Seven Years' War

I

Introduction

Seven Years' War (1756-1763), conflict that comprised two distinct, if partially overlapping, conflicts. On the one hand, Britain and France were engaged in a worldwide war, from North America and the West Indies to West Africa, India, the borders of Hanover, and the coast of France. This war was officially declared in May 1756 (France being joined by Spain in 1762), and was concluded by the Treaty of Paris in February 1763. On the other hand, in the war that started in Central Europe with an attack by Frederick II of Prussia on Saxony in August 1756, Prussia (although supported financially by Britain from 1758 to 1762) fought alone against a coalition that included, at various times, Austria, Russia, France, Sweden, and the states of the Holy Roman Empire. Whereas France largely withdrew from this Central European conflict in 1759, Britain, whose military efforts on the continent were confined to defending Hanover from the French, was, along with Spain, never directly involved in it.

II

Origins of the Anglo-French War

The origins of the Anglo-French conflict lay in North America, as a pacifically inclined British government proved unable to control the encroachment of a British colonial population that had grown to 2 million on the trading interests of a French population of about 100,000 in the Great Lakes region and the Ohio Valley. A series of military clashes in 1754-1755 led to the issue of orders for the general seizure of French merchant ships by the Royal Navy. However, the French and Indian War started badly for the British, who suffered reverses both in North America (where the native population was less hostile to French traders than to British settlers) and, more spectacularly, in the Mediterranean, where Minorca was lost.

III

Origins of the Seven Years’ War in Germany

If the French had hoped that the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 had guaranteed them freedom from continental distractions while they fought Britain overseas, they had quite failed to anticipate the destabilizing consequences of the abandonment of their Prussian alliance that the revolution had entailed. In August 1756 Frederick II, convinced (rightly) that Russia and Austria were planning to attack him, and (wrongly) that Saxony and possibly France were about to join the conspiracy, finally lost his nerve and sought salvation in a pre-emptive strike, sending his armies across the Saxon and Bohemian frontiers. Although militarily the coup was successful, the defeated Saxon army being incorporated into the Prussian army, and the electorate becoming a milch cow for Prussia for the duration of the war, its diplomatic consequences were disastrous. The French, who had so far resisted the attempts of Count Anton von Kaunitz, adviser to Maria Theresa of Austria, to ensnare them in his anti-Prussian schemes, suddenly found themselves obliged by the First Treaty of Versailles (1756) to lend financial and military assistance to their Austrian allies. True, they could console themselves with the expectation that, given the odds against Prussia, the war was likely to be short; and in return for increased subsidies and the prospect of recovering Silesia, the Austrians offered France indirect control of the Netherlands, to be transferred eventually to Don Philip, Duke of Parma, the son-in-law of Louis XV of France (by the Second Treaty of Versailles, May 1, 1757). Nor did these calculations seem unrealistic, given that in January 1757 Russia and the states of the Holy Roman Empire had pledged their support in the forthcoming campaign, and that in March Sweden had joined the coalition. Not surprisingly, the campaign started badly for Frederick who, after failing to take Prague, was defeated by the Austrians at the Battle of Kolin (June 18, 1757), while the capitulation of the army led by the Duke of Cumberland in Hanover (at the Convention of Kloster-Zeven, September 8, 1757) seemed to put an end to all prospects of external support.

IV

Survival of Prussia, 1757-1762

That Prussia survived in the face of such a vast coalition was attributable in some degree to Frederick II himself—to his ruthlessness in exploiting the resources of occupied territories such as Saxony and Swedish Pomerania, and to his dynamic military strategy that utilized the advantages of a unified command structure, as well as to Prussia’s internal lines of communication that allowed Frederick to tackle his disparate enemies separately.

The opposing coalition, moreover, was an ill-coordinated and cumbersome affair, and this was not simply a question of the stubborn adherence of over-cautious Austrian commanders to a slow war of manoeuvre. The aims of the three chief allies were in fact seriously divergent, and they only rarely managed to act together. The French, for example, saw as their chief gain from the earlier War of the Austrian Succession the establishment in Germany of a dualist balance that allowed them to play Prussia and Austria off against each other; and they had no enthusiasm for Austro-Russian schemes to annihilate Prussia altogether. Rather similarly, as Russian commanders advanced westward they were always looking over their shoulders back towards the nation’s capital, St Petersburg, where Empress Elizabeth Petrovna was known to be in poor health, and her successor, Grand Duke Peter of Holstein (see Peter III), was a fanatical admirer of Frederick II. The Austrians and Russians, meanwhile, were chiefly preoccupied with their separate objectives in Silesia and East Prussia, and accusations of exploitation and disloyalty abounded.

In this situation, Frederick was able to survive the first crisis of the war. Inflicting a terrible defeat on a Franco-Imperialist army at Rossbach (November 5, 1757), he marched his forces eastward at an astonishing speed to rout the Austrians at Leuthen (December 5, 1757). If these victories saved the situation for Frederick in the east, they also had momentous repercussions in the west. Louis XV even thought of withdrawing from the war, which threatened to be a long one after all. At any rate, after Rossbach the French never again faced the Prussians in arms, but confined themselves to harassing the Anglo-Hanoverians in western Germany. In Britain, news of Frederick’s success finally determined the government of William Pitt the Elder to take the German conflict seriously. The Convention of Kloster-Zeven was subsequently denounced, and an army of observation established in Hanover under the capable Ferdinand of Brunswick; and from the spring of 1758 British subsidies flowed into Frederick’s coffers until Prussia emerged secure in 1762.

Although in January 1758 Frederick was unable to prevent the Russians from occupying East Prussia, his bloody victory at the Battle of Zorndorf (August 25, 1758) saved Brandenburg. By 1759 the strains on the opposing coalition were intensifying as France decided to concentrate her resources against Britain, revoking her promises about Silesia, renouncing all claims in the Netherlands, and cutting her subsidies to Austria and Russia (by the Third Treaty of Versailles, negotiated between December 1758 and March 1759). Frederick’s resources were, however, if anything even more depleted; if he had been able to start the first two campaigning seasons with an army of 150,000 men, he could hardly muster 100,000 for the last three. Worse still, in August 1759 the Russians and Austrians managed for the first time to combine their forces, inflicting a terrible defeat on Frederick at the Battle of Kunersdorf (August 12, 1759). He was only saved when the allied commanders failed to follow up their victory and moved off in different directions, allowing him to recall his forces fighting against the Swedes to retake Dresden from the Austrians. The closing years of the war were the grimmest for Frederick, constantly on the move against double the number of Austrians and Russians, and if lightning victories such as those of Liegnitz (August 15, 1760) and Torgau (November 3, 1760) gave his enemies pause, by 1761 he was in despair. He was saved when in January 1762 the death of the Russian empress (the “miracle of the House of Brandenburg”) brought the expected reversal of Russian policy. The new tsar, Peter III, and the king of Sweden made peace with Frederick in May 1762 and, for a time, until his deposition in July, Peter even talked of active cooperation with Prussia in a war to recover his patrimony of Holstein from the king of Denmark. True, Peter’s successor Catherine the Great, withdrew into neutrality, but clearly any chance that Maria Theresa, without an ally to support her, might yet encompass the dismemberment of Prussia had disappeared.