George II (1727–1760)
In most ways George II was a far nicer man than his father; like George I he was a brave soldier, but taller and better looking. He spoke better English too, sometimes acting as his father’s interpreter with the English ministers. The first two Georges took such a close interest in the British army that it was the one institution that experienced some attempts at reform in an era very careless about public services. Discipline was improved, and the system of outfitting was overhauled. Commendably George II did not approve of the English practice of purchasing commissions, believing that the holding of a command should be merited. The success of British arms during the Seven Years War of 1756–63 which sealed the First British Empire was due in no small part to the Hanoverian influence.
One of the first things George II did when he became king aged forty-four was, rather touchingly, to put a portrait of his unhappy mother on display. (No one knew he had secretly always carried a miniature of her in his pocket, which he liked to take out and gaze at when he was alone.) The new king’s experience of England so far had been punctuated by humiliating rows between himself and his father. They culminated in George I threatening to have the then Prince of Wales arrested at his first son’s christening. Fortunately a great deal of soft pedalling by the prince’s clever, flirtatious wife Caroline of Ansbach managed to avert this.
Caroline of Ansbach had not been at all in awe of her late father-in-law, but she could see that she and her husband had far more to gain if he ate his pride and was on speaking terms with his father than if he was at daggers drawn. Blonde with a magnificent embonpoint and intellectual tastes (she corresponded with the leading philosophers of the day for amusement) Queen Caroline enjoyed ruling George II. She even tolerated his apparently insatiable appetite for mistresses–English ones, she opined, at least would teach him better English. Throughout her husband’s reign she continued to urge him to entrust himself utterly to the suave Walpole’s wisdom. For his part Walpole commented pleasantly, ‘I have the right sow by the ear.’
But, despite his own suffering at his father’s hands, George II’s atrocious relations with his own son and heir Frederick, the new Prince of Wales, who arrived from Hanover to live in England aged twenty-one in 1728, were no less a source of scandal. That intimate observer of the Georgian era Horace Walpole, Robert’s son, remarked that ‘it was something in the blood’ which prevented the Hanoverians from getting on with their heirs. After a quarrel with his parents, Frederick, or ‘Poor Fred’ as he was generally known, actually carried his wife out of their palace while she was in the middle of labour, to prevent his first child, Princess Augusta, being born near the hated pair.
Just as before, the opposition of out-of-office Whigs and Tories soon began to gather at the court of the new Prince of Wales at Leicester House. By the mid-1730s Frederick, Prince of Wales was its official sponsor. This had the beneficial effect of creating the ‘loyal opposition’ which of course was loyal, after its fashion, to the new dynasty, though its antics drove Walpole mad with rage. And antics they were, ranging from endless satires to plays and cartoons that poked fun at the prime minister. The truth was that, by unscrupulous use of spies and corruption, by both charming and browbeating the decent, straightforward, new king and his worldly wife, the quick-witted and cunning Walpole had absolute control of the country, just as he had under George I. What was new and admirable about Walpole (though there was much to appal) was that he valued peace and the wealth and progress it created, when most other European statesmen of the eighteenth century were interested only in the easy glory of war.
Sir Robert Walpole was one of the most talented managers of Parliament that England has ever seen, and he was as greedy for power and wealth as his huge girth and many houses (including the nonpareil Houghton, his country house) suggest. His two chief henchmen were the Pelham brothers, one of whom, Thomas, Duke of Newcastle, was the most talented fixer of elections in the history of Parliament. An apparently hesitant, scurrying figure, who looked, one wit said, as if he had lost half an hour somewhere and was busy looking for it for the rest of the day, the duke was a very shrewd judge of men, unequalled in the black arts of power-broking and using the government machinery for patronage. Like his master Walpole, Newcastle believed that ‘Every man has his price, it is only a matter of determining it.’
Walpole decided that the only surefire way to keep the Whigs in power and the Stuarts out was to use bribery to secure the adherence of the political and official class of both parties, whether it was by places in ministries or lord lieutenantships or the bench or money itself. MPs used to come to his office to receive handouts in gold. For all its corruption, this system brought real tranquillity to a potentially unstable country whose ruling dynasty had been introduced not much more than a decade before. And Walpole controlled it all with unprecedented efficiency. Nothing could be done, at least at the beginning of his rule, to prevent him driving whatever bills he wanted through the Parliament he handled so exquisitely.
