Part #2: The War That Left Everyone Wanting More
“The War of Austrian Succession” by Johan Strassbourg
After the great French victory at Dettingen and subsequent reversal of the British position in the war, the new Prime Minster, William Pulteney decided to modify the treaty of Worms that his predecessor had been working on. It sought to stabilize the Italian situation as well as box France in. The Prime Minister, now completely committed to war decided to increase the subsidies going to the Italian states as well as to Maria Teresa. He also worked the fleet around to increase the Mediterranean squadron by 15 ships-of-the-lines.
The first of feel the full weight of this new war was Thomas Mathews, the commodore of the Mediterranean squadron of the Royal Navy. He had been shadowing a fleet of French ships and waiting for a formal declaration of war to engage them. Not only did he receive that, but more than he had bargained for, a fleet increase of incredible proportions and orders to destroy the fleet as imminently as possible. He also received news of his people back in his home baying for blood and desperate for a victory.
Thomas Mathews was not the man to give it to them. In the ensuing battle of Toulon, Mathews lined up his fleet incorrectly, due in part to his own incompetence and inexperience, but also to the disorganized and roughshod nature of the Royal Navy at the time. The smaller but better led Franco-Spanish fleet scattered and destroyed many of the British vessels and was able to escape. This battle along with the abysmal performance at the battle of Cartanegra in 1741 paved the way for very serious Royal Navy reforms.
This French victory gave them free reign to land as many troops as they could in northern Italy. The British allied and subsidized Sardinian force led by their king Emmanuel III faced off against a French assault force landed off the victorious fleet in the battle of Villafranca, fought in April of 1744. This was a Pyrrhic French victory, with a causality ratio of two to one and with Sardinian forces retreating to the mountains but ensuring that any French advance into Italy would be futile.
The Pragmatic Army meanwhile had been retreated towards Flanders to lick their wounds and receive British reinforcements. The Duke of Cumberland particular felt personally responsible for his father’s embarrassment and his first defeat on the battlefield at Dettingen. He vowed that he would win a victory for himself and for the glory of his father and he knew where to take his stand.
By early 1745, the greatest French Marshal of his generation, Maurice Saxe was preparing to take Flanders from Austria. In many ways the French political establish saw it as their territory to take. There were many French speakers, it was a rapidly industrializing area and it was a security threat to have a large territory full of Hapsburg troops; perpetual enemies to the Bourbon dynasty. And in their mind, Saxe was the most gifted general take it.
He was soon scheming of how to set another trap for the Pragmatic Army and crush them once and for all. He sent out several smaller armies to besiege the border forts lined along the line separating France and Flanders. In particular, he sent a large force to besiege Mons near where the Pragmatic Army was camping.
Their trap had worked as well as could have hoped. The sieges had diverted thousands of men from the battle that he could now control the terms of himself. The Pragmatic Army was marching to meet him a Tournai and he decided to cut them off at the small village of Fontenoy. They formed up and prepared to fight. The resulting Battle of Fontenoy seemed to play into Marshal Saxe’s plan. The French troops had begun to surround and subsequently destroy the Pragmatic Army. But Marshal Saxe didn’t count on the ‘martial son’ of Britain, The Duke of Cumberland.
He had been humiliated at the battle of Dettingen and he was now the laughingstock of Britain. He had to redeem himself on the battlefield after such a dismal debut. He found himself facing off now with a great French army in the Austrian Netherlands and he knew what to do. The French had positioned themselves on a hill and prepared to again shell the British into submission, but this time was different.
The Duke led twelve regiments (what Saxe would later call ‘the infernal column’) up the hill and charged the weaker lined French infantry on the top of the hill. Although they sustained some causalities getting to the lines, the bloodbath once they reached them was horrific and stirred an intense amount of confusion on both sides. Both sides were tearing each other to pieces in close hand to hand combat, but now it was the Duke that had the trap to spring. While the Marshal was distracted by the infernal column’s charge and redirecting forces to combat them, he lost track of the four foot regiments and two cavalry led by Brigadier Ingoldby. At the Duke’s signal, Ingoldby attacked and took the Redoute D’Eu, a small hill on the right of the French position, ran straight through a token Irish foot regiment and ended up at Saxe’s rear. The route was nearly complete.
Louis XV had come to witness the battle along with Marshal Saxe, but quaked at the sight of the Duke of Cumberland and Ingoldby charging straight for their position. No doubt he was thinking about being captured himself and certainly knew of the vengeance and retribution from the people of ‘perfidious Albion’ that would come with it. He immediately ordered the frustrated army to retreat. Saxe, although devastated, embarrassed and angry, decided to follow orders and limped away from the battlefield.
