In the west, Prince Ferdinand’s army had gone into winter quarters following the indecisive Battle of Kloster Kamp, in October. Thereafter much complaint had been made (privately by Ferdinand, publicly by British officers serving under him) that the army had been hobbled by lack of adequate supplies. Since the British Treasury was solely responsible for supplying Ferdinand’s force, these allegations greatly concerned Newcastle. He was relieved to find, upon inquiry, that the commissariat’s problems had been exaggerated. But that there were problems on the western front was confirmed in March when Ferdinand, who had attacked the French in a winter campaign, was forced by shortages of men and supplies to scuttle back from the Rhine to the River Diemel—a retreat that cost him all of Hesse. Neither Ferdinand nor Frederick seemed likely to force the French, Austrians, and Russians to make peace. Every gain seemed to be compensated for by a loss sustained elsewhere, every victory dampened by its cost and lack of decisiveness. 7
Increasingly, all Newcastle could see was how expensive the war had become. The virtually continuous reconstruction of the Prussian army from the ruin that Frederick’s campaigns made of it, year after year, had already cost the British Treasury millions of pounds. The commissariat of Ferdinand’s army alone was consuming more than ten thousand pounds a day and producing little but complaints. Even though, to the duke’s great relief, the House of Commons had approved the year’s budget estimates for the German war on a voice vote, he still had to find the money somewhere. This was no trivial task. The war was eating up twenty million pounds annually. Tax receipts to the Treasury could supply only about a third of that sum, and nearly half of those revenues were previously obligated to pay the interest on the existing debt.8 Incessantly Newcastle worried that any disruption in the securities market would lead to financial panic and bring the whole house of cards slithering down. And what was Pitt’s response? To blame him for extravagance, and to propose more expeditions!
The duke had served the royal family faithfully during the two previous reigns, and had always drawn strength from his relationship with the king. Deprived of that emotional anchor, he responded in a not altogether rational way to his fears and to Pitt’s bullying refusal to consider peace. In February, when Pitt was immobilized by gout, Newcastle set out to curry favor with the new king by suggesting that the earl of Holdernesse be dismissed from his position as secretary of state for the Northern Department, and that Lord Bute be named as his replacement. Superficially this made sense—Bute as the king’s confidant deserved a formal place in the cabinet, and Holdernesse had been little more than a nonentity—and George jumped at the chance to serve the interests of his favorite. In the most important ways, however, Newcastle’s gambit made no sense at all. He proposed the change to the king without consulting Pitt, who was furious at what he saw as both a personal betrayal and an attack on his authority. Holdernesse, it was true, had been a cipher; but he had been Pitt’s cipher, and Pitt knew that he would never be able to dictate to the man whom the king called his “Dearest Friend” as he had to Holdernesse. Newcastle had perhaps forgotten his colleague’s capacity for pettiness. If so, he would soon have cause to remember it, for Pitt would henceforth make it his purpose to humiliate and thwart the duke at every turn. Moreover, Newcastle would soon discover that he had made an even more significant oversight, for he had not attended to the differences between Bute’s ideas about the kind of treaty that was desirable and his own.