But Walpole also pleased the Whigs’ natural constituency, the merchants and financiers, with his wholesale reform of the tax system. He was not just the hearty, hunting-mad squire who preferred to be in the saddle for eighteen hours a day, as his supporters liked to portray him. He was a real product of the Enlightenment. Though a coarse man, he was also a coldly intelligent one, convinced that any problem could be solved by the application of reason. It was practically a religion with him to get rid of the bumbling methods of the past, the red tape stifling the new businesses, and to apply scientific analysis to trade and industry and the reform of the tax structure. He and his officials in the ministries, who were frequently distinguished Fellows of the Royal Society, were obsessed by the new science of statistics.
In order to promote England’s manufactures and foreign trade, booming since Utrecht, Parliament was persuaded to abolish many of the import duties on raw materials as well as almost all export duties. What the Treasury lost at source it would gain in personal taxation. In other words, the government would reap more revenue from the pockets of the energetic businessmen who were causing fabulous wealth to flow into the country. Trade was growing dramatically more than it ever had before and changing society in the process.
The people with money were no longer the landed gentry, whose money came from farming. In the England of the 1730s wealth was moving to the City, to the traders, to the enterprising merchants arranging deals abroad, as evidenced by the massive increase in shipping. But though wealth was shifting into the hands of the merchants who were creating it, the tax structure reflected the past: the bulk of the money raised by the Treasury still came from the land tax, which fell heavily on the gentry, whereas merchants tended to live in cities and have their wealth in cash. Walpole changed all that. Though he belonged to the Whig party, his family background was that of the naturally Tory small-landowner class–many of his friends and many of his friends’ fathers had been ruined by the land tax, which had quadrupled as a result of the French wars. He now shifted the tax burden to the new wealthy. His sympathy for his fellow squires, the Tory backwoodsmen, was another factor damping down their desire for a Stuart on the throne again, as they saw how good Walpole was for their interests.
Commercially and financially Hanoverian England could not have been flourishing more vigorously. At the same time, with the amoral prime minister to set the tone, the country slipped into a period remarkable for the corruption of its public officials. The Church of England gave no lead: it was becoming a respectable occupation for the brother of the local squire, and very squirelike and unpriestlike the parson became in his comfortable Georgian rectory. It was only towards the middle of the eighteenth century that Methodism revived the religious zeal of the past. The lord chancellor Lord Macclesfield was even tried for selling judicial appointments. Many justices of the peace were connected to the criminal underworld by a kickback system, or were involved in the smuggling business which was sometimes arranged by entire villages. At Porthgwarra near Land’s End in Cornwall the deep tracks of a permanent pulley system may still be seen today where the best local families, and the worst, connived to outwit Customs.
Because there seemed no end to this system, a system without shame, the only recourse of the opposition was to satire. When one of George I’s mistresses sold the right to create a new copper coinage for Ireland to a highly unsuitable businessman named Wood, Dean Swift responded with The Drapier’s Letters (1724). George II’s court was clearly the thieves’ kitchen in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, with Walpole as its chief character MacHeath, the swaggering highwayman. Very sharp practice was the rule of this infinitely hard-edged, commercial, godless and ruthless age, so similar to our own, where the only sin was failure, and success was worshipped.
Without wars to fight and blessed with low taxation, the British concentrated on domestic trade by improving the country’s communications. The enthusiasm for building canals, which would see 3,000 miles cut into the country by the end of the eighteenth century, had started by 1720. Stone roads were laid. Travel through the country became much faster, increasing profits for both merchants and farmers able to sell to a bigger market. For the aspirant middle classes, the successful tradesmen moving away from living over the shop, whose burgeoning wealth meant their wives had servants and were freed from household drudgery, the first circulating library was opened in Edinburgh by Allan Ramsay in 1726. Its imitators that sprang up nationwide soon featured that celebration of middle-class life, the novel, as it began to emerge under Fielding and the bookseller Samuel Richardson. The middle classes had the money to attend to their health, and at the same time indulge their new amour propre by rubbing shoulders with national leaders of fashion in the pump rooms of Bath. Bath’s regular crescents and squares were built on Enlightenment principles with bigger windows to let in the light and closer attention to hygiene. But despite these material improvements for the fortunate, even to its contemporaries the age of Walpole appeared a sleazy period for manners and morals. Its crudity and cruelty were epitomized in the work of William Hogarth, notably in The Rake’s Progress, painted between 1733 and 1735.
Against such a background, it was remarkable that those who were uncorrupt and disinterested continued to flourish at all. For more high-minded currents did exist in Walpole’s England. The spirit of philanthropy was represented by the Tory James Oglethorpe who in 1732 founded Georgia as a new colony in America for people released from debtors’ prison. The Wesley brothers began to revitalize the Church of England in the late 1730s, in a movement known as Methodism. Their charismatic preaching, devotional faith and infectious enthusiasm provided comfort for many like the poor whose lives on earth were very harsh, and who were not served well by a Church which had lost much of its mission.
