The Culture of the Seven Years' War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World 9781442696341

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I The Experience of Empire in the Seven Years’ War
1 From Vernon to Wolfe: Empire and Identity in the British Atlantic World of the Mid-Eighteenth Century
2 1759 – Year of Decision?
3 Colonial Disease, Translation, and Enlightenment: Franco-British Medicine and the Seven Years’ War
4 “Under His Majesty’s Protection”: The Meaning of the Conquest for the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada
II Imagining Conflict: Literature and the War
5 Paper Wars: Literature and/as Conflict during the Seven Years’ War
6 Shakespeare, Voltaire, and the Seven Years’ War: Literary Criticism as Cultural Battlefield
7 “What d’ye call him, Tierconneldrago …”: Oliver Goldsmith and the Seven Years’ War
III Individuals and Identities: Status, Gender, and Race
8 The View from St James’s Palace in 1759: A Court Perspective on the Annus Mirabilis
9 “Unfit to Serve”: Honour, Masculinity, and the Fate of Lord George Sackville
10 Olaudah Equiano and the Seven Years’ War: Slavery, Service, and the Sea
IV Empire and the Arts
11 Setting the Empire in Stone: Commemorating Wolfe in the Gardens at Stowe
12 George Stubbs’s The Zebra and the Spectacle of Fine Art at the End of the Seven Years’ War
13 Facing Past and Future Empires: Joshua Reynolds’s Portraits of Augustus Keppel
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

THE CULTURE OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

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The Culture of the Seven Years’ War Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

EDITED BY FRANS DE BRUYN AND SHAUN REGAN

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2014 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4355-0 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication The culture of the Seven Years’ War : empire, identity, and the the arts in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world/edited by Frans De Bruyn and Shaun Regan. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4355-0 (bound) 1. Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763 – Social aspects.  2. Atlantic Ocean Region – Civilization – 18th century.  I. De Bruyn, Frans, editor of compilation  II. Regan, Shaun, 1970–, editor of compilation DD411.5.C84 2014  940.2'534  C2013-908073-2

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn I  The Experience of Empire in the Seven Years’ War 1 From Vernon to Wolfe: Empire and Identity in the British Atlantic World of the Mid-Eighteenth Century  25 Nicholas Rogers 2 1759 – Year of Decision?  53 Fred Anderson 3 Colonial Disease, Translation, and Enlightenment: Franco-British Medicine and the Seven Years’ War  69 Erica Charters 4 “Under His Majesty’s Protection”: The Meaning of the Conquest for the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada  91 Alain Beaulieu II  Imagining Conflict: Literature and the War 5 Paper Wars: Literature and/as Conflict during the Seven Years’ War  119 Thomas Keymer

vi Contents

6 Shakespeare, Voltaire, and the Seven Years’ War: Literary Criticism as Cultural Battlefield  147 Frans De Bruyn 7 “What d’ye call him, Tierconneldrago …”: Oliver Goldsmith and the Seven Years’ War  169 Michael J. Griffin III  Individuals and Identities: Status, Gender, and Race 8 The View from St James’s Palace in 1759: A Court Perspective on the Annus Mirabilis 191 Nigel Aston 9 “Unfit to Serve”: Honour, Masculinity, and the Fate of Lord George Sackville  213 Robert W. Jones 10 Olaudah Equiano and the Seven Years’ War: Slavery, Service, and the Sea  235 Shaun Regan IV  Empire and the Arts 11 Setting the Empire in Stone: Commemorating Wolfe in the Gardens at Stowe  259 Joan Coutu 12 George Stubbs’s The Zebra and the Spectacle of Fine Art at the End of the Seven Years’ War  284 Douglas Fordham 13 Facing Past and Future Empires: Joshua Reynolds’s Portraits of Augustus Keppel  307 Daniel O’Quinn Notes on Contributors 339 Index 343 Plates follow p. 22

Illustrations

1.1

Louis-Philippe Boitard, British Resentment or the French fairly Coopt in Louisbourg, engraving, 1755.  35 11.1 Obelisk to Major General James Wolfe at Stowe, 1761–2. By kind permission of the National Trust, Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire. Photo: Joan Coutu.  262 11.2 The Grecian Temple at Stowe, begun 1747, dedicated as the Temple of Concord and Victory, 1762. By kind permission of the National Trust, Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire. Photo: Joan Coutu. 264 11.3 Interior, the Temple of Concord and Victory at Stowe. By kind permission of the National Trust, Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire. Photo: Joan Coutu.  266 11.4 Cobham’s Pillar at Stowe, 1749. By kind permission of the National Trust, Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire. Photo: Joan Coutu. 268 12.1 Mary Darly, The Zebra Loaded or the Scotch Pedler [sic], a Northern farce now playing in the South, September 1762, etching, 18.1 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library.  286 12.2 After William Hogarth, Headpiece for The Jacobite’s Journal, Number 6, London, 9 Jan. 1748. Woodblock relief, 11.3 x 18.6 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum.  287 12.3 Anon., The Times pl. 1st / Observations on The Times, 1762, etching, 22.2 x 18.7 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum.  292 12.4 Anon., The Real Ass, Author of the Allegorical One, 1762, etching and type press, 13.6 x 18.8 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 293

viii Illustrations

13.1 Edward Fisher, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Honourable Augustus Keppel, mezzotint, 1760. © Trustees of the British Museum. 316 13.2 John Boydell, after Francis Hayman, The Triumph of Britannia, engraving, 1765. © Trustees of the British Museum.  317 13.3 Anonymous, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Honourable Augustus Keppel, mezzotint, 1774–83. Published by Sayer and Bennett. © Trustees of the British Museum.  318 13.4 Carrington Bowles, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Honourable Augustus Keppel, mezzotint, 1778–93. © Trustees of the British Museum. 319 13.5 William Doughty, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Honble Augustus Keppel, Admiral of the Blue, mezzotint, 1779. © Trustees of the British Museum.  324 Plates follow page 22 Plate 1 Joseph Wilton, Monument to Major General James Wolfe, unveiled 1773, marble. Westminster Abbey, London. Photo: Dean and Chapter of Westminster. Plate 2 William Chambers, Joseph Wilton, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Nicolas Collett, and others, The Royal State Coach, 1760–2. London: Royal Mews, Buckingham Palace. Photo: Her Majesty the Queen. Plate 3 George Stubbs, The Zebra, 1763, oil on canvas, 102.9 x 127.6 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Plate 4 George Stubbs, Whistlejacket, c. 1762–5, oil on canvas, 292 x 246.4 cm, National Gallery, London, UK. Photo: Art Resource, NY. Plate 5 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Captain the Honourable Augustus Keppel, oil painting, 1752. National Maritime Museum. Plate 6 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Admiral Augustus Keppel, oil painting, 1765. National Maritime Museum. Plate 7 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Admiral Augustus Keppel, oil painting, 1779. National Maritime Museum. Plate 8 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Admiral Viscount Keppel, oil painting, 1781–3. Tate Britain.

Acknowledgments

The genesis of The Culture of the Seven Years’ War lay in two international conferences held in 2009 on either side of the Atlantic world that is the volume’s central geographic focus. Organized to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Seven Years’ War’s most decisive phase in 1759 – a year christened an annus mirabilis by a British public startled at their nation’s success – the two conferences undertook to explore the historical and cultural impact of the war, both at the time and in following decades. At an interdisciplinary conference in April 2009 sponsored by the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, Shaun Regan hosted a gathering that considered broadly the continuing cultural significance of the year 1759, a key year not just in political and military terms but also in literature and thought. In November 2009, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Canadian and the Northeast American Societies for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS and NEASECS) met in Ottawa at a joint conference organized by Frans De Bruyn to reflect on the same themes and events, but from the perspective of the North American peoples – indigenous, francophone, and anglophone – whose world was transformed, to adapt the title of Fred Anderson’s historical study, in the crucible of the Seven Years’ War. The collaboration that has given birth to this collection is a broader one than simply that of the two editors, who owe debts in many quarters, beginning with the authors of the essays that follow, who have contributed an impressively broad range of perspectives. The editors are equally grateful for the detailed and incisive comments of three anonymous assessors, who reviewed the volume for the University of Toronto Press. At the Press the encouragement and sage advice of ­Richard Ratzlaff, acquisitions editor in literature and history, have been

x Acknowledgments

most welcome at all stages in the development and production of the book. Thanks are also due to the institutions that have given their permission to reproduce the images in this volume. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported the Ottawa conference with a generous grant. Further assistance came from the University of Ottawa and its Faculty of Arts, as well as from CSECS and NEASECS. Frans De Bruyn gratefully acknowledges the able assistance of Arby Siraki and the logistical support of the administrative staff in the English Department at the University of Ottawa. For help and support at Queen’s University Belfast, Shaun Regan would also like to thank the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Schools of English, History, Languages, and Music.

THE CULTURE OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR

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Introduction Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn

The eighteenth century has sometimes been called the second Hundred Years’ War between Britain and France, with large-scale wars between the two nations marking the beginning, middle, and end of the century. A decisive campaign in that more than century-long conflict was the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), which altered radically the course of European imperial expansion around the globe. The war unfolded in theatres on four continents, affecting the regions of South Asia (India), the Caribbean, Europe, the west coast of Africa, and the Philippines, along with North America. It involved an array of European powers, including Prussia and Portugal on the side of Britain, and Austria, Russia, Saxony, Spain, and Sweden on the side of France. Such was the scope of the conflict that it can without exaggeration be called “The First World War,” as Winston Churchill termed it in the title to his account of the conflict in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.1 Yet despite its global reach, the Seven Years’ War in modern-day memory is often reduced, especially for North Americans, to a single event: the siege and fall of Quebec, which altered forever the colonial arrangements of New France and the rest of the continent. That event has accrued an iconic significance quite out of proportion to the ultimate outcome of military developments in 1759–60, which might have turned out very differently, historians have shown, had the French arrived before the British in 1760 to relieve New France or had negotiations at the end of the war returned the colony to French control. Retrospectively, 1759 stands for French-speaking Quebeckers as the year of the “Conquête,” and the emotional charge of the event remains very near the surface, as the controversy surrounding proposals to reenact the Battle of the Plains of Abraham during the summer of 2009

4  Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn

demonstrates. A useful anthology, La Conquête, compiled by CharlesPhilippe Courtois and published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the fall of New France reaffirms the centrality of this event for an understanding of modern-day Quebec: “The conquest remains a turning point in Quebecois and western history,” definitive for understanding “Quebec today, its demographic weight, its culture, and its institutions influenced by the Anglo-Saxon world.”2 Thus, a fateful September morning in 1759 on the heights above the St Lawrence River retains its fascination, but modern-day readers may not be aware that the process of mythologizing the Battle of the Plains of Abraham as an epic clash of opposing nations culminating in the dramatic deaths of both military commanders began almost immediately after news of the battle reached Europe. Horace Walpole captured the symbolic resonance of the battle: “The incidents of dramatic fiction could not be conducted with more address to lead an audience from despondency to sudden exaltation than accident prepared to excite the passions of a whole people. They despaired, they triumphed, and they wept: for Wolfe had fallen in the hour of victory.”3 The 250th anniversary of the war’s end offers a fitting occasion to examine the provenance of cultural and political myths engendered by the Seven Years’ War and to read them historically as cultural representations. The present collection of essays recontextualizes the Seven Years’ War in two important, interrelated ways: by drawing attention to the global scope and significance of the conflict and by examining the cultural impact of the war at the time it was being fought and in the decades that followed. This approach has the salutary effect of resituating an event such as the fall of Quebec within a much broader historical canvas, while at the same time permitting an exploration of the ways in which that event began to accumulate powerful symbolic weight from the very moment the battle ended. The deaths of Montcalm and Wolfe, for instance, were memorialized at the time in numerous cultural artefacts (sculptures, paintings, engravings, poems) as exemplarily heroic, bringing into play conceptions of classical virtue, masculinity, and gentility that powerfully shaped ideas of empire and European identity at the very time that these were undergoing a decisive transformation under the pressure of dramatic events. Our aim in the collection is thus to explore both the international reach of the Seven Years’ War and its cultural legacy. Individual essays in the volume address one or both of these themes to differing degrees, always with an awareness of their interconnection. Under the rubric of “culture,”

Introduction 5

some essays focus particularly on the arts, some consider conceptions or experiences of empire, while others address aspects of personal and collective identity. If the term “culture” remains, as Raymond Williams put it in Keywords (1976), “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,” it nevertheless constitutes an important umbrella term for capturing the sometimes intricate interrelationships between individual beliefs, social ideals, political ideologies, and forms of literary and pictorial representation that both inform and mediate these modes of understanding.4 In pursuing the theme of identity, the collection also chimes with recent scholarship on the interconnections among culture, identity, and imperialism at this historical juncture. The “British Self,” as Kathleen Wilson argues in the introduction to A New Imperial History (2004), needs to be “rethought in the light of emerging studies on the costs, consequences, and possibilities of empire for the men, women and children living across its domains.”5 In essays by Nigel Aston, Robert Jones, and Shaun Regan, the present volume intervenes in this ongoing investigation into the construction of self within Britain and its eighteenth-century empire. Contributors to the volume also extend the analysis further by examining the identities of other important groupings within the mid-century world – as in Fred Anderson’s and Alain Beaulieu’s discussions of the native peoples of North America, whose role and agency during the Seven Years’ War have frequently been overlooked in scholarship on the conflict. In conducting this exploration of the international character of the Seven Years’ War, the volume attends most fully to Europe and the Atlantic world (taking in Britain, New France, British America, and the Caribbean). This emphasis reflects a recognition that Europe and the Americas were often viewed as the principal theatres of the war during these years, not least in the kinds of textual representation on which the volume focuses. Although this means that there is little direct focus here on India, or on Asia more widely, Britain’s relationship with India is implicated in another broad theme developed in a number of the essays: the problems of empire that the Seven Years’ War generated for Britain in succeeding decades. Addressing the conflict (“the most dramatically successful war the British ever fought”) in her landmark study, Britons (1992), Linda Colley argues persuasively that the “root cause of post-war uncertainty and division” in Britain lay in “the quality and extent of the victory itself.” Developing Colley’s theme in The Island Race (2003), Kathleen Wilson has also contended that the Peace of Paris “brought to the fore a long-­ suppressed unease at the enormity of British possessions, their racial and

6  Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn

religious diversity, the domestic divisions they mirrored and reproduced, and the authoritarian techniques used to govern them.”6 This theme of the legacy of the war for Britain and its citizens is elaborated in various ways in the present volume, from Nicholas Rogers’s opening essay, which considers the new issues of dominion that the conflict raised, to the concluding essay by Daniel O’Quinn – which, through close examination of Joshua Reynolds’s portraits of Augustus Keppel, tracks the downward movement in British national and political fortunes between the victories of the Seven Years’ War and the crisis over America two decades later. In seeking to cast light on cultural representations of, and responses to, the conflict, we wish to supplement rather than to dismiss the historical dimension. Indeed, our collection of essays takes its cue from recent historical accounts that emphasize the complexity of the Seven Years’ War, not just as a conflict that was as much maritime and global as it was European (or North American) and land based, but as one that impinged powerfully on the economic and social relations, the political and religious life, and the national sentiment of the belligerents. This is Stephen Conway’s theme, for example, in War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (2006), a study that recognizes “literary and artistic sources” as indispensable elements to an understanding of the “domestic repercussions” of the period from 1739 to 1763, when “Britain was engaged in a quarter century of more-or-less continuous warfare.”7 The essays in this volume aim to make broader, more interdisciplinary use of the same range of source materials to highlight key themes of empire, identity, and representation – themes designed to reassess both the experience and the depiction of the Seven Years’ War, and to revise previous scholarship that has taken an exclusively political, diplomatic, or military approach to the conflict. It is equally our hope that the collection will stimulate further analysis of the relationship between “arts and arms” during the mid-eighteenth century, comparable to the recent growth of scholarship on war and Romanticism.8 The simultaneous designation of the Seven Years’ War as the first real global conflict or world war and as the midpoint of a second hundredyear struggle between Britain and France signals the challenge confronting scholars who seek to grasp its complexity, for these two characterizations demand on the one hand a broad, synchronic view of Europe and its burgeoning empires in the mid-eighteenth century, and on the other a long, diachronic perspective on Anglo-French antagonism from the 1690s to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. An exploration of

Introduction 7

Anglo-French cultural rivalry, for example, as in Frans De Bruyn’s contribution in this volume on the mid-century quarrel over Shakespeare’s reputation, calls for an awareness of the longer history of the interpenetration of letters and politics, of writers and national prestige, in order to make intelligible the state of the matter during the war years of the 1750s and 60s. The story of the Seven Years’ War unfolds within ongoing Anglo-French preoccupations with the balance of power in Europe (especially control of the Low Countries), religious and political difference (Catholic versus Protestant and ideologies of absolutism versus liberty), economic competition for overseas trade, and a growing sense of national identity on both sides. Similar challenges face present-day historians, who almost invariably find themselves making choices about which parts of a multifaceted story to tell: a “war for empire” or a “great-power contest between Britain and France”; a conflict on land or a war on water and at sea; a chronicle of continental European or of North American events.9 Even the latter theatre of conflict confronts the historian with a choice of widely varying perspectives: those of the metropole, the colonies (both English and French), or the native peoples. Indeed, depending on one’s point of view, there were at least two wars, with the North American contest, termed by Americans “the French and Indian War,” beginning in 1754 and ending, effectively, in 1760, but with the conflict in Europe lagging by two years, breaking out in 1756 and ending in 1763. As Matt Schumann and Karl Schweizer observe in The Seven Years War: A Transatlantic History (2008), “The Seven Years War has ... defied simple reduction into a straightforward narrative despite numerous attempts,” and in recent decades “scholars have tended to concentrate on specific theatres, episodes, or aspects of the war.” Schumann and Schweizer promise the reader “a hint of that elusive overarching history” in their book, which synthesizes a century of scholarship and archival research.10 More ambitiously comprehensive in its scope is Daniel Baugh’s The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Conflict (2011), which covers all the theatres of conflict in a chronological narrative. Most scholarship on the war, however, is more selective in its focus, as is reflected in the titles of recently published monographs. One of the most important studies of the war itself is that written by a contributor to our collection: Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (2000). More recent studies include Jonathan Dull’s The French Navy and the Seven Years’ War (2005), Walter Borneman’s The French and Indian War: Deciding

8  Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn

the Fate of North America (2006), Franz Szabo’s The Seven Years’ War in Europe, 1756–1763 (2008), and David Syrett’s Shipping and Military Power in the Seven Years’ War (2008). During the past decade, the key year of the conflict, 1759, has received attention in its own right in two works of popular history: Frank McLynn’s 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World (2004) and Dan Snow’s Death or Victory: The Battle of Quebec and the Birth of Empire (2009). An erudite and highly readable historical treatment of the siege of Quebec is D. Peter MacLeod’s Northern Armageddon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham (2008). Some recent broader studies of eighteenth-century British history also incorporate discussion of the war; these include Conway’s War, State, and Society (2006) and Brendan Simms’s Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (2007). Finally, for Quebecois historians, the fall of New France to the British has long been central to Quebec’s national history, as exemplified in the work of Lionel Groulx and Guy Fregault, among others, though recent trends towards demographic and social history have de-emphasized the Conquête as a historical subject. But the anniversary of this event has prompted several new publications, including, in addition to Courtois’s anthology, Québec, ville assiégée, 1759– 1760: d’après les acteurs et les témoins, edited by Jacques Lacoursière and Hélène Quimper (2009); and Gerard Saint-Martin’s Les plaines d’Abraham: L’adieu à la Nouvelle France? (2007). To refer to these works as “selective” or to note that their focus is predominantly on the military, political, diplomatic, and logistical dimensions of the conflict is not intended as a criticism, but it speaks to the purpose of the present collection of essays, which seeks to stimulate a broader critical conversation about the experience of empire at this key historical moment. A number of further studies published during the last ten to fifteen years have laid the foundations for this more integrated, interdisciplinary approach. The imaginative literature of the war, for instance, has been addressed in distinct ways in M. John Cardwell’s Arts and Arms: Literature, Politics and Patriotism during the Seven Years War (2004) and Carol Watts’s The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (2007). Cardwell’s study charts the progress of the war as witnessed in works of “political literature” such as ballads and satiric prints. In particular, Cardwell provides some valuable detail on the early phase of the war, especially the controversy surrounding Admiral Byng and the loss of Minorca – an event that contributed significantly to the early sense of despondency in Britain over the nation’s prospects.11

