by Tom Anderson
1794-1809: The Jacobin Wars : The Fifth War of Supremacy. Macclesfield did not consider the Jacobin Wars to be Wars of Supremacy; these have been added by later historians due to the revisionism of the period by the British government in order to justify the return of hostilities, and which merely typifies their futile struggle to delay the inevitable march of Societal Unity with the false promises of nationalism.
*
Lombardi: Now that the stage has been set, we can move on. We have established how things begun to change in TimeLine L.
Pylos: The start was in North America, and in Britain. The ends...the ends would affect everything and everyone.
Chapter #7: And They Call It Peace
From: “The Reign of King Frederick I” by Dr Daniel Clarke (1975)—
Frederick had won back his throne by a combination of valour and base cunning. But, as Shakespeare had said so many years before, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Having returned to his position partially by treachery, Frederick remained somewhat paranoid towards usurpers for the rest of his life. Of course, not all of this was delusion. From a modern perspective looking back, we can see that after 1751 the Jacobites were shattered and would never threaten the House of Hanover again. But Frederick and his ministers were always wary of another attempt, and took steps in order to guard against it.
More steps were taken to reinforce the guard on the Scottish Highlands, with a new road network being built specifically in order to move troops around easily, building upon similar provisions enacted by Marshal Wade after the earlier ’15 rising. Colonel Edward Braddock, a Scot who had previously fought with King William IV’s army in the Netherlands during the Second War of Supremacy, was promoted to major-general and given extraordinary powers over the portions of Scotland that possessed Jacobite sympathies. He became known as The Tanner by the Jacobites, a reference to the fact that they had called William IV The Butcher—they claimed that William had slaughtered the Scots and now Braddock was turning their skin into clothes, i.e. turning Scotsmen into little Englishmen. Later historiographers have repeatedly attempted to draw a direct line of descent between Scottish resentment over this regime and the SPP movement of Donald Black a century later, but this remains controversial.
Ireland was arguably a more difficult problem. Perhaps fortunately for Frederick, the Lord Lieutenant at the time of the Jacobite rising—his enemy Lord Carteret—had died in the struggle. Frederick was persuaded by his ministers not to appoint a hardliner who would only encourage further rebellions. Instead, the Duke of Dorset—a man who had previously served as Lord Lieutenant before falling afoul of the Pelhams’ government—was reappointed to the post. Frederick was content with stationing increased numbers of British, American and German troops there. Mostly Protestants, of course, and this too increased resentment against the mainly Catholic Irish population. Under the laws passed in 1716, the Catholics had been disenfranchised from voting for the Irish Parliament, so while that institution was elected, the majority of the population was not eligible to vote. The Irish Protestants, of course, were themselves seeking vengeance after the Jacobite depredations, and continued to elect hardliners.
Frederick was a more dynamic and active monarch than his father or brother had been, but for the most part continued to let Parliament run things, acknowledging the established system of government. He only directly intervened when Parliament attempted to pass laws on subjects close to his heart, primarily the American colonies, and though he had left them behind forever, the Americans esteemed his name once more when he shot down or watered down several unpopular Bills. Almost alone among the British establishment, Frederick had something of an understanding of the American mind—and he was at the top.
It was his long period of exile in Virginia, along with his friendship with slaveholding families such as the Washingtons, which has resulted in his often-attacked—then and now—relaxed attitude to slavery. His son George, actually born and raised in Virginia, was even worse. It did not help that both of them had lived through the New York slave rebellion of 1741, which had been put down by Governor George Clarke—ancestor of Matthew Clarke, a prominent figure in the Great American War. Abolitionists were not censured in Frederick’s day, but nor were they taken seriously. Though America and the West Indies remained the most common destination for black African slaves, it was a fashion among British ladies of the day to have black slave manservants, raising them from children. For the vast majority of the voting population, slavery was such an integral part of their lives that they could not conceive why anyone would want to abolish it. Few save the most foresighted dreamed that the slavery question would one day tear nations apart. For the present, abolitionism remained merely another high-minded dream of the intelligentsia, along with political reform and freedom of religion.
Frederick had made some progress on the latter issue, at least in some ways. Knowing the bad blood between the German Calvinists and English Anglicans in Carolina, he supported laws passed by Pulteney’s Parliament which, while acknowledging the supremacy of the established Anglican Church, began to return rights to other Protestants. This was not controversial in the Colonies, where the Anglican Church continued to have little temporal power and had no state authority, but was considered very radical in Britain. Frederick and his government thus enjoyed strong support from German Calvinists and Lutherans as well as French Huguenots, most of them exiles from oppression on the continent. The Acts of Toleration (1752 and 1757) enacted these provisions.
A more complex question approached with the rise of the Wesleyan Revival, which had come onto the scene while Frederick was in America.[35] The Wesleyans were evangelical, frightening the staid Anglican establishment with their fervour, and they were also supporters of abolitionism. It is thus unsurprising that Frederick compromised with the Church on this issue, and Wesleyans remained subject to relatively mild repression well into the nineteenth century. Of course, this only made the movement more popular, as the Church always thrives under persecution.