One member of the opposition determined to resist the snares of the Walpolean system was the extraordinary young MP William Pitt, the other dominant figure of the reign of George II. By the mid-1730s the theatrical Pitt had made a name for himself as an exceptional speaker. Despite the little that has survived of his speeches in an era before shorthand or television or radio, he is considered by historians, as he was by his contemporaries, to have been the greatest orator the House of Commons has ever produced. He was part of the opposition to Walpole who called themselves Patriots and claimed the moral high ground in the face of his cynicism. Unlike the Stuarts, Walpole never tried to avoid Parliament–indeed the Parliamentary system developed to an unparalleled extent under him. Nevertheless his use of bribery and corruption was believed by the Patriots to have ushered in a new kind of tyranny.
Walpole called them contemptuously the ‘Patriot boys’, with all that that suggests of juvenile and foolish behaviour. But by the mid-1730s they consisted of the most impressive of the Whigs–William Pulteney, Carteret, the diplomat and wit Lord Chesterfield, the aristocrat Grenville brothers and their brother-in-law William Pitt himself. Pitt’s maiden speech attacking jobbery in the government was so striking that Walpole had his army pension removed, in hopes that he would be muzzled. But Pitt was not at all embarrassed by financial hardship. He drove around town in a shabby old carriage, publicly proclaiming his poverty in pointed contrast to the ostentation of Walpole’s wealthy placemen. He became the scourge of Walpolean sleaze, denouncing corruption, placemen and yes-men.
Walpole’s talent for hogging the limelight ensured that for the next decade there were constant defections of the more talented members of government to the opposition. The prime minister ultimately preferred to have all the glory himself. He soon drove out from the Cabinet any MP with too independent a voice, like the talented foreign policy expert Carteret, whose command of German was so good that there had been a real risk he might supplant Walpole in George II’s counsels. Many others, like Pulteney, left because they disapproved of Walpole’s foreign policy, which was predicated on friendship with France even if that meant ignoring treaty violations. In 1730 Townshend, who as Walpole remarked had previously been the ‘senior partner’ in their relationship, found the going too hard against the ambitious Walpole and retired from government to experiment with his cattle on his country estates. ‘Turnip’ Townshend made his name for posterity by discovering the value of turnips as a winter feed.
Chief among the mischief-makers of the mixed opposition of Tories and disaffected Whigs was the ex-Jacobite Bolingbroke, whose shenanigans continued to be tolerated by the unruffled Walpole. The minute Walpole had allowed him back into the country Bolingbroke had begun his scurrilous polemical magazine the Craftsman. Dedicated to insulting Walpole, the ‘man of craft’, it called on all patriots to establish higher standards in public life, and was intended to revive the Tory party and make them fit for office. Bolingbroke’s booklet On the Idea of a Patriot King was eagerly embraced by the heir to the throne, Frederick, Prince of Wales, the idealistic young man with intellectual tastes who headed the Patriot movement. In fact Poor Fred never became king, predeceasing his son, the future George III, after succumbing to pneumonia in 1751. But that son, having absorbed all these ideas, saw himself as the Patriot king, and from 1760 onwards would try and replace aristocratic Whig power with the ‘King’s party’.
Balked of power, deprived of action, the opposition through the Craftsman had their revenge on Walpole by taunting him with insults and obscene cartoons. Though he was always trying to have the printers and editors thrown into prison for abuse and slander, they usually managed to find some sympathetic judge who released them. Walpole was so infuriated by The Beggar’s Opera and a profusion of theatrical farces about him, many by the novelist Henry Fielding, that he passed the Licensing Act in 1737. This made the lord chamberlain the censor of the British theatre, without whose licence plays could not be performed. That role was not abolished until 1968.
Walpole was not only the first head of the government to be called prime minister, he was also the first prime minister to live at 10 Downing Street. Its spare, unostentatious elegance is symbolic of the power of the Whig oligarchy: George II might wear a crown and live in a palace, but the real power was exercised behind the façade of what looked like a quiet gentleman’s townhouse. It resembled a large number of housing developments being built all over Georgian London, still to be seen today in Bloomsbury and Islington. They were lived in by a remarkably successful upper class of Georgian gentlemen and their wives, whom foreign observers thought remarkably caste-free. The English aristocracy intermarried uninhibitedly with wealthy City families in a way that was unimaginable on the continent.