Introduction 9

Moving beyond the kind of minor and ephemeral material examined in Arts and Arms, the essays in this volume also address some of the major literary figures of the period whom Cardwell overlooks (including key writers such as Johnson, Goldsmith, Sterne, and Voltaire). Canonical literature is also examined in Watts’s The Cultural Work of Empire, which approaches the war period through the lens of Laurence Sterne. Watts’s study proposes particular characters and episodes in Sterne’s life and writings (Uncle Toby, Maria, Eliza Draper) as avenues to understanding a series of large-scale issues – military masculinity, “women’s time and work-discipline,” imperial orientalism – and, more ambitiously, the “imagining of the state” and the “formation of imperial subjectivity” in mid-eighteenth-century Britain.12 Meanwhile, John Richardson has surveyed how the conflict was imagined literarily during these years, noting that despite Britain’s conspicuous military success, the war did not inspire a “sustained, confident tradition of heroic writing” celebrating the country’s victory.13 The relationship between factual history and creative representation has also been explored in recent work that focuses on art and the War. In Behold the Hero (1997), Alan McNairn has detailed the afterlife of General Wolfe in print, oil, plaster, porcelain, and other representational media. As McNairn observes, the “gilded untruths” surrounding Wolfe are “infinitely more revealing than stark facts.”14 Both the most recognizable and the most controversial combatant in the war, Wolfe receives attention in a number of the essays in this collection, most extensively in Joan Coutu’s discussion of the commemoration of the General at Stowe.15 Memorials to Wolfe are also discussed in a recent study by another contributor to this volume, Douglas Fordham, whose British Art and the Seven Years’ War (2010) constitutes the most thorough account to date of the development of art in Britain during these years. Asking why the visual arts became a pressing national concern at this moment in Britain’s history, Fordham’s study challenges longer-term accounts of the development of British art during the eighteenth century (particularly those that portray a gradual movement towards refinement and respectability), arguing instead for the “transformative” role of the Seven Years’ War. This transformation entailed the marginalization of a demotic, and insularly patriotic, Hogarthian aesthetic, and the rapid emergence both of an art establishment that was aligned with notions of national improvement and outward-looking ambition, and of a genre, “contemporary history painting,” that was “dedicated to the glorification of the fiscal-military state.”16

10  Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn

As Fordham observes in his study, the Seven Years’ War can itself be viewed as “a major cultural event.”17 The present volume aims to provide a fuller picture of the roles played by literature, identity, and the arts in the mediation and understanding of this important global contest. Like the historical and cultural studies surveyed above, our collection is not without its own constraints and emphases. In essays by Erica Charters and Frans De Bruyn, Fred Anderson and Alain Beaulieu, the volume offers coverage of Anglo-French cultural relationships and of the war’s effect on the indigenous peoples of North America. Yet overall, the essays focus more on British responses to the war than on French, Canadian, or Aboriginal perspectives. If such an emphasis partly reflects the particular interests and scholarly expertise of the contributors, it also speaks to the depth and longevity of the conflict’s cultural impact in Britain. From courtiers to slaves, in print and on canvas, the Seven Years’ War made a profound impression on the social, political, and imaginative life of Britons during the second half of the eighteenth century. A more particular sense of this national impact can be gleaned from contemporary letters by writers in Britain that tracked the country’s shifting fortunes during the key year of 1759. Seen in retrospect, the dominant note of the year is one of jubilation at a remarkable series of military and naval victories. As Thomas Gray noted in August, “The season for triumph is at last come”; and, from this moment of victorious news arriving from Minden, British correspondence is filled with talk of the “triumphs” and “successes” abroad.18 In October and November, news of the victories at Quebec and Quiberon Bay led to celebrations that struck observers as unprecedented and encouraged national and imperial reflections. Writing to George Montagu on 21 October, Horace Walpole recorded that “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories,” concluding his letter with a wry but revealing postscript: “You shall hear from me again if we take Mexico or China before Christmas.” On 30 November, Catherine Talbot, in Lambeth, sent word of Edward Hawke’s victory to Elizabeth Carter in Deal: “What a series of successes and mercies! ... Nothing could be cheerfuller than my ride this morning in a full sunshine amidst the discharge of the Park, Tower and ship guns, and innumerable ringing of bells.”19 By the end of the year, the shots and peals of victory had become almost commonplace across the towns and cities of Britain. Writing in December from his house in Chelsea, Tobias Smollett declared, somewhat overreachingly, that the “people here are in high spirits on account

Introduction 11

of our successes, and Mr. Pitt is so popular that I may venture to say that all party is extinguished in Great-Britain.”20 The victories of the autumn and winter stimulated writers’ imaginations, as well as their national pride. Writing in October that “The notification of a probable disappointment at Quebec came only to heighten the pleasure of the conquest,” an enthused Walpole was drawn to dramatize the momentous events on the Plains of Abraham: “What a scene! an army in the night dragging itself up a precipice by stumps of trees to assault a town and attack an army strongly entrenched and double in numbers!” More elaborately, in early December Robert Dodsley wrote to William Shenstone proposing a literary response to the death of Wolfe, in the form of a melodramatic elegy that would depict the general’s ghost appearing before his intended bride, Katherine Lowther, to “inform her of his Fate, and endeavour to comfort her in her Affliction.” As with a pamphlet published this year, entitled A Dialogue Betwixt General Wolfe, and the Marquis Montcalm, in the Elysian Fields, here was a work of creative representation that, in the very act of mourning, celebrated Wolfe’s achievement and conjured him imaginatively back to life.21 If the British ended 1759 on an enthusiastic high (despite the death of their new military hero), triumph was by no means the only note sounded during the year. Epistolary reflections on unfolding events remained haunted by an episode earlier in the war: the court martial and execution of Admiral John Byng, which was recalled at various moments of national anxiety and military setback. Notwithstanding the taking of Louisbourg in the summer of 1758, the 1759 “season for triumph,” as Gray’s comment implies, followed seasons of failure and frustration. The early part of the war had not gone well for Britain and, as Jeremy Black observes, “had the war ended in the winter of 1758-9, the British would have had relatively little to show for their campaigning.”22 Concerns about what was to come continued into the spring of 1759 and beyond. A desperate, last-ditch invasion from France seemed possible or even likely at various points during the year. As Walpole observed to Horace Mann in September, recent British successes had actually made an invasion more likely: “I really believe the French will come hither now, for they can be safe nowhere else.” Once news of Wolfe’s victory at Quebec reached England, Walpole became more assured, now writing to Mann that “Monsieur Thurot is said to be sailed with his tiny squadron – but can the lords of America be afraid of half a dozen canoes?”23 If these Walpolean reflections were characteristically arch (to the point of flippancy), a keener insight into attitudes regarding

12  Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn

a potential invasion was provided by Gray, who wrote to Thomas Wharton in July that “Every body continues as quiet about the Invasion, as if a Frenchman, as soon as he set his foot on our coast, would die, like a Toad in Ireland: yet the King’s Tents & Equipage are order’d to be ready at an hour’s warning.”24 As Gray’s letter attests, for all the surface nonchalance on show in Britain regarding a threatened invasion, behind-the-scenes contingency measures indicated the seriousness with which the apprehended danger was being taken. Along with these testaments to (and attempts to mask) unease in Britain, contemporary correspondence also incorporated more sceptical and compassionate reflections, which dwelt on the human cost of the conflict and, in some instances, queried its very legitimacy. In a letter of 10 May, Walpole hinted at such concerns as he exclaimed to Mann: “How fatal a war has this been! From Pondicherry to Canada, from Russia to Senegal, the world has been a great bill of mortality!”25 Not all commentators were so facetiously detached. During the siege of Louisbourg the previous year, Elizabeth Carter had expressed particular concern for Frances Boscawen (wife of the admiral and a friend of Elizabeth Montagu), establishing her own patriotic credentials while also posing an uncomfortable question about the war in America: “After all, if one was to judge without prejudice, what business have either French or English in that country?”26 Indeed, Bluestocking writers were particularly drawn to highlight the dreadful human consequences of the war. On 1 November 1759, Catherine Talbot recorded that the conflict had infiltrated her dreams, in one of which she found herself giving “a French ambassador much good advice about signing a lasting peace” (the emphasis on peace, rather than combat, is revealing). Following news of Hawke’s victory over Admiral Conflans, Carter wrote to Talbot in the succeeding month that “amidst all the joys of victory one must and ought to shudder at the calamities of war. How dreadful is it to think how many families must be undone by the sinking of the two French ships.” Such reflections concerning the impact of war on individuals and their relations could easily lead to a sense that military conflict was unjustifiable. In a further letter of 11 December, Carter wrote to Elizabeth Montagu that, following the country’s “great successes” and the “late providential dissipation of the Brest fleet,” a “secure peace” would be “a blessing infinitely superior to all the triumphs of victory. For what, alas, are the most splendid victories but so many sad instances of human guilt and misery!”27 Even in late 1759, in the midst of national celebration, then, there were voices that gestured more towards

Introduction 13

George III’s assessment of the conflict the following year (as a “bloody and expensive war”) than towards William Pitt’s revision of the new king’s words (to an “expensive but just and necessary war”).28 In gesturing towards the peace, these writers were looking forward to a treaty that would not be formally signed until 10 February 1763. During the years that followed the Peace of Paris, letter writers would also register the problems created by Britain’s extraordinary gains during the conflict. A percipient intimation of future difficulties was made in 1759 itself by Thomas Gray, as he noted George II’s unanticipated status as a successful war leader: “it is an odd contemplation, that somebody should have lived long enough to grow a great & glorious Monarch. As to the Nation, I fear, it will not know how to behave itself, being just in the circumstances of a Chambermaid, that has got the 20,000£ Prize in the Lottery.”29 Later, during the difficult years of the 1770s and 1780s, writers would look back nostalgically to the period of the war as a time not just of heady victories but also of national cohesion and unity of purpose. In October 1779, in the midst of “a detestable Brother’s war” with the American colonies, Ignatius Sancho, a black grocer and London socialite, regarded Britain as “this poor ruined country! – ruined by its success ... ruined by victories – arts – arms – and unbounded commerce.” As Sancho would go on to write in the following year, at the time of the Gordon Riots: “Government is sunk in lethargic stupor – anarchy reigns – when I look back to the glorious time of a George II and a Pitt’s administration – my heart sinks at the bitter contrast.”30 Two years later, in 1782, the poet William Cowper would recall even more fondly “those happier days when you and I could spend our Evening in enumerating victories and acquisitions that seemed to follow each other almost in a continued series.” As Cowper now recollected, in a fit of epistolary enthusiasm: When poor Bob White brought me the news of Boscawen’s success off the Coast of Portugal, how did I leap for joy! When Hawk [sic] demolished Conflans, I was still more transported. But nothing could express my rapture when Wolf [sic] made the conquest of Quebec. I am not therefore I suppose destitute of true Patriotism, but the course of public events has of late afforded me no opportunity to exert it.31

The reflections of Sancho and Cowper emphasize that even if the turning point in the conflict came during a mere handful of months in the second half of 1759, Britain’s triumphs in the Seven Years’ War would

14  Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn

reverberate across the decades that followed, as the scale of the British victory raised difficult and (in some cases) irresolvable questions about national identity, imperial expansionism, and colonial governance. The personal, national, and artistic concerns of such contemporary commentators form the central focus of the essays in this collection, which is organized in four parts. The four essays in part 1 consider how empire and the war were experienced by the nations and peoples involved. Situating the conflict within a longer timeline stretching from the 1730s to the 1770s, Nicholas Rogers opens the volume by assessing the public awareness of events abroad and the developing understanding in Britain of “empire” itself. In particular, his essay emphasizes the important role of newspapers and other printed texts in the communication of the nation’s military fortunes, and in an emerging consciousness of new territorial claims and ambitions. Taking a more synchronic approach, Fred Anderson’s essay confronts the traditional emphasis on the year 1759, which has long been regarded (as in the British correspondence surveyed above) as the turning point in the conflict and in the global rivalry between Britain and France. Challenging the idea that Wolfe’s victory at Quebec was militarily decisive, Anderson instead foregrounds changes in the balance of power in North America in 1758, and the agency of its native peoples in determining both their own destiny and the outcome of the contest. Drawing attention to the casualties of combat and to the effects of disease in colonial warfare, Erica Charters’s essay highlights the significant degree to which military medical knowledge was shared between the British and the French. Printed texts were central to this exchange, and Charters considers the case of the French translation of James Lind’s An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates (1768), a treatise that drew on Lind’s observations during the Seven Years’ War. In the process, the essay reveals how this global conflict and related developments in military medicine helped to shape British and French conceptions of European identity and of the health of national populations. Finally in part 1, Alain Beaulieu develops the theme of Fred Anderson’s essay by considering both the prehistory and the legacy of the war from the viewpoint of the indigenous peoples of Canada. As his essay details, although the region’s native population did not formally capitulate to the British (as did the French), the Conquête nevertheless altered the terms of the relationship between this population and the colonial powers, as a mediated alliance with the French was replaced by the more

Introduction 15

paternalistic and legalistic model of British sovereignty and imperial guardianship. Part 2 extends the volume’s focus on printed texts by considering literary responses to the war and the contest’s bearing on literature itself. The section begins with Thomas Keymer’s wide-ranging discussion of the relationship between “arts” and “arms” in Britain from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. Charting the development of the “paper wars” that punctuated literary culture throughout the period, the essay detects an increasingly combative, bellicose aspect to the literary sphere of the mid-eighteenth century. At the same time, in the works of writers such as James Macpherson, Laurence Sterne, and Christopher Smart, Keymer also discerns a distinctive, if sometimes oblique, literature of war that incorporated troubled reflections on both the jingoistic tenor and the human toll of the conflict. No writer was exempt from the cultural battlefield. Frans De Bruyn’s essay explores the war’s impact on the reputation of Shakespeare, whose authorial stock was on the rise during the century. As De Bruyn shows, claims about his poetic merits and failings began to intensify during the war years, as Shakespeare was invoked and evaluated for particular pol­ itical and patriotic ends. This was not least the case in the dispute ­between Voltaire and Shakespeare’s British defenders, a quarrel that constituted a literary-critical front in the global confrontation between Britain and France. Turning from the national playwright to an author who was still making his name, Michael Griffin examines the war-­ period writings of Oliver Goldsmith, an Irish expatriate in London whose essays, reviews, poems, and histories display an ambiguous and often sceptical response to popular jingoism and global expansionism. Placing Goldsmith’s oeuvre in the threefold context of Ireland, professional writing, and imperial contestation, Griffin’s discussion details the relationship between Goldsmith’s works and the writings of Samuel Johnson and Tobias Smollett, and assesses Goldsmith’s contribution to a discourse that marked the early phase of the conflict in Britain: the print war concerning Admiral Byng. Moving from literary authors to personal identities, the essays in part 3 examine the individual experience of the war from three distinct, and distinctive, perspectives. Nigel Aston considers the year 1759 as it unfolds in the recently discovered diaries of John, fifth Baron Berkeley of Stratton. A well-connected courtier at St James’s Palace, Berkeley was ideally situated to observe responses to military news in the very seat of imperial power. At the same time, Berkeley’s diaries also convey

16  Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn

a lively sense of events closer to home: personal intrigues, familial bereavements, and the everyday formalities of a court that stood at the centre of the nation’s political life. Turning from a canny observer of the war to one of its most notorious combatants, Robert Jones examines perhaps the most extensive and publicly divisive paper war of the conflict: the controversy surrounding Lord George Sackville, commander of the allied cavalry at the Battle of Minden. In a raft of printed texts, Sackville’s battlefield behaviour was defended and impugned, in terms that reveal both traditional and emerging conceptions of character and masculinity, aristocracy and “honour,” and the status of public debate itself. As Jones’s essay also details, Sackville’s conduct at Minden reemerged as a subject for unflattering representation during the mid1770s, this time in relation to the American crisis. Finally in part 3, Shaun Regan considers a retrospective account of the war contained in an autobiographical work by an abolitionist activist and former slave: Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789). Paying particular attention to Equiano’s naval occupation and his assertion of a national affiliation with Britain, the essay explores the textual fashioning of Equiano’s wartime adventures and the unusual situation and uncertain status of a black slave toiling at sea in the service of British global ambitions. Part 4, the final group of essays, shifts the focus to the arts of painting and landscape architecture. To begin, Joan Coutu examines the commemoration of General Wolfe at Stowe, the landscape garden of Richard, Earl Temple. Although primarily a private space, Stowe’s garden nevertheless conveyed a highly charged political message. Here Temple erected memorials to Wolfe that, as Coutu argues, were designed to celebrate the Whig Patriot view of British martial triumph. The period of the Seven Years’ War also witnessed the introduction of art exhibitions in London, and Douglas Fordham’s essay explores the relationship between Britain’s military successes and the open display of art before an eager public. Focusing on George Stubbs’s paintings Whistlejacket and The Zebra, the essay considers the implications of this new institutional development, which threatened artistic autonomy and brought fine art into closer proximity to popular debate and graphic satire – not least during the contention over the Peace of Paris. Rounding off the section, Daniel O’Quinn analyses Joshua Reynolds’s series of portraits of Augustus Keppel, one of the British heroes of the Seven Years’ War. A number of these portraits, dating from the 1750s and 1760s, were reproduced in engraved form when Keppel was court

Introduction 17

martialled in the late 1770s, and O’Quinn explores the political resonances of these recirculated images, and of a further portrait of Keppel that Reynolds painted in 1779, in the context of the American crisis of the late 1770s and early 1780s. Like the essays of Rogers and Jones, O’Quinn’s discussion takes us beyond the period of the Seven Years’ War itself, tracing the conflict’s ongoing influence on artistic practice and on conceptualizations of the British empire in the decades that followed the Peace of Paris. As this collection of essays seeks to demonstrate, the Seven Years’ War was more than simply a military and naval conflict. During these years, the perception of success or failure, heroism or disgrace could be as important as the actuality, and personal experiences could be as dependent upon an individual’s status, gender, or race as upon a sense of national or regional identity. Along with victories and defeats on the battlefield and at sea, therefore, it is necessary to examine responses to and representations of these events, in order to capture their full significance for the peoples involved. The experience of empire at this historical moment was marked by a range of social, political, and technological factors – not least the well-developed machinery of print media – that require an interdisciplinary approach in order to be properly understood. The essays that follow thus direct our attention to the cultural resonances and impact of the Seven Years’ War: its relationship to literary and artistic representation, and to popular understandings of both national and global affairs, during the second half of the eighteenth century. NOTES 1 Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 4 vols (London: Cassell, 1956–8). The Seven Years’ War is recounted in volume 3, The Age of Revolution. 2 Charles-Philippe Courtois, ed., La Conquête: Une Anthologie (Montreal: Typo, 2009), 49 (English translation by Frans De Bruyn). Two new volumes edited by Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid reassess the historical significance and the modern memory of the fall of Quebec: Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective and Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). See also the extensive collection of first-hand testimony, by both French and British participants, to the events of 1759–60 published

18  Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn to commemorate the anniversary in 2009: Québec, ville assiégée, 1759–1760: d’après les acteurs et les témoins, ed. Jacques Lacoursière and Hélène Quimper (Quebec: Septentrion, 2009). 3 Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second, ed. John Brooke, 3 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 3:74–5. 4 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976; rev. 1983), 87. 5 Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 19. 6 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 101; Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), 50. 7 Stephen Conway, War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 8, 1–2. 8 Recent studies of Romanticism and war include Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002); Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 2003); Richard Cronin, Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 9 Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Conflict (London: Longman, 2011), 1. 10 Matt Schumann and Karl Schweizer, The Seven Years War: A Transatlantic History (London: Routledge, 2008), 1. 11 M. John Cardwell, Arts and Arms: Literature, Politics and Patriotism during the Seven Years War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 12 Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 197, 109, 57. 13 John Richardson, “Imagining Military Conflict during the Seven Years’ War,” Studies in English Literature 48 (2008): 587. 14 Alan McNairn, Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 27. 15 On Wolfe, see also Stephen Brumwell, Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006) and Nicholas Rogers, “Brave Wolfe: The Making of a Hero,” in A New Imperial History, ed. Wilson, 239–59. As Rogers observes, “much of what we know of Wolfe the hero is encased in representation” (239).

