Pitt intended this vigorous trimming of sail—and especially the attention to defending Hanover—to win the king’s trust and to secure Newcastle’s neutrality, if not necessarily his support. He achieved the latter only. George II could scarcely bear Pitt’s presence and absolutely loathed Pitt’s brother-in-law Richard Grenville, Lord Temple, who was serving as first lord of the Admiralty. Thus at the first flicker of independence on the part of Pitt—it came when he made a plea for clemency on behalf of Admiral Byng, then under sentence of death for neglect of duty—George sacked the lot. In early April 1757, after a little more than four months in office, Pitt was once again without a job, and the country, in the midst of a war going worse with every passing day, was without a government.9
Fox and Cumberland had forced this turn of events. Fox hoped to replace Pitt as first minister, and Cumberland gave him the support he needed by bluntly refusing to go to Hanover and assume command of the army there, so long as Pitt remained in office. Given the king’s unconcealed distaste for Pitt, this gambit had every prospect for success and doubtless would have worked brilliantly—had Newcastle agreed to cooperate. The duke, however, had never cared for Cumberland and refused to forgive Fox for his recent treachery. Without Newcastle’s support no progress could be made in any direction. Thus what followed the dismissal of Pitt in April was a bizarre three-month interlude of maneuvering and intrigue during which no one seemed to be in control of the government. Horace Walpole, half-amused and half-appalled, called it “the inter-ministerium.”10
None of what happened during this period, while the duke of Devonshire stayed on to head a ghostly caretaker cabinet, had anything to do with policy, for no one suggested that any change should be made in the way the war was to be waged. The only real issues at stake had to do with personalities. The king wished to revive the coalition of Fox and Newcastle, but Newcastle refused to have anything to do with Fox. The duke would undertake no ministry without first being assured that the king and the Leicester House faction could be reconciled, for he had no wish to find himself caught between feuding halves of the royal family. Yet Pitt, high in influence at Leicester House, would cooperate only if he could name his own terms, and they were too steep for either the king or Newcastle to tolerate. Fox wished to return to power, or—failing that— to be appointed to a position of profit; nothing would be possible unless some way could be found to satisfy his ambitions. To reconcile these competing desires and contradictory demands within the rigid frame of parliamentary politics demanded that equations of Einsteinian intricacy be solved. But until all the necessary calculations had been worked out, nothing—not even the war—could take precedence.11
The interministerium did not end until June was nearly over, when Newcastle and Pitt finally resolved, to their own and to the king’s grudging satisfactions, the all-important question of who should occupy what offices. In the end it was agreed that Newcastle would return to office as first lord of the Treasury and would exercise control over all patronage and financial affairs; the formulation of policy would be left to Pitt, who would reassume the Southern secretaryship. Thus Pitt would become “minister of measures” and the duke, “minister of money.” Newcastle’s old friend Robert D’Arcy, earl of Holdernesse, would return to the Northern secretaryship, balancing Pitt in the other of the two chief administrative posts in the Privy Council. Fox, whose patron Cumberland had gone off to defend Hanover, found himself cut off from power but amply rewarded by the paymaster generalship of the forces, a position that paid handsomely (above £4,000 per annum) and provided its incumbent with the choicest opportunities for profiteering that eighteenth-century English government afforded. Fox knew full well when he accepted the post that so long as he held it he would be putting himself on the shelf politically, for the paymastership communicated no influence whatever; but in the end he was happy enough to trade power for profit. Before his tenure ended in 1774, Fox would harvest more than £400,000 from the office. As for the rest of the interested parties, the king saw to it that no single interest triumphed. The detested Grenvilles received offices that conferred (at most) prestige, not power, and that kept them out of his closet. The Townshend brothers, important allies of Pitt among the independents, got nothing at all. Even Newcastle, who had tried to have a ministerial post created for Lord Halifax—a secretaryship of state for America and the West Indies—found himself brought up short. 12
What would come to be known as the Pitt-Newcastle ministry was a coalition created by strenuous bargaining, and it was obviously one that could function only so long as its major parties remained willing to compromise. Relieved that the long weeks of drift were at an end, politicians and others outside the new ministry greeted its formation with expressions of hope for the future. Given the lack of goodwill and trust between the ministers at the outset, however, optimism was hardly the order of the day within the government itself. The king had been deeply offended during the interministerium by Newcastle’s unwillingness to do his bidding; Newcastle was still speaking of Pitt as “my enemy”; Pitt was calling his role in the new ministry a “bitter but necessary cup,” which he approached with a “foreboding mind.”13 As if all that were not enough, on the very day that Newcastle and Pitt kissed the king’s hand for their seals of office, news of the most forbidding sort arrived from the Continent.