The first real check to Walpole, the English Colossus (one of the many nicknames by which the omnipotent prime minister was sourly known), took place in 1733 when he attempted to stymie the flourishing smuggling industry. There was no point trying to increase the customs duties paid when goods entered Britain, as that was where the smuggling came into play. Having no little experience of illegally imported French brandy himself, Walpole saw that the only solution was to tax the article at retail level and transfer tobacco and wine from Customs to Excise.
Ever since it had first been invented by the Long Parliament, Excise had had a bad name because of the brutality of the Excisemen. It was entirely up to them to decide what tax was to be paid, and they collected it with menaces immediately after they had made their inspection. All over the country angry Englishmen and women cried that it would be bread and cheese next if the government was starting to tax wine and tobacco. English liberty was at stake. The opposition, with its obscene and savage cartoons in the Craftsman, had primed its audiences well.
There was a very ugly mood in the capital not only among the poor, but in the city itself. A mob surrounded the House of Commons to make sure that the bill did not go through, and burned Walpole and Queen Caroline in effigy. Walpole himself made a humiliating escape through the back door of a coffee house. When he saw his majority sink to sixteen on the second reading, he withdrew the bill: the consummate pragmatist had seen the writing on the wall. He would not spill blood to get taxes, he said. Walpole continued in power for another nine years after this, but his monolithic state began to crumble.
The rock upon which Walpole actually foundered was the very policy that had made him so successful: his avoidance of war. Maintaining friendly relations with France and Spain for eighteen years despite some provocation had made the country prosperous, won elections and kept the Stuarts out. But by the late 1730s all the merchants and businessmen in the City of London who had been Walpole’s greatest supporters believed that what was needed against Spain was not peace but war.
Britain’s trading success in the South American markets–a Spanish preserve since Cortes–opened up by Utrecht had infuriated the Spanish. Although technically the English were allowed to send one ship a year to trade at the great market of Porto Bello, which was the entrepôt for South America, in practice the ship was accompanied by a great many other less official ships, which reloaded the one ship as she emptied. With the British government turning a blind eye to its nationals’ illicit behaviour at Porto Bello, the Spaniards’ only recourse was to carry out forced searches on all British shipping, since every British vessel was suspected of smuggling.
The English newspapers outdid one another with lurid accounts of Englishmen in Spanish jails suffering tortures worse than those inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition for simply plying their trade. By the late 1730s the Spanish coastguards’ habit of stopping and searching in an aggressive and violent fashion had become a silent war between the two countries. British businessmen believed that it needed to be recognized as such.
They no longer wanted adroit avoidance of hostilities–they were champing at the bit to use war to break into new markets, to get into South America and import her gold and silver. The City of London and the opposition saw the hidden hand of France behind the Spanish attacks on English shipping; they were sure that Walpole was being bamboozled by France, that what England was facing was not so much rivalry with Spain as a battle for trade and colonial supremacy with France. Walpole’s foreign policy was also alienating his master George II, because it had greatly weakened Austria. Like his father, as an elector of the Holy Roman Empire George II was loyal to the emperor in Vienna and believed that Austria must always be backed to limit the power of France. Then in 1737 Queen Caroline died. She had been Walpole’s greatest supporter, and from her death he had more difficulty in clinging to power. The tide was running against him.
By contrast, Pitt in his daring, his brilliance and his arrogance encapsulated the mood of British merchants. War against France at the beginning of the century had won Britain the trading supremacy conferred by Utrecht. War with Spain was necessary now. When in 1739 Walpole would have been happy to accept Spain’s offer of compensation, put forward in the Convention of Pardo, for rough handling of British seamen, Pitt swayed the House of Commons against him. There could be no more half-measures. Quivering, slender, furious and dressed in his customary black Pitt told the House from the opposition benches that the Convention of Pardo was ‘a surrender of the rights and trade of England to the mercy of plenipotentiaries’. The complaints of England’s despairing merchants were the voice of England condemning Walpole’s policy of peace at any cost. ‘If that voice were ignored,’ he warned in a sibilant whisper, ‘it would be at the government’s peril; it must and should be listened to.’
He sat down to a storm of applause, which was echoed next day in every newspaper. The Duchess of Marlborough let it be known that she had left Pitt a legacy in her will to point up Walpole’s pusillanimity and show that Pitt was her husband’s natural successor. In 1739 Walpole reluctantly opened hostilities in the war which is known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Britain’s ostensible casus belli was that one of her nationals, a Captain Jenkins, had had his ear cut off during a search when his ship was sailing through Spanish waters. But that had been back in 1731. It was simply an excuse.
