The Pursuit of Glory, page 72
Poltava was a truly world-historical event, much more momentous than Blenheim, for example. Peter the Great’s (and his sobriquet was now merited) own comment was ‘now, with God’s help, the final stone has been laid in the foundation of St Petersburg’. Leibniz summed up the response of the rest of Europe when he described the battle as a ‘great revolution’, adding: ‘It is being said that the Tsar will be formidable to the rest of Europe, that he will be a sort of Turk of the North.’ But Poltava did not bring peace. In 1711, indeed, Peter only narrowly escaped disaster at the hands of the Turks on the River Prut in Moldavia. As this location suggests, the ‘Great Northern War’ is something of a misnomer. This prolongation of a war the Swedes had irretrievably lost was due in part to Charles XII’s refusal to face facts, more evidence, if it were needed, of the importance of the individual in determining the fate of millions. He returned to the north in 1714, but not even an amazing equestrian feat–he rode 900 miles (1,500 km) in a fortnight–could arrest the further contraction of Sweden’s Baltic empire. His obduracy was strengthened by the interference of other powers once the War of the Spanish Succession had come to an end. Both George I of England, in his capacity as Elector of Hanover, and the Dutch went fishing in the troubled waters of the Baltic.
The negotiation of a peace was assisted by the shooting of Charles XII at the siege of Fredrikshald in Norway in the autumn of 1718, possibly by one of his own soldiers, but was complicated by the fierce mutual rivalry of Sweden’s enemies, especially Hanover and Russia. The first treaty in what amounted to the partition of the Swedish empire was signed in November 1719 between Sweden and Hanover, ceding the substantial principalities of Bremen and Verden to Hanover. Early the following year, peace was signed between Sweden and Prussia, giving the latter most of Pomerania, including Stettin and control of the River Oder. In July 1720 Denmark also made peace, gaining full sovereignty over the Duchy of Schleswig, previously shared with the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. Peace with Russia proved more problematic, for the Swedes hoped for French and British-Hanoverian assistance to force Peter the Great to moderate his demands. Only when it became clear that they were on their own did the Swedes agree to settle. By the Treaty of Nystad in August 1721 Russia gained the provinces of Livonia, Estonia, Ingria and a large part of Karelia. This was not so much the ‘window on the west’ that Peter had long sought as a whole panorama, and confirmed that Sweden had been replaced by Russia as the dominant power in north-eastern Europe.
The collapse of Sweden and the reduction of Poland to a satellite of Russia posed a serious problem for France, which in the past had relied on a ‘leap-frog’ strategy of encouraging countries in the north and east to bring pressure to bear on the Habsburgs in between. It was a problem that had been exacerbated by further defeats suffered by the Turks at the hands of Prince Eugène in the war of 1716–18, which cost them the Bánát of Temesvár and Belgrade. With all three traditional French allies in a greater or lesser state of decay, adaptation was clearly called for. One way forward had been proposed by Peter the Great when he visited Paris in 1717. He told the comte de Tessé, the government minister deputed to look after him during his stay: ‘France has lost its allies in Germany; Sweden, almost destroyed, cannot be of any help to it; the power of the Emperor has grown infinitely; and I, the Tsar, come to offer myself to France to replace Sweden for her…I wish to guarantee your treaties; I offer you my alliance, with that of Poland…I see that in the future the formidable power of Austria must alarm you; put me in the place of Sweden.’ Denied the advantage of hindsight, which would have allowed them to see that the seismic shift in the distribution of power in eastern Europe was going to be permanent, the French did not respond. As we shall see, this failure to adapt was to be damaging.
