by Conrad Black
In North America, there had been no respite in the previous wars, as the Iroquois made peace, if they did, when it suited them and not the chancelleries of Europe. So the War of the Spanish Succession did not immediately have an impact in America and Canada. The exhaustion of the combatants in the late continental struggle was compounded in New France by the buffetings of the fur trade. The opening up of Hudson Bay and the Mississippi created a degree of competition that affronted the mercantilist controlled markets of Colbert and Talon on which the trade had been built. And fashion abruptly changed in Paris, as it has been wont to do since, and the use of beaver fur in hats and as trim on outerwear abruptly declined. New France had had recourse in 1685, under Intendant Jacques de Meulles, to the issuance of card money (playing cards, torn in pieces and signed to a certain value). Frontenac reverted to this in the 1690s, and under the pressure of the War of Spanish Succession, with irregular resupply from France and the burdens of preparing for even technical skirmishing with England, recourse was had to it again. It eased liquidity concerns, but as always, including at time of writing, when the money supply is simply increased without a corresponding increase in productivity or wealth-generation other than simply by the velocity of money transfers, inflation results. (Much of the cause of the American Revolution seventy-five years later, and the American banking crisis sixty years after that, was the result of intense political dispute over similar issues. The less formulaic French of the New World managed it relatively effortlessly with a temporary debasement of the currency that was less foreign to their national experience and culture.)
In the New World, the only early stirrings of this new war were in Acadia, where the Massachusetts militia crept continually up the coast, closing the river mouths to the Abenaki tribe, who owed their loyalty to the French priests and the redoubtable Saint-Castin, scourge of the New Englanders. Pontchartrain and Callière, veterans of protracted Indian combat, urged and supplied the Abenaki, chiefly to keep the English Americans away from the French colonies. Callière also concerted with his successor as governor of Montreal, Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, a plan to provide preveniently for English-American advances by building forts and posts to which friendly Indians could repair in times of military pressure instead of being scattered and slaughtered by the Iroquois whenever the dark aboriginal spirits or English money and rum motivated them to flex their muscles. To this end, in 1704 the coureurs de bois, so frequently the bêtes noires of the authorities of New France, were amnestied (as was also the custom in conflict, when their bold indiscipline could be deployed to advantage). These preparations were quite successful, and New France soldiered into the new conflict in good condition. Despite a smallpox outburst in 1703 and a crop failure in 1705, in 1706 the resident French population was more than sixteen thousand, with a slight female majority. With the population increase, the value of land went up, and seigneurs began to try to exact a price for the land the habitant was supposed to earn by clearing it. In 1711, decrees were issued forcing the cession of cleared land to the habitants for reasonable fees. There would be forfeiture by the tenant if he didn’t maintain the land, and by the seigneur if he didn’t transfer title. Cultivated land sharply increased, and after 1705 New France was self-sufficient in agriculture, other than in years of severe crop failures.
The War of the Spanish Succession was inconclusive for the first three years, but the Duke of Marlborough and Eugene of Savoy’s victory over the French at Blenheim in 1704 blocked the way of the French army to Vienna and knocked Bavaria out of the war, where it had been a French ally. In the same year, the British took Gibraltar. After Blenheim, Marlborough returned to the command in the Netherlands and Eugene to the command in Italy, where he was generally successful in preventing the French from advancing, especially in his defeat of them at Turin, and eventually evicted them from that country. Marlborough, leading the British, Dutch, Danes, and some Germans, pushed France out of the Netherlands. Fighting was indecisive in 1705 and 1706, until Marlborough’s decisive victory at Ramillies (near Maastricht), in May 1706, which enabled him to occupy Brussels, Bruges, and Antwerp.
