Lord Chatham, His Early Life and Connections

by Earl of Archibald Philip Primrose Rosebery

And now it is necessary to say a word of Continental affairs.

A life of Pitt should concern itself with Pitt alone, or with the persons and events immediately relating to him. But as during this period of his life foreign policy was all in all, and Britain seemed a mere anxious appendage to the Continent, it is necessary to give a succinct sketch of the familiar but complicated sequence of events in Europe which occurred at this time, and which inspired almost all the debates in which Pitt took part.

Walpole, as we have seen, had declared war against Spain in 1739, and the not very glorious course of those operations does not call for record. But the year 1740 marked a new and critical epoch. Death in those few months was busy lopping off the crowned heads of Europe, as if to clear the scene for two great figures. On February 6 died Pope Clement XII. On March 31 died the shrewd but brutal boor Frederick William I., and at the age of twenty-eight his son Frederick II. reigned in his stead. His accession was to unveil a mystery; and where mankind had hitherto seen a fiddling dilettante, contemptuous of his countrymen and craving for all that was French, to reveal the direct ancestor of German unity, the most practical and tenacious of conquerors. On October 20 the Emperor Charles VI., the figure-head for which we had fought in the War of the Succession, and, a week afterwards, Anne the Empress of Russia passed away. Rarely has the sickle of Eternity gathered so pompous a harvest. Between February and November it had garnered the Holy Roman Emperor, the Holy Roman Pontiff, the sovereign of Russia, and the sovereign of Prussia. Of these the death at Vienna was by far the most momentous. For Charles left behind him no son, but a young daughter of twenty-three, about to be a mother, whose succession he had attempted to secure by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1718, ratified and recognised by solemn international instruments. On the morning of his death she was promptly proclaimed sovereign of her father's dominions; but her treasury was empty and her ministers paralysed. Bavaria at once protested. Behind Bavaria stood Frederick armed to the teeth, eager to let slip the dogs of war. Every one saw his preparations; no one could tell at whom they were aimed.

'No fair judge,' Mr. Carlyle[147] tells us, can blame the 'young magnanimous King' for seizing this 'flaming opportunity.' The point is fortunately not one which a biographer of Pitt is called upon to discuss, except to note that hero-worship makes bad history. For our purpose it is sufficient to say that Frederick did avail himself of the new juncture of affairs. Charles had died on October 20; on December 6 the announcement was officially made in Berlin that the King had resolved to march a body of troops into Silesia; on December 13 these had passed the frontier, not as enemies of the Queen of Hungary or Silesia, it was declared, but as protective friends of Silesia and her Majesty's rights there. All this was preceded and accompanied by the strangest diplomacy that the world had seen, but which does not concern this abstract. Thus begins the first period of the Continental war.

Britain, like Prussia, was bound by treaty to maintain the Pragmatic Sanction which assured the Austrian dominions to Maria Theresa. Our statesmen at this moment were engaged in a pastime of more immediate interest and excitement, for they were hunting Walpole to death; the exhaustion of the quarry was evident; the end could not be far off. But even then the nature of the aggression and the appeal of a young and beautiful Queen exercised the usual influence on the chivalrous sympathies of the nation. Maria Theresa could, moreover, appeal to treaty rights. So that Walpole found himself reluctantly forced into a new war while the former was still undecided and incomplete. He agreed to renew the pledges of England to maintain that Pragmatic Sanction which secured the succession to the daughter of Charles VI.; he agreed, moreover, to an immediate subsidy of 300,000l., and to sending a force of 12,000 men. Meanwhile Marshal Schwerin had defeated the Austrians at Molwitz at the very moment that the House of Commons was debating these proposals.