One aspect of the wars that came to an end between 1713 and 1721 that does not always attract the attention it deserves is the importance of simultaneous domestic conflicts. Most obviously, perhaps, the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ was also, at least in its early stages, a civil war in Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, and on the mainland an only slightly less virulent struggle between Jacobites and Hanoverians. Neither the battle of the Boyne nor the defeat of the Jacobite rising of 1715 put an end to this dimension, for the French were constantly looking to invade England through a Celtic backdoor, whether Irish or Scottish. At the other end of Europe, for most of the War of the Spanish Succession the Habsburgs were also fighting Hungarian and Transylvanian insurgents in a full-scale war that did not end until 1711. In the Holy Roman Empire, the Bavarians were forced to evacuate the Tyrol in 1703 after a pro-Habsburg rising, while in the following year the Habsburgs abandoned the attempt to annex Bavaria in the face of a popular rising in support of the Elector. Nor was France exempt: in March 1704, Louis XIV felt obliged to transfer his best general, the duc de Villars, from the German front to the Cévennes to put an end to the ‘Camisard war’ waged by Protestants there since 1702. It may be conjectured that Marlborough and Prince Eugène would have found the campaign that resulted in Blenheim much more demanding if Villars had been directing the French armies. In the north, Charles XII was constantly at risk from the sort of aristocratic coup that put an end to absolutism on his death and ushered in the ‘age of freedom’. Peter the Great’s campaigns against the Swedes were constantly hampered by Cossack revolts–by the Don Cossacks in 1707 or by the Ukrainian Cossacks in 1708, for example. And so on. The interdependence of foreign power and domestic stability, and vice versa, may seem a truism but is often overlooked. It did not diminish in importance in the century that followed, as we shall see in the next two chapters.
12
From the Peace of Nystad to the French Revolutionary Wars
1721–87
DYNASTIC PROBLEMS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PENTARCHY
The treaties of the second decade of the eighteenth century might have ushered in a peace as durable as that which followed the Congress of Vienna at the very end of this period. Alas, Utrecht-Rastadt-Nystad turned out to be more like 1919 in their fragility. Even before the Great Northern War had been brought to a close, the western powers were at it again. However, this was rather different from the earlier war, for Great Britain and France were now on the same side. Just how this remarkable volte-face–in its way just as radical a diplomatic revolution as that of 1756–came about tells us a lot about the continuing importance of dynastic, as opposed to national, considerations in determining foreign policy. Of course Louis XIV, for example, had always been concerned to press the interest of the Bourbon family; indeed this has been something of a leitmotiv of recent historiography. Yet he was always careful to identify family and national interests, in the same way that he identified his person with the state. Even if he never actually said ‘I am the state’, he did say much that amounted to the same thing. And he did write in The Craft of Kingship in 1679:
Kings are often obliged to act contrary to their inclination in a way that wounds their own natural good instincts. They should like to give pleasure, and they often have to punish and ruin people to whom they are naturally well disposed. The interests of the state must come first…When one has the State in view, one is working for oneself. The good of the one makes the glory of the other. When the State is happy, eminent and powerful, he who is cause thereof is covered with glory, and as a consequence has a right to enjoy all that is most agreeable in life in a greater degree than his subjects, in proportion to his position and theirs.
If he conceded on his deathbed that he had liked war too much, and if even his most adulatory biographers allow that his early wars were motivated primarily by a search for personal gloire, his strengthening of the frontiers did benefit the whole nation.
Purely dynastic, on the other hand, was the policy adopted by Spain, which proved to be the rogue elephant of international politics. Or rather one should write: the policy adopted by the Queen of Spain, for the driving force was supplied by Elizabeth Farnese of Parma, whom Philip V had married as his second wife in 1714. Dominating her husband to a degree that very few consorts have achieved, she used the resources of her new country to carve out a patrimony for the two sons she bore–Don Carlos in 1716 and Don Philip in 1720. Neither seemed likely to succeed to the Spanish throne, as Philip V already had two surviving sons by his first marriage, so she turned her attention to Italy. In this she was aided and abetted by Giulio Alberoni, a turbulent priest originally from Piacenza who had first gone to Spain as secretary to the duc de Vendôme, had then become the envoy of the Duke of Parma and had been responsible for the selection of Elizabeth as Philip V’s new wife. An adventurer by temperament, he also appears to have harboured a strong antipathy towards the Austrians, the new masters of the Italian peninsula, and so was an enthusiastic accomplice.
