A history of England

by Charles Oman

The Seven Years' War, like the War of the Austrian Succession, had two sides—the Colonial and the European. In 1756, as in 1742, England, while contending for her own objects beyond seas, was also subsidizing a powerful continental ally, who had his own interests to serve, in order to distract the attention of France from the more distant struggle. The new war resembled the old in another respect. In each case it was the colonial quarrel which first came to the front; the European strife was a later development. The causes which provoked the Seven Years' War were to be found both in America and in India. In both of these quarters the representatives of England and of France came to blows before the mother countries had resolved on war. The quarrel was the result of natural causes which made it inevitable, and not the deliberate work of the timid Newcastle or the selfish Lewis XV.

Supremacy of Dupleix in Southern India.

It was in India that the first hostilities broke out, not very long after the peace of Aachen had been signed. We have already mentioned how the French governor Dupleix had raised an army of Sepoys, and resolved to employ it for the furtherance of French interests in Southern India. He was enabled to do this by the fact that a war of succession had broken out in each of the two great native states which were neighbours to the European settlements on the Coromandel coast. In the Deccan two princes of the Nizam family, an uncle and a nephew, were disputing for the throne of Hyderabad. In the Carnatic a rebellious minister was trying to usurp his master's throne. Dupleix resolved to sell the aid of his army to one pretender for use against the other. The appearance of his disciplined battalions in the field settled the fortune of war at once. He gained for his ally Mozuffer Jung the whole of the Hyderabad dominions. Then he turned against the Carnatic, slew the old nawab in battle, and drove his son, Mohammed Ali, into Trichinopoly, his last stronghold. The rebel minister, Chunda Sahib, was then saluted as ruler of the land. The two new nawabs soon became the mere creatures of Dupleix, whose military strength completely overawed their motley armies. They lavished millions of rupees upon him, and Mozuffer Jung gave him the title of Supreme Vizier of all India south of the river Kistnah, and appointed him permanent chief of his army.

Clive seizes and holds Arcot.

Dupleix was in truth master of Southern India, a fact viewed with dismay by the English settlers along the Coromandel coast. They had, in rivalry with him, espoused the cause of the two nawabs whom he had crushed. One of these princes was now dead, the other besieged in his last stronghold. The rulers of Madras despaired, but a single bold spirit persuaded them to venture a blow against the power of the Frenchman. Robert Clive, the scapegrace son of a Shropshire squire, had been sent out to Madras as a clerk in the East India Company's service to keep him out of mischief. But he changed his pen for the sword, and became a captain in the Company's army. Now he persuaded Governor Saunders to entrust him with a few hundred men, to make a diversion in favour of the besieged nawab, Mohammed Ali. To draw away the army which was beleaguering Trichinopoly, Clive resolved to strike at the capital of the Carnatic, the town of Arcot. Marching by night and with great speed, he seized the place and fortified himself in its citadel. He was at once attacked by the forces of the Chunda Sahib, aided by a division of the army of Dupleix. But he contrived to inspire his 500 men with such obstinate courage, that they repulsed all the assaults of 10,000 enemies, and finally compelled the nawab's army to withdraw foiled (1751).

Further successes of Clive.—Dupleix recalled.

After thus winning Arcot, Clive was entrusted by the Madras Council with all their disposable troops—200 Europeans and 700 English Sepoys. With these reinforcements he took the field against Dupleix and Chunda Sahib, routed a number of French detachments, and finally recovered the whole of the Carnatic for Mohammed Ali, the protégé of the English. Chunda Sahib surrendered to his enemy, who had him murdered. Dupleix played a losing game against his greater rival for two more years, and was finally recalled in disgrace by the French Government (1754). Thus the English carried out the lesson which the great Frenchman had taught them, that India might be conquered with Indian arms, and that its princes might be made the vassals of the mere traders who had paid them humble tribute a few years before. With the establishment of the English suzerainty over the nawab Mohammed Ali and his realm of the Carnatic begins the English empire in Hindostan.

The struggle for the Mississippi valley.

Clive and Dupleix had posed as the mere auxiliaries of the nawabs, and their struggle was not supposed to commit the mother country to war. But a less disguised form of hostilities between England and France commenced somewhat later in America. Its cause was the want of any definite boundary between the settlements of the two nations. It was the ambition of the English colonists to push westward from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and gradually to colonize all the waste lands, sparsely inhabited by savage Indian tribes, which lay between them and the Mississippi. But the French had another and a no less ambitious scheme. Besides their dominions in Canada, they possessed another colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, round the town of New Orleans. They claimed that this territory of Louisiana stretched up to the head-waters of the great river, and it was their object to connect it with Canada by a string of forts placed along the Mississippi and its tributary the Ohio. If they could have carried out this gigantic and wide-stretching plan, they would have shut in the English colonies between the Alleghany mountains and the sea, and prevented them from extending into the interior of the continent. The weak point of the plan was that the French were far too few in numbers to execute any such project. Though they counted among them many hardy backwoodsmen and fur-traders, who had explored all the waterways of the West, they could not back these pioneers up with solid masses of population. There were not more than 180,000 French emigrants in America, while the English colonies boasted at this time nearly 2,000,000 sturdy settlers.