CHAPTER 17
The Fortunes of War in Europe
1757
STRIKING SOUTH out of Saxony into the Austrian province of Bohemia, Frederick of Prussia won a smashing victory over the Austrian army outside Prague, then trapped more than forty thousand Austrian soldiers in the city and laid it under siege in early May 1757. While waiting for them to submit or starve, however, he found his own supply lines cut by a second Austrian force, commanded by Field Marshal Leopold, Count von Daun. With his options suddenly limited to attack or withdrawal, Frederick again took the offensive and marched an army of more than thirty thousand Prussians against Daun’s fortified camp near Kolín. He lost nearly half of them in a great battle during which fully two-thirds of the infantrymen in his army were killed, wounded, or captured: as Frederick would explain to George II, he was compelled to break off his attacks “for lack of combatants.” Defeat left him with no choice but to raise the siege of Prague and withdraw his army from Bohemia. This crisis in the continental war furnished “dreadful auspices . . . [to] begin with,” but Pitt and Newcastle would soon hear worse. Even as Frederick was retreating from Bohemia, the French were moving against his territories in East Friesland, their allies the Swedes were sending thousands of troops against Pomerania, and the Russians were poised to invade East Prussia.1
By the middle of July, the Prussian king was bombarding Pitt with pleas to do something, anything, to relieve his distress: at the very least, he might dispatch British troops to Hanover, to replace the Prussian contingents in the Hanoverian army and free them to defend their own country. Yet that, for reasons soon to become apparent, was the least possible of all solutions to Frederick’s problems.2
Although Britain had sent no troops to defend Hanover, the king had dispatched his son, William Augustus, the duke of Cumberland, to lead the electorate’s armies. Cumberland had not been a bad choice. At age thirty-six, he had already gained considerable experience as an army administrator, had seen battle during the previous war, and had the physical courage to lead men in combat—but the terms of his appointment were ambiguous, and he had come to the Continent with “orders that read more like the minutes of a cabinet meeting than an operational document.” In mid-July, as Frederick pelted Pitt with demands for help, a large French force crossed the Weser. Frederick helpfully suggested that Cumberland attack immediately, despite the fact that the French outnumbered his army by approximately two to one. Cumberland, declining the king’s advice, took up defensive positions at a village called Hasten-beck, not far from the Weser, and waited. The French attacked on July 25, dislodged Cumberland’s army, and forced it to retreat northward, toward t
he mouth of the Elbe. Cumberland hoped that the British navy could bring him the reinforcements and supplies he needed to counterattack; but the French outflanked him and cut him off from the river, then sat back and waited for him to make the next move.3
Cornered and impotent, the duke now came under intense pressure from Hanover’s ministers of state to make a peace that would save their country from being overrun. In early August it only remained unclear when, not if, Cumberland would negotiate. His father privately instructed him if necessary to make a separate peace for Hanover, and there was no doubt that his commission, muddled as it was, empowered him to negotiate any settlement he thought prudent. The longer he delayed in negotiating, however, the less credible his defeated army grew as a threat, and the less likely he would be to obtain favorable terms from the French. As August wore on, the ministry’s hopes for retrieving the military situation on the Continent waned, the king’s anxieties for preserving Hanover’s sovereignty mounted, and Frederick’s concerns for the defense of Prussia grew more desperate. Everything now focused on Cumberland’s ability to extricate himself from a situation that grew more dismal by the day.4
Only a few hopeful developments relieved the grimness of the Pitt-Newcastle ministry’s first days. On July 8 news arrived from India that military affairs in that distant quarter, at least, were improving. Fragmentary reports had been coming in since Christmas that the army of the nawab of Bengal had attacked the British East India Company post of Fort William at Calcutta the previous June, with disastrous results for its garrison. Now word arrived that at New Year’s, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Clive—deputy governor of Fort St. David, the East India Company factory at Madras—had retaken Calcutta from the nawab’s army. With the receipt of dispatches informing him that Britain and France had declared war, Clive had gone on to attack Fort d’Orléans, the French Compagnie des Indes factory at Chandernagore, and had forced its surrender on March 23.5
Because months of travel were necessary to relay information from India, no one in England yet knew that on June 23 the indefatigable Clive had gained a decisive victory over the nawab at the Battle of Plassey and seized control of all Bengal. That knowledge would surely have cheered Pitt, but in early July he remained wary. “This cordial,” he wrote to a political ally of the news that Calcutta had been regained and Chandernagore taken, “such as it is, has not the power to quiet my mind one minute till we hear Lord Loudoun is safe at Halifax” and ready to launch an assault on Louisbourg. To his great relief, the dispatches that arrived from America on August 6 brought the news he longed to hear. Loudoun had arrived in Nova Scotia at the beginning of July and his preparations for the amphibious attack on the great Cape Breton fortress were proceeding apace. “I am infinitely happy to think of the joy this news will give [in the household of the Prince of Wales],” Pitt wrote to the prince’s tutor, the earl of Bute. Unfortunately for Pitt’s peace of mind, this would prove the last piece of encouraging news from America for a long, long time.6
CHAPTER 18
Loudoun’s Offensive
1757