In 1717 the ambitious duo despatched a mighty armada (the largest Spain had assembled since Lepanto in 1571) comprising 300 ships bearing 33,000 troops and 100 pieces of artillery to conquer Sardinia from the Austrians. As the latter were preoccupied with their latest war against the Turks, this proved to be a soft target. So too did Sicily, to which the victorious Spaniards moved the following year. This violent revision of the peace settlement then attracted the hostility of the other great powers, notably France and Great Britain. Both wished to see the status quo preserved, mainly for dynastic reasons. The Regent of France, the duc d’Orléans, naturally still entertained hopes of becoming king if the infant Louis XV were to die and so, equally naturally, was at daggers drawn with Philip V, the only other possible claimant. It was in pursuit of a possible Orleanist succession that he sought a rapprochement with Britain against Spain. George I was turned into a responsive listener to his overtures by the thought that an alliance would both neutralize the threat from the Stuart pretender and secure Hanover. The latter looked especially vulnerable in 1716 when Peter the Great went into winter quarters with a large army in the Duchy of Mecklenburg, next door to Hanover. So it was that the ‘natural and necessary enemies’ (as the British envoy to the French court, Lord Stair, put it in 1717) sank their differences and combined to put a stop to Elizabeth Farnese’s Mediterranean adventures. On 11 August 1718 a British fleet commanded by Admiral Byng destroyed the Spanish fleet off Cape Passaro, the southernmost point of Sicily, capturing seven ships of the line in open waters and then destroying the remaining seven that sought refuge inshore.
Two years of horror followed, both for the marooned Spanish army and their involuntary hosts, until the inevitable surrender was signed. Meanwhile, in 1719 a British expeditionary force landed in Galicia, taking Vigo and Pontevedra, and a French army invaded the Basque country, taking San Sebastian. Alberoni was dismissed and expelled. As John Lynch has written, ‘rarely has a war been so resoundingly lost, or a fall from favourite to scapegoat been so precipitate’. France and Britain now imposed a settlement to tidy up and stabilize the Utrecht-Rastadt treaties: Philip V was to renounce any claims to Italy or the southern Netherlands, but the succession to the duchies of Parma and Tuscany was assigned to his son by Elizabeth Farnese, Don Carlos; Charles VI finally abandoned his claim to the Spanish throne but received Sicily; Victor Amadeus II of Savoy had to give up the latter but received Sardinia in exchange and kept his royal title.
The complete package took a very long time to be implemented. Even the most gifted narrator would find it difficult to construct an account of the 1720s both coherent and interesting, or indeed either of those things. Only intense concentration and repeated reference to the chronology can reveal which abortive congress was which, which short-lived league brought which powers together, who was allied to whom, who was double-crossing whom, or whatever. Suffice it to say that this was a period when Great Britain enjoyed a preponderant influence on the European states-system that was as rare as it was brief. Among other things, the British succeeded in forcing the Spanish to recognize the commercial concessions granted at Utrecht and the Austrians to abandon their project for a commercial empire based at Ostend. One lucky beneficiary of all this hustling and bustling was Elizabeth Farnese, for whom sixteen years of scheming finally paid off when Don Carlos entered Parma in March 1732 as its new duke. The Spanish troops sent to assist him were transported across the Mediterranean in British ships, as was the garrison sent to Tuscany to protect his claim against the day when the current childless Grand Duke died.
By 1730 the French had recovered sufficiently from the exertions of the War of the Spanish Succession to contemplate resuming what they believed to be their rightful position at the apex of the European states-system. Not only had Louis XV survived childhood and adolescence, he was now a hale and hearty adult, who had sired a male heir in 1729 and gave every sign of producing many more. In 1726 he had sacked the incompetent duc de Bourbon and announced–in conscious imitation of his predecessor–that he would henceforth be his own first minister, although adding almost in the same breath that Cardinal Fleury would be present at all meetings with his ministers. Fleury was indeed the new director of French policy, bringing to foreign affairs an impressive combination of subtlety and resolution. He disliked the high-handed manner in which Sir Robert Walpole had imposed a pax britannica on the Mediterranean in 1731 and he was also alarmed by the Austro-Russian axis: ‘Russia in respect of the equilibrium of the North has mounted too high a degree of power, and its union with the House of Austria is extremely dangerous.’ So he began to distance France from the entente with Britain and to resume the leap-frog relationships with Denmark, Sweden, Poland and the Ottoman Empire.