Despite the great national excitement, the war did not open well. Though Porto Bello was captured, with the loss of only seven men, the few skirmishes were completely indecisive. In the middle of all this, a general election fell. Walpole scraped back into office, but it was with a very small majority. He was soon defeated on a vote of no confidence and in 1742 he retired. Much of his administration remained, including the Pelham brothers, but the foreign policy expert Lord Carteret, who had long languished in opposition, returned to power for two years under Prime Minister Spencer Compton (now Earl of Wilmington), propelled by his knowledge of continental affairs. For Carteret’s rise and Walpole’s fall were both the effect of a new war which had begun on the continent in 1740, the War of the Austrian Succession.
This soon superseded the War of Jenkins’ Ear. It had opened with the upstart kingdom of Prussia’s outrageous seizure of mighty Austria’s duchies of Silesia. Prussia was then a struggling north German state, but her soldiers and military traditions were shortly to become the wonder of Europe. Austria, however, was the home of the Habsburg emperor, whose dynasty had dominated the German-speaking lands of the continent for the past 300 years.
The figure behind the capture of Silesia was the twenty-four-year-old Frederick II of Prussia, whose father had died only a few months earlier. He had taken swift advantage of the accession of the young and inexperienced Maria Theresa to her father Charles VI’s hereditary dominions to rush his troops into the duchies of Silesia to the south of Prussia, claiming them as his own. He followed this up by defeating the Austrians at the Battle of Mollwitz. It was a fantastic humiliation for Maria Theresa and Austria, the great Habsburg power, to be defeated by the House of Brandenburg. Though all the emperor’s allies had signed the Pragmatic Sanction, a treaty which announced the indivisibility of all the Austrian possessions left to Maria Theresa, Prussia had no intention of honouring it.
Where Prussia led, other states followed. France and Bavaria, which had much to gain from dismembering the Austrian Empire, signed an alliance with Prussia. Maria Theresa rode to Hungary and rallied the Hungarians to her side, but the situation looked bleak for her. The whole German continent was in uproar, while the remnants of Austrian power in Milan were now harassed by Spain and Sardinia. For the first time in three centuries the electors had chosen as Holy Roman Emperor a candidate who was not a member of the House of Habsburg, preferring the Elector Charles of Bavaria whose armies were running amok all over Maria Theresa’s lands.
Both George II and the foreign secretary Lord Carteret agreed that this time treaty obligations to Austria should be fulfilled now that there was no Walpole to prevent it. Large subsidies were paid to Austria to help her hire troops to defend herself. A spate of negotiations by Carteret, the most gifted diplomat of his generation, removed Prussia from the war. He persuaded Maria Theresa to let Frederick keep Silesia. In return Frederick guaranteed George’s precious Hanover against the French. George himself, who was an ex-professional soldier, in person led a large army consisting of English, Hanoverian and Hessian troops to the Low Countries to attack the French and keep them away from the main theatre of war in the imperial lands. Wearing a yellow sash over his armour, the colours of Hanover, the king was victorious at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743. But it could no longer be disguised that everything that Walpole had feared had come to pass. Britain and France were once more at war, with all the expense and disruption which that entailed.
Dettingen did a great deal of good for George II’s reputation in England –though some courtiers had to stifle yawns at his hundredth retelling of the battle. In the short term the French were frightened back across the Rhine. But over the next two years things began to look quite shaky for the Hanoverians. Walpole had said privately to friends when Britain exploded with patriotic pride as the war against Spain opened, ‘They are ringing their bells now, but they will soon be wringing their hands.’ He was right. French spies had reported to their government that there was still a lot of support for the Jacobite cause in England. Once again, as Walpole had always predicted they would, the French prepared to invade England and spark off a general rising to divert her from the Austrian War.
Their plans were defeated in 1744 by a great storm. Only tempestuous winds, what Pitt called ‘those ancient and unsubsidized allies of England’, prevented a French army landing on Britain’s coast. It was to have had the son of the pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, known as the Young Pretender, at its head. But French military success in the next year, 1745–the swingeing French victory over George II’s second son the Duke of Cumberland at Fontenoy, when the Dutch ran away and the British and Hanoverians were hopelessly outnumbered–prompted the French to concentrate their efforts in the Low Countries and to abandon the plan to conquer England and restore the Stuart line.
But their supposed puppet candidate, the twenty-five-year-old Prince Charles Edward, was not so easily put off. He was as spirited and courageous as his father had been sad and uninspiring. With Britain distracted by war it seemed the optimum moment to win back his ancestral lands. So began the Forty-five rebellion. With only seven men but 1,500 muskets, twenty small cannon, ammunition and 1,800 broadswords clanking in the hold, the prince landed at Moidart on the west coast of Scotland in late July 1745. He at last exerted in his handsome person the extraordinary Stuart charm that always cast such an ill-fated spell over its audience.