LORD LOUDOUN had been pleased to learn that Pitt supported an all-out war in the colonies, though he doubtless found it disquieting that the minister showed so much eagerness to intervene in the planning of his campaign for 1757. Loudoun had initially intended to send regulars to Pennsylvania and South Carolina to strengthen their defenses, but otherwise to defend the colonial frontier with provincials. His redcoats he would use in a single daring offensive against Québec. When word of Pitt’s plans for the campaign of 1757 arrived at Loudoun’s headquarters, however, he discovered that the minister wanted him first to attack Louisbourg and only then to proceed against the Canadian heartland via the St. Lawrence—a plan with strategic merit, but one that inevitably left the New York–New England frontier exposed to raids, or even invasion, from Canada. Good soldier that he was, Loudoun proceeded according to orders, swallowing his reservations along with whatever resentment he felt at Pitt’s intrusion into his operational planning. Since Pitt had promised a reinforcement of eight thousand regulars for the coming campaign, and since he was making it a point for Loudoun “to be refused nothing,” the commander in chief may not have thought the bargain an especially bad one. Moreover, he believed that his efforts in reforming colonial affairs would contribute to the success of the 1757 campaign, no matter whether its immediate goal was Louisbourg or Québec.1
Loudoun had spent the whole fall of 1756 and much of the ensuing winter trying to impose order on the American war effort. In September and October he concentrated on rationalizing the supply system, introducing efficiency and economy into what had been a notoriously complex and (he believed) corrupt operation. With centralized storehouses at New York, Albany, and Halifax, and with a vigilant commissary of stores working to inspect the victuals for wholesomeness, Loudoun’s new system guaranteed that adequate stocks of equipment, clothing, and provisions would be available to regulars and provincials alike, for the first time in the war.2
Significant as they were, however, Loudoun knew that improvements in procurement, storage, and inventory control would be meaningless without a reliable means of moving the supplies to the forts and troops that needed them. Thus he decided to retain the services of John Bradstreet and his corps of armed bateaumen, despite Bradstreet’s close ties to the detested Shirley. In consultation with Bradstreet, Loudoun undertook the measures without which no successful campaign could ever be mounted against the French, widening roads and improving portages, creating an army wagon train to supplement the services of the expensive and often unreliable civilian wagoners, building standardized supply bateaux and scows, and constructing way stations to shelter supplies and men in transit from station to station. The fall in the cost of moving supplies offers the best index of Loudoun’s success in improving the efficiency of the transport system. In 1756 it had cost nearly sixpence a mile to move a two-hundredweight barrel of beef from Albany to Lake George, which meant that the army was spending more than half the value of the beef itself to carry it sixty miles. By the end of 1757, the same barrel could be transported over the same route for less than twopence a mile.3
Loudoun undertook these reforms to lessen his reliance on Americans, whom he found untrustworthy as well as ungrateful. He followed the same course in dealing with provincial troops, requesting for the campaigns of 1757 less than half the number that had served in 1756. Loudoun also hoped to establish control over the contract-minded soldiers of New England and their rank-conscious officers by changing the method of recruitment. Whereas in the past each province had supplied what amounted to a small complete army, now Loudoun asked the colonies to provide troops in standardized, hundred-man companies, with only one field officer per province ranking above the company commanders. These provincial companies were to be integrated into campaign forces and garrisons under redcoat command.
In this way Loudoun expected to solve the two most intractable problems of 1756. No man could now maintain that his enlistment contract exempted him from joint service with the redcoats, and thus from redcoat discipline; and the commissioning of a single colonel from each province would minimize disputes between provincial and regular field officers over rank and precedence. Although he could not escape using Americans altogether, Loudoun’s clear preference was to use them on his own terms. Even the colonial backwoodsmen who made up the the army’s ranger companies were, in Loudoun’s eyes, temporary substitutes for regulars. Although the unwillingness of most Indians to serve as scouts for the British left him with no choice but to use Americans, Loudoun encouraged junior officers to accompany the rangers on their patrols to learn woodcraft and bush-fighting techniques. Within a year or so, he hoped to be able to form ranging companies under the command of these officers, within regular regiments. Then he would be free to dissolve the troublesome, expensive, undisciplinable American ranger units.4
Loudoun’s reforms and his plan for 1757 reflected his disappointments in 1756 and seemed li
kely to solve the problems that had hobbled that year’s misbegotten campaigns. Quartering remained a difficult issue— Loudoun’s legal position was as weak as his men’s need for housing was desperate—but progress seemed likely to result from Pitt’s willingness to introduce a bill authorizing the billeting of troops in American private homes. Until such a measure could be secured, Loudoun contented himself with his usual tactic of threatening to take quarters by force, a system that effectively produced colonial cooperation, if not goodwill. After a trial of strength between the commander in chief and the mayor and town council of New York late in 1756, the provincial assembly agreed to build a barracks on Manhattan to house the first battalion of the Royal American Regiment. At about that same time, Philadelphia’s city government and the Pennsylvania war commissioners were knuckling under to Loudoun’s threats and making the new provincial hospital available as a barracks for the regiment’s second battalion; in 1758 the Pennsylvania assembly would follow New York’s example and build permanent accommodations.5
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