Introduction 19 16 Douglas Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 1, 2, 256. 17 Fordham, British Art, 3. 18 Thomas Gray to the Rev. James Brown, 8 August 1759, in Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 2:632. 19 Horace Walpole to George Montagu, 21 October 1759, in The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, ed. Paget Toynbee, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 314–15; Catherine Talbot to Elizabeth Carter, 30 November 1759, in A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, from the Year 1741 to 1770, ed. Montagu Pennington, 4 vols (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1809), 2:304. 20 Tobias Smollett to John Harvie, 10 December 1759, in The Letters of Tobias Smollett, ed. Lewis M. Knapp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 87. 21 Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, 19 October 1759, in Letters, 4:312–14; Robert Dodsley to William Shenstone, 1–[4] December 1759, in The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 1733–1764, ed. James E. Tierney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 432. 22 Jeremy Black, Crisis of Empire: Britain and America in the Eighteenth Century (London: Continuum, 2008), 78. 23 Walpole to Mann, 13 September and 19 October 1759, in Letters, 4:298–9, 314. 24 Gray to Thomas Wharton, 21 July 1759, in Correspondence, 2:628. 25 Walpole to Mann, 10 May 1759, in Letters, 4:260. 26 Elizabeth Carter to Elizabeth Montagu, 18 August 1758, in Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, to Mrs. Montagu, between the Years 1755 and 1800, ed. Montagu Pennington, 3 vols (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1817), 1:11. 27 Talbot to Carter, 1 November 1759, in A Series of Letters, 2:298; Carter to Talbot, 3 December 1759, in A Series of Letters, 2:306; Carter to Montagu, 11 December 1759, in Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, 1:73. 28 For this famous alteration see, for instance, Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 170. 29 Gray to William Mason, 1 December 1759, in Correspondence, 2:655. 30 Ignatius Sancho to Jack Wingrave, October 1778, to Mr. Rush, 20 October 1779, and to John Spinx, 9 June 1780, in Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African, ed. Vincent Carretta (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998), 131–2, 185, 220. 31 William Cowper to Joseph Hill, 31 January 1782, in The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 2:12.

20  Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Carter, Elizabeth. Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, to Mrs. Montagu, between the Years 1755 and 1800. Edited by Montagu Pennington. 3 vols. London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1817. Carter, Elizabeth, and Catherine Talbot. A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, from the Year 1741 to 1770. Edited by Montagu Pennington. 4 vols. London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1809. Courtois, Charles-Philippe, ed. and intro. La Conquête: Une Anthologie. Montreal: Typo, 2009. Cowper, William. The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper. Edited by James King and Charles Ryskamp. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. A Dialogue Betwixt General Wolfe, and the Marquis Montcalm, in the Elysian Fields. [Coventry?], 1759. Dodsley, Robert. The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 1733–1764. Edited by James E. Tierney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Gray, Thomas. Correspondence of Thomas Gray. Edited by Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935. Lacoursière, Jacques, and Hélène Quimper, eds. Québec, ville assiégée, 1759– 1760: d’après les acteurs et les témoins. Quebec: Septentrion, 2009. Sancho, Ignatius. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. Edited by ­Vincent Carretta. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998. Smollett, Tobias. The Letters of Tobias Smollett. Edited by Lewis M. Knapp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Walpole, Horace. The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford. Edited by Paget Toynbee. Vol. 4. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903. – Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second. Edited by John Brooke. 3 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Secondary Sources Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. London: Faber and Faber; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Bainbridge, Simon. British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Baugh, Daniel. The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Conflict. London: Longman, 2011.

Introduction 21 Black, Jeremy. Crisis of Empire: Britain and America in the Eighteenth Century. London: Continuum, 2008. Borneman, Walter R. The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Brumwell, Stephen. Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006. Buckner, Phillip, and John G. Reid, eds. Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. – eds. Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Cardwell, M. John. Arts and Arms: Literature, Politics and Patriotism during the Seven Years War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Churchill, Winston. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. 4 vols. London: Cassell, 1956–8. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Conway, Stephen. War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cronin, Richard. Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Dull, Jonathan R. The French Navy and the Seven Years’ War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Favret, Mary A. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Fordham, Douglas. British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. MacLeod, D. Peter. Northern Armageddon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2008. McLynn, Frank. 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004. McNairn, Alan. Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Middleton, Richard. The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Richardson, John. “Imagining Military Conflict during the Seven Years’ War.” Studies in English Literature 48 (2008): 585–611. Rogers, Nicholas. “Brave Wolfe: The Making of a Hero.” In A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, edited by Kathleen Wilson, 239–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

22  Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn Saint-Martin, Gerard. Les plaines d’Abraham: L’adieu à la Nouvelle France? Paris: Economica, 2007. Schumann, Matt, and Karl Schweizer. The Seven Years War: A Transatlantic History. London: Routledge, 2008. Shaw, Philip. Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002. Simms, Brendan. Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783. London: Allen Lane, 2007. Snow, Dan. Death or Victory: The Battle of Quebec and the Birth of Empire. London: HarperPress, 2009. Syrett, David. Shipping and Military Power in the Seven Years’ War. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2008. Szabo, Franz A.J. The Seven Years’ War in Europe, 1756–1763. Harlow, UK: ­Pearson, 2008. Watts, Carol. The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1976; rev. ed. 1983. Wilson, Kathleen. The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 2003. – ed. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Plate 1  Joseph Wilton, Monument to Major General James Wolfe, unveiled 1773, marble. Westminster Abbey, London. Photo: Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

Plate 2  William Chambers, Joseph Wilton, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Nicolas Collett, and others, The Royal State Coach, 1760–2. London: Royal Mews, Buckingham Palace. Photo: Her Majesty the Queen.

Plate 3  George Stubbs, Zebra, 1763, oil on canvas, 102.9 x 127.6 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Plate 4  George Stubbs, Whistlejacket, c. 1762–5, oil on canvas, 292 x 246.4 cm. National Gallery, London, UK. Photo: Art Resource, NY.

Plate 5  Sir Joshua Reynolds, Captain the Honourable Augustus Keppel, oil painting, 1752. National Maritime Museum.

Plate 6  Sir Joshua Reynolds, Admiral Augustus Keppel, oil painting, 1765. National Maritime Museum.

Plate 7  Sir Joshua Reynolds, Admiral Augustus Keppel, oil painting, 1779. National Maritime Museum.

Plate 8 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Admiral Viscount Keppel, oil painting, 1781–3. Tate Britain.

PART ONE The Experience of Empire in the Seven Years’ War

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1 From Vernon to Wolfe: Empire and Identity in the British Atlantic World of the Mid-Eighteenth Century Nicholas Rogers

In 1764, in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, Thomas Pownall penned a long pamphlet entitled The Administration of the Colonies. He was well placed to do so. Upon leaving Cambridge University, Pownall had been appointed a clerk to the Board of Trade, where through the influence of his brother he quickly won the ear of the Earl of Halifax. Then he was briefly the private secretary of a governor of New York, and subsequently an observer at the Albany conference of 1754, which sought to address the issue of imperial defence and the frontier relations with indigenous peoples. Three years later Pownall became the governor of Massachusetts, replacing the long-serving Sir William Shirley. Upon the conquest of Quebec he had been offered the governorship of South Carolina, but instead he chose a lucrative post as commissary for the British forces in Germany before marrying well and securing a parliamentary seat for a minor Cornish borough from which he hoped to influence the course of colonial policy.1 Thomas Pownall failed in that pursuit, but his pamphlet, which was revised and expanded five times in the tumultuous years leading to the American conflict, neatly outlined many of the problems besetting the British Atlantic empire. Pownall was acutely aware that the territorial gains of the Seven Years’ War had transformed that empire. He talked in fact of a “revolution of events, beyond the ordinary course of things; some general apprehension of some thing new arising in the world.”2 In his opinion the challenge of securing the British empire from further intrusions by the French demanded a greater coordination of colonial policy under the aegis of a new metropolitan department and some adjustments to the neo-mercantilist system that framed Britain’s Atlantic economy. Basically, Pownall recognized that what had long

26  Nicholas Rogers

been conceived as a maritime empire of trade now had to address new territorial imperatives, whether that meant defining the terms of westward expansion beyond the Appalachians, improving relations with the still formidable Aboriginal peoples, or accommodating singularly un-British settlers within the new empire. In a phrase, new issues of dominion confronted the British in the aftermath of the war. Pownall could still extol “the spirit of commerce” that had “wrought up” the plantations to become “objects of trade,” to a point that “the British Dominions through every part of the Atlantic Ocean” now formed “a Grand Marine Empire.”3 Indeed, this commercial connection was the vital link in any effort to unify the empire. But he also understood that imperial defence would touch on vexed issues of taxation and metropolitan jurisdiction that would challenge the constitutional customs of many colonial assemblies. Like many of his contemporaries, Pownall was unsure how colonial liberties and metropolitan supervision could be reconciled, and his own ultimate solution, an imperial federation with imperial representation at Westminster, satisfied few. Pownall was a percipient student of empire, ahead of public opinion. But just how far? How did Pownall’s contemporaries understand empire? To what extent were they taken by its allure, even if they lacked some direct experience or financial investment in its enterprises? There is no easy answer to these questions and predictably historians cannot agree. In the wake of postcolonial perspectives on history and the drive to make British history more multicultural and imperial in scope, there has been a renewed quest to bring the British empire back home, to explore the complex reciprocities between metropole and colony as they were played out in patterns of investment and consumption and through the pleasures of the imagination. In these studies empire is at the very core of Britishness, a crucial marker of its identity. By contrast, there are those who believe that the haphazard growth of British overseas possessions defied definition as an empire, and still others who wonder whether the enthusiasm for imperial ventures, particularly those that took a bellicose turn in the mid-century decades, was not fundamentally “synthetic,” the work of particular pressure groups rather than the public at large. These historians also see the outpouring of print on colonial themes as an offshoot of international politics, and perhaps even an opportunity to market topical issues on which the public were signally ignorant.4 How can these conflicting views be adjudicated? One plausible route would be to examine the careers and representations of two noteworthy heroes of the mid-eighteenth-century wars,

From Vernon to Wolfe  27

Admiral Edward Vernon and General James Wolfe. Both of these men embodied values that the nation held dear. Their service for king and country was self-evident; notwithstanding the political connotations that surrounded the term, they were cast as true patriots, ready to defend British interests abroad. Their intrepidity in the face of danger became legendary and made their masculinity shine in an age when “luxury,” spurred by the growth of a consumer economy and the concomitant emergence of politeness, was thought to vitiate the martial virtues of the ruling class. They gained reputations as paternalist leaders, even though their hauteur sometimes troubled fellow officers and their undisguised contempt for the raw, undisciplined recruit limited their compassion for the rank and file.5 They were also both committed to extending and defending British interests in the Atlantic at a time when Britons pondered the utility and expense of maintaining an elaborate system of European alliances to support the interests of the House of Hanover, with which British fortunes were dynastically linked. Vernon and Wolfe rose to prominence on account of some spectacular victories against the Bourbon powers. Vernon’s successful attack upon Porto Bello in November 1739, with two thousand troops and only six men-of-war, made him a hero overnight, while Wolfe’s famed battle and death on the Plains of Abraham secured him an apotheosis that lingered in the public imagination for decades. Yet their familiarity to the public, and ultimately their draw, depended in large measure upon important developments in the public sphere. They could be said to be among the first military commanders to gain great visibility from the burgeoning newspaper press of the eighteenth century, whose daily circulation averaged 20,000 in 1750 and 25,800 a decade later.6 Allowing for ten readers per issue – for many newspapers were readily available in coffee houses and taverns – roughly one adult male in nine perused or heard a newspaper being read on a regular basis; allowing for fifteen readers per issue, as many as one in six.7 Clearly, newspaper readership engaged significant numbers of the middling sort, and within London, where there were many literate artisans, it penetrated even further down the social scale. This conclusion is corroborated by anecdotal evidence from such visitors as Caesar de Saussure, who reported that “All Englishmen are great newsmongers. Workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee rooms in order to read the latest news.”8 Imperial battles were thus collectively and imaginatively experienced by a wide range of people, all of whom could be drawn into the dramas of empire. Of course, the simultaneity of this experience, of

28  Nicholas Rogers

knowing that others were party to this adventure through the world of print, was to some extent offset by the time lag between the publication of metropolitan and provincial newspapers.9 And although much has been made of the saturation of British news with imperial themes, the coverage was actually uneven, intense when speculation about British expeditions ran high but often falling off conspicuously on other occasions.10 In the spring of 1761, for example, during a hiatus between the military victories of late 1759 and the successful Caribbean ventures of 1762, the Bath Chronicle devoted relatively little space to colonial events. In late February, it filled its section on “Plantation News” with tales of gales, privateers, and Aboriginal reprisals against British settlers on the frontier. Yet the next instalment of “Plantation News” did not occur until mid-April, to be followed by another in mid-May, when the campaign against the Cherokees in South Carolina began to filter through the press.11 Instructively, the Chronicle spent a lot more time in 1761 expatiating on the death of Richard Nash, the MC of fashionable Bath, than it did pondering the significance of the slave revolt in Jamaica known as Tacky’s Rebellion. This merited one brief entry only, even though we know from the diary of Thomas Thistlewood that the insurrection was deeply troubling to the slave owners and necessitated military interventions from the navy to bring it under control.12 Imperial news, whether in the shape of official dispatches or more informal letters, was also sporadic because of the conditions of communication in an era of wind and sail, when storms, hurricanes, and disease among crews, not to mention the activity of enemy privateers in wartime, could disrupt sailing schedules and staunch the flow of information. In the 1740s Britons could expect “fresh advices” from Boston or New York within a month, depending upon the time of year, and from Jamaica within two months. Yet delays could generate a good deal of speculation about what was happening abroad, combining reliable information with gossip and hearsay. Vernon’s well-publicized venture to the Caribbean in 1739 gave rise to rumours that his crews had been smitten with tropical fevers off Havana, delaying his arrival in Jamaica. His squadron “was in so bad a situation,” remarked the London Evening Post in mid-January 1740, “as to not be in a Condition of undertaking anything.”13 A little later, a report from The Hague alleged that the British admiral had been killed at Porto Bello, something that the London press was quick to deny. Rumour and even deliberate misinformation thus characterized reports from overseas. Because of the greater variety of colonial news by the mid-century decades, when

From Vernon to Wolfe  29

official communications in the London Gazette were supplemented by letters from packet boats, privateers, and merchantmen, as well as the gossip of foreign courts, readers were often subjected to conflicting and contradictory reports from Atlantic waters. In the early 1740s the most dramatic instance of volatile and contradictory news came from Cartagena. The British expedition there initially spawned jubilation about the prospect of victory because of the navy’s early successes in demolishing the forts at the entrance to the harbour. Within three weeks these hopes were dashed by the official news that the British Army had been decimated by disease and had abandoned the expedition, although the British public was also receiving private letters from common seamen that the Spanish authorities in Cartagena had surrendered. As it turned out, Vernon’s crews had been fed this information as a morale booster at a critical point in the campaign, although back home the reports brought only bewilderment. “These Letters have occasion’d much Discourse,” remarked the London Evening Post, “and many People are surpriz’d that such a Number of Letters should agree in contradicting the Account publish’d by Authority.”14 Bewilderment or not, readers were drawn into the drama of empire, however sporadic and episodic the delivery of news. Such was the curiosity of the public that printers and publishers were sometimes apologetic that they could not provide more.15 That audience, I have suggested, was pre-eminently a middling one, even when newspapers rhetorically talked of the “plebeian politician” reproaching the ministry for its “want of capacity” in innumerable coffee houses and taverns, as they did in 1762.16 Yet the drama of empire did arguably have a larger social draw. Colonial victories were celebrated by mixed audiences in Southwark and at Bartholomew Fair. Amid the tumbling and harlequinades of the Goodman’s Fields Theatre in 1745, there were “representations” of the “storming, cannonading, bombarding and taking [of] Fort Louisbourg.”17 Ballads, broadsides, and inn signs blazoned Vernon’s name in the early 1740s, and versions of “Brave Wolfe” became embedded in popular culture after 1759 (resurfacing in the folk music revival of the 1970s). The politics of commemoration expanded the audience for empire. Vernon’s rapid and surprising victory at Porto Bello was celebrated in Newcastle, Norwich, and Nottingham, as well as in the metropolis. Medals were struck at the Tower to mark the event. After his second victory at Fort Chagres on the Isthmus of Panama, the momentum of jubilation increased; at least the newspapers certainly construed it that

30  Nicholas Rogers

way. By the time of Vernon’s birthday in 1740 the admiral was toasted up and down the country, as far afield as Dublin and Edinburgh. Indeed, in the fourteen months that spanned Vernon’s expeditions to Porto Bello and Cartagena – March 1740 to May 1741 – demonstrations of joy were reported in fifty different locations, about half being large towns.18 This was perhaps predictable in view of the mercantile support Vernon accrued by virtue of his destruction of the Spanish ports from which guardacostas had harassed British shipping. Yet there is evidence that small villages were also swept up in the war fever, even small hamlets where cottagers clubbed together to “make a Bonfire to his Memory.”19 Such was Vernon’s popularity that he was nominated for six constituencies in 1741 and was the only parliamentary figure to be returned for three at a general election. At Ipswich, where Vernon had been defeated in 1734 and where the ministry attempted to mobilize the customs officers and corporation against him, the admiral swept the poll, taking 98 per cent of the voters.20 “You are certainly at this time the most popular & best loved man in England,” wrote William Pulteney enthusiastically. “All places that send Members to Parliament have been struggling to have you for their representative & I dare say you might have been chosen in twenty more places than you are.”21 What was the basis of Vernon’s popularity? What sort of empire did he champion? Essentially it was an empire of trade. Vernon’s victories vented the long-standing mercantile frustration at the activities of Spanish guardacostas in the Caribbean and the fears that France would capture valuable markets in the New World and undermine the British sugar trade.22 Since 1737, merchants from London and the western ports had bombarded Parliament and the ministry for tougher action against the Spanish. Bitterly critical of the Spanish convention, which had pared down their reparations for illegal seizures and left unsettled their right freely to navigate Atlantic waters, they welcomed Vernon’s triumphs. So, too, did the industrialists of the West Midlands and the clothiers and weavers in the Stour Valley of Gloucestershire, who were eager to consolidate their export markets in North America and the West Indies.23 In vindicating Britain’s right to an empire of the seas, writers cast Vernon as a patriotic defender of Britain’s commercial interests tout court, an argument that had considerable purchase at a time when the colonial trades were becoming more dynamic and essential to the metropolitan economy.24 Beyond that, they celebrated Vernon as a defender of Britain’s “National Honour,” avenging the humiliations suffered by

From Vernon to Wolfe  31

British seamen at the hands of Spanish guardacostas.25 Predictably, they framed Vernon’s victories within the context of Britain’s Protestant destiny and the buccaneering spirit of the previous centuries. “To humble Spain three naval heroes born,” ran one couplet, “DRAKE, RALEIGH, VERNON, Britain’s Isle adorn.”26 Upon the capture of Porto Bello and then Fort Chagres, the public was reminded of Henry Morgan’s famed expeditions to South America, culminating in the sacking of Panama in 1671.27 Such predatory actions were improbably projected upon Vernon, fanning the lore of imperial masculine adventure. In drinking songs the admiral was portrayed as a seafaring gallant, “a Man ev’ry Inch,” a “True Cock of the Game” before whom la bella Porto Bello could only “submit to his Pleasure.”28 This heady mix of national stereotype, commercial imperative, and sheer machismo was intoxicating. It ran into problems when Vernon’s expeditions to Cartagena and Cuba proved disastrous and when the public was confronted with the high mortality of tropical warfare. Recruitment into the armed forces stalled; resistance to naval impressment increased. Harvest failures in England and near-famine conditions in Ireland did not ease the Admiralty’s problems of manning the navy at home, and in Atlantic waters they proved equally difficult.29 American seamen stubbornly opposed the press gangs, and in 1747 they received substantial support from Bostonians, who angrily besieged the assembly when Commodore Knowles attempted to take men off the quays. In the Caribbean both merchants and planters constrained the operations of the gangs ashore; in 1746 they successfully lobbied for a law that left sea commanders unable to take up any seamen save deserters without the permission of governors and assemblies. Impressment revealed that commercial imperatives did not always coincide with those of the state; in the plantation zone, in particular, slave owners were reluctant to drain their islands of the white males required to manage their estates and sail their convoys. The struggle over recruitment also underscored the paradox of imperial expansion: to sustain Britain’s freedom of the seas and the right of its citizens to due process under the law, the navy had to rely to a considerable extent upon unfree labour. Idealized in Richard Glover’s poem London as the “chosen train of Liberty and Commerce,” many sailors were denied the very liberties they were defending.30 In the broader debate over imperial needs and strategies, any discussion of unfree labour remained very much on the margins. The British were not prepared to concede that one of the central Spanish grievances,

