by Tom Anderson
With George III’s Britain publicly declaring its condemnation of the Seven Missions conflict and racial purging (a somewhat ironic complaint given its own guilt in shifting the Acadians just a few years before), Hispano-Portuguese relations soured and, in 1763, another border incident resulted in the outbreak of war.
The First Platinean War (1763-7) was for the most part desultory in itself, but had several important ramifications. The Spanish Army in South America performed admirably, not only quickly taking back the territory of the former missions, but pushing forward and occupying the entire Rio Grande do Sul[70] region by summer 1765. An attempted Spanish descent on Santa Catarina Island in Portuguese Brazil in 1766, though, was defeated by an Anglo-Portuguese squadron under Admiral Augustus Keppel. Overall, though, things at first went well for the Spanish in South America.
The same was not true in other theatres. American troops invaded Florida in 1764 and took the last holdouts, in San Agustín, at the end of 1766—a far cry from their failure a generation before. More worryingly, after two Spanish invasions of Portugal failed in 1763 and 1764, a British descent on A Coruña was combined with a successful Portuguese occupation of Galicia. The best of Spain’s army was engaged in South America and, while what remained in Spain managed to defeat Anglo-Portuguese siege attempts of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz (1765 and 1766), the Portuguese could not be dislodged from Galicia. Charles III had counted on French support, which had not materialised for a variety of reasons: firstly because Louis XV was attempting to stay out of all but the most essential wars due to the state of France’s finances, and secondly because Spain was not the only ally pestering him for support. So the Bourbon Family Compact was not honoured, with Charles III even having to briefly flee to France in 1766 when Madrid was consumed with food riots. Following his return, Spain proposed peace terms on March 17th, 1767.
One apparently inconsequential footnote to the war was the British occupation of Buenos Aires, in Spanish Rio de la Plata, from 1765 to 67. The Spanish national armies were still engaged in Rio Grande de Sul, and no reinforcements came from an increasingly desperate Spain. However, the local colonial peoples formed militias and—despite the regulations against criollos[71] bearing weapons—successfully inflicted an embarrassing defeat on the British forces, mostly Royal Marines, at the city of Rosario in summer 1766. Although the ill-prepared British were not entirely dislodged by the time peace was signed, it was a great embarrassment for the Royal Navy (for the British Army had not been involved) and necessitated the court-martial and then, controversially, execution by firing squad of Admiral Marriott Arbuthnot, the commanding officer.
Nonetheless, the war was overall an Anglo-Portuguese victory. Spain was forced to accept status quo ante bellum borders, minus Florida which was annexed to the Empire of North America, and also to open up its colonies to British trade—a highly unpopular move among businessmen in the colonies. The Marquis of Ensenada, guilty of the terrible crime of being right about France’s policy priorities, was exiled to Spanish America. He eventually gravitated to Buenos Aires, where the people were furious about their great victory being ignored by Spain, by the fact that they had to return the conquered mission lands in Rio Grande de Sul to Portugal, and that the new British trade would undercut their livelihoods. Ensenada was good at working with discontent, and he of course had the recent example of Prince Frederick when it came to engineering an exile backfire with colonial help...
After the war, Spain focused on internal reform under the restored chief minister Richard Wall (AKA Ricardo Wall), an Irish exile, while Carvalho remained chief minister of Portugal until the death of Joseph in 1769,[72] upon which the King’s daughter Queen Maria I sent him too into American exile. Carvalho had brought Portugal kicking and screaming into the modern world, curbing the powers of the nobility, suppressing the Jesuits and bringing in greater religious freedoms. And, inevitably, the people hated him for it—although perhaps more so for the ‘reign of terror’ he had imposed in response to the attempts on the King’s life.
Carvalho went to Rio de Janeiro, and it is perhaps inevitable that he eventually met up with his old enemy Ensenada in Buenos Aires. But it should have been known by now that if two such keen political minds could be persuaded to work for the same cause, then the foundations of the world would tremble...