The duke wanted peace as soon as possible, but not at the expense of Britain’s allies. He therefore favored economizing by scaling back operations against France but sustaining the German war as long as necessary to obtain an honorable peace. Given his driving fear of bankruptcy, this was at best an inconsistent policy; it was certainly at odds with Pitt’s evident determination to strip France of her empire, humble her diplomatically, and in effect dictate the peace terms. Bute, on the other hand, wanted a prompt settlement and was willing to accept the status quo as its basis, which meant that he wanted to cut the German subsidies and leave Frederick and Ferdinand to shift for themselves. So Newcastle in fact compounded his woes by suggesting that Bute be made a minister, yet realized it too late to stop the appointment. On March 10, before the duke had a chance for second thoughts, before Pitt even knew what was happening, Bute kissed his former pupil’s hand for the seals of office. With that ritual act began Pitt’s descent from power and the somewhat more protracted decline of Newcastle himself.9
Shortly thereafter, at the end of March, Louis XV made a formal appeal for a peace to be concluded, on the basis of the current status quo, at a general conference of all the belligerent powers. Simultaneously Pitt received a letter from the French war minister, Étienne-François de Stainville, duc de Choiseul, proposing that Britain and France exchange envoys to discuss the issues—implicitly, an offer to begin negotiations for a separate peace. Although neither Pitt nor Newcastle was as willing to make peace without reference to the interests of Prussia, they agreed to send a diplomat to Paris and to receive a French representative in return. In the meantime, Pitt’s long-planned expedition against Belle-Île-en-Mer went ahead. By the time the envoys were beginning to state their governments’ respective positions in Paris and London, the island was in British hands, following a campaign that afforded yet another example of the cooperation between army and naval forces that had come to characterize the war effort under Ligonier and Anson.10
Belleisle was more than just a diplomatic counter to be bargained back in return for Minorca or those parts of the Prussian Rhineland that France had conquered. Reviving his old navalist strategy, Pitt intended Belleisle to be a stage from which coastal raids could be launched to take pressure off Ferdinand by forcing the French to concentrate on coastal defense. Thus while the seizure of an island that lay less than twenty miles off the Brittany coast shook the French court, it also frightened Newcastle, Bute, and others in the British ministry who were inclined to negotiate for peace. They feared both any addition to Pitt’s popularity and the prospect that more defeats would drive France, in desperation, to seek an alliance with Spain—and there were plenty of indications that Madrid would favor such an agreement. Yet Pitt, far from fearing the prolongation of the war, seemed actually to welcome it. As his colleagues in the cabinet knew only too well, his war aims had grown with every victory; they worried that he would refuse to make peace so long as he could go on expanding British military and commercial power. They had good reason to fear that he would think the Spanish colonies, too, were ripe for the picking, and that he would find only a kind of perverse benediction in Spain’s belligerency.11
The Southern secretary’s haughty reception of France’s peace envoy seemed only to prove the substance of Bute’s and Newcastle’s fears. Despite the announced willingness of the French to deliver up most of their American empire, Pitt insisted that he would not make peace until they also surrendered their rights to the Newfoundland fishery, and that demand was strictly nonnegotiable. This was not solely, or even principally, because the French market for cod sustained a £500,000 annual trade, a sum larger than the whole fur production of Canada. It was rather because every eighteenth-century strategist held it as an axiom that a great fishery was a “nursery of seamen,” and thus crucial to maintaining a significant navy. Pitt was demanding, in effect, not only that the French surrender the bulk of their colonies, but that they prostrate themselves before a British commercial monopoly and foreswear rebuilding their naval power—thus placing their international trade permanently at Great Britain’s mercy.12
Virtually everyone in the cabinet except Pitt saw this as madness, an invitation to make Britain into an international pariah in the postwar era. As the duke of Bedford (lately lord lieutenant of Ireland, but now a cabinet member without portfolio) observed to Newcastle, Pitt’s gambit for supremacy “would be as dangerous for us to grasp at as it was for Louis XIV, when he aspired to be the arbiter of Europe, and might be likely to produce a grand alliance against us.” More i
mmediately it produced deep divisions within the cabinet, stopped the negotiations cold, and finally aligned every important minister against a sublimely unconcerned Pitt. 13
