SEVEN YEARS' WAR (1756–1763). Encompassing conflict in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and India, the Seven Years' War resulted from a collision between two very different international problems. First, there was the growing colonial and imperial friction between Britain and France, which became acute in the early 1750s as the French authorities and the British colonists in North America began staking out rival claims to the Ohio River Valley. Open warfare then erupted in the backcountry during 1755, and this was followed by repeated British seizures of French shipping in the North Atlantic. In response Louis XV despatched Louis Joseph, marquis of Montcalm, with reinforcements for the French colonial forces, to take military command in New France (Quebec) in April 1756.
Second, the Seven Years' War stemmed from Austria's refusal to accept the loss of Silesia to Frederick II of Prussia during the War of the Austrian Succession, and from Russian determination to humble Prussia. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) had merely suspended Austro-Prussian conflict over Silesia. While Austria carried out internal reforms to her administration, Count Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, one of Maria Theresa's inner councillors who became chancellor in 1753, pursued the possibility, remote at first, of a French alliance against Prussia. Nevertheless, during 1755–1756 his patience and hard work began to pay dividends. Great Britain, anxious about the security of George II's German domains and no longer able to rely on Austrian support, secured Russian guarantees in September 1755 for George's electorate of Hanover in exchange for promised subsidies. This Anglo-Russian agreement in turn prompted a fearful Frederick II of Prussia to manage a reconciliation with Britain in January 1756 in the shape of the defensive Convention of London. But the unforeseen consequence was the "diplomatic revolution." A furious Russia all but repudiated her agreement with Britain and tightened her alliance with Austria, and both powers prepared for a combined war against Prussia. Now bereft of allies, Louis XV took up Kaunitz's proposal of an end to 250 years of Franco-Habsburg antagonism, and on 1 May the defensive first Treaty of Versailles was signed between France and Austria (Russia acceded to this treaty in January 1757). Two weeks later, after France invaded British-ruled Minorca, war broke out between the two states. Frederick II, now acutely aware of the forces gathering against him, felt he had no choice but to launch a preemptive strike in August to seize Saxony and take over its army, causing France to activate its Austrian alliance.
PRUSSIA'S STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL
Not until the summer of 1757 did the triple alliance launch an assault on Prussia, after France and Austria concluded the offensive second Treaty of Versailles (1 May) with the purpose of dismembering Frederick's state. Frederick's invasion of Bohemia was halted, and the Russians invaded East Prussia, but more damaging was the neutralization of the trapped Anglo-Hanoverian army by the French at Kloster-Zeven in early September. In the face of such a crisis, Frederick fought a campaign of strategic brilliance. First he crushed the poorly commanded and logistically weak Franco-Imperial army at Rossbach (5 November), deploying the greatly improved Prussian cavalry under Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz and moving his infantry swiftly across the battlefield in echelon, rather than linear, formation. Then he followed this up with the defeat of the Austrians at Leuthen, two hundred miles to the east and exactly a month later, using the "oblique order" in an attack on the enemy right flank. After Rossbach, George II repudiated the convention of Kloster-Zeven, and Anglo-Hanoverian operations resumed under the command of Frederick's protégé Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolffenbüttel. Moreover, thanks to WilliamPitt's return to power in June 1757, Britain began subsidizing both the Hanoverian forces and, from April 1758, Frederick's Prussia. With the odds evened up, Austria henceforth sought to wear Prussia down by a process of attrition, but this presupposed a certain strength within the triple alliance that itself was fading.
In 1758 the French were pushed back over the Rhine by Ferdinand, while the emerging dominance within the French government of Étienne-François, duke of Choiseul, produced in March 1759 the third Treaty of Versailles, in which France reduced her role in the continental war to that of an Austrian auxiliary, and concentrated instead on trying to force Britain into peace. Yet when the French returned to Westphalia in 1759, Ferdinand of Brunswick smashed them at Minden on 1 August. The principal burden of attacking Prussia had in fact passed in 1758 to the Russians, a symptom of their growing strength and stamina. Königsberg, in East Prussia, was captured in January, forcing this kingdom under Russian occupation for the rest of the war. However, in his Brandenburg heartland, Frederick II defeated the Russians in the bloody battle of Zorndorf in August, while an Austrian surprise attack at Hochkirch in October failed to loosen his control of Saxony and Silesia. Despite the apparent stalemate, the Austrians and Russians made a further joint offensive against Prussia during 1759, in which Frederick suffered his worst defeat ever, at Künersdorf, forcing him to abandon Saxony and Silesia. The following year saw victories on both sides, but Frederick's success against the Austrians at Torgau was bought with greater casualties than were suffered by the vanquished (3 November), and Russian troops even reached Berlin and held it to ransom.