The one area in which Frederick was certainly not going to increase religious freedoms was the Catholic Question. Catholic emancipation remained a romantic cause among intellectuals (and, obviously, Catholics), but was deeply unpopular elsewhere. Popery continued to be seen as an insidious threat to the country that would take over if the merest concessions were made to it, much like many popular views towards Societism today. In Ireland, Scotland, England and America as well (most obviously Acadia), Catholics remained disenfranchised, were not permitted to become officers in the Army or Navy,[36] and were technically forbidden from possessing weapons, although this was rarely enforced.
The continued hostile approach to popery was not merely a reaction to the Jacobites, but also related to Frederick’s icy foreign policy towards France and Spain, which was reciprocated in full by Louis XV and Ferdinand VI. Spain at this time was recovering from the Second War of Supremacy using internal reforms enacted by the chief minister, Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea, Marquis of Ensenada. Ensenada also softened Spain’s policy of Bourbon absolutism, giving the state more of a paternal attitude towards the Spanish people.
France, on the other hand, remained true to the original interpretation of Bourbon absolutism, and indeed Louis XV even lacked anything analogous to a chief minister after Cardinal de Fleury died in 1743. Perhaps the closest thing to to a head of the French government in this period was the King’s mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour. Louis was a relatively peaceful man, and would have preferred to reform his existing ‘perfect hexagonal kingdom’ than to try and win more territory through war, but nonetheless events conspired to lead France to war again and again. Reform, too, was a lost cause; with the help of Pompadour, Louis unsuccessfully tried to impose taxes on France’s privileged classes from the provincial estates. The aristocratic Parlement de Paris spoke out against these reforms, labelling itself the defender of the fundamental laws of the kingdom against the arbitrary whims of a monarch. Louis had
remained popular with the common people for these failed attempts at taking the nobility in hand, until he had handed back the Austrian Netherlands at the ‘Stupid’ Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle after so much bloodshed. This was probably the moment when the French ancien régime sealed its own fate.
One piece of territory France had taken had not been returned, however. Quite understandably, after Frederick’s Britain refused to ratify the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (due to the requirement of returning Fort Louisbourg), the French had in turn refused to withdraw from Fort St George in the city of Madras in India.[37] This meant that the French East India Company would dominate the Carnatic, at the expense of their British rivals. The British East India Company were therefore one of the relatively few groups of powerful people in England to absolutely and nigh-openly detest Frederick.[38] Under the able leadership of their Governor-General, Joseph François Dupleix, the French continued to extend their influence throughout southern India.
The French had taken many Britons prisoner when they had taken Fort St George, and they were not released for many years later. Technically, as Frederick had refused to sign the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Britain and France were still at war, although during the period between the Second and Third Wars of Supremacy, this was typically reduced to scattered skirmishes in India and on the frontiers of the Colonies. The war did not begin again in earnest until the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756. As the British prisoners languished in French captivity, many died—some from disease, some shot while escaping, and one actually committed suicide, having suffered from lifelong depression. His name was Robert Clive, and this obscure young soldier is only remembered by history because of the famous lament Clive of India, penned by his fellow prisoner James Boot. Boot used Clive’s tragic death as a symbol of the Company’s greater failure, hence the poem’s title: Clive’s death matched the death of the Company’s ambitions for total domination of India.[39]
The British East India Company remained in power further north, in their Presidencies of Bengal and Calcutta, though relations with the Nawab of Bengal, Ali Vardi Khan, were sometimes strained. On the other hand, the French had equal problems. Dupleix’s attempt to capture the British Fort St David at Cuddalore in 1747 had failed due to an attack by the British-allied Nawab of Arcot (also called the Nawab of the Carnatic), Anwarooddin Mohammed Khan. The French had eventually patched over relations with the Nawab, but a second attempt to take Cuddalore before the Second War of Supremacy ended also failed. Dupleix held a grudge against the Nawab ever since, and the Nawab continued to favour the British after the war officially ended—thanks to the fact that they now had less influence in the area, and were thus less likely to usurp him if he aided them. Thus, from 1749 to 1754—in the period between the wars—Dupleix aided the usurper Chanda Sahib against first Anwarooddin Mohammed Khan, and then his son Mohammed Ali, supported by the British. Chanda Sahib and the French won a great victory at the Battle of Arcot.[40] After this, British influence in the Carnatic remained patchy, and then almost nonexistent after Fort St David was finally taken by the French in 1757. The BEIC resorted to building up a new army in Bengal and Calcutta, which only alarmed their patron, the Nawab of Bengal...
*
...back in Europe, things were moving apace. Lawrence Washington returned to the Colonies in 1754, despite being a member of the Privy Council and now possessing lands in Britain and the right to sit in the House of Lords. At the age of 36, he was promoted to Major-General and effectively headed all the colonial militias of Virginia.[41] He left his younger brother and protégé, George Augustine Washington, in Britain to be educated by the same royal tutors as his one year younger namesake and lifelong friend, George Augustine, Prince of Wales: the future King George III.