Many Highlanders doubted the wisdom of the enterprise without French backing, but the government in England took the threat extremely seriously. There was concern at the highest levels about whether there were enough guards to defend the royal palaces. The prime minister, Henry Pelham, who had taken over from Wilmington and Carteret because of the poor progress of the war, anxiously sent word to George II that he must return from Hanover. There seemed to be a level of disaffection among the people which might be turned into hostility towards German George and a welcome for the Young Pretender.
Bonnie Prince Charlie, as he was becoming known, seemed to have luck on his side. By the end of September he had taken both Perth and Edinburgh, and had inflicted a comprehensive defeat on the English general Sir John Cope at the Battle of Prestonpans outside the latter city. Until Prestonpans there had been a debate within the government whether the situation really merited recalling the troops from the Austrian Netherlands. Now it was deemed a first-class emergency. The British army would have to be back in London to defend the capital before Bonnie Prince Charlie got there.
Meanwhile many of the prince’s advisers urged him to declare Scotland’s independence, to wait for the arrival of reinforcements from France and reorganize his troops. But, carried away with his own success, the prince could think only of London. Avoiding Newcastle and General George Wade, Charles made for Carlisle. On 14 November it surrendered. Two weeks later the Scots entered Manchester. However, all was not well. Huge numbers of Highlanders, homesick away from their native glens, had deserted between Edinburgh and Carlisle. The English Jacobites, such as the Duke of Beaufort and Sir Watkin Wynn, refused to rise in the south because there was no French invasion to back them up.
Though the rebellion was doomed, it did not seem so when the tartan army streamed into Derby, only 127 miles from London. Even though government forces were closing in from behind, there was now just one army between Bonnie Prince Charlie and the capital, and the crown. So desperate did the situation seem, with reports of the Highlanders having their broadswords sharpened at a blacksmiths in Derby, that there was a run on the Bank of England. George II put all his treasures on a yacht in case he had to flee to Hanover.
It all changed at Derby. The prince was for pressing on to London. Who knew what would happen if there was a pitched battle with George II? But his advisers convinced him to retreat: Scots and Irish soldiers in the service of the French king had arrived in Scotland, and they preferred to regroup and launch another assault on England the following year. Meanwhile Wade and the Duke of Cumberland were getting far too close behind him. Cumberland was in Staffordshire. The rebels therefore limped back towards the northern port of Inverness on the Moray Firth, where reinforcements were believed to be awaiting them. But the Scottish army was running out of steam, money and arms, while Cumberland’s men were having new boots and good food sent up to them from boats which landed daily on the Scottish coast. Even the Highlanders, austere though their lifestyle was, were completely exhausted by the time they faced Cumberland’s men on Drumossie Moor at Culloden in April 1746. It was a cold windswept plain above Inverness, with no natural advantages for the defenders and a very poor place to give battle. It was Bonnie Prince Charlie’s choice. His military advisers tried to dissuade him, but he paid no attention.
Though the celebrated, bloodcurdling whoops of the Highlanders were only a faint echo of the sounds which had terrified the people of Derby, the kilted warriors still managed to break two regiments of Cumberland’s front line. But after that it was a massacre. Culloden was a battle decided by firepower. The well-fed, well-armed redcoats who outnumbered the Jacobites by 3,000 men destroyed the clans. Those who were alive fled, hobbling along secret ways across the mountains to the west coast and then on to fishing boats to France. Back at the battlefield Cumberland gave orders for the wounded rebels still lying on the field to be bayoneted to death, earning himself the name of Butcher.
The prince himself made for the Western Isles and would have been captured on South Uist had he not been rescued by a brave local lady named Flora Macdonald. She dressed him up as her maid, and very peculiar he looked too, because like his great-uncle Charles II he was exceptionally tall. For five months Prince Charles Edward wandered the west of Scotland like his followers, trying to evade the government soldiers. In an orgy of revenge, to terrorize the locals into betraying Bonnie Prince Charlie’s hiding place, the soldiers raped their women, took their cattle, destroyed their humble dwelling places, burned their lands, and broke their ploughs, with the result that many of these crofters died from exposure and famine. To the English government’s fury, although the reward on Bonnie Prince Charlie’s head was £30,000, not one of the Highlanders betrayed him.
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, believing 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 state 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.
In 1758 Pitt sent out a bold new American expedition of huge dimensions and astonishing ambition. It was a three-pronged attack on Canada, France’s largest settlement, centring on Quebec. Pitt believed that once Quebec was captured, Canada would fall to the English, and French power in North America would collapse. British and American troops were to come from New York in the south, the west and the east, the latter via a seaborne landing. The eastern expedition was intended to recapture Louisbourg, the strategically important capital of Cape Breton Island, and the western operation was to take back Fort Duquesne as Braddock had failed to do. Meanwhile, under Lord Abercromby, the British were to advance up the Hudson river from New York and destroy all the French forts guarding the route north.