Meanwhile, the Spanish court had grown concerned that France was at the point of selling out Spain’s interests, and promised Choiseul a formal alliance if he would refrain from making a separate peace. In fact Choiseul, deeply committed to rebuilding French power, had no intention of agreeing to peace on Pitt’s terms and eagerly took advantage of Spain’s offer. The alliance, concluded at Paris on August 15, was called the Family Compact because its signatories represented the two branches of the Bourbon dynasty. It took the form of a defensive mutual pledge that Spain and France would settle their differences with Great Britain in concert. The signatories made no special effort to conceal its provisions, but they took care not to publicize the existence of the secret convention that accompanied it. This instrument promised that if the war had not ended by May 1, 1762, Spain would enter hostilities as France’s ally.14
The Spanish hoped that the Family Compact would make Great Britain reasonable and that the convention would make France resolute. Only the latter hope had any prospect of fulfillment. The conclusion of the Franco-Spanish alliance inaugurated the last futile phase of the peace negotiations, in which the stakes were higher than ever and the fishingrights issue—now that Spanish demands for consideration had to be included as well—was even less susceptible to resolution. By mid-September Pitt was pressing hard for a preemptive declaration of war against Spain. An intercepted letter from the Spanish ambassador to Paris to his counterpart in London had suggested that a secret protocol of the Family Compact provided for a military alliance to take effect after the treasure fleet arrived from the New World. This, Pitt argued, could only mean that the Spanish intended to enter the war. If war with Spain was inevitable, what was to be gained by waiting? But Pitt’s fellow ministers were not about to be swept into an expanded conflict by torrents of eloquence. Some, like Bute and Bedford, opposed declaring war on Spain for diplomatic reasons, since victory in such a conflict would threaten the balance of power. Others, including Anson and Ligonier, doubted the ability of the navy and army to take on a new enemy and demurred for strategic reasons. Newcastle, worrying that tremors in the securities markets in May and June portended worse problems to come, dissented on financial grounds.15
When the cabinet met on September 15 and 18, only Richard, Earl Temple, the lord privy seal and Pitt’s brother-in-law, supported the Great Commoner’s demand for an immediate declaration of war. The other ministers agreed to reinforce the Caribbean and Mediterranean fleets but wanted to try to buy Spain out of the alliance by offering to withdraw Britain’s logwood cutters from the Honduras coast—a significant concession in a long-standing dispute between London and Madrid. It was clear in the meeting of September 15 that the cabinet would not be bullied. In desperation, therefore, at the next meeting, Pitt and Temple produced a minority report they had drawn up for presentation to the king. This was a maneuver for which there was no precedent, and George, treating it as “Mr. Pitts black scheme,” refused to accept the report.
“Were any of the other Ministers as spirited as you are my Dearest Friend,” he wrote to Bute, “I would say let that mad Pitt be dismissed, but as matters are very different from that we must get rid of him in a happier moment than the present one.” Cannily, the king insisted on waiting for the expected return from Paris of the British peace envoy before hearing arguments for and against a declaration of war. While they waited, the ministers convinced themselves that they could not afford to follow the Southern secretary’s line, and George braced himself for the political hurricane that would inevitably accompany Pitt’s offer to resign.16
When the critical meeting of the cabinet came on October 2, Pitt once more made his case for a declaration of war. When all of his fellow ministers except Temple declined to support him, however, he gave up. In better grace than anyone who knew him expected, he thanked “the old ministers for their civility to him” and took his leave. Three days later he tendered his resignation to the king; Temple followed suit on the ninth. Astonishingly, there was no crisis. The king, with ceremonial expressions of regret, accepted the seals from the secretary and immediately “made him a most gracious and unlimited offer of any rewards in the power of the crown to bestow.” Pitt, who had been under extraordinary psychological strain, broke down and wept. That evening, he and Bute worked out the terms of his reward: a pension (for his, his wife’s, and their son’s lifetimes) of three thousand pounds per year and a peerage, as Baroness Chatham, for his wife.17
It was a generous reward, although not an extravagant one. It secured Pitt’s family from possible financial embarrassment and it allowed him— since it was his wife who had received the title—to remain in the House of Commons. But it served another purpose, too, and one Pitt could hardly have expected when he tearfully accepted the king’s offer. The terms of pensions granted by the Crown were customarily kept secret, but Bute ordered the details of this one to be reported in the government’s next Gazette. That alone would have been sufficient to harm the Great Commoner’s reputation for disinterestedness, but Bute also had pamphleteers engaged to write tracts with titles like The Patriot Unmasked and The Right Honourable Annuitant Unmasked, lest anyone miss the point. Insofar as possible, the ungracious Scot had insured that if Pitt went into opposition, he could not easily stake his customary claim to the moral high ground. And for that, three thousand pounds a year must have seemed a bargain indeed.