32  Nicholas Rogers

the Assiento, had become a sluice gate for the contraband sale of slaves to the Spanish colonies.31 Nor were they willing to admit that the commercial freedoms they demanded were primarily for the export of tropical staples produced by plantation labour. Instructively, the link between Vernon and the buccaneers harked back to an age of plunder when the  plantation complex was still relatively undeveloped. And while Vernon’s exploits in the Caribbean were punctuated by news of the Stono Rebellion of African slaves in South Carolina and of General Oglethorpe’s campaigns against the Spanish in Georgia and East Florida, there was no discussion in the press of what these events portended regarding the increasing use of enslaved Africans in the plantation zone or the precarious status of Georgia as a white settler colony without slave labour. No one denied that slavery existed in the British colonies. Prior to the war, it was acknowledged that “our Colonies receive a constant supply of slaves, without which they cannot possibly subsist.”32 Very occasionally the iniquity of slavery was admitted as well as its incompatibility with British traditions of liberty. Yet such frank admissions were rare before the conflict with America after 1763. The conventional coupling of “trade and plantations” tended to occlude slavery rather than reveal it, or at the very least commodify it; and while the standard text on Britain’s colonial possessions, John Oldmixon’s The British Empire in America, discussed slavery in the West Indies, its numerous editions were not updated to reveal the dramatic increase in slave labour.33 Rather, the British empire of the 1740s was popularly imagined as commercial, maritime, Protestant, and free.34 In contrast to the Spanish, whose brutal treatment and enslavement of indigenous people was foregrounded through translations of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s famous tract, British imperialism was perceived as positively benign.35 The issue of territorial empire was correspondingly given a low profile in discussions of Britain’s goals and strategies during the 1740s. Admiral Vernon had conceived of his task as one of raiding and destroying important treasure ports and privateering stations. He was an exponent of a “blue-water policy,” that is to say, a foreign policy that emphasized Britain’s maritime might over its European connections. Opposition politicians in Britain championed Vernon’s maritime priorities to contrast his ventures to Sir Robert Walpole’s foreign policy, which they viewed as too Eurocentric and too deferential to Hanover. Vernon’s avowed aim was to dislocate Spanish commerce, not to capture Spanish territory, even though his secret instructions urged him to capture some

From Vernon to Wolfe  33

key ports such as Havana or Cartagena, from which the sparks of internal revolt might be ignited. When the admiral failed to capture Cartagena in 1741, British commentators did not think it an irreparable loss. They were more concerned that Spanish commerce be disrupted. During the 1740s colonial acquisitions seldom generated a public debate about the benefits of territorial empire. Take the example of Cape Breton. This island and its fortress at Louisbourg were captured in 1745 by an American colonial force under the command of Sir George Pepperell with the somewhat belated help of the Royal Navy.36 Although the City of London hailed the capture of Louisbourg as a “valuable acquisition,” it is clear that most British merchants perceived that victory in commercial terms, as a means of curbing the activity of French privateers along the North American littoral, as well as controlling the cod fishery, itself a valuable nursery for seamen. In other words, the capture of Louisbourg was praised because it abetted the British blue-water policy of promoting a strong navy and colonial trade. To be sure, one of the promoters of the expedition, the admiralty judge Robert Auckmuty, understood its broader strategic implications, seeing Louisbourg as an important strike against French territorial ambitions in America. So, too, did the governor of Massachusetts, Sir William Shirley. But this dimension was not mentioned in the congratulatory addresses to the Crown, at least not in Britain.37 In 1748, when Louisbourg was returned to the French to offset British commitments in Europe, there were predictably howls of protest from New Englanders, partly because of the sacrifices they had made in taking it and partly because of its significance to the Franco-American empire.38 In particular, Americans feared they would be subjected to further French-backed Aboriginal raids on their frontier settlements.39 By contrast, the complaints in Britain were singularly muted, and again framed largely in maritime terms. The return of Louisbourg would allow the French to recover the “full freedom and benefit of their Navigation,” so it was argued in the British press. It would restore their navy to a point where it would be “capable of disputing the Empire of the Seas with that of Great Britain.”40 Ten years later, in 1758, Britain captured Louisbourg again. On this occasion British and American opinion was more closely aligned, principally because of the unsettled state of affairs in America. Efforts to create a Protestant colony in Nova Scotia to counter the French reoccupation of Louisbourg had faltered, partly because the early settlers, ­demobilized soldiers and sailors, showed little enthusiasm for sodbusting, and partly because the combined influence of the French and

34  Nicholas Rogers

the Mi’kmaq eroded the neutrality of the francophone Acadians who inhabited the Bay of Fundy. In what was essentially an unofficial war in Nova Scotia, the British eventually decided to deport the Acadians, whose loyalty to the British Crown was now in doubt. Some seven thousand were shipped out in late 1755, and a further three thousand after the fall of Louisbourg.41 The removal of this long-standing FrancoAmerican community took place at the time when the French and British clashed in the Ohio Valley, an area of growing international rivalry. Here the westward expansion of British settlers challenged French claims to the interior at a time when the fragmenting Iroquois Confederacy could no longer contain or mediate European ambitions in the region.42 The events of the 1750s illustrated the extent to which developments on the periphery dictated the dynamics of empire. The Board of Trade and the Privy Council were certainly aware of these developments, even if they were a little hazy on their geography, but the British public moved slowly to a realization of what was happening. Instructively, it took a spectacular defeat of General Braddock’s army at the Forks of the Ohio in July 1755 to jolt the British public’s attention to the threat of French forces along the American frontier. True, the British had some inkling of the problems of settling Halifax and the difficulties of defining the boundary between Acadia and Nova Scotia. Yet the general public would have been unable to construct a coherent narrative to explain why the Acadians were deported. The London Evening Post carried the simple message that the “French in Nova Scotia would be remov’d out of the province but to what places was unknown.”43 As for the Ohio Valley, very little news appeared in the British press about the struggle for mastery there until 1755. The only newspaper that followed events there in some detail was the Whitehall Evening Post, which carried several pieces on French relations with the native peoples, and reasserted the need for the British to retain Aboriginal goodwill after the Albany Conference of 1754.44 No mention was made of Christopher Gist, the chief agent of the Ohio Company, who was actively buying up land in the interior, or of George Washington’s confrontations with the French and his surrender at Fort Necessity. By the time James Wolfe entered upon the scene, the public was a good deal more attentive to the challenges posed by France in America and of the desirability of cultivating better alliances with native peoples. In the wake of Braddock’s defeat at Fort Duquesne, monthlies vied with one another to produce maps of the emerging theatres of war.

From Vernon to Wolfe  35

1.1 Louis-Philippe Boitard, British Resentment or the French fairly Coopt in ­Louisbourg, engraving, 1755.

A print by Louis-Philippe Boitard, published by an act of Parliament to commemorate the British naval blockade of Louisbourg at the outset of the war, proved to be a veritable tableau of empire, linking the blockade with the broader struggle against France in the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley (see figure 1.1).45 After the loss of Minorca to the French in 1756 and the suspicion that the government had been lethargically ineffectual and publicly evasive in countering French territorial ambitions, the fate of the western frontier in America took on a new urgency. It entered political discourse in the opposition’s demands for an enquiry into the ministry’s handling of overseas affairs in the final months of 1756.46 Duquesne and Minorca pushed American affairs to the centre

36  Nicholas Rogers

of the debate over British overseas strategy and linked them closely to the political fortunes of William Pitt, whose rise to prominence was publicly acclaimed by many of the same interests who had applauded Vernon in the early 1740s.47 Wolfe had been briefly mentioned in the accounts of the abortive expedition to Rochefort in 1757, although he had not been in any way associated with its failure. At the enquiry it became clear that he had favoured a landing despite the risks, and his zeal was rewarded with the brevet rank of colonel in the 20th Regiment of Foot. In the following year he played a prominent role in the capture of Louisbourg, for which he was commended in official dispatches and toasted at celebratory bonfires and dinners at home. The city of Exeter even offered him the freedom of the city, along with Admirals Boscawen and Hardy and General Amherst.48 In Philadelphia, the capture of Louisbourg was celebrated with a fireworks display on the Delaware, at which rockets soared from a floating tower named after Wolfe.49 Thus, before his victorious but fateful encounter with the French at Quebec, Wolfe had already captured the limelight. He had gained a reputation for intrepid, zealous service to his country. His successes were a welcome departure from the train of military failures that had beset British forces in the early years of the war, and from the scandal of Minden, where Lord George Sackville declined to advance when so ordered.50 Like Frederick of Prussia, Wolfe was praised for his professionalism at a time when serious doubts were raised about the capabilities of upper-class officers, who seemed too besotted with “unmanly Luxury” and “selfish Effeminacy” to generate the necessary martial spirit for victory.51 Wolfe, whose father was an army officer and whose maternal grandfather was a small country squire, represented the subaltern who had risen through the ranks by discipline and merit rather than privilege. Al­ though Wolfe prided himself on his gentlemanly status and believed in the innate qualities of the gentleman officer, he was cast by his first biographer, John Pringle, as a paragon of bourgeois rectitude: a ­ Christian soldier, a devoted son, and an officer who looked forward to the delights of domestic felicity once the war was over.52 What is clear is that the public was beginning to understand the significance of Wolfe’s victories in larger strategic terms. Although the recapture of Louisbourg was championed in 1758 in much the same terms as 1745, there was a new emphasis upon its territorial implications. The Norwich and Bristol corporations talked of protecting British possessions in America; others noted how the retention of Louisbourg would

From Vernon to Wolfe  37

compromise French ambitions in the backcountry and stifle its empire in the St Lawrence.53 The territorial imperative was even more explicit in the addresses and commentaries on Quebec. That victory was seen as a decisive defeat of the French empire in America, destroying its plans for an arc of influence from the St Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. Quebec was “an excellent Conquest,” remarked the London Evening Post, “and extensively advantageous as it secures the British subjects in that Part of the World against the flagitious Scheme which the Grand Monarque had formed to engross their Properties and oppress their Liberties.”54 “The British Empire in America,” declared “Britannicus,” was now secure. Anticipating the onrush of westward expansion, he foretold of great economic benefits to “our trading and commercial people,” especially through the consumption of British manufactured goods.55 In the next two years the British chalked up further victories, including Martinique, Havana, and Senegal on the African coast. They captured Gorée, whose gum trade was important to the British textile industry. As they pondered which of these territories they should try to retain in the peace negotiations of 1762–3, the broader articulations of the British empire came into view. In the 1740s the sugar islands were regarded as the jewels of the Atlantic economy, more important than many northern colonies by virtue of their staple exports and reciprocal relations with the metropole. In the early 1760s there were opportunities for expanding Britain’s sugar empire by incorporating the French islands, something that Liverpool slavers, among others, welcomed.56 But the strong planter lobby in the British House of Commons, fearful of competition from the former French sugar growers, blocked this proposal. In the end, Britain opted for only a modest expansion of its sugar economy in the Neutral, or Windward, Islands, protecting the established channels of supply and demand. Readers of the debate on the peace were continually confronted with the question of whether it was better to retain the large wilderness ­territory of Canada or small sugar islands such as Guadeloupe. Judged by economic criteria, the answer seemed obvious: cod, lumber, and beaver pelts were no match for the lure of sugar, rum, and other tropical products. William Burke, briefly a senior administrator in occupied Guadeloupe, believed the return of the island quite contrary to Britain’s commercial traditions and future interests. So, too, did a writer in the Gazetteer who thought any increase in the profits of slavery would benefit a British economy that was so heavily in the red.57 Yet if the problem was posed in terms of imperial security and long-term development,

38  Nicholas Rogers

the answer was more complex. As one journalist remarked: “Canada will not give us riches, yet it certainly will give us power.”58 The retention of Canada was the key to the westward development of the mainland colonies, whose population now approached one and a half million and whose purchasing power was very buoyant. Rather than grandiose visions of empire, it was matters of security, national honour, and international rivalry that dictated the terms of the debate in 1762–3. Indeed, some newspapers worried openly whether Britain could govern the new territories she had acquired by conquest or whether they would eventually be lost to powerful colonial interests. “The seat of empire may be transferred if they grow too powerful,” remarked the North Briton; “It is a great rule in politics that colonies and dependent countries should be kept poor, not to raise their heads, or wag their tongues, lest they should spit at their mother country.”59 Whatever qualms people had about the windfalls of war, they eventually had to face up to its implications. What emerged from the post1763 settlement was a new conception of Britain’s mainland empire. It could no longer be viewed as a polyglot group of seaboard colonies but was, rather, a crucial part of the network of Atlantic commerce. With a population of over two million, the American colonies were an increasingly important market for British manufacturing goods as well as a valuable resource of some semi-tropical staples and naval stores. It was part of an empire, declared the Public Advertiser, “not inferior to that of antient Rome.”60 Britons now agonized over whether the French retention of Louisiana would compromise their grip over a territory that stretched from Nova Scotia to Florida. Worryingly, France retained West Florida to the banks of the Mississippi. In 1763 Britain emerged with a large and potentially limitless American empire almost by default, although one could certainly argue that the logic of settler development and its potential economic benefits had driven Britain on this path of imperial expansion.61 Certainly, colonial reformers like Henry McCulloch and Benjamin Franklin would have thought so.62 It was an empire, moreover, whose territoriality posed new problems of authority and power. To what extent should the British attempt to assimilate new subject peoples? To what extent should they attempt to accommodate their customs and laws?63 The question was posed in the context of the seventy thousand Canadiens in the new province of Quebec, who clearly could not be deported in the manner of the Acadians. Some hoped that the introduction of English schools and the self-evident benefits of free trade and enterprise capitalism would

From Vernon to Wolfe  39

rapidly integrate the Canadiens into the British colony. Benjamin Franklin believed that the influx of Protestant migrants into Canadian territory would overwhelm the Catholic population within a decade, but this was a wildly optimistic forecast that totally ignored the resilience and demographic vitality of the habitants, as well as the reluctance of British immigrants to live among them.64 As a result, Britain was confronted with the problem of how to govern an alien population whose cultural traditions contrasted with, and even helped define, her own national and imperial identity. This predicament was aggravated by the fact that the Seven Years’ War was sometimes viewed as a providential war by Protestants against Catholics – in New England, in particular.65 In his 1759 sermon to the Boston House of Representatives upon the capture of Quebec, Samuel Cooper expatiated on the providential blessings of war, the triumph of the Protestant interest, and the king’s attachment to Liberty, whom Cooper personified as a monarch “who has long since founded his Empire in the hearts of his subjects.”66 In Britain, too, God’s providential hand was intoned. One suggested text for the thanksgiving of the peace was Psalm 44:3. “For we gat not the Land in Possession through our own Sword: neither was it our own Arm that helped us” but God’s guiding hand.67 Such sentiments spelt trouble to a British government bent on making pragmatic concessions to the Canadien way of life. By recognizing Catholic rights of worship and a French-based civil code, the government inevitably flouted a long-standing and revivified tradition of antiCatholicism and anti-absolutism on which British identity was based. British politicians agonized over this issue for a decade or more. Tacit freedom of conscience was quickly granted after the conquest of French Canada, and a full structure of civil courts was in place by 1763.68 But the issue of whether the Catholic Church should be formally subsidized remained unresolved until 1774.69 At this point the strategic concessions to Catholicism generated a Protestant populism that destabilized politics in both Britain and America. Dealing with a large Catholic population was not the only problem Britain inherited in the new imperial order. Another was how to handle the native peoples, who had always been part of what was often a triangulated struggle in North America. During the Seven Years’ War, France succeeded in retaining the allegiance of native peoples more successfully than the British, with the result that British and American settlers were constantly deluged with accounts of Aboriginal raids on

40  Nicholas Rogers

frontier settlements and the ambushing and even massacre of British and colonial troops.70 The disappearance of France as a player in the frontier wars brought into high relief the issue of how westward settlement and Aboriginal land claims might be reconciled. The question was dramatized by a spate of Aboriginal uprisings in the period 1763– 5, of which Pontiac’s War was the most conspicuous, and by the retaliatory actions of such groups as the Paxton Boys on the Pennsylvania frontier. In this context, Indian Superintendent Sir William Johnson sought to frame a policy to offset the near-anarchy of the frontier, first by creating some uniform rules to mediate existing land disputes and second by constructing a boundary line between British and Indian lands around which future land sales might be negotiated between the Crown and resident nations.71 The policy divided British political circles on account of its expense and inefficacy; it failed to prevent new settlers from squatting on Aboriginal territory, and it did not stem the continuing speculations of colonial land companies and agents. Nor could it curb the land hunger of officers and privates who had fought in America during the Seven Years’ War.72 As an early example of imperial trusteeship, it was never able to reconcile the working assumption that native peoples were subjects of the realm with their own estimation of themselves as sovereign friends and allies of the British. By 1768, this comprehensive program had been significantly reduced, giving individual provinces the upper hand in the regulation of the Indian trade and removing the brakes on western expansion, to the grave detriment of native peoples. The failure of the Indian policy was symptomatic of a larger problem. The rise of a larger territorial empire with an unregulated western frontier required not only more regulation but a great financial investment when it could least be afforded. Britain’s nominal debt at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession stood at £74.6m; by 1763, it stood at £133m, and required over 50 per cent of tax revenues to meet outstanding obligations.73 There was a deepening fear that the cost of servicing the debt had outstripped the nation’s capacity to raise taxes: hence the quest for further sources of revenue from colonial pockets to meet larger imperial obligations. Those obligations now included a greatly enhanced British military presence in North America, to be paid for by the colonists themselves. It was an impolitic policy that miscalculated the chances of a French resurgence in North America after 1763 and ignored the testy relationship between British officers and colonial militias during the Seven Years’ War. It encouraged a more authoritarian stance towards

From Vernon to Wolfe  41

the colonists and a tighter surveillance of Britain’s eighteenth-century maritime empire. For years the implementation of the navigation laws had been accompanied by a recognition that multilateral trade with French and Spanish colonies was useful and necessary to the economic growth and diversity of the North American colonies. That flexibility was now abandoned in favour of a more rigid imperial policy centred on Parliament.74 Such a policy also brought into high relief one of the great paradoxes of the Seven Years’ War: that Britain’s successful defeat of France and rise to world pre-eminence also coincided with the increasing self-confidence, not to say truculence, of colonial assemblies, who were not prepared simply to defer to the metropolis on the question of how the empire might be reorganized. Confident of their political and legal inheritance as free-born Britons, Americans refused subordinate status and bristled at those sectors of the British press that, during the Stamp Act crisis, trashed them as “a mixed rabble of Scotch, Irish and foreign vagabonds” and “descendants of convicts.”75 Of course, the victories of Wolfe at Louisbourg and Quebec did not occur in this contentious climate. They represented the high point of Anglo-American consensus, a moment when the course of the war turned and French ambitions for an American empire collapsed. In this moment of martial glory, the news of the victory against Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham was greeted in Long Island with toasts not only to the “Patriotism and Integrity of Mr. Pitt” but to the king’s own “paternal tenderness” towards his colonies.76 Some saw Wolfe as America’s guardian angel, even though the general was often contemptuous of the colonial rangers who fought in the war. “The Americans are in general the dirtiest most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive,” Wolfe wrote upon hearing of Abercrombie’s defeat at Ticonderoga in 1758. “There is no depending upon ’em in action.”77 None of these disparaging remarks reached the ears of the press in 1759 and 1760. Wolfe’s apotheosis had few detractors. His spectacular victory obscured the problems that a larger territorial British empire in America might generate. “The Conquest of Quebec is so sudden, so surprising, and so stupendous a Mark of the Blessing of Providence upon our just Cause,” remarked the Whitehall Evening Post, “that it requires some Time to contemplate its Circumstances.”78 Only perceptive observers like Thomas Pownall had an inkling of the challenges that lay ahead. For most, the events of 1758–62 were conceived in terms of longstanding international rivalries, not in terms of their long-term implications for empire. Even for the London merchants and tradesmen who

42  Nicholas Rogers

championed Pitt and demanded the retention of many French territories, issues of honour, sacrifice, and international security mattered as much as the potential benefits of new lands, if not more so.79 It was in terms of the money spent and blood shed that many demanded a punitive peace, not with a view to territorial acquisition, save as a safeguard against a French resurgence. Instructively, Britons used the term “British empire” sparingly during the 1760s. The term crops up on only thirteen occasions in the Burney collection of newspapers between 1759 and 1770, and four of these referred back to John Oldmixon’s British Empire in America, first published in 1708. The notion that Britons possessed a “clear sense of a British empire” by the mid-eighteenth century, “encompassing dominance of the high seas and possession of overseas territories,” is overdrawn. William Pitt, now Lord Chatham, could refer to the “undeniable pretensions of the British empire” in 1770, but it really had taken a decade to sink in.80 In the immediate aftermath of Wolfe’s final victory, Britons and Americans were one in applauding the general for thwarting a French empire and securing a British. By the 1770s, however, as the politics of empire became more contentious, Wolfe’s legacy would be disputed. Many still chose to see him in almost timeless terms, as the quintessential patriot serving king and country.81 But Wolfe would also be cast as an unreflecting promoter of empire, as an imperial reformer in the manner of Chatham, and also as the man who enabled Americans to realize their manifest destiny. In Henry Brakenbridge’s play The Death of General Montgomery, published in Philadelphia in 1777, the ghost of Wolfe even appears as an outright defender of American liberties.82 In 1772 the Middlesex Journal remarked that Wolfe had “exalted this kingdom to the dominion of Immeasurable Empire.”83 Four or five years later readers may well have wondered at what cost. NOTES 1 On Thomas Pownall, see John A. Shutz, Thomas Pownall: British Defender of American Liberty (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1951), 181–214, and the ODNB entry by Eliga Gould. 2 Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies (London, 1764), 1. Cited in Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 210n.