How was it, though, that the three greatest military powers on the Continent failed to crush Frederick's Prussia? To begin with, Austria and Russia both suffered from sluggish systems of planning and logistics that impeded offensive operations. Furthermore, their leading generals were cautious, unimaginative, and relatively uncooperative, and in the French case frequently incompetent. Maria Theresa and her advisers displayed poor strategic sense, waging a war of aggressive intent in a largely defensive and attritional fashion that allowed Frederick to deal with his enemies in turn in each campaign.Elizabeth of Russia was similarly unable to provide clear strategic direction after her stroke in 1757 allowed a major split to open up in her council. Related to this, the aims of the three powers diverged sufficiently to impede any overriding common purpose of destroying Prussian power. All this combined to prevent Frederick's enemies from holding the initiative for any length of time, and from following up their military successes.
The weaknesses of the triple alliance were matched by the remarkable resilience of Prussia. Britain's financial support of Prussia and Anglo-Hanoverian military protection of Brandenburg from the west enabled Frederick to concentrate his forces against only two enemies after late 1757: Austria and Russia. Frederick's strategic, operational, and tactical skill, while by no means flawless, enabled a united Prussian command, and a heavily centralized and obedient state, to take full advantage of the deficiencies in the triple alliance's war effort. If Prussia was exhausted financially and materially, with underage and substandard recruits filling the army's ranks by 1760, the Austrians and the French were also incapable of further offensive action.
THE ANGLO-FRENCH IMPERIAL STRUGGLE 1755–1760
While the war in Europe produced stagnation, the Anglo-French conflict was vastly more decisive, in large part because Pitt was determined to destroy as much of France's overseas power as possible. In India, Robert Clive's skillful handling of indigenous auxiliary troops and combined operations with the navy allowed him to recapture Calcutta from the Nawab of Bengal in March 1757 after its loss the previous year; and he followed this by gaining control of all Bengal after his victory at Plassey (26 July). But in North America things were going considerably less well for the British. Montcalm made much progress in the backcountry in 1756–1757, but this only forced the British commanders to reconsider their strategy and plan instead for a full assault on New France up the Saint Lawrence River, for which they requested massive land and sea reinforcements from London.
They were fortunate that Pitt endorsed their request, and in early 1758 the issues that had bedeviled relations between the regular forces and the colonies were resolved to the satisfaction of the colonists, unlocking colonial military resources immediately. As if to prove the need to attack New France by sea, in July 1758 Montcalm blocked the British advance at Fort Ticonderoga at the foot of Lake Champlain, but the same month the French were unable to prevent a British amphibious seizure of their fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. Four months later the British also reduced Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio, and the cumulative effect of these successes was to neutralize the American Indian nations, who now came to an accommodation with the British colonial authorities. In the meantime, during 1758 Pitt launched a series of diversionary amphibious attacks on the French Atlantic coast, the mere threat of which pinned down French forces so they could not be deployed either against Hanover or in the colonies.
Worse was to come for Louis XV in 1759. Montcalm's forces in New France were suffering from a lack of supplies and dwindling manpower, in spite of the mass mobilization of the colony's adult males. Britain, by contrast, sent out eight thousand fresh troops under James Wolfe, who in June sailed up the Saint Lawrence with twenty-two ships of the line to Quebec City, which soon found itself cut off and with dwindling supplies. While Amherst capturedTiconderoga, securing New York and Massachusetts, in September Wolfe provoked Montcalm into a battle just outside Quebec where both commanders were killed, but the British were victorious. Although Quebec surrendered, remnants of the French army managed to escape, and, reinforced to seven thousand men, marched on Quebec to attempt its recapture in April 1760. Yet Lévis's victory over a British force just outside the city walls could not prevent the abandonment of the siege in the face of British relief, and in September the French governor, Pierre François de Rigaud, marquis of Vaudreuil, surrendered the rest of New France. But in spite of this vigorous campaign, the outcome in North America had, in reality, been determined the previous year at sea, when the British had destroyed one French battle fleet off Lagos (Portugal) on 17 August, and defeated the other at Quiberon Bay off the coast of Brittany (20 November). Not only did this dash Choiseul's serious hopes of an invasion of Britain; it also assured Britain command of the Atlantic and English Channel, allowing the blockade of French ports and cutting off the French overseas from the homeland. In June 1761 Britain even managed to capture Belle-Isle, dominating the southern coast of Brittany.
