A History of the World

by Andrew Marr

  The problem was that this was only one half of Frederick’s personality. He might have recoiled from his father’s Germanic simplicities, but he idolized the army his father had bequeathed him. His resentment at being forced to marry a woman he did not love was directed not only at his father, but also at the overweening power in the Germanic world that had lobbied for that marriage – the Austrian Habsburg empire. And so when he became king ten years after the traumatic decapitation of his officer friend, Frederick’s first act had been to march his armies into neighbouring Austrian-controlled Silesia, a huge territory with considerable manufacturing wealth, and seize it. Frederick’s armies almost brushed aside the Austrians rather than merely defeating them, but in doing so he upset the balance of European power-politics and triggered further wars.

  In his second act upon becoming king, he again took on the role of aggressor, seizing Saxony. As a result, in his third and biggest conflict, part of the global Seven Years War, Frederick faced a daunting coalition comprising France, Austria, Russia and Sweden, encircling him and threatening to carve up Prussia for ever. He had a small British–Hanoverian force on his side, but he faced overwhelming odds. At this point the philosopher-king was seriously considering a suicidal ‘soldier’s death’ on the battlefield. But Frederick became ‘the Great’ not because he had cultivated Enlightenment thinkers or because he played the flute well, but because he proved to be a brilliant soldier. Expert at dividing and confusing his enemies, he won most of his battles, often against great odds.

  Just as Alexander the Great could not have achieved his brilliant successes without the army created by his father Philip II, so Frederick could not have achieved what he did without the formidable army created by his father. The Prussian army could move faster and more efficiently in parade-ground formation than any other. In the eighteenth century, parade-ground drill and discipline were essential. Being able to wheel your forces round and rain down fire from unexpected angles, and to hold perfect formation under a hail of musket balls and cannon-fire, was what turned men and muskets into mass weaponry. Frederick’s army was composed of harshly drilled young men under the command of aristocrats, themselves trained in the new military academies to see war as a science. These aristocratic Junker families would lose vast numbers of their sons to Frederick’s wars, but won for themselves a status in his fast-growing Prussian state that they would lose only in Nazi times.

  These wars were perhaps not as socially destructive as those of the earlier Protestant–Catholic conflict, but they were bloody enough, with raping, pillaging, burning of towns and villages and the slaughter of civilians, as well as the carnage of the set-piece battles. It has been estimated that Prussia alone lost around 10 per cent of its population, some four hundred thousand people. (In the First World War, by comparison, Germany lost 2.47 million people, but that was less than 4 per cent of the total population; so Frederick’s wars were proportionally more than twice as bloody.)

  The consequences were momentous. In Prussia, Frederick had to repair the damage by moving populations into underexploited areas, a kind of internal colonization, and by introducing cheap-food and welfare policies. This in turn resulted in a more powerful and intrusive state. Austria suddenly found that she had lost her traditional position of dominance over the jigsaw of statelets known as the Holy Roman Empire. France, distracted from her key strategic struggle against the rising power of Britain, became entangled in a close alliance with Habsburg Austria, which seemed to many French people – used to Bourbons fighting Habsburgs – unnatural and wrong. The arrival of the Habsburg princess Marie Antoinette to marry the future Louis XVI was only one aspect of the unpopular policy, which would cost the French monarchy dear.

  In all of this, Frederick remained an enigma. Who was he, really? One historian of the Prussian state says: ‘To the injunction of his brutish father: “be an honest fellow, just be honest”, the teenage Frederick had responded with a sly, foppish civility striking the pose of the wry dissembling, morally agnostic outsider.’ This slippery, devious and ruthless man had been made, but also ruined, by his father. He was left rereading the classics, despairing of mankind and practising the flute until his teeth fell out, ‘devouring the latest works of philosophy and recruiting new conversation partners to fill the places vacated by friends who had died or betrayed him by taking wives’.14

