the war would be lost–hitherto the colonies had considered themselves to be quite unconnected to one another.
The Story of Britain Page 53