Chapter 13: Let’s Talk Peace
As the campaigning season began to draw to a close, Britain was facing up to the realities of a disastrous year. The Allies had been able to win multiple decisive battles, and it had become clear to Lord North that he was going to have to find a way out of the conflict, or resign. Rumors were swirling that Parliament was going to hold a confidence vote, and that was even before the news of Boston reached London.
On January 5th, 1781 Parliament held a vote of no confidence against the North ministry. Despite the best efforts of his supporters and the King, the continued defeats and mounting costs were too much to overlook. For the first time since Robert Walpole decades earlier, a government had fallen due to a no confidence vote. The conduct of the war would be left to a new government, and one soon was formed under Lord Shelbourne. Shelbourne made the decision to push for peace, and to get the best peace that they could get, and he knew that Britain’s enemies were running out of money.
Louis XVI had spent heavily backing the Americans, and despite all of the victories that had happened since the French had intervened in the Revolution, the Americans continued to ask for more. France’s finances were so bad that there were even calls to have a meeting of the Estates General to figure out how to get out of the debts that had skyrocketed over the last couple of years. With the news of Allied victories in America, the King instructed his ministers to begin peace talks, after an agreement with his Bourbon cousins across the mountains in Spain.
The Americans were ready for peace talks to begin as well. Despite all of the attempts by Congress to pay for the war, the debts were starting to pile up, and the inability to raise a national tax to get money to provide for the war effort was going nowhere due to states still not having a national outlook. Congress authorized the beginning of peace talks, and began to communicate with their European allies on a strategy for peace talks.
The peace talks would be held on neutral ground in Vienna. Austrian Emperor Joseph II had offered to host peace talks going off his previous offers to mediate the conflict between fellow European powers. Both sides accepted, as a way to get the process started, and hammer out the issues.
Two days before the peace talks, Charles James Fox, who was one of the most notable voices in Parliament against the Revolution, gave what would be one of the most famous speeches of his career.
“When all this started, the mistakes that we as a governing body and the rest of His Majesty’s government should have been obvious. The Americans were raising what they thought the issues were. We sit here in London half the world away, and we thought we knew what conditions in America were like. As much as one can argue that the American rebels should not have raised their populace to a rebellion against His Majesty, what should be noted is that all of this cost in lives, treasure, and effort should have been prevented, and could have been prevented.
What Lord North and the majority should have done is sent a group of ministers over to listen to them, and to observe what the colonists were saying. It might not have been perfect in our eyes, but all of this started because both sides were too hard headed to come to the peace table years ago. And what did this war win us? We’ve lost Gibraltar, battles in the Caribbean, and our bases in the southern part of the colonies. And who knows what we might have to trade to get them back? All of the gains by William Pitt’s government and strategy in the previous war might be going away, or at the very least diminished.
The peace talks that would eventually culminate in the Treaty of Vienna would have a profound impact on all of the nations, and would open up new avenues that would lead to later conflicts.
Author’s Notes: And we are back. We have an additional source in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara Tuchman. I personally recommend the book, as it discusses the fall of Troy, how the mistakes of 6 popes contributed to the rise of Lutheranism, the British government losing America, and America’s handling of the Vietnam War. So the Treaty of Vienna is going to be the analogue to OTL’s Treaty of Paris, but won’t be an exact copy. Thanks again for reading, and feel free to share your comments and questions.