  Voltaire by now had learned to put not his trust in princes, however much they claimed to like his books. As war ravaged Europe, he responded to the problem of living under absolute monarchs by becoming one himself, albeit in a modest way. At the village of Ferney, on the Swiss–French border, he bought himself an estate that would allow him to dodge French attempts to seize him. He could flee by coach or boat in any one of several directions if the alarm was raised. In 1758 he bought a large house and plenty of land, with walls around it, and took on responsibility for the farmers who lived there. Inside his tiny kingdom he could write his masterpiece, the satirical novel Candide, which attacked almost every aspect of old Europe, and contribute to the great encyclopaedia – the Encyclopédie – of the new generation of enlightened philosophers, stirring up hornets’ nests without himself being stung.

  Voltaire was not an atheist, but a deist, believing in a supreme being. But after the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake, which hit the city on 1 November 1755, he had become increasingly hostile to the ‘all is for the best’ or ‘whatever is, is right’ thinking of the early Enlightenment. The earthquake had not only killed thirty thousand people in Lisbon, it had overwhelmed Cadiz with a tsunami and shaken neighbouring countries. It hit during a religious holiday, and among those killed were Jesuits about to burn some Portuguese Jews as heretics. All over Europe a great debate ensued about what this disaster signified for the idea of a beneficent God. From Ferney, Voltaire lashed out in all directions – at the Jesuits, at Frederick’s militarism, at intolerance of all kinds.

  At home, Voltaire turned to farming and to cultivating his tiny patch of borderland France, developing the house into a miniature version of Sans-Souci, rebuilding the church (tolerance, even there), turning the barn into a theatre and welcoming intellectually curious visitors from across Europe to his tiny fortress of liberty. They came from America too, but particularly from England – and Scotland, where the next phase of the Enlightenment was roaring ahead. Among them were the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, and the friend of Dr Johnson and David Hume, the irrepressible James Boswell. By the time of Voltaire’s death Ferney had a watchmaking industry that he had promoted, some eighty houses and a thousand inhabitants, whose absolute monarch called himself ‘all Europe’s innkeeper’ and performed nightly for guests.

  Voltaire still had plenty of fire left in him. After the torture and hideous public execution of an elderly Protestant in a cooked-up murder case in Toulouse, he ran a furious campaign, which ended in the quashing of the conviction in Paris. ‘Écrasez l’infâme!’ – ‘Crush the infamy!’ – was his battlecry, one he had coined while talking with Frederick in the old days in Prussia. Voltaire lived long, fighting more campaigns for justice – models that would be imitated by journalists and politicians from the Dreyfus case to our own days. He made himself a champion of Protestants, a dangerous thing in France, and he also made something of a fool of himself by denouncing some recently translated Shakespeare as no good. At the end he returned to Paris, where he was treated virtually as a living god himself, cheered and celebrated and crowned with laurels at the theatre. He died on 30 May 1778 after refusing confession and telling two priests, ‘Let me die in peace.’

  Absolutist France, too, which had seemed such a formidable enemy, was on her last legs. She had been weakened by both Zozo and Frederick, by the new thinking at home and by the devastating costs of war, not least against Britain. The old certainties tottered. How else could the mocking Voltaire have become a hero to Catholic Paris? But the rot had begun on the battlefields of Germany. Going to war is what absolute monarchs do. It means they can ne
ver be truly enlightened – for what is the point of banning torture if you leave hundreds of thousands to die slow and agonizing deaths on the battlefield?

  But by now the conundrums that had briefly united Frederick and Voltaire when they were younger – how is it possible to combine authority and liberty? can one really legislate for human happiness? – were getting a new kind of answer. Among those who had come to pay tribute to Voltaire in his final weeks was a man from a free country rather bigger than Ferney. He was Benjamin Franklin, sent to France by the new American Congress.