From Vernon to Wolfe  43 3 Pownall, Administration of the Colonies, 4th ed. (London, 1768), 8–11. 4 For the emphasis on empire, see Kathleen Wilson, “Empire of Virtue: The Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture c. 1720–1785,” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (London: Routledge, 1994), 128–64. For a more sceptical view, see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 51–3, 171–4, 338–40. For emphasis upon international rivalry as the driving force of empire, see Bob Harris, “War, Empire, and the ‘National Interest’ in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Britain and America Go to War: The Impact of War and Warfare in Anglo-America, 1754–1815, ed. Julie Flavell and Stephen Conway (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 13–40. For doubts that there really was a coherent notion of empire, see J.G.A. Pocock, The Politics of Extent and the Problem of Freedom (Colorado Springs, CO: Colorado College, 1988), 9–12, and David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. 4. 5 Wolfe once called soldiers the “Geneva and piss” of the country: Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (London: William Heinemann, 1909), 274. 6 John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 142. 7 For these calculations, I have used the age structures set out in E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), table A 3.1. I have counted everyone over fifteen as adult. 8 Caesar de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II, ed. Madame van Muyden (London: J. Murray, 1902), 162–3. Don Manoel Gonzales, London in 1731 (London, 1888), talked of coffee houses where “the middle sort of people chiefly resort, many to breakfast, read the news, and talk politics” (160). 9 The issue of “simultaneity” and the importance of print in mobilizing collective identities is raised in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 50–79. In relation to what Anderson termed “cosmic time,” the issue of “simultaneity” makes sense, although it is worthwhile adding a Braudelian perspective to the reception of news in the age of sail. 10 For the papers’ imperial focus, see Wilson, “Empire of Virtue,” 133. See also her “The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent: Imperialism and the Politics of Identity in Georgian England,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), 237–62.

44  Nicholas Rogers 11 Bath Chronicle, 26 February, 9 April, 14 May 1761. 12 Bath Chronicle, 12 February 1761; Douglas Hall, ed., In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–1786 (London: Macmillan, 1989), chap. 5. 13 London Evening Post, 12–15 January 1740. 14 London Evening Post, 23–5 June 1741, reprinted in the Salisbury Journal, 30 June 1741. 15 Gloucester Journal, 9 June 1741, regarding the desire for news of Cartagena; Whitehall Evening Post and London Evening Post, 10–12 August 1758, regarding news from Cape Breton in 1758. 16 London Chronicle, 23 October 1762. See also Daily Gazetteer, 3 June 1741. 17 Emmett L. Avery et al., eds, The London Stage, 1660–1800, 5 parts, 11 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–8), part 3, vol. 2, p. 863 (12 November 1740), part 4, vol. 2, p. 812 (18 September 1760); General Advertiser, 11 September 1745. 18 This tally is based on a search of the London newspapers and six pro­ vincial papers: the Gloucester Journal, the Newcastle Courant, the Norwich Gazette, the Northampton Mercury, the Leeds Mercury, and the Salisbury Journal. On Vernon celebrations, see Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral ­Vernon,” Past and Present 121 (1988): 74–109; and Gerald Jordan and Nicholas ­Rogers, “Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in Hanoverian ­England,” Journal of British Studies 28, no. 3 (July 1989): 201–11. 19 London Evening Post, 13–15 November 1740. 20 The Poll for Members of Parliament for the Borough of Ipswich (Ipswich, 1741). The turnout was 91%. 21 B. McL. Ranft, ed., The Vernon Papers (London: Printed for the Navy Records Society, 1958), 240. 22 On fears that France would outpace Britain in the production of sugar, see [A Merchant of Bristol], A Dissertation on the Present Conjuncture, particularly with Regard to Trade (London, 1739), 14. 23 For Stour Valley celebrations, see London Evening Post, 17–19 November 1741; Newcastle Courant, 21–8 November 1741. 24 For scepticism about the general character of the agitation, see [Merchant retir’d], An Address to the Merchants of Great Britain (London, 1739), 34: “It is not the Sense therefore of this Merchant, nor the other that is to direct the Councils of a trading Nation, it is the general interests of the whole that must prevail.” 25 Especially the mutilation of Captain Jenkins, whose loss of an ear in 1731 became a cause célèbre in 1738–9; see Philip Woodfine, Britannia’s Glories: The Walpole Ministry and the 1739 War with Spain (London: Royal Historical

From Vernon to Wolfe  45

26

27

28 29 30 31 32

33

3 4 35

36 37

Society, 1998), 90–1. For Vernon and the “National Honour,” see [Merchant of Bristol], Dissertation on the Present Conjuncture, 26. The pamphlet also talked of threats to the “National Profit.” Gentleman’s Magazine, 11 (1741), 274; London Magazine (1741), 251. See also the poem in the London Evening Post, 25–7 March 1740, where Vernon’s “Old English Valour” recalls Drake and Raleigh. See Peter Earle, The Sack of Panama: Captain Morgan and the Battle for the Caribbean (London: Thomas Dunne, 1981), and more briefly, The Pirate Wars: Pirates vs. the Legitimate Navies of the World (London: Methuen, 2003), 94–6. Vernon’s Glory: Containing 14 New Songs, Occasion’d by the Taking of Porto Bello and Fort Chagre (London, 1740), 19. For riots and reports of starvation in Ireland, see London Evening Post, 10–12 April, 29–31 May, 14–17 June 1740. Richard Glover, London; or, The Progress of Commerce, 2nd ed. (London, 1739), 27. The Assiento of 1713 allowed the British South Sea Company to deliver a specified number of slaves to the Spanish colonies in the New World. General Evening Post, 11 March 1735. On the iniquity of slavery, and its dangers to planters, see Robert Robertson, A Detection of the State and Situation of the Present Sugar Planters of Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands (London, 1732), 26–7. On the emergence of slavery as a moral and political issue in public discourse, see Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). First published in 1708, the second edition of The British Empire in America was advertised in the Daily Post, 13 December 1740, and there were further advertisements the following year and on into the 1750s and 1760s. Compare Wilson, “The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent,” 240–1, who approvingly cites Oldmixon as evidence of the penetration of imperial themes in Britain. The phrase is from Armitage, Ideological Origins, chap. 4. The third and fourth editions of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s text, entitled Popery and Slavery Displayed (London, 1745), also contained a heavy dose of anti-Catholic literature, some of it clearly drawn from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. John A. Schutz, William Shirley, King’s Governor of Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 95–7. Richard Rolt, An Impartial Representation of the Conduct of Several Powers of Europe Engaged in the Late General War … from 1739 to 1748, 4 vols (London, 1749–50), 4:9–11; General Evening Post, 5 September 1745; London Gazette, 17 September 1745. For Governor Shirley’s appreciation of the broader

46  Nicholas Rogers s­ ignificance of Louisbourg, see George Arthur Wood, William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts, 1741–1756, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1920), 1:249. 38 This angle was only addressed in Britain in the Westminster Journal, 21 May 1748, where a writer noted the sacrifice that New Englanders had made in promoting “the interest of the British Empire.” 39 Schutz, William Shirley, 142. 40 Remembrancer, 4 June 1748; London Evening Post, 14 June 1748. 41 On the Acadian removal, see John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland (New York: Norton, 2005), and Geoffrey Plank, An ­Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign against the Peoples of Acadia (­Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 42 Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), part 1; Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), part 2. 43 London Evening Post, 6–8 November 1755. 44 Whitehall Evening Post, 2–4 July, 20–2 August, 7–10 September, 10–12 October 1754. The London Gazette, 12 October 1754, did carry a report of the Albany delegates settling affairs with the Six Nations, but included nothing about colonial disunion and the unwillingness of colonial assemblies to endorse the Albany resolutions. 45 On the maps, see Wilson, “The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent,” 241–2. On the print, British Resentment or the French fairly Coopt in Louisbourg (1755), see Timothy J. Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Conference of 1754 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 57–9. 46 See the address of the City of London in Read’s Weekly Journal, 6 November 1756. The paper also carried a report from Sir William Johnson to General Abercrombie that the Delaware had buried the war hatchet and that the British could look forward to better relations with native people on the Susquehanna. 47 Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 99–104. 48 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 9 September 1758. For toasts to Wolfe, see ­London Evening Post, 26–9 August 1758. 49 Pennsylvania Gazette, 7 September 1758. 50 See Robert W. Jones’s essay in this volume (pages 213–34) for a fuller discussion of Sackville’s conduct at Minden.

From Vernon to Wolfe  47 51 Nicholas Rogers, “Brave Wolfe: The Making of a Hero,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 240–2. 52 John Pringle, The Life of General James Wolfe, the Conqueror of Canada (London, 1760), 5–7, 17; Willson, Life and Letters of James Wolfe, 353. 53 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 2 and 16 September 1758; London Gazette, 25 September 1758; Monitor, 26 August 1758. 54 London Evening Post, 1–4 December 1759. The Thetford address talked of the fall of France’s “despotic Empire”: London Gazette, 18 December 1759. 55 London Evening Post, 3–5 January 1760. 56 One hundred and forty-five principal merchants of Liverpool signed an address supporting the retention of Guadeloupe. See Gazetteer, 2 November 1762. 57 William Burke, An Examination of the Commercial Principles of the Late Negotiations between Great Britain and France in 1761 (London, 1762); Gazetteer, 2 November 1762. 58 Gazetteer, 2 September 1762. 59 London Evening Post, 13–15 November 1762; North Briton, 13 November 1762. 60 Public Advertiser, 18 December 1762. 61 In the King’s speech of 1762, the forthcoming treaty was said to add “an immense territory to the Empire of Great-Britain” but also to “lay a solid foundation for the increase of trade and commerce.” Noted in the St James’s Chronicle, 25 November 1762. 62 Shannon, Indians and Colonists, 64–8, 89–102. 63 For a discussion of this issue, see P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 182–9. 64 Benjamin Franklin, The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadeloupe (Boston, 1760), 47; London Evening Post, 1–3 January 1761. 65 Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), chap. 7; Harris, “War, Empire, and the ‘National Interest,’” 27–30. 66 Samuel Cooper, A Sermon Preached before His Excellency Thomas Pownall, Esquire … the Honourable His Majesty’s Council and House of Representatives, of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England, October 16th, 1759 (Boston, 1759), 23. The sermon was extracted in the London Chronicle, 18 March 1760. 67 A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving to Almighty God: To be used in all Churches and Chapels throughout England (London, 1763), 3.

48  Nicholas Rogers 68 Douglas Hay, “Civilians Tried in Military Courts: Quebec 1759–1763,” in Canadian State Trials: Law, Politics and Security Measures, 1603–1837, ed. F. Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 114–28. 69 Philip Lawson, The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989). 70 Troy Bickham, Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 61–3. 71 See especially Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, chaps. 4–6, and Daniel K. Richter, “Native Americans, the Plan of 1764, and a British Empire That Never Was,” in Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America, ed. ­Robert Olwell and Alan Tully (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 269–92. 72 Marshall, Making and Unmaking of Empires, 117. 73 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688– 1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 114–16. 74 On this sea change in British policy, see Daniel A. Baugh, “Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of ‘a grand maritime empire,’” in An Imperial State at War, ed. Stone, 185–223. 75 Cited in Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume II: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 225. 76 Pennsylvania Gazette, 15 November 1759. 77 Boston Evening Post, 22 October 1759; George Louis Beer, British Colonial Policy, 1754–1765 (London: Macmillan, 1907), 174. 78 Whitehall Evening Post, 27–30 October 1759. 79 Rogers, Whigs and Cities, 116–26. 80 Bingley’s Weekly Journal, 1 December 1770. The term came up in a debate on the Falkland Islands crisis. For the statement that the “British empire” was “an established facet of cultural life,” see Anthony Webster, The Debate on the Rise of the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 24. 81 This is principally how he was seen in the poems sent to the press, September-November 1772, as fitting epitaphs to his monument in ­Westminster Abbey. 82 Rogers, “Brave Wolfe,” 258. 83 Middlesex Journal, 3 September 1772.

From Vernon to Wolfe  49 BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Pamphlets, Letters Anon. A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving to Almighty God: To Be Used in All Churches and Chapels throughout England. London, 1763. – Vernon’s Glory: Containing 14 New Songs, Occasion’d by the Taking of Porto Bello and Fort Chagre. London, 1740. Burke, William. An Examination of the Commercial Principles of the Late Negotiations between Great Britain and France in 1761. London, 1762. Cooper, Samuel. A Sermon Preached before His Excellency Thomas Pownall, Esquire … the Honourable His Majesty’s Council and House of Representatives, of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England, October 16th, 1759. Boston, 1759. Franklin, Benjamin. The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadeloupe. Boston, 1760. Glover, Richard. London; or, The Progress of Commerce, 2nd ed. London, 1739. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. Popery and Slavery Display’d. London, 1745. A Merchant of Bristol. A Dissertation on the Present Conjuncture, particularly with Regard to Trade. London, 1739. Merchant retir’d. An Address to the Merchants of Great Britain. London, 1739. Oldmixon, John. The British Empire in America. London, 1708. Pownall, Thomas. The Administration of the Colonies. London, 1764. Pringle, John. The Life of General James Wolfe, the Conqueror of Canada. London, 1760. Robertson, Robert. A Detection of the State and Situation of the Present Sugar Planters of Barbadoes [sic] and the Leeward Islands. London, 1732. Rolt, Richard. An Impartial Representation of the Conduct of Several Powers of Europe Engaged in the Late General War … from 1739 to 1748. 4 vols. London, 1749–50. Vernon, Edward. The Vernon Papers. Edited by B. McL. Ranft. London: Printed for the Navy Records Society, 1958. Newspapers, Newspaper Entries Bath Chronicle, 1761. Bingley’s Weekly Journal, 1770. Boston Evening Post, 1759.

50  Nicholas Rogers Daily Gazetteer, 1741. Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 1758. Gazetteer, 1762. General Advertiser, 1745. General Evening Post, 1745. Gentleman’s Magazine, 1741. Gloucester Journal, 1741. London Evening Post, 1740–1, 1748, 1755, 1758–62. London Gazette, 1745, 1754, 1759. London Magazine, 1741. Middlesex Journal, 1772. Monitor, 1758. Newcastle Courant, 1741. North Briton, 1762. Pennsylvania Gazette, 1758, 1759. Public Advertiser, 1762. Read’s Weekly Journal, 1756. Remembrancer, 1748. St James’s Chronicle, 1762. Salisbury Journal, 1741. Westminster Journal, 1748. Whitehall Evening Post, 1754, 1758–9. Secondary Sources Avery, Emmett L., et al., eds. The London Stage, 1660–1800. 5 parts in 11 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–8. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. London: Faber and Faber; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. – A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2000. Baugh, Daniel A. “Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of ‘a grand maritime empire.’” In An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, edited by Lawrence Stone, 185–223. London: Routledge, 1994. Beer, George Louis. British Colonial Policy, 1754–1765. London: Macmillan, 1907.

From Vernon to Wolfe  51 Bickham, Troy. Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Brewer, John. Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. – The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Brown, Christopher. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Earle, Peter. The Sack of Panama: Captain Morgan and the Battle for the Caribbean. London: Thomas Dunne, 1981. Faragher, John Mack. A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland. New York: Norton, 2005. Greene, Jack P. “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume II: The Eighteenth Century, edited by P.J. Marshall, 208–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hall, Douglas, ed. In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750– 1786. London: Macmillan, 1989. Harris, Bob. “‘American Idols’: Empire, War and the Middling Ranks in MidEighteenth-Century Britain.” Past and Present 150 (1996): 111–41. – “War, Empire, and the ‘National Interest’ in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain.” In Britain and America Go to War: The Impact of War and Warfare in Anglo-America, 1754–1815, edited by Julie Flavell and Stephen Conway, 13–40. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Hay, Douglas. “Civilians Tried in Military Courts: Quebec 1759–1763.” In Canadian State Trials: Law, Politics and Security Measures, 1603–1837, edited by F. Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright, 114–28. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Hinderaker, Eric. Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Jordan, Gerald, and Nicholas Rogers. “Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in Hanoverian England.” Journal of British Studies 28 (1989): 201–11. Langford, Paul. A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Lawson, Philip. The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. Marshall, P.J. The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America, c. 1750–1783. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Miller, Peter N. Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

52  Nicholas Rogers Plank, Geoffrey. An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign against the Peoples of Acadia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Pocock, J.G.A. The Politics of Extent and the Problem of Freedom. Colorado Springs, CO: Colorado College, 1988. Richter, Daniel K. “Native Americans, the Plan of 1764, and a British Empire That Never Was.” In Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America, edited by Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, 269–92. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Rogers, Nicholas. “Brave Wolfe: The Making of a Hero.” In A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, edited by Kathleen Wilson, 239–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. – Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Shannon, Timothy J. Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Conference of 1754. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Shutz, John A. Thomas Pownall: British Defender of American Liberty. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1951. – William Shirley, King’s Governor of Massachusetts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961. Steele, Ian K. “The British Parliament and the Atlantic Colonies to 1760: New Approaches to Enduring Questions.” Parliamentary History 14 (1995): 29–46. Webster, Anthony. The Debate on the Rise of the British Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Willson, Beckles. The Life and Letters of James Wolfe. London: William Heinemann, 1909. Wilson, Kathleen. “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon.” Past and Present 121 (1988): 74–109. – “Empire of Virtue: The Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture c. 1720–1785.” In An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, edited by Lawrence Stone, 128–64. London: Routledge, 1994. – “The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent: Imperialism and the Politics of Identity in Georgian England.” In The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, edited by Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, 237–62. London: Routledge, 1995. Wood, George Arthur. William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts, 1741–1756. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1920. Woodfine, Philip. Britannia’s Glories: The Walpole Ministry and the 1739 War with Spain. London: Royal Historical Society, 1998.