To the surprise of many senior military staff, the task was entrusted to the command of young officers. But they were men in whom Pitt had seen leadership qualities–an ability to think the unthinkable and improvise under fire. All the officers he plucked out to command expeditions turned out to be superb generals. And they were inspired by Pitt himself. He imbued them with his own sense of purpose, of fighting for the Protestant free world. Louisbourg, the gateway to the St Lawrence, was captured that year against all the odds, chiefly because of Brigadier Wolfe’s bravery in establishing a beachhead under fire. From then on British arms triumphed. Fort Duquesne, the site of Braddock’s ambush, which would have been the key link between the French colonies in the south and Canada, was taken by John Forbes in a single assault and renamed Pittsburg. Meanwhile Colonel Bradstreet, a celebrated New Englander soldier who was known for his rapport with the Indians, captured the important Fort Frontenac. From then on the forts on Lake Ontario fell one after another, until the capture of Fort Niagara brought the Great Lakes under British control.
But the most astonishing feat of arms in the American campaign was the capture of Quebec by the thirty-three-year-old Wolfe, now a general. Letters detailing the British plans of attack for Canada had been stolen, so the Marquis de Montcalm, the gifted French commander, had enough time to move troops down to Quebec from Montreal further upriver. The city was bristling with guns and soldiers when the British arrived. Worse still, by the time the superb sailors among Wolfe’s team had picked their way up an often dangerously shallow river (they included James Cook, soon to become famous for his discoveries in the South Seas), Montcalm and his men had positioned themselves quite perfectly above them. Quebec was built on a headland known as the Heights of Abraham, and French troops were disposed round the citadel guarding every approach.
The only possible way into the city was therefore up the sheer cliffs rising from the St Lawrence to the Heights of Abraham. These great escarpments of chalk loomed impregnably above the British. Even if they could be climbed, and in any case there seemed nowhere to land from the river below, the French would be able to pick them off as they ascended. No one even considered the possibility of getting enough men up the cliffs to fight a battle, certainly not the 5,000 British soldiers whose tents sprawled as far as the eye could see on the south bank of the St Lawrence.
The rest of the summer of 1759 was spent by the British gazing at the city as it sparkled tantalizingly above them. The situation in their camps was made more gloomy because General Wolfe was coughing blood incessantly into a bowl by his bed, a victim of consumption. It had become clear to many from his emaciated looks and hacking cough that he was not long for this world. For most of that summer, his brigadiers were near despair, as day after day passed and Wolfe could not emerge from his tent. The season was ticking on. Autumn would soon arrive and once the St Lawrence froze all plans would have to be postponed until the following year when spring melted it again. The men could not be left indefinitely outside Quebec.
The few orders Wolfe did give seemed to make no difference. The canny Montcalm would not be lured out of his eyrie to protect the villages surrounding Quebec which Wolfe ordered his men to attack. The bombardment of Quebec from below had no effect. An attempt to storm Montcalm’s camp had been hopeless. Wolfe became so ill that he could scarcely lift his head, and he asked his seconds-in-command to draw up their own plans.
Then at the end of the long hot summer, when for a short time the consumption went into remission, the old Wolfe showed himself. He had an audacious plan, a gambler’s plan, the sort of plan that Pitt banked on his commanders having as a last resort. On a trip along the St Lawrence, Wolfe had noticed a tiny inlet the river had carved into the cliffs; he believed that if his soldiers could land there at night, they could scale the cliffs under cover of darkness and surprise the French in the morning.
At dead of night, Wolfe led the 5,000 British and American soldiers with blackened faces silently downriver in rowing boats till they were opposite the Heights of Abraham. As he was borne along the treacherous river whose rocks and shoals made it a hazard to all but Quebeçois, Wolfe softly read out his favourite poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray, published only a few years before, a copy of which his fiancée had just sent out to him from England. His thin face, touched by moonlight, seemed to wear a beatific expression as he murmured the sonorous words whose Romantic, melancholic spirit echoed his own. As the mysterious cliffs loomed up ahead and the men rested on their muffled oars, Wolfe closed the book. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I had rather have written that poem than take Quebec.’ But then he leaped overboard, into the swirling St Lawrence, and ran ahead of them until his was only one of the many tiny figures on the vast cliff face pulling themselves up by ropes.