Chapter #10: Pole to Pole (and Lithuanian)
From: “Born Under A Squandering Tsar: Monarchy in 18th Century Russia” by Dr Andrew Sanderson (1948)—
Many in Europe had viewed with relief the aftermath of the Third War of Supremacy, in which Prussia had been reduced from a budding European Great Power down to a mere regional power. It was true that the Prussian army was still one of the best, if not the best, trained in Europe—but the losses of the war, both in men and land, coupled to the death of the charismatic Frederick II, meant that any Prussian revival would be a long hard road. Unless the Franco-Austrian alliance broke down, many commentators opined, it would be impossible.
Events intervened, though, as they often do. In 1762, Empress Elizabeth of Russia died and was succeeded by her nephew as Peter III, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias. Peter was a quixotic figure, which was somewhat worrying considering he occupied a position that still maintained absolute power over the country. Having been born in the Germanies himself, he was an unashamed Germanophile and had particularly admired Frederick II before his death. Some Prussian commentators even sourly remarked that, if his aunt had had the decent to die a few years earlier, he would have made Russia switch sides in the Third War.[73]
Frederick had also been succeeded by his own nephew, who how reigned as Frederick William II, King in Prussia. Young and inexperienced, he relied heavily on advisors, most of whom were the surviving generals who had served under his father. Some counselled that attempting to regain Silesia from Austria or her minor possessions from Saxony should be Prussia’s first priority, but the Franco-Austrian alliance—coupled with the fact that George III’s Britain currently had problems of its own to deal with and would not be too receptive to an alliance anyway—meant that for the forseeable future, it remained an impossible dream.
Poland had been ruled since the War of the Polish Succession (in the 1730s) by Augustus III, better known as Frederick Augustus II of Saxony. Augustus cared little for Poland proper, seeing it merely as conferring a royal dignity and providing a way of gathering more power to himself in Saxony. Geographically isolated, the vast Commonwealth became paralysed with an indifferent elected king and a vast nobility (szlachta) unwilling to part with any of its power.
Augustus died in 1765, leaving Saxony to his son Frederick Christian, but Augustus’ unpopularity in Poland meant that Frederick Christian was not the natural successor for the Sejm to elect as king.[74] Stanisław Leszczyński, a Swedish-imposed king who had ruled for two periods in the 1710s and 1730s and had eventually become Duke of Lorraine, died mere months after Augustus. The Polish system was not based on heredity, and even if it had been, he had left only two daughters—the younger of whom was Louis XV’s queen consort, Maria Leszczyńska. The throne remained empty and the opposing factions deadlocked despite the efforts of the Interrex, the Archbishop of Gniezno and Primate of Poland.[75] Months passed and no king was elected. Civil war openly broke out in July 1766, and it became obvious that the great powers neighbouring Poland would intervene.
Austria produced the Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, second son of Maria Theresa, as their candidate for King of Poland. (Later he would generally become known as ‘Archduke Ferdinand’ after his elder brother Ferdinand Francis became Holy Roman Emperor as Ferdinand IV and confusion could be avoided). Maria Theresa’s armies occupied the Kraków region, preparing to take Warsaw and attempt to impose Austrian-backed rule on the country, just as Sweden had fifty years earlier. However, a deal between Frederick William of Prussia and Peter of Russia emerged in 1767, with both states declaring war on Austria—though mysteriously they did not produce a candidate of their own for the
Polish kingship.
Commentators who had expected the Prussians to drive mulishly for Silesia again were left gaping as Frederick William’s forces invaded Polish Royal Prussia and then retook the Polish-occupied southern half of Ducal Prussia that they had lost in the Third War of Supremacy. The Swedish-occupied northern half was left untouched; it later emerged that Peter had, somewhat controversially, bought Sweden’s neutrality by promising them Courland. The Prussians met up with the Russians and, in a crushing series of victories at Warsaw, Poznan and Breslau (finally entering Silesia), the Austrians were driven from Poland. The Poles themselves typically fought on both sides, as well as some szlachta factions maintaining private armies manoeuvring for the establishment of some other candidate as king. There was no unified resistance until it was too late. The conflict would be recorded in the history books not as the Polish Civil War, but as the War of the Polish Partition...