The Duke of Cumberland and his daring assault with the Pragmatic Army were given accolades across Europe. The Duke was especially given praise, where he was said to redeem himself fully from his follies at Dettingen. They could celebrate; they saved the Austrian Netherlands and ultimately their own pathway back home. While there would be some border skirmishes along the border of Flanders and France, ultimately 1745 and the battle of Fontenoy marked the end of land combat on the western side of the continent.
The Austrians were very gracious for that victory in the face of other events in Silesia. The battle of Hohenfriedburg in 1745 had pitted the best Austrian troops against Frederick II’s highly trained Prussian Army. During the battle, he had utilized every possible cunning technique and fought to standstill. But after a few hours, the smoke cleared and the Beyreuth Dragoons, one of his premier brigades of 1500 men found and opening in the Austrian lines and charged. The Austrian army was broken and with it, any hopes that they could regain Silesia this time around. It was after this battle that many Prussians, as well as many across Europe began styling the King of Prussia, Frederick “The Great”.
While some other battles were being fought along the barrier between France and the Austrian Netherlands with British and Dutch troops to pand large battles in the colonial theaters, overall conflict died down throughout 1746 and the peace process was well on the way by mid 1747...
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An excerpt from “King George’s War”
The conflict known as the War of Austrian Succession in Europe was known as King Geroge's War in North America by the British subjects there. In many ways, the conflict would prove to confirm the trends that had been developing among the peoples inhabiting the continent.
In 1744, after several inconclusive skirmishes between the French, Indians and British troops, the northern colonies, led by Massachusetts governor William Shirley, planned a fully colonial led assault on the French fort at Louisbourg in what is today Nova Scotia. The governor gathered nearly three thousand men from colonial militias, over twenty canon, as well as several ships donated from all of the northern colonies.
The expedition, as it set out in March of 1744, took on the air of a religious crusade; a violent and militaristic manifestation of the years of virulent anti-French and anti-Catholic feelings brewing throughout New England during this time period. They wanted a victory badly against the French, who were seen the quintessential enemy. They had prepared from all of the stories of the vicious French soldiers that allied themselves with the mysterious and horrifying Indians, waiting for them to come north so they could pounce.
Fortunately for the New Englanders, they were over prepared. The French forces inside Louisbourg were badly underfed and underpaid, making them almost mutinous. Worse, the government back in Paris had forewarning of the colonial led assault on the Fort and decided to do nothing to try and stop of them. All of this coupled together to make the siege decisively easier for the New Englanders.
The French soldiers did not meet them out on the battlefield and survived for a surprisingly long amount of time. After all, with the religious fervor of the invading force, they were certainly fighting for their lives. They held out until June, when the colonial troops overtook the fortress, ransacked and subsequently occupied it. Shirley and the others were quite happy with themselves, produced pamphlets declaring their victory and generally increasing their own popularity and cementing their leadership role. But in this celebration, they became complacent and entirely too arrogant. Throughout the winter, the small garrison the New Englanders had placed in the fortress whittled away to nothing, leaving them defenseless.
So in 1747, six French ships carrying roughly one thousand troops landed near Louisbourg as part of a rescue attempt to recapture the Fort from the British. They were the only survivors of the Battle of Cape Finnistere, where the famous General George Anson destroyed or captured nearly the entire French fleet save those six troop transports. The battle ended any sizeable French naval presence in Europe, as the escorting fleet of thirty five ships were ahnillated by Anson, but they managed to buy enough time to let those troop ships escape and manage to weather the Atlantic trip to Nova Scotia.
The landing took place during the spring, as the battered garrison was emerging from the cold and dreadful winter with nearly half their original numbers. They were quickly sliced to shreds by the superior French force and Louisbourg was retaken and its inhabitants restored in the town. The loss was a shock and near panic broke out in New England. While Boston and the rest of the coastal settlements seemed safe, militias were called up throughout 1747. Everyone was deathly afraid of a French invasion until word of peace arrived. Paranoia, however wasn’t even the most important impact of the retaking of Louisburg.