When dawn rose over Quebec, Montcalm awoke to see on the plain behind him, above the cliffs said to be unclimbable, row after row of British redcoats. They were in battle array and far outnumbered the French, whose sentries’ mangled bodies bestrewed the cliffs or floated in the river below. It was a breathtaking, almost impossible, feat, to have put thousands of men on top of a cliff overnight, but Wolfe had done it.
In a few hours it was all over; Quebec was taken by the British and Americans, who had fought like devils under Wolfe’s inspired leadership. Despite being hit by three musket balls, Wolfe allowed his wounds only to be hastily dressed before he encouraged the line to make the final charge that ensured victory, a victory achieved with just one cannon and no cavalry against an enemy armed to the teeth. As the smoke of battle cleared, and he was fainting from loss of blood, Wolfe saw that the French retreat had been cut off as he had directed. The next minute he was dead. Montcalm, too, died from wounds received that day.
Although the actual surrender of Canada to the British crown would not take place for another year, by holding Quebec and thus commanding the St Lawrence waterway, the British prevented the new French commander from bringing his troops up to relieve Montreal. When reports of Wolfe’s gallant death reached England, George II was so inspired by the story that he commissioned Benjamin West to paint a narrative picture of the dying Wolfe which may be seen today in the National Portrait Gallery.
As Pitt had vowed, with the exception of Louisiana in the south the French had been wiped from the face of North America. Their plan of linking Canada and Louisiana and preventing the English colonists from expanding west was in ashes. The extraordinary effort Pitt had exhorted from the colonists with every last drop of his being had come good when they had fought together in the first imperial war. In what became known as the year of victories, 1759, from all parts of the globe came nothing but encouraging news: Britain had captured important French settlements on the island of Goree off west Africa and in Senegal itself. The capture of Guadeloupe, one of the West Indian sugar islands, which had been attacked when the British failed to take Martinique, raised Pitt’s reputation to new heights among his fellow countrymen, as well as bringing £400,000 in income in one year alone. In India under the extraordinary Clive there had been a series of victories, which as in North America had driven the French off the Indian subcontinent. Most important was the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which secured the large area of Bengal in the north-west as a British dependency ruled on behalf of Britain by a new nawab, Mir Jaffier. Sent there from the south, with 2,000 British troops and 5,000 sepoys, Clive destroyed the 40,000-strong army of France’s ally Siraj-ud-Daula.
Like Wolfe’s triumph on the Heights of Abraham, Plassey determined the shape of the future. Adding Bengal to the Karnatic made Britain the most powerful European presence in India; those territories became the basis for the British Empire in India. Though Clive retired to England on grounds of ill-health, his work was continued by Colonel Eyre Coote, who had been at Plassey and who had a unique relationship with the sepoys. By 1761 after decisive victories against the French at Wandewash and Pondicherry, Coote had extirpated the last of French influence in southern India. In Europe too the year 1759 drew to a triumphant close for Britain, bringing nothing but victories: Ferdinand of Brunswick relieved Hanover by drawing the French army into a successful ambush at Minden.
Even the threat of a new French invasion of Britain was foiled by the exceptional bravery of Admiral Hawke, Pitt’s favourite admiral. Transport ships to take French soldiers across the Channel had collected at the mouth of the Seine. Their advance was to be covered by the Brest fleet, so the best chance of preventing it was to destroy the fleet which was anchored below Finisterre, on France’s Atlantic coast, in Quiberon Bay. Distance, and the appalling November weather, would have stopped most men from putting to sea, let alone sailing for the Bay of Biscay, but Hawke was not to be deterred. Though driving rain rendered visibility nil, and massive waves were breaking across the decks, he ordered his pilot to rush into the shallow waters of Quiberon Bay. Its rocks stuck up like needles and the long suck and swell of water presaged disaster for any ship not already at anchor. But it was there that the Brest fleet was drawn up. And it was there that Hawke shouted in words that became legendary, ‘Lay me alongside the Soleil Royale!’ The valiant British navy followed Hawke straight into the middle of the French ships and sank them, losing only forty men.
Lost in admiration at the change in Britain’s fortunes under Pitt, Frederick the Great proclaimed that ‘England was a long time in labour, but at last she has brought forth a man.’ The Prussian king himself was almost as popular in England as Pitt, as may be seen from the number of pubs still named the King of Prussia. But in the middle of all these victories in 1760, when England’s reputation had never been higher, George II died suddenly, aged seventy-seven. The throne now passed to his grandson George III. By the end of his reign George II had grown quite fond of the man who had expanded his dominions beyond recognition. Now in 1760, despite all he had done for Britain, Pitt was vulnerable to being toppled by a new court.