Frederick the Great, Britain’s ally on the continent, was generously supported with money and men; considerable French forces, which might otherwise have made a nuisance of themselves in America, were thus tied up in central Europe. In less than three years the strength of the British navy was increased by fifty-five thousand men and seventy ships, and with it the operational reach of British arms was transformed.
Pitt’s strategy, which his extraordinary energy and charismatic personality made feasible, was to exploit Britain’s financial advantage over France, and to deploy the manpower so raised to seize the initiative on every front of what he realized was a world war.11 France was to be
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destroyed as an imperial power, not only in America, but all over the globe. As Johnson observed, “Lord Chatham [as Pitt was to become in 1766] was a Dictator; he possessed the power of putting the State in motion.”12 The fruits of such a strategy inevitably took some time to appear, and the second half of 1757 seemed at first like a continuation of the previous trend of calamity, with the defeat of Frederick the Great at Kolin, the duke of Cumberland’s signing of the Convention of Kloster-Zeven which crystallized a temporary French advantage in Germany, the fiasco of failed British raids on the French coast, and the loss of Fort William Henry on Lake George to the accomplished and professional French general Montcalm. The following year, however, was more promising. Frederick enjoyed some spectacular successes on the continent;13 the navy showed itself to be more effective in disrupting French operations; there were victories in America (including the capture of Louisburg and Fort Duquesne); and a series of well-planned lightning raids on the coast of Brittany and on French settlements in West Africa demonstrated in British forces a new proficiency in mounting combined operations.
That positive trend was consummated in 1759, the famous “Year of Victories”—and also, of course, the year in which Montagu’s Reflections was published, but too early for its text to take account of the sudden upturn in British military fortunes.14 In May, Guadeloupe was captured; on 1 August, British regiments were conspicuous at Minden in Ferdinand of Brunswick’s great victory over a numerically superior French force under Contades; on 13 September, Wolfe took Quebec (accompanied the following year by Canada in its entirety); and finally in November, a French fleet gathered to escort across the Channel the transports of an invading French army mustered on the Brittany
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coast15 was almost entirely destroyed by Hawke in the battle of Quiberon Bay.
However, the death of George II on 25 October 1760 and the accession of his grandson George III inaugurated the endgame of the Seven Years’ War. The new king and his closest adviser, Lord Bute (who happened also to be Montagu’s brother-in-law), were determined to bring to a close what they regarded as a bloody and expensive conflict. In the spring of 1761 France and Russia began to negotiate for peace, and relations between Pitt on the one hand and George III and Lord Bute on the other, which in the mid-1750s had been cordial, but which had been put under strain in late 1758 by Pitt’s high-handedness in office, steadily worsened, until on 5 October 1761 Pitt resigned the seals of office. By the summer of 1762, and with the resignation of Newcastle on 26 May of that year, Bute became First Lord of the Treasury and was thus fully in the ascendant. Peace negotiations moved forward with renewed velocity, and on 3 November 1762 the duke of Bedford signed the preliminary articles of what on 10 February 1763 would become the Treaty of Paris. Pitt rose from his sickbed to denounce the terms of the preliminary articles as unduly lenient toward France and embodying an unforgivable desertion of Britain’s heroic Protestant ally, Frederick the Great—but to no avail.
Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the arguable shabbiness of her behavior in sealing the peace, at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 Britain was beyond question the dominant world power, with vastly enlarged territories in America, a free hand in India, and no serious rival among the great nations of Europe. The situation was caught in a remark of Johnson’s made a few years afterward:
It being observed to him [Johnson], that a rage for every thing English prevailed much in France after Lord Chatham’s glorious war, he said, he did not wonder at it, for that we had drubbed those fellows into
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a proper reverence for us, and that their national petulance required periodical chastisement.16
Yet it was a precarious eminence, as Johnson’s likening of Pitt to a “meteor” (as opposed to the “fixed star” of Walpole) perhaps hinted.17 At least some of the seeds of the two great convulsions of the later eighteenth century—the War of American Independence, and the French Revolution—can be found in the legacy of the Seven Years’ War.
With respect to America, the deceptive glory achieved in 1763 encouraged British statesmen to adopt imperious policies toward the North American colonists—policies which, as Fred Anderson observes, actually ran counter to the lessons a more subtle observer would have drawn from the conflict:
In the Philippine episode [the capture of Manila by Draper in 1762] more than any other of the Seven Years’ War, the principles of imperial dominion stood out with unmistakable clarity. Military power—particularly naval power—could gain an empire, but force alone could never control colonial dependencies. Only the voluntary allegiance, or at least the acquiescence, of the colonists could do that. Flags and governors and even garrisons were, in the end, only the empire’s symbols. Trade and loyalty were its integuments, and when colonial populations that refused their allegiance also declined to trade, the empire’s dominion extended not a yard beyond the range of its cannons.18
Pitt had realized that, to achieve victory, he must embrace Britain’s North American colonists. Accordingly he treated them as allies, not as auxiliaries, still less as subordinates; and they in turn saw themselves as partners in the project of empire. But victory turned the minds of British politicians away from the comprehensive policies which had been the mother of success and beckoned them instead down the ruinous paths of autocracy. The exertion of control from Whitehall was now the favored mode of administration. The resulting new techniques of imperial administration raised in the minds of the colonists doubts as to whether their interests and those of Great Britain were not only the same but even aligned.
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The small irony that Washington acquired in the service of Great Britain during the Seven Years’ War the military skills which he would later deploy against the mother country points toward the much larger irony that American independence can, without undue distortion, be seen as the unintended consequence of Britain’s triumph in securing and extending her North American colonies. Meanwhile in France, the check to imperial ambitions sustained in 1763 had removed if not the solution then at least a possible palliative for the economic and social problems which would in 1789 demand more drastic remedies.
Montagu’s Reflections was written as an intervention in the first of these crises, and it went on to enjoy an afterlife in the second and third. As we shall see, it is a work of history which is repeatedly wrong-footed by history itself, being uniformly invoked in support of causes against which events were soon to set their face. Yet the facts of its republication and translation suggest that until the end of the century it never entirely lost its power to interest and even to influence.
Reflections and the Seven Years’ War
By publishing the Reflections in 1759 Montagu was at one level opportunistically following in the footsteps of John “Estimate” Brown, who two years previously had enjoyed meteoric success with his civic humanist chiding of decadent Britain, Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times. But Montagu’s focus on the ancient republics gave a distinctive twist to his contribution to the chorus of voices lamenting Britain’s decline. As he explained in the preface:
The