Opportunity for the French to flex their muscles came from the succession problems that were afflicting several of their rivals. In Great Britain, the Stuarts were still a threat. Peter the Great’s failure to establish primogeniture destabilized the Russian state every time a Tsar or Tsarina died; indeed his decree that the incumbent should designate the successor positively invited instability. Most importantly, Charles VI had proved unable to produce a male heir, thus calling into question the succession to the Habsburg Monarchy. To guard against its partition, in 1713 Charles issued a ‘pragmatic sanction’ proclaiming that, in the event of his dying without a male heir, all his possessions in their entirety would pass to his elder daughter, the Archduchess Maria Theresa. This was bound to be problematic, not least because it involved passing over the daughters of his predecessor, his elder brother Joseph I. Charles now set about gaining international recognition for the pragmatic sanction and not without success, for Spain in 1725, Bavaria, Cologne and Russia in 1726, Great Britain and the Dutch Republic in 1731, and Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire in 1732 all gave their consent. It was not given freely, of course, but had to be bought by concessions of one kind or another. Whether it was worth all the diplomatic effort involved is doubtful. It is hard to disagree with Prince Eugène’s opinion that a large army and a well-stocked treasury would have been more help than these paper promises.
In the event, the next major European war was precipitated not by the Austrian but by the Polish succession. When Augustus II of Saxony-Poland died on 1 February 1733, Austria and Russia supported the election of his son as Augustus III, while France resurrected the candidature of Stanislas Leszczyski, who had been briefly King of Poland from 1704 until 1709 as the puppet of Charles XII. In the meantime, Stanislas had secured French support by the marriage of his daughter Maria to Louis XV in 1725. However, his son-in-law gave him only token support in Poland, choosing instead to campaign on the Rhine and in northern Italy. Here the French were uniformly successful and by 1735 were ready to dictate terms to the hapless Charles VI. Their diplomatic position had been greatly strengthened by an alliance with Spain, the ‘First Family Compact’ of 7 November 1733. The war was finally brought to an end by the Treaty of Vienna in May 1738, three years after the actual fighting had stopped. Its terms showed once again how important were dynastic considerations in determining the map of Europe. Augustus III was confirmed as King of Poland, with Stanislas Leszczyski receiving as compensation the Duchy of Lorraine, which on his death was to pass to France. The current Duke of Lorraine, Francis Stephen, who had married Charles VI’s heiress Maria Theresa in 1736, was to receive Tuscany, whose last Grand Duke had died in 1737. The Habsburgs were also to take the Duchy of Parma from Don Carlos, who was to receive Naples and Sicily, where he was to become ‘King of the Two Sicilies’. Although for the time being his brother Don Philip was not provided for, Elizabeth Farnese’s dream of setting up her boys as independent rulers had taken another giant step forwards.
So the pax britannica had been short-lived. It was the French who directed the peace-making of 1735–8 and it was they who seemed in control, for they had established a solid axis with their Spanish relations and extended Bourbon control over southern Italy. Their victory over Charles VI seemed all the more complete when financial exhaustion and military failure forced him to accept French mediation to bring to an end the war he had been fighting against the Turks since 1737. By the Peace of Belgrade of September 1739, the Turks regained most of the territory they had lost in 1718, including Belgrade, although the Austrians kept the Bánát of Temesvár. In the east, however, the situation was less encouraging, for the new King of Poland, Augustus III, was under no illusions that he owed his crown to Russian and Austrian support and was also married to a Habsburg. French leap-frog diplomacy was still intact, but was going to be more problematic in the future.