The European situation was changing. Austria and Britain had mutually decided that their alliance was unprofitable—Maria Theresa had been furious at having to withdraw from Italian territories due to William IV’s demands to meet the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and then after she had done so, the fact that Frederick’s Britain had then gone on to ignore the treaty itself was merely the icing on the cake. Equally, Prussia was becoming a more receptive potential ally for Britain. An agreement signed in 1754 by ‘Les Deux Frédérics’, as the French called them,[42] stated that in exchange for Prussian defence of Hanover, the British would not assist Austria in regaining Silesia. This was a notion of Pulteney’s government; Frederick was unpopular in Hanover for not having a particular fondness for the land where he had been born. He only visited it once, in 1753. Voltaire aptly remarked that Frederick was ‘an Englishman to the Germans, an American to the English, and a German to the Americans’.
Another war was not merely likely, but a certainty. Europe had only paused to gather its strength again for yet another struggle. Despite the shifting alliances, though, few would have suspected that things would change so radically. The Third War of Supremacy would be no futile, deadlocked European war. It would have consequences that echo around the world...
Any number of causes could be named—skirmishes in the Colonies or India, incidents between British and French ships at sea—but what clinched it was the ‘Diplomatic Revolution’, in which France and Austria matched the Anglo-Prussian agreement by burying their differences and forming an alliance of their own. At the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1756—which formalised the Franco-Austrian alliance—King Frederick I declared war on France, and King Frederick II invaded Saxony.
Once more, the world was flung into the fire, and who would have predicted what would result?
Chapter #8: To Add Something More To This Wonderful Year
Come cheer up my lads, ’tis to glory we steer
To add something more to this wonderful year!
To honour we call you, as freemen not slaves -
For who are so free as the sons of the waves?
Heart of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men -
We always are ready—steady, boys, steady!
We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again!
- “Heart of Oak”, words by David Garrick, music by William Boyce
*
From: “The War of the Diplomatic Revolution”, by Arnold Claythorn (1987)—
At first, the war appeared to be nothing more than another of the largely futile struggles that the European powers had engaged in throughout the eighteenth century, and indeed the seventeenth before it. But the War of the Diplomatic Revolution, as it was called at the time, was truly a War of Supremacy greater than any before or, perhaps, even since. Earlier and later conflicts would also have fronts outside Europe, but none would match the Third War. In Macclesfield’s terms, it had a greater impact on whose culture, whose language would grow to dominate the world than any other.
The war formally started upon the signing of the Treaty of Versailles by Louis XV’s France and Maria Theresa’s Austria in May 1756. Frederick of Prussia’s forces crossed into Saxony, and the state of quiet war[43] that had existed between Britain and France since 1751 was ignited into a full-blown conflict.
In this struggle, King Frederick I remained a dynamic leader, but suffered the loss of his wife Mildred in December 1756 and never truly recovered. Despite the fact that the marriage had initially been forced on him, Frederick had grown to genuinely love his American bride and refused to listen to timid proposals from Parliament about the possibility of him remarrying to a German princess for a dynastic alliance. At the same time, and possibly for that reason, Frederick drifted apart from his eldest son, George Augustine, Prince of Wales. George was the first Hanoverian firstborn not to hate his father’s guts, a fact which many ascribe to the infusion of American blood from his mother, but he nonetheless had many disagreements with his father. The most significant was the fact that he wanted to fight in the war, and in America, the land of his birth. Frederick refused him permission, and this at a time when George’s friend George Washington was also returning to serve under his uncle Lawrence as a captain o
f the Virginia militia.
With a mule-headedness that he could only have inherited from his father, Prince George vanished in early 1757 and, despite the best efforts of Frederick’s agents, could not be found. Of course, he had gone to the Colonies, and once there he too bought himself a captain’s commission under the name of Ralph Robinson.[44]
George was not the only child that Mildred had borne Frederick; there was also the second son, Frederick William, the young Duke of York, and his elder sister Princess Mildred—an object of controversy among the princes of Europe, who couldn’t work out whether marrying into the royal line of powerful Britain was worth overcoming their revulsion to her half-commoner background. (King Christian VII of Denmark eventually decided on the former, and married off his son to Mildred in 1765). Still, George was Frederick’s favourite, and his disappearance on top of Mildred the elder’s death pushed the King into a depression.
However, Frederick was fortunate enough to have extremely capable ministers. William Pulteney remained Prime Minister, while William Pitt effectively managed most of the conduct of the war from his position as Secretary of the State for the Southern Department—which gave him authority for dealings with France, the Mediterranean, India, and the North American colonies. Grenville moved up to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, leaving the less important Northern Department to Henry Fox.[45] The latter had been in government under George II and William IV, and thus it took a lot for Frederick to let him return. However, Fox was a skilled speaker, able to hold his own against even Pitt. Unfortunately, the reason everyone knew this was because he had been a great enemy of Pitt in the days of George II. Thus, there was some chilly friction in the Cabinet, but at least Frederick had the ablest of ministers on all sides.