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 attention of Maria Theresa’s ministers. In Russia, Catherine II had to grapple with legislative and administrative reforms and then suppress the Pugachev revolt (1773–5). This did not prevent further Russian expansion in the south or the manoeuvres 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 centre 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 fuelled 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 III’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 theatres 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 1776–83 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 totalled 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.
