The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (25 page)

The military and naval expertise displayed by the Anglo-Prussian alliance, at least after the early setbacks, worked in the following way. At sea an enormous Royal Navy under Anson’s direction steadily imposed a blockade upon France’s Atlantic ports, and had sufficient surplus of force to mask Toulon and regain maritime supremacy in the Mediterranean as well. When fleet actions did occur—at Cartagena, off Lagos, and in Hawke’s incomparable gale-battered pursuit of Conflans’s fleet into Quiberon Bay—the superiority of British seamanship was made manifest time and again. What was more, this blockading policy—maintained now in all weathers, with the squadrons supplied by a comprehensive provisioning system—not only throttled much of France’s maritime trade and thus protected Britain’s commerce and its territorial security, but also prevented adequate reinforcements of French troops being sent to the West Indies, Canada, and India. In 1759, the
annus mirabilis
, French colonies were falling into British hands right across the globe, nicely complementing the considerable victory of the Anglo-German troops over two French armies at Minden. When Spain foolishly entered the war in 1762, the same fate befell its colonies in the Caribbean and Philippines.

Meanwhile, the House of Brandenburg had already seen its share of “miracles,” and in the battles of Rossbach and Leuthen, Frederick not only ruined a French and an Austrian army respectively, but also blunted the eagerness of those two nations to press into northern Germany; after Frederick caught the Austrians again, at Liegnitz and Torgau in 1760, Vienna was virtually bankrupt. Nevertheless, the sheer costs of all this campaigning were slowly grinding down Prussian power (60,000 soldiers lost in 1759 alone), and the Russian foe proved much more formidable—partly because of Czarina Elizabeth’s hatred of Frederick but chiefly because each encounter with the Russian army was such a bloody affair. Yet with the other combatants feeling the pace as well, and France keen to come to terms with a British government now also disposed to peace, Prussia found that it still had enough strength to keep the Austrians and Russians at bay until rescued by Elizabeth’s death in 1762. After this, and the new Czar Peter’s swift withdrawal from the war, neither Austria nor France could expect anything better than a peace settlement on the basis of a return to the prewar status in Europe—which was, in effect, a defeat for those who had sought to bring Prussia down.

In the 1762–1763 settlements the one obvious beneficiary was again Great Britain. Even after returning various captured territories to France and Spain, it had made advances in the West Indies and West Africa, had virtually eliminated French influence from India, and, most important of all, was now supreme in most of the North American continent. Britain thus had access to lands of far greater extent and potential wealth than Lorraine, Silesia, and those other regions over
which the continental states fought so bitterly. In addition, it had helped to check France’s diplomatic and military ambitions inside Europe and thereby had preserved the general balance of power. France, by comparison, had not only lost disastrously overseas but had also—unlike in 1748—failed in Europe; indeed, its lackluster military performance suggested that the center of gravity had shifted from western Europe to the east, a fact confirmed by the general disregard of France’s wishes during the first partition of Poland in 1772. All this nicely suited British circles, satisfied with their own primacy outside Europe and not eager to be drawn into obligations on the continent.

The “breathing space” of well over a decade which occurred before the next stage in the Anglo-French struggle gave only a few hints of the turnaround which would occur in British fortunes. The Seven Years War had so overstrained the taxable capacity and social fabric of the Great Powers that most leaders frowned upon a bold foreign policy; introspection and reform tended to be the order of the day. The cost of the war to Prussia (half a million dead, including 180,000 soldiers) had shocked Frederick, who now preferred a quieter life. Although it had lost 300,000 men, the Habsburg Empire’s army itself had not done too badly; but the overall governmental system was obviously in need of changes which would doubtless arouse local resentments (especially among the Hungarians) and consume the attentions of Maria Theresa’s ministers. In Russia, Catherine II had to grapple with legislative and administrative reforms and then suppress the Pugachev revolt (1773–1775). This did not prevent further Russian expansion in the south or the maneuvers to reduce Poland’s independence; but those could still be classed as local issues, and quite distinct from the great
European
combinations which had preoccupied the powers during the Seven Years War. Links with the western monarchies were now less important.

In Britain and France, too, domestic affairs held the center of the stage. The horrendous rise in the national debts of both countries led to a search for fresh sources of revenue and for administrative reform, producing controversies which fueled the already poor relations between George III and the opposition, and between the crown and
parlements
in France. These preoccupations inevitably made British foreign policy in Europe more haphazard and introspective than in Pitt’s day, a tendency increased by the rising quarrel with the American colonists over taxation and enforcement of the Acts of Trade and Navigation. On the French side, however, foreign-policy matters were not so fully eclipsed by domestic concerns. Indeed, Choiseul and his
successors, smarting from the defeat of 1763, were taking measures to strengthen France’s position for the future. The French navy was steadily built up, despite the pressing need to economize; and the “family compact” with Spain was deepened. It is true that Louis XV frowned upon Choiseul’s strong encouragement of Spain against Britain in the 1770 clash over the Falkland Islands, since a Great Power war at that point would have been financially disastrous. Nonetheless, French policy remained distinctly anti-British and committed to extracting advantages from any problems which Britain might encounter overseas.
⁶⁷