DOMESTIC POLITICS AND THE ENDING OF THE WAR
However, by the end of 1760 there was a general war-weariness among all the belligerents, even the British, whose economy was flourishing. Indeed, during 1761 Anglo-Prussian relations deteriorated largely because Frederick II refused to consider any concessions to his enemies, culminating in the curtailment of British subsidies in April 1762. All this notwithstanding, the hostility of Elizabeth of Russia to Frederick II, and Pitt's determination to wring a "Carthaginian peace" out of France prolongedthe conflict. What pushed the great powers toward peace was not victories or defeats but rather changes in their domestic political configurations.
George III's accession in October 1760 produced a notably more pacific tone in the British government, driving Pitt out of the ministry a year later. France sought to profit from this, ratcheting up demands in peace negotiations. Louis XV forged a third Family Compact in August 1761 with the anglophobe Charles III of Spain, who had acceded to his throne in 1759. This produced in January 1762 a Spanish declaration of war against Britain, ostensibly to protect Charles's New World economic interests, but Charles's rash decision was soon repented, as Britain captured both Havana (August) and Manila (October) in successful amphibious operations. That same year, the British also captured the islands of Martinique, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Grenada, and Tobago from France, to add to earlier seizures of Guadeloupe in 1759 and La Gorée in West Africa (1758). The Franco-Spanish position at the end of 1762 was worse than it had been a year earlier. Nevertheless, John Stuart, earl of Bute, now directing the British government, concluded the unnecessarily lenient Peace of Paris (10 February 1763) in which Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia, and La Gorée were returned to France. All of New France, except Saint Pierre and Miquelon and fishing rights off Newfoundland, was retained by the British, and in India France was permitted to retain only the five trading posts held in 1748; Minorca was returned to Britain in exchange for Belle-Isle. To recover Cuba and Manila, Spain ceded Florida to Britain, receiving compensation from Louis XV in the form of Louisiana. Britain had shattered the French empire, and France had seen her armies humiliated (with serious domestic political consequences), but the French territories George III handed back to Louis XV were the most productive.
Prussia's survival intact, with peace concluded at Hubertusburg (15 February 1763), equally owed much to changes in domestic politics: the death of Tsarina Elizabeth in January 1762, and Peter III's immediate withdrawal of Russia from the triple alliance. Catherine II, after her usurpation of the throne six months later, maintained Russian neutrality but refused to assist Frederick as her husband had wished to do. With the treaty, Europe reverted to the status quo ante bellum. By merely carrying on the war, and regularly defeating his enemies against massive odds, Frederick II acquired the sobriquet "the Great" for himself and Prussia's recognition as a great power by the other states. Austria had failed dismally in the attempt to regain Silesia, prompting a further bout of administrative reform that, in less than a decade, increased the quality and quantity of her armies. Yet Russia, in spite of making no territorial gains from the war, emerged as the arbiter of eastern Europe, in part through her military performance but also thanks to the new tsarina, Catherine II, who was determined that Russia would henceforth act to maintain its newly acquired pivotal role.
See also Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748) ; British Colonies: The Caribbean ; British Colonies: North America ; Catherine II (Russia) ; Elizabeth (Russia) ; Frederick II (Prussia) ; French Colonies: The Caribbean ; French Colonies: North America ; Louis XV (France) ; Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire) ; Pitt, William the Elder and William the Younger ; Prussia .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of the Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. London, 2000.
Dorn, Walter L. Competition for Empire, 1740–1763. London and New York, 1963. See chapter 8. Still the best narrative of the war.
Middleton, Richard. The Bells of Victory: the Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years' War, 1757–1762. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1985.
Scott, H. M. The Emergence of the Eastern Powers 1756–1775. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.
Guy Rowlands