  Cold Tea and Mohawks

  It remains the most famous protest against a tax in world history. The night of 16 December 1773 was cold and misty in the crowded port of Boston, Massachusetts. More than two hundred men, some disguised as Mohawk warriors, boarded three ships tied up at Griffin’s Wharf – the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver. All were carrying heavy lead-lined chests of the most sought-after luxury of the day, tea (then pronounced ‘tay’). The 340 chests were hauled onto the decks, smashed open with axes and then emptied into the cold black water. It was a long, hard job. Over three hours, the men disposed of some ninety thousand pounds of the tea, originally grown in China and distributed around the world by Britain’s East India Company.

  This was a protest against the tea tax imposed by the far-off London government, but more fundamentally, against the principle of London rule over colonies whose people had no seats in the Westminster Parliament. As the slogan had it, ‘No taxation without representation.’ There were many oddities about the ‘Boston Tea Party’ (though it was not known as this until far later in the next century). One was that the Americans were at that point actually winning their argument against the British ministers, who were being far more flexible and less determined than history remembers. In 1756 the Stamp Act, an attempt to tax American newspapers, magazines and legal documents, had been repealed in just a year, after boycotts and demonstrations.

  Hot tea and cold print added up to the same issue: representation. The Stamp Act had rubbed American noses in their second-class status within the British Empire. Most Americans inside the thirteen seaboard colonies thought of themselves as English, with the birthright of freedom won in the civil wars of the previous century. But they could not obtain the highest offices or negotiate their own trade rules, never mind vote for Parliament. A self-taught Virginia lawyer called Patrick Henry demanded the rights of freeborn Englishmen; and his state passed a motion that taxes could only be levied by the people themselves or by those chosen to represent them. Among those taken aback by the violent rebellion that followed was Benjamin Franklin himself. After a long career as one of the geniuses of Philadelphia, and a classic Enlightenment polymath, Franklin was then in London arguing the case for Pennsylvania becoming a royal colony, perhaps with himself as King George’s representative there. Franklin, suspected at home of favouring the Stamp Act, heard that his house had been targeted by the mob and that he was lucky not to have had it burned down.

  After the government backed down over the Stamp Act, it had tried to win back some revenue by introducing various other duties, this time on humdrum but essential commodities such as paint, paper, lead, glass – and tea. In London, Franklin was all for this. But again, the colonists had reacted with marches, boycotts and protests. The boycotts did not stop the Americans drinking tea: some turned to local herbal teas and many others to cheaper, smuggled tea from Dutch ships. And again, after some hesitation, the ‘tyrannical’ British government had caved in, repealing all the duties except that on tea, which was retained only so as to assert the shredding principle of Crown sovereignty.

  There was a pause in the smouldering crisis, which then ended in bizarre circumstances. In London, the prime minister Lord North’s government was over-taxing tea generally, and by doing so was pushing the East India Company towards bankruptcy. Ministers responded by allowing the Company to sell directly to the colonists, rather than bringing it home and taxing it through London first. This would dramatically cut the price of American tea, and help the Company. It was a liberal act. Lord North did, however, keep the original modest tax on American tea because this paid for colonial governors and judges, keeping them loyal to King George. Even then, the Bostonians and others were now being offered tea costing less than the smuggled tea they had been drinking. The ‘Boston Tea Party’ was a tax revolt against a commodity that was getting cheaper, not more expensive. How could that be?

  Ministers might have reflected that the only thing worse than losing a war is winning it. For in 1763, a decade before the tea was so nastily brewed in cold saltwater, Britain had ended her Seven Years War against France and Spain in triumph, with church bells ringing across the land. The war had sprawled across much of Europe, where Britain had been helping Frederick. Beyond Europe, Britain had won Bengal in India, islands in the Caribbean, and Minorca in the Mediterranean. But it was in America that the most dramatic shift had occurred. In 1759, the ‘year of victories’, British forces (including a young George Washington) and their native American allies trounced the French, seizing Canada and Florida. ‘New France’ vanished from the map. As a result, Britain controlled the whole eastern American seaboard, as well as having the putative ‘right’ to push west beyond the Appalachians. It was a famous victory, which seemed to establish Britain securely as ruler of America. When the new King, George III, was proclaimed, Americans loyally rejoiced.