CHAPTER 50
The End of an Alliance
1762
THE KING AND BUTE were now free to replace Pitt and Temple, but not to reshuffle the rest of the cabinet’s ministries according to their liking. Newcastle, without whose complicity Pitt could never have been unseated, would remain in the post Bute coveted, while the aging architects of military operations, Anson and Ligonier, would continue to direct the navy and the army. Thus while Pitt’s departure averted an immediate declaration of war on Spain, it generated only marginal changes in long-established patterns. The duke of Bedford, Newcastle’s old enemy and an ally of Bute, was named to replace Temple as lord privy seal, while Charles Wyndham, the second earl of Egremont—an aristocrat qualified by irreproachable pedigree, if no other qualities, for the office—took over Pitt’s old position as Southern secretary.1
Since no commoners now held ministerial posts, someone had to be designated to manage the government’s interests in the House of Commons, and for that role Bute and the king settled on George Grenville. This was in some ways a clever choice, for Grenville was Temple’s brother and Pitt’s brother-in-law, and an important figure in “the faction of cousins” that had been the Great Commoner’s base in Parliament during his long career in opposition. Although he put himself on bad terms with the other members of his party by accepting the position as the ministry’s leader in the Commons, Grenville was still bound by familial and political ties to Pitt, and thus at least potentially offered another means of keeping Pitt out of opposition. Grenville was a deeply unimaginative man but a legendarily hard worker and an able fiscal technician—all qualities that commended him to Bute. A rarer quality commended him to the king: a reputation for incorruptibility equal to Pitt’s, before Pitt accepted the pension. This made him a figure capable of retaining the loyalty of the independent M.P.s on the backbenches and thus limiting the damage Pitt could inflict as an opposition leader. At the top of his form Grenville was no better than a lackluster orator, but his talents as a parliamentary operative seemed adequate to offset that deficiency.2
In policy, as in personnel, the changes that followed Pitt’s resignation all came at the margins. The circumstances of the Great Commoner’s departure and the necessity of avoiding a crisis that would compel the king to recall him to office dictated that George and his ministers take a hard line on the war, particularly on questions relating to Spain. Thus the negotiations with France, long fettered by
a fisheries issue that might now have been resolved, were allowed to lapse. The British ambassador in Madrid was instructed to demand assurances that Spain’s intentions in concluding the Family Compact were peaceable and was authorized to open negotiations on the logwood question. In the meantime, however, Ligonier and Anson set to work preparing for a widened war.3
In the event of hostilities, Spain’s likeliest first move would be to invade Portugal, a country bound to Britain by a defensive treaty and so tightly tied to the British empire economically as to be a virtual dependency. To defend Portugal would take perhaps 10,000 soldiers more than the approximately 110,000 currently on active service. This posed a major problem because since 1760 the number of volunteers enlisting had been no more than adequate to replace losses. Ligonier and Charles Townshend—the brilliant young opportunist who had been appointed secretary at war in March—therefore grasped the nettle of necessity and sanctioned “raising for rank,” or offering commissions as field officers to gentlemen who could raise new battalions from among their tenantry. To revive this antique practice was a desperate measure, since the personal loyalties that produced such units weakened the professionalism of the army; yet the only alternative, conscription (declaring a “land impress”), would have produced worse effects and probably riots. Lord Anson, meanwhile, faced even more inflexible limits in ships and manpower as he began trying to identify potential targets in the Spanish empire. So fully was the navy committed that any expeditions would have to rely heavily on troops already based outside the home isles—an expedient, it was true, but one that had the advantage of speed. If plans could be laid before the declaration of war, orders might be sent overseas soon enough to enable the expeditions’ commanders to surprise their opponents. Or so, at least, Anson hoped.4
Crucible of War Page 55