All this meant that when London’s quarrel with the American colonists turned into open hostilities, Britain was in a much weaker position, in so many respects, than in 1739 or 1756.
⁶⁸
A great deal of this was due to personalities. Neither North, nor Shelburne, nor any of the other politicians could offer national leadership and a coherent grand strategy. Political faction, heightened by George Ill’s own interventions and by a fierce debate on the merits of the American colonists’ case, divided the nation. In addition, the twin props of British power—the economy and the navy—were eroded in these years. Exports, which had stagnated following the boom period of the Seven Years War, actually declined throughout the 1770s, in part because of the colonists’ boycott and then because of the growing conflict with France, Spain, and the Netherlands. The Royal Navy had been systematically weakened during fifteen years of peace, and some of its flag officers were as unseasoned as the timbers which had gone into the building of the ships of the line. The decision to abandon the close blockade strategy when France entered the war in 1778 may have saved wear and tear on British vessels, but it was, in effect, surrendering command of the sea: relief expeditions to Gibraltar, the West Indies, and the North American coast were no real substitute for the effective control of the Western Approaches off the French coast, which would have prevented the dispatch of enemy fleets to those distant theaters in any case. By the time the Royal Navy’s strength had been rebuilt and its dominance reasserted, by Rodney’s victory at the Saints and Howe’s relief of Gibraltar in 1782, the war in America was virtually over.

Yet even if the navy had been better equipped and the nation better led, the 1776–1783 conflict contained two strategical problems which simply did not exist in any of the other eighteenth-century wars fought by Britain. The first of these was that once the American rebellion spread, its suppression involved large-scale
continental
fighting by British forces at a distance of 3,000 miles from the home base. Contrary to London’s early hopes, maritime superiority alone could not bring the largely self-sufficient colonists to their knees (though obviously it might have reduced the flow of weapons and recruits from Europe). To conquer and hold the entire eastern territories of America
would have been a difficult task for Napoleon’s Grand Army, let alone the British-led troops of the 1770s. The distances involved and the consequent delay in communications not only hampered the strategical direction of the war from London or even from New York, but also exacerbated the logistical problem: “every biscuit, man, and bullet required by the British forces in America had to be transported across 3,000 miles of ocean.”
⁶⁹
Despite significant improvements by the British war ministry, the shortages of shipping and the difficulties of procurement were simply too much. Moreover, colonial society was so decentralized that the capture of a city or large town meant little. Only when regular troops were in occupation of the territory in question could British authority prevail; whenever they were withdrawn, the rebels reasserted themselves over the loyalists. If it had taken 50,000 British soldiers,
with substantial colonial support
, to conquer French Canada two decades earlier, how many were needed now to reimpose imperial rule—150,000, perhaps 250,000? “It is probable,” one historian has argued, “that to restore British authority in America was a problem beyond the power of military means to solve, however perfectly applied.”
⁷⁰

The second unprecedented difficulty in the realm of grand strategy was that Britain fought alone, unaided by European partners who would distract the French. To a large degree, of course, this was a diplomatic rather than a military problem. The British were now paying for their break with Prussia after 1762, their arrogance toward Spain, their heavy-handed treatment of the shipping of neutral states like Denmark and the United Provinces, and their failure to secure Russian support. Thus London found itself not only friendless in Europe but also, by 1780, facing a suspicious League of Armed Neutrality (Russia, Denmark, Portugal) and a hostile United Provinces, while it was already overstretched in dealing with American rebels and the Franco-Spanish fleets. But there is more to this story than British diplomatic ineptitude. As noted above, during the 1760s and 1770s the interests of the eastern monarchies had become somewhat detached from those in the West, and were concentrated upon the future of Poland, the Bavarian succession, and relations with the Turks. A France intent upon becoming “arbiter of Europe,” as in Louis XIV’s day, might have made such detachment impossible; but the relative decline of its army after the Seven Years War and its lack of political engagement in the east meant that London’s acute concern about French designs from 1779 onward was not shared by former allies. The Russians under Catherine II were probably the most sympathetic, but even they would not intervene unless there was a real prospect that Britain would be eliminated altogether.

Finally, there was the significant fact that for once France had adopted Choiseul’s former argument and now resisted the temptation
to attack Hanover or to bully the Dutch. The war against Britain would be fought
only
overseas, thus dislocating the “continental” from the “maritime” arm of traditional British strategy. For the first time ever, the French would concentrate their resources upon a naval and colonial war.

The results were remarkable, and quite confounded the argument of the British isolationists that such a conflict, unencumbered by continental allies and campaigns, was best for the island state. During the Seven Years War, the French navy had been allocated only 30 million livres a year, one-quarter of the French army’s allocation and only one-fifth of the monies provided to the Royal Navy each year. From the mid-1770s onward, the French naval budget steadily rose; by 1780 it totaled about 150 million livres, and by 1782 it had reached a staggering 200 million livres.
⁷¹
At the time France entered the war, it possessed fifty-two ships of the line, many of them being larger than their British equivalents, and the number was soon increased to sixty-six. To this could be added the Spanish fleet of fifty-eight ships of the line and, in 1780, a Dutch fleet of not more than twenty effectives. While the Royal Navy remained superior to any one maritime rival (in 1778 it had sixty-six ships of the line; in 1779, ninety), it now found itself repeatedly outnumbered. In 1779 it even lost control of the Channel, and a Franco-Spanish invasion looked possible; and in the 1781 encountered between Graves’s and de Grasse’s fleets off the Chesapeake, French numerical superiority kept the British force at bay and thus led to Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown and to the effective end of the American campaign. Even when the Royal Navy’s size increased and that of its foes fell away (in 1782 it had ninety-four ships of the line to France’s seventy-three, Spain’s fifty-four, and the United Provinces’ nineteen), the margin was still too narrow to do
all
the tasks required: protect the North Atlantic convoys, periodically relieve Gibraltar, guard the exit from the Baltic, send squadrons to the Indian Ocean, and support the military operations in the Caribbean. British naval power was temporary and regional and not, as in previous wars, overwhelming. The fact that the French army was not fighting in Europe had a lot to do with the islanders’ unhappy condition.