  This, however, turned out to be the classic example of unintended consequences turning victor into vanquished. First, because of the removal of the French threat, the colonists no longer needed British troops to keep them safe. Second, the American colonists lost the right to expand as they had hoped, because to placate the British Empire’s new French-speaking subjects, control over native American lands (in today’s Ontario, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin) went to Canada. Pioneers from Britain’s thirteen North American colonies were forbidden to drive further west. In Massachusetts and Virginia, fear of French invasion was replaced by anger about the new carve-up. All this was ominous enough. But, third, the huge cost of the global war had doubled the British national debt, which now took about half the government’s revenue to service.15 New taxes were inevitable.

  A later British prime minister, son of the great William Pitt who had presided over Britain’s first run of imperial victories, would eventually have to introduce an income tax, so he could prosecute the war against Napoleon. Before that, new taxes mostly meant new duties on goods, and the goods that were most wanted and most valuable (like tea) were the obvious targets. To sum up: in the decade after London’s victory, her American colonists needed Britain less, were being boxed in by British diplomacy, and yet had to pay Britain more. The reason the colonists did not want to pay even the lower tea taxes was because they suspected they would be giving up a principle. If they agreed the right of the British to tax them, those taxes would, sooner or later, rise to intolerable levels. They had a point: it would always be easier to tax far-off colonials than loud-voiced landowners and grand merchants represented in Parliament and vocal at home.

  Some believed a rupture was inevitable, though in the early 1770s they were a minority. Benjamin Franklin, on an intellectual journey that was distancing him from loyalty to the Crown, put his finger on a looming problem: one day the population of British America was bound to be larger and wealthier than that of the home islands. What would happen then? Would the capital of the British Empire have to shift from London to Philadelphia? Others wanted to remain loyal to the Crown but also to enjoy the maximum freedom to trade without levies, to agree local laws without reference to London, and to take native land without worrying about global treaties.

  There is little doubt that, had the king’s ministers trodden even more warily, not only repealing unpopular taxes but accepting limits to their power in the new colonies, then the rebellion could have been postponed for a long time to come.

  Meanwhile, plenty of smaller mistakes were made. Had
British soldiers not responded to humiliating taunts and goading by opening fire and killing protesters in the ‘Boston massacre’, then that city would not have been the cauldron of anti-British feeling that it became. Had Lord North’s government not responded by passing the so-called Intolerable Acts to repress Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular, the colonies would not have retaliated with their own congresses or combined in the first Continental Congress. Had Britain not then sent more and more troops, provoking the creation of militias, and had King George not arrogantly rejected the ‘olive branch petition’ from the Continental Congress in 1775 affirming American loyalty, full-scale war might have been averted. And indeed, had the British commanders in the 1776–81 War of Independence been better, and luckier, soldiers, then the British forces might have won, at least for a time.

  Yet such ‘what if ?’s are not convincing. To return to Franklin’s point, by the 1770s the thirteen colonies had a population of around 2.4 million, mostly British by origin, but Dutch and German too. This was still around four million fewer than Britain herself, but the population was growing fast and was far too substantial to be forever kept out of imperial politics. And ‘substantial’ means more than numbers. These were people with high levels of literacy, networks of political societies, their own lawyers, newspapers and pamphlets, and their own colonial level of politics. For the many British supporters of the American cause, these were British people no different from any others, and therefore with the same rights. British political philosophy was based on stories of resistance to tyrannical power, going back to medieval times. The argument about the right of representation, which thrummed through the coffee houses and drawing rooms of Philadelphia, Boston and New York, was understood just as clearly by many observers in London’s Cheapside, Bristol or Edinburgh.