In northern New York, at the border of the Mohawk Valley, a wealthy landowner named Sir William Johnson decided that enough was enough and decided to organize as many men as he saw fit among the Mohawks he was neighbor to and went on raiding parties on the outskirts of Montréal. While their methods of scalping were considered controversial in their day and morally repugnant in ours, it was quite successful at preventing French counter raids until peace was declared in 1748…
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An excerpt from “Jacobites: The Rebellions” by William O’Connoll
For years after his father had bestowed the role of the Stuart claimant on him, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, or Bonnie Prince Charlie as his decorators in London called him, had been calling for a French backed invasion of England so he could reclaim the Stuart monarchy for himself and reestablish absolutism. He certainly wasn’t taken seriously in his claims. While the French court hosted him, they patronized him and even allowed him to even claim the throne of France, dating back to Hundred Years War. Bonnie Prince Charlie didn’t really understand that he was being mocked in the process. This above all else showed how silly they considered the Jacobite claimant. They really only kept him on to be a thorn in the side of the British and really only as a scary specter of British unrest and invasion that they could never really raise.
So after the battle of Fontenoy in 1745, Charles thought that, with almost all of the British Army camped in Flanders, the times was ripe for a covert force to land in Scotland and begin another rebellion. Ultimately he wanted to gather enough forces to march on London and depose the Hanoverian ‘pretender’ in his eyes.
But the French and particularly Louis XV, still smarting from the defeat of their best armies at Fontenoy, were very apprehensive. They couldn’t take another defeat and were already in the process of negotiating a peace treaty. While Charles was unhappy that the French, who had previously wanted to help him were now unwilling to. Nevertheless, he wouldn’t let the pessimism of another monarch dictate his chances towards reclaiming his crown. He decided he was going to be raising the funds himself. He gathered extra money from several sympathetic aristocratic friends in Paris and even went as far as pawning off his mothers jewelry to raise enough for an expedition.
Ultimately, he was able to field one ship-of-line called the Elisabeth and fielded over 450 men from the Irish Brigade and set out to Scotland, where Charles would make his stand. He nearly failed however, when a Royal Navy task force spotted him, but luckily, fog that night prevented them from engaging and destroying the ship. So Charlie and the hopes of a Jacobite restoration moved on.
They landed in Scotland in May of 1745 and immediately met with several important Scottish highlander clans who pledged their fealty to Charles and he began to raise an army. Ultimately by Mid-June, he had gathered up enough support to field an army of roughly 5000 men and decided to march inland to take Scotland back for the Stuarts.
The small British garrison led by John Cope heard the uprising was happening and he, while more than a little panicked, decided to go out and meet the Jacobite rebels and defeat them as the rebellion of 1715 were defeated. But with the vast majority of the British Army in Flanders, his troops were relatively inexperienced and not prepared for the force that they would come up against. They marched north and eventually spotted the mostly Scottish Jacobite army and Cope had the advantage with 7000 men, so he decided to engage them at Corriarack Pass in late June.
The resulting battle was, in retrospect, unsurprising. The Scottish force was made up of mostly Highlanders who were renowned for their fierce and unorthodox fighting style, while Cope’s forces were inexperienced and Cope was not a capable commander. The fight ended up quite bloody, with many losses on both the Jacobite and the British government forces, but the ferocity of the Highlanders took their toll. Over half of the British forces died, with the rest scattering southward in retreat with Cope leading.
Charles was delighted and marched with his new army to Edinburgh, where he crowned himself King of Britain in August. Cope reached Liverpool then as well and sent word to London that Scotland was now in full blown rebellion. Parliament, led by Pulteney, was up in arms and quickly sent for troops from those holding down France in the Austrian Netherlands. The Duke of Cumberland mulled over the situation on the continent before choosing his course of action. After Fontenoy, he had fought several skirmishes with the French including the battle of Bruge and other French assault, all of which were too small to actually threaten their position in the Austrian Netherlands. He knew that forces threatening Britian itself should be dealt with severely, but he knew if he removed too many troops, his position could crumble. But in reality, he knew from intelligence reports that the Jacobites did not have a massive support base and inexperienced government troops held their own. So the Duke of Cumberland decided to have 5000 of his soldiers under Henry Huxley, one of his most competent lieutenant generals to deal with the rebellion while the rest of his forces remained to defend the Austrian Netherlands.
Huxley knew that he would have to move quickly to stamp out this rebellion and when they landed, they were very cautious. However, they needn’t be. The new ‘king’ of Great Britain was engaging in irresponsible frivolity since he had taken up court in Edinburgh and because of his adherence to the divine right of kings, made sure that every decision about the army and the lands he ruled was his to make, and his decision only.
Huxley, confident from his role in the victory at Fontenoy, marched his troops noisily northward towards the pretender’s throne at Edinburgh. Charles, now positively ecstatic in his role in the “true king of Great Britain”, decided it was the perfect time to march south and take his rightful English throne for himself as well. He readied his troops and decided to march south to meet them. The armies clashed at Falkirk and Charles was woefully unprepared for the battle ahead of him. Emboldened by his claim of power in Edinburgh and his victory at Corriarack pass, Charles decided to take part in battle himself and make all of the decisions related to the course of the battle. This proved to be disastrous against a very large and well trained force under the command of the not only competent but very skilled Henry Huxley.