While this was happening, there were intermittent but prolonged negotiations between Callière and the British governor of Massachusetts, Joseph Dudley, over a possible treaty of peace between their colonies. French privateers from Port-Royal continued to beset the New England ports, and the Abenaki were unleashed from time to time to annoy the British while retaining official but implausible deniability for the French against accusations that the Abenaki had acted with French encouragement. These provocations finally sunk the local peace negotiations, but the New Englanders did not get organized to attack Quebec until 1711, fully justifying Champlain’s view that Quebec was so remote and loftily situated that it would be impregnable to attack other than by a massive amphibious assault.
France held its frontiers through 1707, and the attempted allied assault on Madrid was defeated by the French and pro-French Spanish at Almansa, where the French commander, the Duke of Berwick, was James II’s illegitimate son and the Duke of Marlborough’s nephew, as Berwick’s mother was the duke’s wife’s sister, Arabella. The Duchess of Marlborough was Queen Anne’s closest friend and was instrumental in each phase of Marlborough’s political and military career. Marlborough came south with his armies and Eugene north with his in 1708 and severely defeated the French at Oudenaarde. Louis felt compelled to open talks for peace. He was prepared to cede Spain and even to allow the allies to dispose of his grandson, Philip, as king of Spain, and to make a financial contribution to that end, but the allies, against the advice of Marlborough and Eugene, demanded that Louis defeat and expel his own grandson, for whose right to govern France and Spain Louis had gone to war. (Dynasties ruled, but kinship did not ensure loyalty in any of them.) This was too much for the Sun King, and in what was in some respects his finest hour, he appealed to the entire French nation for more volunteers for the army and for endurance of a special surtax. France responded, and the Duke of Villars, who had resigned because noble fellow officers had resisted his request for a lightning strike against Vienna in 1703, was recalled to lead the defence of the country.
In the bloody Battle of Malplaquet, which was effectively Villars’s defence of Paris against the again-combined forces of Marlborough and Eugene, the French technically lost, as they retired from the field, but only because Villars was wounded, with a cannonball shattering his knee. The allies took twenty thousand casualties, twice the number suffered by the French, and Villars really defeated the combined allies led by their two greatest generals. In the following year, the allies were defeated in Spain, and France regained Barcelona. Villars successfully led his army through 1711 to the reconquest of a good deal of lost ground. To make his life easier, Queen Anne quarrelled violently with Marlborough’s duchess, sacked her from her place of influence, and the death of the king of Spain opened up the prospect of reunion of the crowns of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire (Austria). The British and Dutch had not slogged through ten years of heavy combat for any such prospect. The pro-peace Tories defeated the pro-war Whigs, and the queen and the royal majority in the House of Lords swung over to the peace party. Marlborough remained loyal to his departing Whig allies and to the presumptive future king, the elector of Hanover (who would in three years become King George I of Great Britain on the death of Anne). The queen recalled Marlborough, and Villars routed the allies, now led by Eugene, at Denain on the French frontier and continued his advance.
In North America, where the War of Spanish Succession was known as Queen Anne’s War, as the Nine Years War had been known as King William’s War, nothing involving direct combat between the English Americans and French Canadians, as opposed to Indian surrogates, had really happened until a Massachusetts contingent led by Colonel Francis Nicholson, captured Port-Royal in 1710, shut down the French privateers, and renamed it Annapolis Royal. There was another farcical advance overland on Montreal, which withered and gave up without fi
ring a shot after disease thinned its active ranks en route. An assault upriver against Quebec was attempted, but the expedition, commanded by Sir Hovenden Walker, had navigational problems and grounded, losing eight ships and the mission, in emulation of the 1690 fiasco that Frontenac had seen off, limped back to Boston. The French exterminated a large Fox band of Indians in a clash near Detroit, and unsuccessfully attempted to seize the British Fort Albany in Hudson Bay, and repulsed other attacks on some of its forts.