This victory brought into the arena new and eager claimants for some part of the Austrian spoils, now apparently so available. The eminent guarantors of the integrity of Austria were suddenly transformed into hungry schemers for her immediate partition. Spain, Sardinia, and Poland-Saxony all advanced pretensions. But a mightier enemy was preparing to join hands with Frederick and take the field; for it was scarcely to be supposed that the secular enemy of the House of Hapsburg could remain quiescent at such a moment. France saw a unique opportunity for breaking up the Austrian dominions, and reducing the portion reserved to the young Queen to comparative insignificance. In France, as in England, the Minister was peaceful, but the party of war carried the day. Two French armies of 40,000 men each crossed the Rhine in August 1741. One under Marshal Maillebois marched on Hanover. The ruler of that State, who, as sovereign of Great Britain, was the active ally of Maria Theresa, hastily concluded a treaty of neutrality for one year, promising to give no assistance to the young Queen in his Hanoverian capacity, and to refrain from voting for her husband as Emperor. For this treaty George II. was violently attacked by his British subjects, who believed themselves to be fighting for Hanoverian interests, while Hanover itself was thus snugly removed into a haven of peace. The censure was, we think, excessive, if not undeserved. The treaty did indeed accentuate the duality which somewhat unequally divided the person of George. But if that be once conceded, it must be admitted that he was right as Elector to do his very best for Hanover, just as King he was bound to do his very best for England. As Elector, then, he was fully justified in keeping his defenceless State out of the devastation of war, from which it was destined to suffer so terribly sixteen years later from another French army under the Duke of Richelieu, when neutrality was no longer possible.

While Maillebois marched towards Hanover, the other army, under Marshals Belleisle and Broglie, marched through Bavaria and menaced Vienna. Maria Theresa had to fly to Hungary, and appeal in a manner made familiar by description to the chivalry of the Magyars. The Elector of Bavaria, who was the figure-head chosen by the confederates for the imperial throne, and who had his fill of titles in the lack of more substantial fare, was proclaimed Archduke of Austria at Linz, King of Bohemia in Prague, and soon afterwards Emperor in Frankfort. It seemed as if a vast partition was about to take place, and the House of Austria destined to disappear.

But this was the turning-point; in the general blackness there appeared rays of hope for Maria Theresa. Walpole, the peace minister, disappeared, and the control of Foreign Affairs in Great Britain passed to Carteret, who was warm for Austria, and eager to play an active part on the Continent. Moreover, the misfortunes of the Queen roused the enthusiasm of Great Britain. Five millions were voted for the war, half a million as a subsidy to the Queen of Hungary. Sixteen thousand men were sent into Flanders to assist the exertions of the Dutch. Unfortunately there were no exertions to assist, and our troops remained useless. Our fleets were more active. They harried the Spaniards and controlled the Mediterranean. A squadron entered the Bay of Naples and gave the King, afterwards Charles III. of Spain, an hour in which to decide whether he would abandon the confederacy against Austria or see his beautiful city bombarded. The King of Naples yielded, but as King of Spain never forgave the English for this humiliation.

Feb. 12, 1742.

The Austrians, too, found a bold and skilful general in Khevenhüller, who seized Bavaria and occupied Munich on the very day on which its ruler was crowned Emperor. In the succeeding June a peace, which proved afterwards to be but a truce, was concluded at Breslau between Austria and Prussia, through the mediation of Great Britain, and followed by the Treaty of Berlin, to which George II. both as King and Elector, the Empress of Russia, the States General, and the King of Poland as Elector of Saxony were parties. There had been a secret armistice between the two states in the winter of 1741, by which Lower Silesia and Niesse had been ceded to Frederick, but this had soon proved inoperative. A new situation was however produced by the severe battle of Chotusitz, in which the Austrians suffered defeat at the hands of Frederick. Maria Theresa now yielded to the pressure of the English ministry and ceded all Lower and part of Upper Silesia with the county of Glatz to Frederick, who in return abandoned his allies and left the French to themselves, on the plea that they were in secret communication with Vienna. Saxony, under his influence, also withdrew from the war, and the King of Prussia and the Elector of Hanover concluded a defensive alliance, the Elector guaranteeing Silesia and Glatz to the King. Frederick saw that he had been too successful. He was determined to retain Silesia, but he saw with apprehension great French armies overrunning the German Empire. That France should be aggrandised at the expense of Germany was no part of his policy. For Germany as Germany he had no natural affection; but the waters of Germany, however troubled they might be, he proposed to keep for his own fishing.