Not only was the battle of Falkirk a rout, but Huxley captured Charles and the rest of his band of supporters and had them dragged back to London. There, they were put before a court and sentenced to treason and beheaded. This sparked King George II to enact several draconian laws against the Scottish culture, including banning the Highlander uniform in an effort to stamp out the unique cultural practices of the rebellious areas. He also commissioned a system of military roads to try to establish permanent garrisons so that Scotland could be pacified quickly again. The fear of uprising never again threatened Scotland but the roads would serve to jump start Edinburgh and Glascow's prominence in Britain's industrial revolution...
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An excerpt from “The Carnatic Wars”
The War of Austrian Succession was known as the First Carnatic War among the myriad of Indian sultanates and kingdoms as well as to the multiple monolithic companies bent on control of the continent. It was a perfect power vacuum in the face of the collapsing Mughal Empire and was a heady time for those willing to grab power. The war was a way for the young and soon to be world famous directors and soldiers fought over the vast riches held in the rich oriental lands of India.
The most ambitious of these commercially minded men was Joseph Francois Dupleix. He was a headstrong, ambitious, but most of all resourceful new head of the French East India Company. He was an expert in building alliances among the princes and sultans growing in their power as the Mughal Empire receded. He constantly had to struggle with a permanently difficult and unhelpful French government. But his skills at hiring and training local regiments as well his audacious demeanor made him and the FEIC a force to be reckoned with during his time as the director.
The First Carnatic War was where Dupleix could really spread his legs and expand the FEIC’s diplomatic and trade dominance in southern India. It is important to note here that while Britain and France were bitter enemies in Europe, their respective trading companies were quite cordial, often trading and cooperating together on commercial ventures. Dupleix harbored no animosity towards the British, but remained ever the opportunist. So when Royal Navy and BEIC ships raided and captured a few French trading vessels, he knew it was time to strike. The struggle began with some skirmishes between the FEIC and BEIC sea fleets, with the British capturing a few French ships and obtaining small victories. Dupleix, however was to call for reinforcements from as far out as Mauritus and prepared to strike at the nerve center of the British in the Carnatic, Madras.
He, using hitherto unseen tactics of regiments of Indian soldiers under French officers, besieged Madras for several months. Ultimately, he starved the city and garrison out and captured the fort in 1746. Several hundred British soldiers were captured, but it was one extremely gifted company man led an escape from the clutches of the FEIC guards and brought word to Fort St. David to the south, in Cuddalore. His name, soon to be broadcast across the British Empire, was Robert Clive. Clive escaped with the knowledge that Dupleix would use his momentum to attack the very fort he was escaping to. Fort St. David was now the only British garrison of any mention in the Carnatic and if Dupleix captured it, he and the FEIC would have unprecedented control of the Carnatic. He went directly to his higher authority in Calcutta; Stringer Lawrence.
Lawrence appealed to the Nawab of the Carnatic, Anwaruddin Muhammed Khan, who was allied to the British at the time. He supplied them with auxiliary troops and defeated the FEIC sepoy forces as they were moving south towards the siege in 1747. Shortly thereafter, word spread that a peace treaty was to be signed between Britain and France, ending the war of Austrian Succession. Dupleix was unhappy of course, but knew what he had to do to ensure French hegemony in the Carnatic…
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The Treaty of Aix-La-Chapelle
It was signed in 1748, officially ending the War Austrian Succession between all of the major powers of the time (Austria, Prussia, Russia, France and Britain) and returned much to status quo ante bellum, despite many misgivings among the powers. France, arguing its victories in Italy, wanted Parma, presumably under Spanish (and therefore Bourbon) sovereignty. But the defeat at Fontenoy as well as several small victories by King Immanuel of Piedmont ensured that Parma was retained by Austria.
One large concession was the British Fort St. George in Madras. This was masterminded by the founder of the modern French East India Company and was fast becoming the most powerful man on the Indian subcontinent. He had outsmarted the British and was beginning to force them from the Carnatic and this well placed gain would only further cement his control.
Prussian control of Silesia was begrudgingly recognized by Austria and Great Britain but Maria Teresa certainly wasn’t happy. The North American front remained deadlocked as well, with Louisbourg being fought over endlessly and raids taking place on both sides. That was certainly seen as one flashpoint for the Seven Years War, but the scheming of Maria Teresa to have Silesia returned was certainly the cassus belli…