Peace finally broke out again, in the treaties of Utrecht in 1713 and of Rastatt and Baden in 1714. France retained its borders, and Philip remained as king of Spain, but renounced the crown of France. France conceded much of Acadia to Britain, but with vague boundaries that were bound to lead to further friction, and ceded half of the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts and recognized British possession of Rupert’s Land and Newfoundland. This gave the Hudson Bay forts back to Britain, and thus left Great Britain that access to North America and left it athwart the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, though France retained Cape Breton Island and Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island). The British had sovereignty over the Iroquois, a mixed blessing, but potentially dangerous for France, and the right of both countries to trade with all the Indians effectively divided eastern North America close to the main waterways through to Lake Superior. This would prove a lasting division. Spain ceded its position in the Netherlands, Naples, Milan, and Sardinia, all to the Habsburgs (Austria), and Gibraltar and Minorca, as well as a thirty-year monopoly on the non-Spanish slave trade in the Americas, to Britain. Spain lost; the Holy Roman Empire, Great Britain, and the Dutch won; and France again drew the issue with almost all the other European powers against it. These were unwise wars to no purpose for those who began them, and every peace left so many shaggy edges that it was almost certain to generate another war, and this one did.
France was becoming enervated by these endless wars – twenty-seven years of war in forty-one years, from 1672 to 1713 – like having two Thirty Years Wars plus the civil war of the Fronde and several lesser conflicts in less than a century. And there was no point to the costs in blood and treasure of constant war if it was only to break even, which was all France did after 1678, only to show that La Belle France could, unto herself, hold a coalition at bay. This was inferior strategic direction.
While the French were forgetting some of Cardinal Richelieu’s lessons, the British were steadily perfecting the techniques of Cardinal Wolsey’s game: divide and prevent conquerors in Europe, seize and hold the sceptre of the seas, and take the best of the non-European world for the home islands in the name of civilization, meaning commerce and public administration. Christianity was only a flourish to the British. To the extent foreign policy was a crusade, it must be for the national interest, not the extension of a sectarian province in the kingdom of God.
In the New World, France had retained its access to Newfoundland fisheries, and this was the traditional training ground of French mariners and seamen, and while the British were encroaching on the edges of New France and the trend was disturbing, the colony itself was intact and growing. In 1714, the governor, Vaudreuil, sent Pontchartrain a series of urgent recommendations: to increase the military garrison, reintroduce trading licences to keep the Indians from being commercially seduced by the English, and, for the same motive, re-establish the sale of brandy at Frontenac, Detroit, Michilimackinac, and other trading forts; to provide a special incentive to the Abenaki to keep their alliance; and to fortify Île Royale (Cape Breton). It was an intelligent, but a necessarily defensive, strategy to maintain the tenuous French hold on the northeastern and central parts of the continent. Pontchartrain agreed.
Canada’s greatest soldier and fighting sailor, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, had captured the British island of Nevis in the Caribbean and announced that the entire population were prisoners of France, but died of yellow fever at Havana a few months later, in 1706, while planning an attack on the Carolinas. He was forty-five. The Duke of Villars became Louis’s minister of defence and one of only six men in French history to enjoy the sonorous title marshal general of France. He played an important role in the regency of the 1720s, and returned to active service, aged eighty, in the War of the Polish Succession. But after leading his armies successfully, he died peacefully in his campaign billeting, aged eighty-one. This war was the last throw for Louis XIV, who had reigned seventy-two years when he died in 1715, fifty-four of them by direct dictatorship since the death of Richelieu’s assiduous disciple, Mazarin, in 1661. Louis was a talented man, cultured, patriotic, a genuine Roman Catholic, and a dutiful if very autocratic and profligately extravagant monarch. He was the personification of the grandeur of France in many fields, and a monarch who inspired pride among many French and respect among most foreigners, even Eugene of Savoy. He had expanded the country and, to a small degree, its empire, but he had not really raised France’s relative importance from where he had found it, as France’s rivals, except for Spain, had gained at least as much. And he had done nothing to endow the country with flexible political institutions that would enable it to weather the ages without terrible internal conflicts. He was the greatest figure of his age in Europe, but not the greatest ruler, an honour that would probably go to Peter the Great, of the now emerging Russia. Louis XIV would come to be seen as illustrative of the dangers, as well as the grandeur, of absolutism.