2  1759 – Year of Decision? Fred Anderson

The search for turning points, an impulse bred in the bone of the historian’s craft, is nowhere more profound than among military historians, who tend to look for those decisive moments in battles and who commonly argue that battles are the very hinges on which wars, and even greater developments, have turned. Enter the keywords “decisive battles” in the search box of WorldCat, the online union catalogue of seventy thousand libraries around the world, and more than fifteen hundred titles will appear in the list of results. Remove the duplicates and false matches (for instance, Seventy Decisive Years in American Hymnody, 1799– 1868, by Ford Lewis Battles [1967]) and more than 750 books still remain. Consciously or unconsciously, most of their authors are paying homage to – and doubtless hoping to recapitulate the success of – The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, from Marathon to Waterloo (1851), Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy’s best-selling investigation into “the chain of causes and effects by which [these events] have made us what we are.” Creasy said his purpose was to encourage readers to “speculate on what we probably should have been if any one of these battles had come to a different termination,” but in fact his fifteen case studies did not anticipate modern counterfactual analysis so much as elaborate assumptions about the centrality of battles to history that Herodotus and Tacitus had embedded in their accounts of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, two millennia before.1 That the patterns ancient Greek chroniclers discerned in historical events bore a powerful resemblance to the plots of classical tragedies is neither accidental nor particularly surprising: Thucydides was after all both a general and a historian, and Aeschylus fought with notable valour at the Battles of Marathon and Salamis.2 Whether historical or

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fictional in character, stories of conflicts resolved in dramatic climaxes had great visceral appeal to Athenian citizen-soldiers trained in phalanx tactics and experienced in hand-to-hand combat. Such tales have continued to fascinate readers ever since. For all their persistent appeal, however, these narratives do not necessarily convey the complex realities of warfare, and the assumption that battles necessarily decide the outcomes of wars can as easily cloud as illuminate conflicts and their effects. The Seven Years’ War in North America offers a case in point. That the Battle of Quebec (13 September 1759) decided the outcome of the North American phase of the Seven Years’ War seemed self-­ evident to commentators in the eighteenth century. The blood had barely finished soaking into the Plains of Abraham when the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew preached two sermons at Boston celebrating the victory of the British forces. The battle afforded Mayhew not only evidence of God’s favour for Anglo-America but a vantage point from which he foresaw a future when British colonists would possess the eastern half of the continent, with the Indians and the French papists pushed safely beyond the Mississippi. The victory, he predicted, would permit the Protestant colonists of Great Britain to become a “mighty empire (I do not mean an independent one)” – a parenthesis he was quick to add lest his audience draw the wrong inference about the future.3 Nineteenth-century writers, for whom the post-war trajectory of the North American colonies had proven the accuracy of Mayhew’s prophecy (if not his parenthesis), regarded the decisive quality of the Battle of Quebec as beyond dispute. Francis Parkman, whose narrative of the Seven Years’ War in North America has governed subsequent understandings of the conflict more than any other, made this point unmistakably clear in his magnificent set-piece account of the battle and its results. Even now, a century and a quarter after Parkman wrote it, the climax of Montcalm and Wolfe makes compelling reading as two tragic heroes face off and meet their fates, simultaneously, beneath the battlements of Quebec. What makes the decisiveness of the battle unmistakable in Parkman’s account, however, is the way that he concluded his tale, barrelling through the campaign of 1760, the surrender of Canada, the Caribbean campaigns of 1761–2, the conclusion of the European war, and the Treaty of Paris in approximately twenty thousand words – not many more than the thirteen thousand he used to narrate three weeks of run-up to the battle, the clash of 13 September, and the fall of Quebec.4 Parkman could conclude his great work with such speed because once he had finished with the battle, he had nothing left to tell that

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mattered. The epic of France and England in North America was simply over, and the rest of the story was just so much tying up of loose ends. The problem with treating the Battle of Quebec in this way, however, is that in fact it wasn’t decisive, even in the narrowest military sense. The Battle of Quiberon Bay (20 November 1759) mattered much more, because it destroyed the last significant French naval squadron on the Atlantic and thus precluded the resupply and reinforcement of French forces in Canada. That left Montcalm’s successor, the chevalier de Lévis, unable to follow up on his spectacular comeback victory at the Battle of Ste-Foy (28 April 1760) and force the surrender of the beaten, exhausted, diseased British garrison at Quebec – something he would undoubtedly have accomplished had it been a French ship of the line and a few transports that appeared on the St Lawrence after the ice broke up in May, instead of HMS Vanguard leading a British naval squadron and a flotilla of store ships.5 More significantly, too heavy a concentration on the Battle of Quebec has tended to obscure the significance of native people in determining the shape and outcome of the Seven Years’ War in America. The brief passage of arms on the Plains of Abraham was an extraordinary event in many ways, but in none more so than that it was an open-field battle fought in European style, decided, as such battles were supposed to be, by the exchange of musket fire and a bayonet charge. The Battle of Quebec has generally been depicted as a battle between Europeans (and Euro-American colonists); Indians took part, but those who did fought at the margins of the battlefield or sniped at the thin red line of British troops that stretched from one side of the Plains of Abraham to the other.6 Yet insofar as assigning the Battle of Quebec decisive significance marginalizes native people, it utterly distorts our understanding of a war that depended at virtually every turn on native peoples and native agency. Indeed, by far the most accurate way to locate the war’s real turning point is to tell the story in a way that does not privilege a single battle, but rather that makes clear the cause, character, and consequences of a great shift in the North American balance of power that took place in 1758. That, in turn, requires a look back to the period before the Seven Years’ War began. For a full half-century before the outbreak of fighting between France and Britain in the mid-1750s, native peoples successfully played colonizing groups off against one another and hence minimized the chance that any of the three major European empires in North America would gain pre-eminence. By the 1720s a half-dozen Indian groups – the

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Abenakis and Six Nations Iroquois in the Northeast and the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws in the Southwest – were engaging in balance-of-power diplomacy with agents of the empires that claimed lands east of the Mississippi River.7 The group whose activity was key to moderating the effects of the Anglo-French imperial competition was the Iroquois Confederacy, a religious and political league based in what is now upstate New York. Taking advantage of their geographical position on the borderlands between New France and the northern British colonies and refusing to act exclusively on the behalf of either European power, the Six Nations found it possible to manipulate both empires to their own advantage. Under the management of chiefs skilled in diplomatic negotiations, the Iroquois League extracted subsidies and favourable trade relations from the French and the British alike, even as they managed the flow and interpretation of intelligence between the adversaries in such a way as to prevent either from gaining the upper hand.8 The “play-off” system, however, was not especially favourable to the native peoples who were subordinated to one or another of the groups that dominated it. In particular three groups subordinated to the Six Nations – the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingo Senecas of Pennsylvania and western New York – chafed under Iroquois claims of dominion. In the 1730s Iroquois chiefs acting in collusion with the sons of William Penn had sold the ancestral lands of the Delawares, or Lenni Lenape, out from under them. The Delawares had moved to an area around the Forks of the Ohio in search of autonomy, or even in hopes of recapturing their independence. Their migration to the Ohio Country suited Iroquois purposes very well at first, because the presence of subordinated allies at the Forks of the Ohio strengthened Iroquois claims to ownership of the region. But the Delawares were unwilling to have their homes and hunting grounds sold from under them again, and once they resettled in the Ohio Country alongside the Shawnees and the Mingos they began to dream of freeing themselves from Iroquois diplomatic hegemony and participating on their own in the play-off system. The slide towards war that began in western Pennsylvania in 1754 can in large part be understood as the result of efforts by an Iroquois headman, Tanaghrisson, to arrest the independent actions of the Delawares and others at the Forks of the Ohio.9 The operative phrase here is “in large part,” for even this complex set of contexts and circumstances does not fully account for the native origins of the war. In fact, the Shawnees of the Ohio Country had reasons of their own to attack the frontiers of Britain’s colonies. In 1753 six

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Shawnee warriors, on a raid against the Catawba, had been imprisoned at Charlestown by South Carolina’s governor, James Glen. This act, outrageous to Shawnee sensibilities, would have been cause enough to destroy a friendly relationship with the British colonies to the east and south of the Shawnees’ Kentucky hunting grounds; it became casus belli when the leader of the imprisoned war party, Itawachcomequa (The Pride), sickened and died in prison. The resulting war of revenge, initially directed against settlers in the Virginia-Carolina backcountry, continued on and off until 1813.10 The Shawnees’ motives for belligerency, only recently described in the scholarly literature, make clear the degree to which the various Indian groups that took part in the war did so for their own reasons, carrying on parallel campaigns that responded to their own plans and goals, with only incidental reference to the strategic agenda of their allies the French. What we call the Seven Years’ War and have long conceptualized as growing out of the clash of two European empires over the Ohio Country, in short, was not one war but several, and originated less in European territorial ambitions than in native politics and motives of which imperial policy-makers were wholly ignorant and colonists were at most dimly aware. The complex conflict that set the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia ablaze in 1755 was both traditional in its conduct and wholly new in its scope and results. It was traditional in the sense that it reflected classic French and Indian asymmetrical warfare techniques, which used surprise attacks to cause panic and thus to stimulate massive refugee flight from the frontiers, throwing the larger, less flexible Anglo-American population into a posture of more or less helpless defence. The war was traditional also in the way the Anglo-Americans pursued a military solution by launching expeditions against French strongholds, either by sea (against Louisbourg in 1758 and Quebec in 1759) or overland – the latter of course being something they could do only with permission from the Iroquois League, whose country they had to pass through to invade Canada. What was wholly new was the war’s scope – for as it spread from North America to Europe, the Caribbean, West Africa, South Asia, and ultimately even the Philippine Islands, it became in a real sense the first world war – and its outcome, the decisive British victory that extinguished French imperial power in North America and transferred the claim to the continent’s eastern half to Britain in the 1763 Peace of Paris. The unprecedented size and results of the Seven Years’ War have been clear enough to the generations of historians who have studied it.

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But the way they have generally described the war’s events – that is, the narrative they have constructed to give its events meaning – has constrained their understanding of the war’s character and significance. In concentrating on expeditions and sieges and battles, the great majority of writers from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries either understated or altogether overlooked the critical role that native people and native power played in determining the outcome of the war in North America. In 1755 Indian actions and initiatives determined the development and course of the war. The defeat of General Braddock’s force at the Monongahela on 9 July was almost entirely attributable to Indian agency: negatively in the sense that Braddock had driven off potential allies by his astonishingly arrogant treatment, thus depriving himself of scouts and effectively rendering himself blind to his adversaries’ position and movements in the forest; positively in the sense that the seven hundred or so warriors who destroyed his force operated autonomously throughout the battle. Subsequent raids by Delawares and Mingos on the Pennsylvania frontier and by Shawnee warriors in the Virginia and North Carolina backcountry created a state of chaos that put the central colonies on the defensive for the next three years. Meanwhile, in the north, the decision of the Mohawks to withdraw from their initial alliance with New York and the New England colonies following the Battle of Lake George (8 September 1755) stymied every effort of the Anglo-Americans to come to grips with the French by invading Canada via the Lake George–Lake Champlain–Richelieu River corridor. During the whole of the period from late 1755 through late 1758 the absence of Iroquois cooperation doomed Anglo-American operations on the New York frontier as effectively as it had in the previous three colonial wars.11 Throughout 1756 and 1757 the absolute nadir of British fortunes in North America coincided quite precisely with the height of the alliance between New France and its enormous network of native allies, a system that brought warriors from as far away as Minnesota and Iowa to join in attacks on the northern British colonies. Thanks, however, to the marquis de Montcalm’s efforts to make his Indian allies into auxiliaries who would fight under his direction and in accordance with the values he associated with European warfare, this highly successful system faltered in the aftermath of the Fort William Henry “massacre” in 1757, markedly diminishing the willingness of warriors from interior Indian groups to fight alongside the French in 1758. This shift can be seen quite clearly in the difference between the number of native warriors who

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participated in the attack on Fort William Henry in 1757 – about eighteen hundred – and the number who turned out to aid in the defence of Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga) in 1758: fifteen. More warriors would return to aid the French in the defence of Canada the following year, but the diminished enthusiasm that native people showed for helping the French in 1758 would prove an important factor in the direction of the war thereafter.12 The year 1758 was one in which factors internal to Britain and its colonies would contribute to a shift in the direction of the war as well. In part this was because in the same year the British political leader William Pitt finally found a way to mobilize the vast demographic advantage and economic resources of the Anglo-American colonies by treating them, for the first time, as partners in empire, offering generous subsidies in return for voluntary participation in the war effort. It was a policy that stimulated a huge patriotic surge and mobilized American colonists for the war – as provincial soldiers, recruits in regular regiments, privateers, military contractors, artificers, wagoners, bateaumen, sutlers, and so on – in numbers that nearly equalled the entire population of French Canada.13 That was an immensely important development, but not a decisive one, for Indians still effectively held the balance of power on the frontiers and in the conduct of military operations. This was nowhere clearer than in Pennsylvania, the critical theatre of operations in 1758. The complexity of events in 1758 can obscure their overall shape, but the great shift came with the arrival of John Forbes in Philadelphia in the spring to take command of operations against the French stronghold at the Forks of the Ohio, Fort Duquesne. At the age of fifty Forbes was an experienced regular officer, particularly gifted in matters of organization and logistics. As a newly appointed brigadier general he was determined not to repeat Braddock’s mistakes, which in his mind were two: ignoring Indians as savages (hence depriving himself of intelligence and allies) and hastening to come to grips with the French, which had led him to outrun his support column and to deprive himself of a secure base to which he could retreat after being surrounded and overwhelmed at the Monongahela on 9 July 1755. In operational terms the way to avoid the latter problem was simple, though vastly expensive – to make a “protected advance” against Fort Duquesne, building a road with major forts as bases of supply every forty miles or so, with blockhouses interspersed between them. (This was a technique Forbes, a Scot, had seen used to good effect in the suppression of the

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Highland Rebellion of 1745.) The problem of Indian allies was more complex and uncertain, requiring Forbes to regain connections with native people in a province that had been wholly in chaos for three years, with a frontier effectively constricted to a rough arc that was in some places no more than two days’ travel from Philadelphia. Forbes’s first answer was to try to import Indians from South Carolina – Cherokees – and that proved an expensive failure, because he was slow to understand that while the Cherokees were willing to act as allies they would refuse to be treated as auxiliaries. When he tried to coerce them into serving on his terms, they simply went home, taking tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of arms and supplies with them. Eventually, however, Forbes came to understand the situation in Pennsylvania better by collaborating with two unlikely allies – a notably rich and influential merchant, Israel Pemberton, and a poor and desperate Delaware chief, Teedyuscung. The Quaker merchant elite of Philadelphia had effectively controlled politics in Pennsylvania until 1756, when the war had made them decide between their pacifist principles and political power. Rather than approve the arming of a militia and authorize bounties on enemy Indian scalps, Pemberton and others had withdrawn from the assembly and founded what amounted to a non-governmental organization called the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures. The Friendly Association had succeeded in opening an informal diplomatic channel with Teedyuscung, the chief of a band of eastern Delawares living in the Susquehanna Valley, encour­aging them to leave the warpath in 1757. By exploiting this connection, and using yet another pacifist go-between (Christian Frederick Post, a  Moravian missionary who had married into the Delaware people), Forbes managed to extend that  initial diplomatic channel to the Delawares on the Ohio. Through Teedyuscung’s connections to the western Delaware leaders Pisquetomen, Tamaqua, and Shingas, Forbes discovered that the Delawares might indeed be induced to withdraw from the French alliance and make a separate peace. Thereafter Forbes pursued two parallel approaches to the Ohio and its people simultaneously: building his fortified road, which was advancing expensively and slowly across Pennsylvania, while at the same time pressing ahead with a diplomatic initiative that depended on the good offices of Quakers and Indians, the kinds of people whom few conventional military officers would tolerate in their presence, let alone trust with the king’s business.

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To pursue this dual path took both patience and enormous moral courage on Forbes’s part, but these were qualities he had in abundance. He had to hold out against his own subordinate officers, including Colonel George Washington of Virginia, who constantly pressed him to come to grips with the enemy by hastening the march or changing his route; against powerful and well-connected officials (the Northern Indian Commissioner, Sir William Johnson, and the Penn family) who were deeply unwilling to negotiate directly with the Delawares; and against military colleagues who disdained the Quakers as fools and believed that Indians were savages whom force alone could subordinate. But in the end Forbes proved right. The Ohio Delawares did agree to withdraw from the French alliance, and the other Indians in the upper Ohio followed suit in return for the solemn promise that the British would open a trade on favourable terms with the Ohio peoples, deal with them as diplomatic equals (in other words, not as Iroquois dependents), and prohibit permanent white settlement beyond the Alleghen­ ies after the war. And in the end, when Forbes completed his road, the  French, bereft of native support, blew up Fort Duquesne and Forbes took possession of the Forks of the Ohio – without firing a shot. Forbes accomplished this military triumph by refusing to seek a climactic confrontation with his enemy. Instead of seeing the Indians who had made an abattoir of the frontier for the previous four years as savages and brutes, he had been able to understand them as human beings who could be dealt with as human beings. And he had done it, most remarkably, while he was dying of what seems to have been stomach cancer. Three months after his men seized the Forks, Forbes died at Philadelphia. To the very end he was writing letters to his superior, Jeffrey Amherst, urging him not to “think triflingly of the Indians or their friendships,” but instead to take them seriously and settle Indian relations “on some solid footing” that would preserve peace.14 The willingness of the Delawares and other Ohio Indian groups to make peace changed everything on the central frontier, altering the balance of power in ways that required the Iroquois League to respond. At some point late in 1758 it seems to have become clear to the chiefs of the Great Council at Onondaga that the Iroquois Confederacy would have to abandon its neutral stance in favour of an active alliance with the British. Why? Realpolitik offers the likeliest explanation. For the previous four years the alliance of the Ohio peoples with the French had effectively deprived the Iroquois of their claim to dominion over the Ohio

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Country; if they hoped to reassert control over the Ohio and its peoples they needed the British as allies, and above all they needed the British to recognize them as the rightful overlords of the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos. If the Iroquois League did not reclaim control over the Ohio peoples, they would in effect be acquiescing in the independence of groups who would emerge from the war as competitors, ideally situated by geographical position to pursue the course they had tried so hard to steer before the war. Thus in the following year, 1759, more than nine hundred Iroquois warriors – perhaps four-fifths of the total fighting strength of the League – accompanied the British expedition against Fort Niagara, which surrendered on 25 July 1759, putting an end to the French ability to draw on Indian alliances from the upper Great Lakes. This was the case not just by virtue of British seizure of the fort and the portage it guarded, but because following the surrender of the fort Iroquois diplomats, supported by English trade goods and subsidies, travelled throughout the upper Great Lakes basin and the upper St Lawrence Valley, negotiating to neutralize the French-Indian alliances. The following year, 1760, when Amherst’s three-pronged campaign closed in on Montreal and the last defenders of New France from the east, the west, and the south, the invaders met no effective resistance from the erstwhile Indian allies of New France because Iroquois diplomats had preceded them. In the end Amherst, like Forbes, won his greatest victory without firing a shot or losing a single man in battle.15 So Indian agency, in the end, not only precipitated the clash of empires on the Ohio in 1754 but decided the war’s outcome in North America seven years later. The spectacular fifteen-minute clash of arms across the Plains of Abraham on 13 September 1759, which bewitched the imagination of contemporaries, transfixed Francis Parkman, and continues to fascinate modern writers, decided nothing.16 It was 1758, not 1759, that had been the year of decision. But how does that change the way we understand the Seven Years’ War and its larger significance? First of all, it reminds us of a fundamental truth that is all too easy to forget: war is not a sport, and battles resemble games only in the minds of metaphorically impoverished sportswriters. At least from the time that states established their monopolies on violence in the early modern era, wars have typically ended when one or all of the belligerents concluded that it was no longer possible to continue expending treasure and lives, and therefore agreed to make peace. Within this fundamental pattern, battles have been only the most spectacular and extravagant

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episodes of expenditure, and what has mattered most is not what happened on the field of battle but the state’s capacity – demographic, industrial, fiscal, psychological – to burn through lives and matériel until its enemy has found it impossible to continue. From the inhuman perspective of the state, victories in battle are significant insofar as they encourage populations to continue bleeding and paying; otherwise they are incidental. No matter how many battlefield victories Frederick the Great won, he would surely have gone down to defeat in the Seven Years’ War had not a completely unmilitary event, the death of Tsarina Elizabeth I in January 1762, removed Russia from the war and saved Prussia from collapse. Second, the absence of decision on the battlefield in the American phase of the Seven Years’ War directs our attention to what did make the difference: the participation of native peoples. Indians have long been relegated to the margins of the war’s narrative not because historians have been racists or apologists for imperialism, but because the assumption that battles decide the outcomes of wars has led them to overlook the critical role played by warriors who did everything they could to avoid battle, and the fantastic waste of lives that battles entail. Once we write a narrative of the war with native people included in roles that are not only active, but decisive, we begin to see the war – and indeed, North American history as a whole – in a different light. Not least importantly, we see the decisiveness of the war as a whole in a new context, for the native peoples whose actions contributed so powerfully to the origins and outcome of the war were flabbergasted by the Peace of Paris. The effect of France’s withdrawal from North America, of course, was to deprive the Indians of their chief ally against the Anglo-Americans. Over time the result would prove to be the destruction of the balance-of-power politics that Indian groups had mastered over the first half of the eighteenth century and the loss of their ability to control the terms on which they interacted with Anglo-Americans; in the end that would be the most tragic result of all. Similarly, the unprecedented decisiveness in the war’s outcome would destabilize the victorious British empire, which collapsed into civil war and revolution just twelve years after the Peace of Paris. Ironic though the results were for the Indians who found themselves in the path of a relentlessly expanding American republic, the act of recognizing the central role played by native people in the train of events that led to the Revolution marks the beginning of a radical reorientation in our understanding of the origins and development of the United States of America.17

