The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended the war in 1748, settled nothing and satisfied nobody. It was, in fact, only a truce to let the tired opponents get their breath and prepare for the world-wide struggle which was to settle the question of oversea empire.
The British in America were very angry with the Mother Country for giving back Louisbourg. But they were much too narrow in their views; for their own fate in America depended entirely on the strength of the Royal Navy, which itself depended on having a safe base in the Mother Country. Now, France had conquered those parts of the once Spanish but then Austrian Netherlands which included the present coast of Belgium; and Britain could no more allow the French to threaten her naval base from the coast of Belgium then than she could allow the Spaniards before or the Germans in our own time. Therefore both she and her colonists won many points in the game, when playing for safety, by
CHAPTER XVI
PITT'S IMPERIAL WAR
(1756-1763)
The British part of the Seven Years War was rightly known as The Maritime War, because Pitt, the greatest of British empire-builders, based it entirely on British sea-power, both mercantile and naval. Pitt had a four-fold plan. First, it is needless to say that he made the Navy strong enough to keep the seaways open to friends and closed to enemies; for once the seaways are cut the Empire will bleed to death just as surely as a man will if you cut his veins and arteries. This being always and everywhere the Navy's plainest duty it need not have been mentioned here unless each other part of Pitt's fourfold plan had not only depended on it but helped to make it work. The second part of his plan was this: not to send British armies into the middle of Europe, but to help Frederick the Great and other allies to pay their own armies—a thing made possible by the wealth brought into Britain by oversea trade. The third part was to attack the enemy wherever British fleets and armies, acting together in "joint expeditions," could strike the best blows from the sea. The fourth was to send joint expeditions to conquer the French dominions overseas.
But lesser men than Pitt were at the head of the Government when the fighting began; and it took some time to bring the ship of state on to her proper course even after his mighty hand began to steer.
In 1754 "the shot heard round the world" was fired by the French at Washington's American militiamen, who were building a fort on the spot where Pittsburg stands today. The Americans were determined to stop the French from "joining hands behind their backs" and thus closing every road to the West all the way from Canada to New Orleans. So they sent young George Washington to build a fort at the best junction of the western trails. But he was defeated and had to surrender. Then Braddock was sent out from England in 1755. But the French defeated him too. Then France sent out to Canada as great a master of the art of war on land as Drake had been by sea. This was the gallant and noble Montcalm, who, after taking Oswego in 1756 and Fort William Henry in 1757, utterly defeated a badly led British army, four times the size of his own, at Ticonderoga in 1758.
Meanwhile war had been declared in Europe on the 18th of May, 1756. On one side stood France, Austria, Saxony, Russia, and Sweden; on the other, Great Britain, Prussia, and a few smaller German states, among them Hanover and Hesse. Things went as badly here as overseas; for the meaner kind of party politicians had been long in power, and the Fleet and Army had both been neglected. There was almost a panic in England while the French were preparing a joint expedition against Minorca in the Mediterranean lest this might be turned against England herself. Minorca was taken, a British fleet having failed to help it. Hawke and Saunders were then sent to the Mediterranean as a "cargo of courage." But the fortunes of war could not be changed at once; and they became even worse next year (1757). The Austrians drove Frederick the Great out of Bohemia. The French took Hanover. And, though Frederick ended the year with two victories, Pitt's own first joint expedition failed to take Rochefort on the west coast of France. Clive's great victory at Plassey, which laid the foundation of our Indian Empire, was the only silver lining to the British clouds of war.
But in 1758 Pitt was at last managing the war in his own perfect way; and everything began to change for the better.