The absence of any democratic institutions or traditions in France made their colonial regime less effective and spontaneous than that of the English, though they did better under inspired leaders such as Champlain and Talon and Frontenac. Under Richelieu, the die was cast for absolute royal dictatorship. This produced capable but unrestrained government under very able leaders, but irremediable incompetence under poor leaders, and ultimately even talented absolute monarchs at the head of such a rich country and intelligent nationality overreached (Louis XIV and Napoleon). In the end, the British model of constitutional rights and civil responsibility, for all its absurd frictions and political vapidity, was a superior system that encouraged less public cynicism, a more motivated population, and greater probity in government than French absolute monarchy. Britain never had a revolution or civil war after 1660, while France has had a total of twelve violent changes of regime (though several were almost bloodless) after the Bourbon dictatorship finally exploded in 1789, and, as has been referred to, domestic conditions were far from peaceful through most of the seventeenth century, despite Richelieu’s authoritarian genius.
8. La Vérendrye, Westward Expansion in North America, and King George’s War (the War of Austrian Succession), 1715–1754
Governor Vaudreuil revived the sluggish fur trade by folding the Company of the Colony, a Montreal enterprise that had been under-capitalized, unable to enforce its position opposite the Indian fur trappers and suppliers, resistless against the fickleness of fashion, and a victim of the erratic wartime communications with France across a North Atlantic dominated by Britain’s Royal Navy. Vaudreuil delivered the colonial fur monopoly to the Company of the West in 1718, a mainly French concern, more amply financed by merchants of the French port cities. While peace reigned with the British and Americans, the massacre of the Fox band at Detroit in 1712 was just the opening shot in the Fox Wars, in which that stubborn and fierce tribe fought for their historic right to be the middleman between the Sioux who trapped the beavers and provided the fur and the French who sent the fur to market overseas. It was the nastiest and most violent permutation of a grubby commercial argument.
New France perversely resented the expanding reach of its adventurers, as commercial opinion in Montreal and Quebec saw Louisiana, founded at this time, and posts along the Mississippi and Ohio systems that fed it and exported furs through New Orleans, as a competitor and a drain and distraction. The first Fox War lasted only from 1714 to 1716, but the Fox won a skirmish in 1715, killing the son of Claude de Ramezay, who was at the time the acting governor of New France, and d’Iberville’s nephew.
The French pushed them back into Wisconsin, and there was a peace from 1716 to 1727, though one punctuated by frequent skirmishing. The Fox earned their name by their cunning and obduracy and nipped at the French spider web of trading posts and forts whenever they saw an opportunity. The French empire in North America was built on French élan and imagination and had tensile strength but no mass of reserves of people or resources. To the British Americans, who had no strategy at this point but were a string of communities of homogeneous British seeking a better life as colonists, the French and French Canadians were a distant annoyance, but to the Indians they were a mortal threat to their territory and livelihood.
The fortification of Île Royale (Cape Breton Island) began in 1720, as construction of the powerful fort of Louisbourg was put in hand at English Harbour. As it turned out, there was a good deal of corruption in the contracting, and the fortifications and plans were not all they appeared. Louisbourg was portrayed, in France and in Canada, as the Dunkirk of the New World, and Louis XV eventually said that it was so expensive he should be able to see it on the horizon from Brittany, but it was not as formidable a bastion as it was billed. The fort did assist Vaudreuil in promoting Abenaki harassment of the British colonists inching up the New England coast, and the Abenaki War, in which France spuriously claimed to be neutral, began in 1722. The New York traders were also moving north from what is now Albany, and established Fort Oswego on the south shore of Lake Ontario in 1726. The French answered with their fort at Niagara the following year. To protect the fur trade, brandy flowed from the French to the Indians in ambitious emulation of the thundering waters of the Niagara River; the forces of lucre (not exceptionally) had won the long battle with the pieties of the Catholic missionaries.