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Finally, rethinking the history of this particular war in terms of native agency may help us see more clearly, and examine more critically, certain assumptions we are apt to make about history generally. We tend to assume, almost without question, that great historical events must have comparably great causes. Yet this account of a truly transforming war suggests how native peoples – non-state actors – critically shaped North American history in the late colonial period. If this was indeed the case, we may well look beyond the colonial period for further evidence of native agency, and prepare to be surprised by what we see. A recent, influential book by Brian DeLay on the Texas-Mexican borderlands in the 1830s–1840s demonstrates that large-scale raids by Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache warriors severely destabilized the whole of northern Mexico and facilitated both the coming of the USMexican War and its decisive conclusion. If DeLay is right, then it would seem clear that Indian agency was crucial in shaping not only a great eighteenth-century imperial war that whipsawed the British empire into civil war and revolution, but also a great nineteenth-century reprise of the same process for the United States.18 What if matters as consequential as two decisive imperial wars and the revolutions that followed them can be crucially inflected by small groups of native people, or even by individuals motivated by highly wrought conceptions of honour? What if the course of wars can be determined not just by generals but by clan matriarchs or set on a course to conclusion not by foreign ministers in Whitehall and Versailles but by civil chiefs in Kittanning and Caughnawaga? At the very least the answers to these questions would seem to argue for a more inclusive sense of what and who mattered in the past, and urge us to develop a more nuanced sense of causality and agency as we write and rewrite narratives dealing with four of the last five centuries of North American history. NOTES 1 Edward S. Creasy, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, from Marathon to Waterloo, enlarged ed. (New York: Harper Brothers, 1918), xvi. 2 The archetypal quality of Greek phalanx battles and the emphasis on battlefield decisions has long been remarked; among the most notable modern works that insist on these as essential to the Western way of warfare are Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in

1759 – Year of Decision?  65 Classical Greece (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989) and Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001); John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking, 1976) and A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). For a sceptical account of the underlying assumptions of these works, see John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture from Ancient Greece to Modern America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003). 3 Jonathan Mayhew, Two Discourses Delivered October 25th, 1759, Being the Day Appointed by Authority to be Observed as a Day of Public Thanksgiving for the Success of His Majesty’s Arms, More particularly in the Reduction of Quebec, the Capital of Canada (Boston, 1759), 60. 4 Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, chaps. 27–32; in David Levin, ed., Francis Parkman: France and England in North America, vol. 2 (New York: Library of America, 1983), 1375–1479. 5 First to make the case for the decisiveness of Quiberon Bay was the strategic and naval historian Julian S. Corbett, in England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918). 6 The great exception to this generalization can be found in one of the most recent accounts of the campaign and battle of Quebec, D. Peter MacLeod’s Northern Armageddon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2008), the first study of those events to give full weight to the participation and agency of native people. 7 This diplomatic system has been described from various angles by ethnohistorians and others working on eighteenth-century North American history since the 1970s. The best synthetic account can be found in Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), esp. 151–88. 8 Treatments of the Iroquois League published over the last four decades are voluminous and extraordinarily sophisticated. Among the many distinguished works in this literature are several monographs by Francis J­ ennings, including The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1975), The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York: Norton, 1984), and Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York: Norton, 1988); Richard Aquila, The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701–1754 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the

66  Fred Anderson Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1992); José António Brandão, “Your Fyre Shall Burn No More”: Iroquois Policy toward New France and Its Native Allies to 1701 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); David L. Preston, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667–1783 (­Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); and Jon Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534–1701 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010). 9 Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 11–73. 10 Ian Steele, “Shawnee Origins of Their Seven Years’ War,” Ethnohistory 53, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 657–87. 11 Anderson, Crucible of War, 86–123. 12 Anderson, Crucible of War, 135–57, 185–201. 13 Anderson, Crucible of War, 219–39; 317–24; 387–90. 14 Anderson, Crucible of War, 267–85. 15 Anderson, Crucible of War, 330–9, 400–14. 16 See, e.g., Alan W. Eckert, Wilderness Empire: A Narrative (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1969); Gordon Donaldson, Battle for a Continent: Quebec, 1759 (Toronto: Doubleday, 1973); Frank McLynn, 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004); Walter R. Borneman, The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). 17 Andrew Cayton and I have argued this point at length in The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York: Viking, 2005). 18 Brian E. DeLay, The War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.Mexican War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Mayhew, Jonathan. Two Discourses Delivered October 25th, 1759, Being the Day Appointed by Authority to Be Observed as a Day of Public Thanksgiving for the Success of His Majesty’s Arms, More Particularly in the Reduction of Quebec, the Capital of Canada. Boston, 1759.

1759 – Year of Decision?  67 Secondary Sources Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. London: Faber and Faber; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Anderson, Fred, and Andrew Cayton. The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000. New York: Viking, 2005. Aquila, Richard. The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701–1754. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983. Borneman, Walter R. The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Brandão, José António. “Your Fyre Shall Burn No More”: Iroquois Policy toward New France and Its Native Allies to 1701. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Corbett, Julian S. England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918. Creasy, Edward S. The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, from Marathon to Waterloo. Enlarged edition. New York: Harper Brothers, 1918. DeLay, Brian E. The War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Donaldson, Gordon. Battle for a Continent: Quebec, 1759. Toronto: Doubleday, 1973. Eckert, Alan W. Wilderness Empire: A Narrative. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1969. Hanson, Victor Davis. Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. New York: Doubleday, 2001. – The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Jennings, Francis. The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744. New York: Norton, 1984. – Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America. New York: Norton, 1988. – The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1975. Keegan, John. The Face of Battle. New York: Viking, 1976. – A History of Warfare. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Lynn, John A. Battle: A History of Combat and Culture from Ancient Greece to Modern America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003.

68  Fred Anderson MacLeod, D. Peter. Northern Armageddon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2008. McLynn, Frank. 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004. Parkman, Francis. Montcalm and Wolfe. In Francis Parkman: France and England in North America, edited by David Levin. Vol. 2. New York: Library of America, 1983. Parmenter, Jon. The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534–1701. East Lansing: ­Michigan State University Press, 2010. Preston, David L. The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667–1783. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. – The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of ­European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1992. Steele, Ian. “Shawnee Origins of Their Seven Years’ War.” Ethnohistory 53, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 657–87.

3 Colonial Disease, Translation, and Enlightenment: Franco-British Medicine and the Seven Years’ War Erica Charters

European medicine in the eighteenth century was notable for its focus on the health of the general population. No longer content with the regulation of medical practice, physicians and surgeons turned their attention to improving the health of the entire population, having faith in their ability to reform systems and institutions, and often linking medicine and health to Enlightenment ideals and political reforms. Historians have demonstrated the central role of military medicine in these developments. More particularly, recent historical research has traced how naval and military institutions contributed to the development of modern, clinical medicine. With large groups of men under naval and military command, and with foreign environments encouraging experimentation and empirical techniques, eighteenth-century warfare was central to the changing nature of European medical practice. Because of its unprecedented scope, the Seven Years’ War was particularly instrumental in shaping medicine during this period; the global dimension of the war proved fundamental to the development of colonial medicine, with its category of “hot” or tropical climates contrasting with that of European temperate climates. The Seven Years’ War also provides an opportunity to demonstrate how eighteenth-century British and French medicine converged. Histo­ rians usually emphasize cross-Channel differences, contrasting royal and centralized French structures of knowledge with the informal nature of British science, independent of state control. Yet medicine in the French and British armed forces was strikingly similar. Moreover, medical theories relating to the experience of war and colonial expansion were exchanged, discussed, and shared across national boundaries. Rather than presenting war as a problem that disrupted a pan-European

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republic of letters, these circumstances suggest that warfare was an integral part of, even a crucible of, Enlightenment networks of knowledge. Franco-British medicine during the war shows how Enlightenment cosmopolitanism coexisted with military patriotism and national rivalry. In this essay I provide a survey of the impact of the Seven Years’ War on French and British medicine. Whereas traditional studies examine medical developments separately in each nation, a detailed analysis of the transmission and reception of military medical texts shows that French and British military medical practitioners shared information and resources. I begin with an overview of French and British medicine in the army and navy during the middle of the eighteenth century before turning to translations of some key medical texts of the Seven Years’ War, with a particular focus on the seminal text on colonial medicine, James Lind’s An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates (1768). Such translations demonstrate that war was not an obstacle to the diffusion of Enlightenment knowledge but was an engine of it, stimulating cross-Channel intellectual and scientific exchange. I conclude with some reflections on how the experience of colonial warfare and national rivalries influenced Enlightenment practices and ideas. The war not only shaped the evolution of European medicine, but also contributed to developing notions of European identity and difference. Medicine and War For contemporaries, as for historians, the Seven Years’ War was notable because of its scope. For the British and the French, the two belligerents who fought each other continuously throughout the war and across all theatres, the war recruited more men than ever before, with many of them serving overseas. With theatres of conflict in such far-flung places as the Caribbean islands, the west coast of Africa, the Indian subcontinent, North America, and continental Europe, the war sent thousands of European troops abroad to such lands as India, where previously only a few hundred had gone. As a result, the Seven Years’ War provided Europeans with a novel experience of colonial warfare. The war soon demonstrated to imperial and military administrators the significant role of disease in war. When British troops arrived in French-held Martinique and Guadeloupe in January 1759, it took only two months for almost half of the five thousand troops – including their commander, General Hopson – to fall ill or die from sickness. Similarly,

Colonial Disease, Translation, and Enlightenment  71

it took only three months for the British garrison in Quebec to be decimated by disease during the autumn of 1759. In September, following the famous battle on the Plains of Abraham, the British occupied the city with seven thousand soldiers; by December, only four thousand soldiers were fit for duty, the remaining three thousand sick or dead from scurvy. In India, during the rainy season, European regiments – French and British alike – regularly suffered sickness rates reaching 50 to 60 per cent. Until the twentieth century, disease always killed and immobilized far more men than did combat. This was long recognized by military leaders; as the French military officer the marquis de Bussy recorded in India, the climate and the unhealthy season were “the biggest enemy that we have to fight.”1 High rates of disease were a physical demonstration of logistical and disciplinary weaknesses. They were not only a common cause of military failure and surrender but also had long-term repercussions, such as troop disaffection on campaign and public relations problems for governments at home. In colonial environments, where officials depended on local cooperation for recruitment, where logistical capabilities were strained, and where new environments gave rise to foreign illnesses, disease was a formidable challenge for military and medical officials. They did not simply accept high rates of morbidity and mortality but worked to prevent and attenuate the consequences of such problems. Keeping European troops healthy was thus a crucial part of military strategy and logistics throughout the war, as well as a vital national concern that engaged both military and civilian authorities.2 Britain and France alike maintained extensive medical systems as part of their respective armed forces. Each had surgeons attached to land regiments and naval vessels, along with permanent onshore establishments in the form of hospitals. France’s network of military medicine during the mid-eighteenth century drew upon a sophisticated state bureaucracy of both the armed forces and civilian medicine. Permanent onshore naval medical establishments dated to the seventeenth century, and by the middle of the eighteenth century these were complemented by medical schools.3 The French army, with large numbers of men maintained throughout the country even during peacetime, had an extensive hospital system in terms of numbers and geographical dispersion.4 Medicine was also part of French colonial structures: as historians of eighteenth-century French science and medicine have demonstrated, “from the time of Louis XIV, the royal administration created and supported an elaborate scientific and technical

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infrastructure that was not merely tapped on occasion to aid colonization, but which quickly became integral to the process.”5 The French state thus employed an extensive medical bureaucracy that was central to colonial and military operations. In contrast to the French, British military medical structures during this period have been characterized as ad hoc. Yet despite their smaller bureaucracy, British military and naval medical services were comparable with French services in terms of efficiency and range. The Royal Navy was notable in that it supported an extensive medical administration, similar in scope to the French. The naval medical board (called the Sick and Hurt Board) became permanent in the course of the Seven Years’ War, and it was during this period that large-scale naval hospitals, such as Royal Haslar near Portsmouth, which held one thousand beds initially, were built.6 Moreover, medical service in the British Army and the Royal Navy was a desirable career route for ambitious and educated – albeit poor and unconnected – men, and British colonial expansion provided additional and lucrative opportunities for gaining medical experience and advancement. In Britain, military medical practitioners were also well-respected: the military physician Sir John Pringle, for example, served as president of the Royal Society from 1772 to 1778.7 Important as medicine was to colonial and military development in both Britain and France, eighteenth-century European medical practitioners were also increasingly interested in the health of general populations. Indeed, medicine was considered central to Enlightenment ideas of progress, a practical method of achieving widespread social improvement.8 This is evinced in various eighteenth-century innovations that focused on the health of the general population, such as the establishment of new hospitals, the expansion of existing ones, and their development as secular centres of medicine. It is likewise evident in attempts to quantify and increase the size of populations and make urban environments more salubrious. Moreover, medical theorists became increasingly interested in medicine for common people, as demonstrated in the growth of self-help medical texts and a focus on environmental causes of disease – such as the air and climate – rather than personal characteristics.9 In turning away from individual patient narratives, concentrating instead on the general characteristics of disease as displayed in a large number of patient cases, eighteenth-century European medicine was developing traits that are associated with modern, clinical medicine. “The birth of the clinic” (in Michel Foucault’s famous phrase) is traditionally tied to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France

Colonial Disease, Translation, and Enlightenment  73

and is characterized by its emphasis on hospitals as places for both research (particularly pathological anatomy) and teaching, and by a concomitant rise in the status of medical practitioners.10 Yet in their examination of military and colonial medicine during the mid- and late eighteenth century, medical historians have demonstrated that such developments were initiated earlier and along the margins of Europe, products of the unique medical environments of the colonies and the armed forces in the eighteenth century. Colonial and military medical practitioners streamlined patient notes, routinized trials, and implemented experimental practices such as dissection. As historians of science and medicine have long recognized, colonialism was a spur to, and an opportunity for, empirical practices and experimentation more broadly. With colonial environments giving rise to what Europeans considered new diseases and new drugs, medical practitioners experimented with novel medicines and were forced to rely on their own sense experiences in order to evaluate efficacy, rather than traditional textual forms of authority.11 Medicine in the armed forces was thus both influential and innovative, encouraging developments that reached the general populations of Britain and France in the eighteenth century, and stimulating widespread reforms. Contemporaries were aware of this – a review of a 1760s medical treatise on observations in French military hospitals declared that this was a project that would help to found a great structure, a “national medicine.”12 These histories point to underlying similarities between British and French medicine. This is significant, given that historians most often point to the contrasting structure of medicine in each country and ­emphasize differences. Like medicine in the army and navy, French civilian medicine of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been described as fundamentally formed through the bureaucratic structures of the French state: the enormous Paris hospitals, for example, are considered emblematic of state power and control.13 By contrast, historians have stressed the private – non-state, voluntary, and informal – nature of civilian medicine in eighteenth-century Britain. The work of Roy Porter on the eighteenth-century medical world of England has encouraged scholars to see little of the state in British eighteenth-century medical science. Even historians who challenge and refine Porter’s approach tend to focus on the role of the marketplace and charitable hospitals, rather than state institutions, in eighteenth-century British medicine.14 Studies of medicine in the British armed forces, by contrast, highlight the role of the British state in medical developments, allowing h ­ istorians

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to trace government expenditure and networks that allowed medical science to flourish in eighteenth-century Britain. Translation and War Although the history of medicine in the armed forces brings out underlying similarities between Britain and France during this period, these have not been studied as points of convergence. Medical developments in the British Army and the Royal Navy resembling those in French medicine are viewed as competing runners in a race, rather than teammates. Likewise, histories of eighteenth-century Europe as a cosmopolitan republic of letters consider wars as interruptions and obstacles, events that forced scholars to retreat into their national rivalries. As a result, there remains a gulf between military histories of eighteenthcentury Europe and intellectual histories of the same period. This interdisciplinary consensus on Europe clashes with a more integrated view of war and scientific exchange beyond Europe’s shores: while much work has been done on knowledge exchange between Europeans and non-Europeans, even in times of war, there are few studies that examine wars as opportunities for intra-European knowledge sharing and learning.15 A detailed examination of military medicine therefore provides an opportunity to see where military and intellectual history merge during this period and how scientific enquiry and the experience of war influenced each other. The correspondence between French and British military colonial medicine is demonstrated in the translation and reception of key texts of the Seven Years’ War. The translations show that the experience of war provided a point of convergence and was a site for European knowledge exchange among military and medical officers. As historians of intellectual culture during the eighteenth century have long recognized, European men of letters worked within structures that were national, yet also transcended such national boundaries. The two central scientific societies in Britain and France during the eighteenth century, the Royal Society in London and the Académie royale des sciences in Paris, had various foreign members, and the official publications of each society circulated beyond domestic circles, even undergoing translation for wider dissemination.16 Moreover, individual members corresponded beyond their homelands and, particularly in the case of British gentlemen, travelled to the Continent as part of their education.17 Beyond the official publications of the two national science societies, which featured notices and reports by practitioners

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across the Channel, a burgeoning number of medical periodicals in the provinces also included notices and reviews of texts published by both British and French practitioners. In the seventeenth century there were only six medical periodicals in England and France, but over the next century their number grew to twenty-six in Britain and fifty in France.18 Among learned British men knowledge of French could be assumed, as French was at the top of the hierarchy of vernacular languages in Europe during the eighteenth century, often replacing Latin as the lingua franca among the educated elite. In the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, therefore, reports were often published in their original French.19 Moreover, untranslated French texts were common in the libraries of British gentlemen throughout the eighteenth century: a key eighteenth-century French text on medicine in the army, Dezon’s Lettres sur les principales maladies qui ont regné dans les hôpitaux de l’armée (never translated into English), appears in the private libraries of at least three British clergymen. It was cited by Donald Monro, physician to the British military hospitals in Germany, during the Seven Years’ War.20 French medical practitioners also demonstrated their knowledge of English-only texts: Richard Brocklesby, for example, who wrote an influential medical treatise gleaned from his experience with the army during the Seven Years’ War, never had his work translated into French. This book was nevertheless listed in French review periodicals and cited by various French medical practitioners, one French physician even listing Brocklesby among a number of known medical writers before citing “numerous others, whose names are less familiar.”21 Yet overall – and more so than in the case of the transmission of French texts – English works reached readers in France through their translation into French, following the course of Enlightenment texts in general. The key authors of British military medicine during the period of the Seven Years’ War, apart from Richard Brocklesby, were translated into French. The naval surgeon and physician James Lind’s Treatise on the Scurvy (1753) appeared in French in 1756, and his Essay on the Health of Seamen (1757) appeared in French in 1758 – both within three years of their initial publication in English. Lind’s papers on fever and infection were also translated into French and published in 1780, and his An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates (1768) was published in French in 1785. The military physician Donald Monro’s Account of the Diseases Which Are the Most Frequent in the British Military Hospitals in Germany (1764), based on his experience of the Seven Years’ War, appeared in French as Médecine d’armée in 1769. Similarly, John

76  Erica Charters

Pringle’s Observations on the Diseases of the Army (1752) was published in French right at the opening of the Seven Years’ War and was followed by a second French edition in 1771. Although little is known in general about eighteenth-century translators and their motivations, it is notable that the translators of these works were scholars in similar fields. Achille Guillaume de Bègue de Presle, who translated Monro’s work, also translated other English medical texts and published his own writings on health for the general population with a focus on environmentalism. Bègue de Presle was no lowly practitioner but a prominent and influential expert in his field, serving as Royal Censor and physician of the Paris medical faculty.22 The Abbé G. Mazéas, who translated Lind’s treatise on the health of seamen, also translated other English medical works and was a frequent contributor to the Philosophical Transactions on a variety of scientific matters. The translators of Lind’s treatise on scurvy were both part of France’s military and naval medical community: Jacques Savary was a naval surgeon stationed at Brest, and Thomas Carrère was physician to the military and royal hospital in Perpignan. Similarly, C.-E. Thion de la Chaume, who translated Lind’s An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, had served as physician in the French army at stations abroad, albeit in less foreign (and less humid, though still hot) locations such as Corsica and Monaco. The one exception is the translator of Pringle’s Observations on the Diseases of the Army, Pierre-Henry Larcher, who was better known for his French translation of Herodotus: he translated Pringle during a period of productive Anglophilia, during which he also translated many of Alexander Pope’s writings. Larcher’s case demonstrates the role that translation played in professional prestige: unlike the medical practitioner translators, Larcher’s translations remained anonymous, with his name not appearing on the first or subsequent French-language editions of Pringle. Historians of publishing have likened eighteenth-century translation to piracy. They point out that few original authors would have known about translations of their treatises, let alone given prior approval or received financial reward. As historian Avi S. Lifschitz remarks, in continental Europe during this period “piracy was the rule rather than the exception – especially considering translations. In most cases there was no contact whatsoever between authors and their translators.”23 Yet this was not the case for military medicine, which suggests that these French and British practitioners worked within a networked community. In the translator’s preface to Pringle’s second French edition of Observations on