*
The major provisions of the Treaty of Stockholm (1771):
Austria to retain Silesia and the vicinity of Kraków (though not all of Galicia), but renounce any and all claims to the Polish throne.
Royal Prussia and the formerly Polish Ducal Prussia to be annexed to Prussia.
Sweden to retain northern Ducal Prussia and be awarded Courland as well.
Some eastern vojvodships[76] of Poland (those with a Ruthenian majority) to be directly annexed to Russia.
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania separated from the Commonwealth as an independent state, with a Russian-imposed Grand Duke.
The remainder of Poland to be reorganised into a rump Kingdom of Poland in personal union with Prussia.
The territorial integrities of the resulting Polish and Lithuanian successor states to be guaranteed.
*
Peter appointed his son Paul, the Tsarevich (crown prince), as Grand Duke of Lithuania. This position rapidly became accepted as the Russian equivalent to Britain’s Prince of Wales or Spain’s Prince of Asturias, always occupied by the crown prince. There remained periodic uprisings in the former Commonwealth against foreign occupiers, especially in the southeastern vojvodships where Polish lands had been directly annexed to Russia and the Orthodox religion imposed, but in the rump Poland proper the situation eventually subsided to something not unlike the apathy during the reign of Augustus III. However, Frederick William was far more interested in his new (reduced) Polish domain than Augustus had been—not something his new Polish subjects became very pleased about. This was true to the extent that within a few years people spoke of ‘Prussia-Poland’ or even ‘Brandenburg-Poland’ as though ‘Prussia’ now described the combined area of both states.
Prussia had bounced back admirably from its humiliation, with Peter’s alliance sometimes being called the ‘Miracle of the House of Brandenburg’ before that term would later be applied to even more unlikely events in the nineteenth century involving Frederick William’s grandson.[77] The Tsar’s position was steadied at home, but a coup plot involving his strong-minded German wife Catherine emerged in 1772.[78] Peter purged the Leib Guards, who had collaborated against him, and had Catherine exiled to the appropriately named Yekaterinburg, on the other side of the Urals.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a crisis of quite a different kind was taking shape...
Chapter #11: Don’t Tread On Me
JOHN STUART, 3RD EARL OF BUTE (TORY, OPPOSITION): Can the noble lord deny that the colonials enjoy the same comforts, the same benefits as true Englishmen? Can he deny that they have been defended against the rapacities of the French and protected from piracy by the Navy? Then why can he not see that it is only just that they pay their fair share of tax?
CHARLES WATSON-WENTWORTH, 2ND MARQUESS OF ROCKINGHAM (WHIG-PATRIOT, FIRST LORD OF THE TREASURY): Indeed, sir, I cannot. But why, then, I ask the noble lord, must his reasoning proceed in only one direction? The colonials—the Americans—have not stood idly by while our valiant forces defend them. They have bled and died alongside what the noble lord calls true Englishmen. Why, then, are they denied the liberties that we all agree are the birthright of every trueborn Englishman? Can the noble lord answer me that?
- Exchange in the House of Lords, 5th October 1767, as reported in The London Gazette
*
From: “The Making of a Nation”, by Peter Arnold (1987)—
Many scholars have debated just when the awakening of a national consciousness can be said to have taken place in Britain’s colonies on the North American continent. To be sure, there was some semblance of independence from the motherland almost since the colonies were founded: the isolation from England, the separation across a vast ocean, meant that this was unavoidable. When contact with the King was typically limited to him occasionally sending a new governor every few years and ultimately initiating some of the wars in which the colonials fought, the colonies were independent in name if not in fact. And they developed as such, creating their own means of governance, indeed effectively trialling many new constitutional ideas in different colonies. Many colonies had local assemblies elected on varying means, and, for reasons of historical accident, lacked an established Church. Any attempt to impose Anglicanism on the colonies now would run into the problems of the numerous German Calvinists and Lutherans, to say nothing of the Presbyterian Scots and the (few) Catholics who had settled there. Thus, America had always been a little different.
