Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire by Simms Brendan

Author:Simms, Brendan [Simms, Brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465013326
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2009-01-02T07:00:00+00:00

31. The ‘dog’ in this cartoon is Lord George Sackville, whose alleged cowardice at the Battle of Minden in 1759 became a matter of national controversy in Britain and dogged his later career.

out with the King and the Hanoverians over the conduct of military operations. It could potentially provide a rallying point for navalists and Germanophobes attacking the monarchy and the administration, and unravel the Continentalist consensus which had developed between 1757 and 1759.50

In this context, Pitt’s response was an indication of the value which he attached to the European theatre of war, even when it was domestically controversial. He had been a shrill partisan of Stair in 1743, and his relations with Sackville hitherto had been very cordial. Now he unhesitatingly took the Duke’s side. Sackville was court-martialled, and some thought him lucky to escape with his life. In ministerial circles Sackville was ostracized. He was cut by Pitt. Crucially, a key patriot paper, the Monitor, took an anti-Sackville line, though not vigorously. The Minden controversy fizzled, but it never ignited in the way that it would have done in the early 1740s. The Prince of Wales complained that he thought ‘the whole proceeding against Ld. George the most extraordinary and contrary to our constitution affair [sic] I have ever before met with’; and defiantly signalled his intention to continue to receive Sackville. George’s championship of Sackville was to bear unforeseen and disastrous fruit nearly twenty years later when he, as Lord George Germain, emerged from obscurity to take charge of the American colonies.51

In the course of 1759, therefore, Pitt had won over most of the sceptics to his integrated European and colonial strategy. The Prussian subsidies encountered no Tory opposition in December 1758, and in January 1759 Beckford averred that the Prussian subsidy ‘was giving money to America by this diversion on the continent of Europe and that if Hanover were lost, he would vote one hundred millions sooner than not recover it’. Truly, as he was later to boast, Pitt had brought the Tories to support his war coalition on ‘Whig principles’, by which he meant, of course, foreign policy principles. In broad sections of the public sphere, too, the conversion was complete. Here again, the Monito r led the way. Support for Hanover and Prussia, it argued repeatedly throughout the year, was not ministerial toadying, but part of a broader British project for the ‘preservation of a bulwark to arbitrary power and universal monarchy on the Continent’. 1759 also saw the creation of the London ‘Troop Society’ which was dedicated to help the widows and orphans of men killed in Germany. Loyal addresses to congratulate the King were already making fewer attempts to highlight colonial over Continental victories. The two theatres were increasingly seen, even by former navalists, as part of a single war effort. Even more to the point, popular opinion had accepted the central role of Hanover. Thus one print showed the British lion in collaboration with the Hanoverian horse against the French cock.

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