Prince Frederick’s exile was an epiphany. The vast majority of the colonial Americans had never seen their monarch, even their future monarch, on anything except a coin or a print, much less in the flesh. When he was travelling up and down Cisappalachia, politicking with governors and occasionally solving disputes, suddenly the King was not just some vague figure over the horizon, but a man of flesh and blood who was at work in the world. It was, as the nineteenth-century commentator Philip Bulkeley remarked dryly, as though America’s Judaean concepts of monarchy had suddenly become those of Christendom.
Even after Frederick himself departed, the plans and promises he had set in motion meant that there were serious political upheavals. Tyrannical governors were no longer tolerated, and Frederick appointed more native-born Americans—for so they were now called—as governors. He was the first monarch to elevate significant numbers of Americans to the peerage, and many (including Lawrence Washington) elected not to take up their seats in the House of Lords, but to remain at home in the colonies where their titles at present meant little. It was an important message: Americans were not simply Englishmen who happened to be born abroad, and returned home when they became important and influential men. They identified more with their birthplace, the thin line of civilisation bordering the vast tracts of unexplored wilderness, than with the green fields and pleasant hills of England.
This awakening took some years in America, beginning in the 1730s and coming to a climax some thirty or forty years later. It took rather longer for the British public consciousness to become aware of it, hence the relative surprise with which the Troubled Sixties and the Crisis of 1765 were held in many quarters.
It is impossible to cover here all the causes leading up to the situation, but the Crisis ultimately stemmed from the fact that the Third War of Supremacy had cost Britain dearly and, given that a great part of the war expenditure had been devoted to forcing the French from Québec, many British politicians considered it only appropriate that the Americans should pay their fair share of the taxes levied to cover it. Furthermore, the colonies had always had extremely lenient tax regimes compared to the home country. That was one reason why the British settler colonies had grown in population so rapidly, while their French counterparts had floundered—French law was the same everywhere, so there was less reason for a Frenchman to move to a wild colony if he would have to pay the same taxes when he got there. When the British government of the 1760s now tried to alter this comfortable status quo, it resulted in tax protests such as the Pittsburgh Whisky Riots of 1768.
Nonetheless, it was clear that the s
ituation was unsustainable. The Americans regardless were defiant on the subject, and a committee of their peers was formed to negotiate directly with the newly formed Department for Home and Colonial Affairs.[79] The committee was headed by Sir Benjamin Franklin, the celebrated natural philosopher and political writer who was respected on both sides of the Atlantic.[80] Franklin had, in recent years, provoked a stir in his native Massachusetts with the publication of a short volume entitled Unite or Die: The Case For A New England Confederation. The title was a reference to his famous political cartoon representing the colonies as the parts of a snake that would have to come together to vanquish the French. Previously, the fiercely independent New England colonies had voiced much opposition to any sort of unified confederation, in particular King James II’s short-lived Dominion of New England that had also attempted to include New York. In the end, of course, that particular project had been voided by James’ overthrow in the First Glorious Revolution, and few had dared reopen that particular can of worms.
But now the situation had changed. In particular, there was a growing division between the colonies as a whole. The colonies had originally been founded when the British believed that North America was much narrower than it is, and had envisaged there being only ten days’ march between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Based on that assumption, the colonies’ charters stated that their territory would go from the east coast westward until it reached the Pacific. As North America turned out to be rather wider than expected, this meant that if this was implemented, a map of the British lands would look like a series of long stretched-out stripes stacked one on top of the other.