Colonial Disease, Translation, and Enlightenment  77

the Diseases of the Army, Larcher notes that he gained access to the original English text directly from Pringle himself, as Pringle sent him pages as soon as they were printed. Even more extraordinarily, this 1771 French edition was based on the seventh English edition of Pringle’s work, which was not published in England until 1774: a French audience thus gained access to Pringle’s revisions three years before English readers did.24 Although written in order to help win wars, military medical writings were enthusiastically shared across the Channel. Historians of Enlightenment translation generally focus on the transmission of literature and emphasize the creative nature of translation. Rather than a focus on the original text, which characterizes presentday translation, eighteenth-century translations were concerned with the audience of the text, changing the source text during translation and transforming it into something new to aid its dissemination among its new readership. Indeed, the literary scholar Mary Helen McMurran describes eighteenth-century translation between English and French as more akin to “domestication” than translation, and scholars have noted that French translations were characterized by an aesthetic of “les belles infidèles,” beautiful but unfaithful to the text.25 In its review of the French translation of Monro’s Account of the Diseases, the periodical Journal des Sçavans praised it for having “better achieved its objective” as the translator had added extensive notes to Monro’s original text.26 In general, however, works on medicine in the army and navy did not conform to this trend. The French translation of one of the key texts from the Seven Years’ War, Lind’s An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, is characterized by careful fidelity to the English original. Thion de la Chaume makes no alterations to Lind’s text, confining himself to the occasional footnote that either further explains points made by Lind or reinforces them with examples from his own experience during military campaigns. This suggests two things. First, the text was a practical work and therefore accuracy of translation was paramount over a creative transformation into a new version. Second, French medicine was so similar to British medicine that a direct translation would be widely understood. Indeed, the translator’s preface reiterates Lind’s point that his Essay was a practical text for those sent out to overseas colonies and, as such, particularly useful, since few practitioners had experience of medical practice in these foreign environments – a situation strikingly similar to that in British medical circles. Thion de la Chaume praises Lind much as he was lauded in Britain, for writing clearly and comprehensively on foreign diseases and for

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basing his conclusions on observations and experience, and not simply on an abstract, theoretical system. Thion de la Chaume’s approval of Lind’s approach was reinforced by the registrar of the French Royal Society of Medicine, who cited Lind’s work as highly enlightened, instructive, and practical.27 As his practical advice reveals, Lind is optimistic about the ability of Europeans to adapt to new, hotter climates. Throughout this foundational text of colonial medicine, based on observations made during the Seven Years’ War, Lind points out that it is within the power of officials – medical, military, and political – to make decisions that will ensure the health of men under their command. Key among these is the location of settlements, with a preference for dry, healthy environments that could be found even in such places as Guinea, which most observers considered mortal for Europeans. Lind stresses that these environments are in many ways simply extreme versions of what can be found in Europe, but he also notes that overseas environments could be different in kind. As a result, practitioners needed to be aware of the difference in localities, and thus have experience of these new climates: simply applying what eminent physicians, such as Thomas Sydenham, had adduced from their experience in London, for example, would do more harm than good.28 Lind recommends careful seasoning (the gradual acclimatization of one’s body to the new environment, including regime, climate, and diet) and advocates the abandonment of old notions, such as bleeding Europeans so that their blood could be replaced by fluid more in tune with the new environment. Such seasoning would allow Europeans to maintain their health and adapt to colonial environments. As Lind explains in one of his most famous passages, “Men who thus exchange their native for a distant Climate, may be considered as affected in a manner somewhat analogous to plants removed into a foreign soil; where the utmost care and attention are required, to keep them in health, and to inure them to their new situation; since, thus transplanted, some change must happen in the constitutions of both.”29 The key French texts on colonial medicine parallel Lind’s view of disease and medicine. In the mid-eighteenth century, Antoine PoissonnierDesperrières’s writings on the French colony of Saint-Domingue were most widely known. Poissonnier-Desperrières had been the royal physician at Saint-Domingue from 1748 to 1751, thereafter becoming the deputy administrator for medicine in the navy and the colonies. His older brother was Pierre-Isaac Poissonnier, a foreign member of the London

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Royal Society and, from 1763, inspector of French naval hospitals and director general of medicine, pharmacy, and botany in the colonies; James McClellan describes the two brothers as a powerful “diumvirate” responsible for French naval and colonial medicine.30 PoissonnierDesperrières’s Traité des fièvres de l’isle de S. Domingue was published first in 1763 and again in 1766 and 1780. His work demonstrates the French physician’s awareness of British medical writings, as well as the underlying convergence of British and French medicine. Poissonnier-Desperrières refers liberally to British military medical texts in his published treatises, particularly those of Lind and Pringle, while Lind repaid the favour, citing Poissonnier-Desperrières’s treatise on fevers in the West Indies. In Traité des fièvres de l’isle de S. Domingue, Poissonnier-Desperrières notes that “man is a flexible animal, who can adapt himself to all climates” as long as he follows a careful regime, and he even explicitly likens the body of man to a kind of plant.31 Poissonnier-Desperrières also shared with Lind the view that diseases among Europeans in hot climates were to be understood by means of a theory of putrefaction. Thus, he recommends the same remedies as the British naval physician: a firm regime of moderation and self-discipline, as well as vinegar, vegetables, and acidic fruits (which Lind termed “antiseptics”).32 Throughout the Essay, Lind cites reports, letters, and unpublished or soon-to-be-published information from military and medical military men stationed throughout the global theatres of Franco-British war, which demonstrates that his treatise was based on a wide network of medical observers. This was an informal network in that most of the information was unpublished, but it was also formal in that it was embedded within the British Army and the Royal Navy. Lind even notes cases in which his recommendations had been tested among the forces, and he cites officers’ letters in support of his views. Thion de la Chaume, in his role as translator, provides supplemental evidence from the French army stationed abroad, adding to the weight of Lind’s authority through footnotes carefully marked “T” for translator. Significantly, Thion de la Chaume also adds in further details from British sources, including published texts on medicine in the English East India Company and the work of an English physician stationed in India.33 This is not entirely surprising; the context of colonial war would have given numerous opportunities for each side to share information informally. When the British official Byam Crump found his surgeons inexperienced in the climate of Guadeloupe during the war, he promptly hired a local French physician to direct his British military surgeons.34

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Unfortunately for historians, such exchanges were not often recorded. But it is clear that information was shared in various ways across national rivalries and was applicable in both national contexts. Yet these authors were aware that their texts were produced in differing national contexts. The translator of Lind’s Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans identified an English gift for observation and insight that had enabled Britain to surpass other nations in its writings on foreign diseases.35 He was not alone in this view. In the 1790 volume of the Encyclopédie méthodique on medicine, published under the direction of Vicq d’Azyr, the entry on military hospitals and medicine cites works by British authors as having established the field, particularly those by Pringle, Monro, and Brocklesby; and in the area of naval medicine, again, the authors of the encyclopedia note that “English physicians had extensively researched diseases of seamen … Most are written in English, and those who do not know this language are lacking the precious information contained therein.” The encyclopedia accordingly recommends the various French translations available at the time.36 The eminent French physician Jean Colombier reiterated this view in his influential military medical treatise Code de médecine militaire, stating that the English had begun the study of military medicine with Pringle’s publications and that they had continued since then with various English practitioners such as Monro.37 The French recognized openly that the British were more advanced in naval-related medicine; inhabiting a damp and cold island had its benefits. In their publications on naval medicine during the middle of the eighteenth century, French physicians were at pains to offer insights beyond what the British had already provided. Moreover, French publications after the Seven Years’ War, when the Royal Navy had effectively curbed French naval power, were explicit about the need to emulate British practices. In his treatise on the health of seamen, PoissonnierDesperrières uses the superior model of the British to spur on French advances: he urges the French to copy the English example of sobriety and discipline on board ship, and he praises the British model of naval medical training, repeatedly noting the impressive achievements of British medical practitioners in the Royal Navy. However, he is eager to point out that his motive is not simply admiration for the Royal Navy; it is “as a [French] patriot, as much as a physician, that I have detailed the diverse problems I found, and the methods with which to remedy them.”38 As a 1767 review noted, Poissonnier-Desperrières’s treatise was a very useful one and particularly so at that time. What the English physicians had given their country, he wished to give to France:

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“preventing the destruction of the numerous men working at sea is surely a useful labour for one’s nation [Patrie].”39 For these medical experts, the study and dissemination of medicine in the army and navy was a patriotic act, undertaken in the context of national rivalry, even if the science itself was based on the accomplishments of national rivals.40 Knowledge was thus shared across the Channel, to be applied within the context of a deep-seated and heated national enmity. Conclusion Returning to Lind’s An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, it is striking how devoid of national identities and rivalries this text is, even in its original English version. Lind relied extensively on material gathered during the Seven Years’ War, and the text is replete with examples of troop rates of sickness and health, as well as practicable advice gleaned from the experience gained in the field. Lind often cites names of informants and stations where his information was recorded to support his method of deductive reasoning. Yet for a work that derives from the British experience of war, Lind’s treatise was accessible to all European nations: as the title makes clear, this was a medical text for Europeans, not just for the British. Though the main focus in Lind’s work is on Europeans, whites are also occasionally contrasted with blacks and mulattoes, terms used indiscriminately to specify non-Europeans and their descendants in India, Africa, or the West Indies. In medical texts of the early eighteenth century, by contrast, specific medicines for British patients – as opposed to those of the French, for example – were often suggested, and relocation to other European countries was described as dangerous to Britons’ health in the same terms as Lind uses to describe the foreign climates of the East and West Indies. One’s native locality, indeed, was judged fundamental to health. The military physician John Polus Lecaan advised moderation and careful attention to healthy air and diet for British men serving overseas, anticipating Lind in his declaration that “This way of Living Strangers should observe, especially in the beginning, by which they will season themselves to the Country, and be able to bear the Climate almost as well as the Natives.”41 Lecaan, whose treatise was published in 1708, writes here about adapting not to the East or West Indies, but to the climate and diet of Spain and Portugal. Such narrowly national understandings of medicine – as reflected, for example, in a  medical treatise entitled The British Physician … for the Benefit of all Britons Who Desire Health (1716) – often impeded translation.42

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It is noteworthy, then, that military medical observations and theories, which had distinguished in the early eighteenth century among Europeans according to locality, evolved by the middle of the eighteenth century to consider European bodies as similar to one another but differing from populations beyond Europe’s shores. These medical theories were not inherently racial, but they were influenced by contexts that were increasingly defined through imperial and military categories of European and non-European bodies. With the largest number of European bodies yet sent beyond Europe, the physical experience of the Seven Years’ War shaped European views and practices, including the definition of what was European and what was not. National identities and national rivalries did not disappear in these colonial contexts; yet, as the French and British military medical writings demonstrate, national differences were noticed and commented upon, even used as a spur to patriotic advances and reforms. In the broader context of foreign, colonial environments, French and British national identities dissolved into notions of European identity and European bodies. Likewise, texts written to improve the ability of British armed forces to fight against the French, or the French against the British, were easily translated into a general program of Enlightenment progress for Europeans everywhere, especially in Europe itself. Lind’s and Poissonnier-Desperrières’s focus on healthy settlements, advocating drainage and the thorough passage of air, would subsequently be applied in European urban environments, and their advice about cleanliness and discipline as means of maintaining health and order on board ships and in the colonies would also re-emerge in civilian settings closer to home, as hygiene and sanitation came to define European identity and civilization. Reframing European Enlightenment medicine to include colonial warfare reveals that scientific innovations and medical experience from the peripheries fed into metropolitan networks of knowledge and shaped public health reforms and practices. Imperial rivalry and warfare, therefore, supported the development of medical expertise in Europe’s cosmopolitan centres of learning and science. NOTES 1 Marquis de Bussy to the comte de Lally, 15 July 1758, Service historique de la défense, Vincennes, A1 3541, fo. 24. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French are the author’s own.

Colonial Disease, Translation, and Enlightenment  83 2 This case is made in full in Erica Charters, “The Caring Fiscal-Military State during the Seven Years War, 1756–63,” Historical Journal 52, no. 4 (2009): 921–41. 3 Pierre Pluchon, Histoire des medécins et pharmaciens de marine et des colonies (Toulouse: Privat, 1985), chap. 1. For an overview of French military and naval medicine within the context of French medicine, see Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (­Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 689–700. 4 Monique Lucenet, Médecine, chirurgie et armée en France: au siècle des lumières (Sceaux, France: I&D, 2006), chap. 3, “Les hôpitaux royaux.” 5 James E. McClellan and François Regourd, “The Colonial Machine: French Science and Colonization in the Ancien Regime,” Osiris 2nd ser., 15 (2000): 32. See also James E. McClellan, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Pluchon, Histoire des médecins et pharmaciens, chap. 4. 6 P.K. Crimmin, “The Sick and Hurt Board and the Health of Seamen c. 1700–1806,” Journal for Maritime Research 1, no. 1 (December 1999): 1–17; Erica Charters, “The Western Squadron, Medical Trials, and the Sick and Hurt Board during the Seven Years War,” in Health and Medicine at Sea 1700–1900, ed. D.B. Haycock and S. Archer (London: Boydell Press, 2009), 19–37. 7 L.G. Stevenson, “A Note on the Relation of Military Service to Licensing in the History of British Surgery,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 27 (1953): 420–7; J.R. Butterton, “The Education, Naval Service, and Early Career of William Smellie,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 60 (1986): 1–18; Paul E. Kopperman, “Medical Services in the British Army, 1742–1783,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 34, no. 4 (1979): 428–55; Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies 1660–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 8 Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 370–98; Peter Gay, “The Enlightenment as Medicine and Cure,” in The Age of the Enlightenment: Studies Presented to Theodore Besterman, ed. W.H. Barber et al. (Edinburgh: St Andrews University Publications, 1967), 375–86; Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (London: Routledge, 1999), chap. 3. 9 Lindsay Granshaw and Roy Porter, eds, The Hospital in History (London: Routledge, 1987); Andrea A. Rusnock, Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); James C. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (New York: Macmillan, 1987).

84  Erica Charters 10 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1976); E.H. Ackerknecht, Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794–1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967). 11 On the development of statistical analysis, see particularly Ulrich Tröhler, “To Improve the Evidence of Medicine”: The 18th Century British Origins of a Critical Approach (Edinburgh: Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 2000). On trials and experimentation, see Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 692–7; Lucenet, Médecine, chirurgie et armée, esp. the introduction and conclusion; Haycock and Archer, eds, Health and Medicine at Sea; ­Geoffrey Hudson, ed., British Military and Naval Medicine, 1600–1830 (New York: Rodopi, 2007); Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire. 12 Journal des Sçavans, June 1767, 376; review of Richard de Hautesierck’s Recueil d’observations de médecine des hôpitaux militaires. 13 Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Foucault, Birth of the Clinic. 14 See Roy Porter and W.F. Bynum, eds, William Hunter and the EighteenthCentury Medical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter, Patients and Practitioners: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Susan Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils and Practitioners in Eighteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Patrick Wallis and Mark Jenner, eds, Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450–1850 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 15 On the Enlightenment republic of letters, see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). For a recent summary of knowledge exchange in military and colonial circles during this period, see Londa Schiebinger, “Scientific Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 294–328. 16 Pascale Brioist, “The Royal Society and the Académie des sciences in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” in Anglo-French Attitudes: Comparisons and Transfers between English and French Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Christophe Charle, Julien Vincent, and Jay Winters (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 63–77.

Colonial Disease, Translation, and Enlightenment  85 17 See most recently Stephen Conway, Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 5, “Investigation and Improvement.” 18 Claire Crignon-de Oliveira, “Le rôle des périodiques dans la diffusion du savoir médical en France et en Grande-Bretagne (fin dix-septième – fin dix-huitième siècle),” in Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Ann Thomson, Simon Burrows, and Edmond Dziembowski (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010), 132. For a caution regarding the extent of Franco-British medical exchange, see Laurence Brockliss, “The French Republic of Letters and English Culture, 1750–90,” in Anglo-French Attitudes, 98–121. 19 Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Enlightenment in Translation: Regional and European Aspects,” European Review of History: Revue européene d’histoire 13, no. 3 (2006): 386–9; Conway, Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe, 112–14. 20 A Catalogue of the Libraries of the Revd. Mr Luckyn, the Revd. Mr. Boys, and of the Counsellor Boys of Essex …, vol. 2 (London, 1757), 349; Benjamin and John White, A Catalogue of a Large and Valuable Collection of Books in all Languages … (London, 1793), 292; John White, A Catalogue of Rare, Splendid, and Valuable Books … Including the Entire Libraries of the Rev Harvey Spragg … (London, 1798), 310. See also Medical Essays and Observations, Published by a Society in Edinburgh, vol. 6 (Edinburgh, 1747), 468; Donald Monro, Observations on the Means of Preserving the Health of Soldiers, 2 vols (London, 1780), 1:183, 2:277, 322. 21 Journal de medécine, chirurgie, pharmacie, &c., vol. 48 (Paris, 1777), 166–7; Daniel Delaroche, Recherches sur la nature et le traitement de la fièvre puerpérale (Paris, 1783), 78; Bègue de Presle, letter in Journal de médecine, chirurgie, pharmacie, &c, vol. 22 (Paris, 1765), 150. 22 For biographical information, see Archives Biographiques Françaises, series I, 77, 188–90. For his own medical theories, see his Le conservateur de la santé (Paris, 1763). 23 Avi S. Lifschitz, “Translation in Theory and Practice: The Case of Johann David Michaelis’s Prize Essay on Language and Opinions (1759),” in Cultural Transfer through Translation: The Circulation of Enlightened Thought by Means of Translation, ed. Stefanie Stockhorst (New York: Rodopi, 2010), 39. 24 John Pringle, Observations sur les maladies des armées, trans. [P.-H. Larcher] (Paris, 1771), xi. This is not simply an empty boast on the part of Larcher; the small revisions Pringle made between the 1768 (6th) and 1774 (7th) English editions appear in the French text, such as the change in title of part III, chap. 7, section 6.

86  Erica Charters 25 Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), introduction; Oz-Salzberger, “Enlightenment in Translation,” 390; Stefanie Stockhorst, “Introduction. Cultural Transfer through Translation: A Current Perspective in Enlightenment Studies,” in Cultural Transfer through Translation, 14–15; Evelyn L. Forget, “‘At Best an Echo’: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Translation Strategies and the History of Economics,” History of Political Economy 42, no. 2 (2010): 653–77; Lifschitz, “Translation in Theory and Practice,” 29–43. 26 Journal des Sçavans, February 1769, 122. 27 “Extrait des registres de la Société Royale de Médecine,” in James Lind, Essai sur les maladies des européens dans les pays chaud, trans. C.-E. Thion de la Chaume, 2 vols (Paris, 1785), vol. 2. 28 Lind, An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, 3rd ed. (London, 1777), 76–7; Essai sur les maladies, vol. 1, 98. As the French translation uses Lind’s third English edition, I have also used this English edition throughout. 29 Lind, Essay, 2. 30 McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 140. 31 Antoine Poissonnier-Desperrières, Traité des fièvres de l’isle de S. Domingue (Paris, 1763), xvi, 6. 32 Lind, Essay, 133. On self-discipline and medicine in the French colonies, see Sean M. Quinlan, The Great Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity and Health Crises in Revolutionary France c. 1750–1850 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), chap. 3. Lind, Pringle, and other British medical writers had been advocating a theory of putrefaction for some years, so this is a case not of direct textual influence but, rather, of general similarities between British and French medical theories. 33 Lind, Essai sur les maladies, vol. 1, notes on 126–7. 34 Byam Crump to William Pitt, 4 October 1759, in Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State, ed. Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1969), 2:174. 35 Thion de la Chaume, “Préface du Traducteur,” in Lind, Essai sur les maladies, vol. 1, xiv–xv. 36 Encyclopédie méthodique: Médecine, vol. 3 (Paris, 1790), 266, 315. 37 Jean Colombier, Code de médecine militaire pour le service de terre (Paris, 1772), xx–xxi. 38 Antoine Poissonnier-Desperrières, Traité des maladies des gens de mer (Paris, 1767), 429. 39 Journal des Sçavans, July 1767, 534–5.

Colonial Disease, Translation, and Enlightenment  87 40 On the Seven Years’ War and the development of patriotism in France, see Edmond Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme français, 1750–1770: la France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept ans (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998). 41 John Polus Lecaan, Advice to the Gentlemen in the Army of Her Majesty’s Forces in Spain and Portugal (London, 1708), 8–9. 42 Crignon-De Oliveira, “Le rôle des périodiques,” 140–5.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Archival Material Vincennes Series A1 3541. Service historique de la défense. Primary Sources Bègue de Presle, Achille Guillaume de. Le conservateur de la santé. Paris, 1763. – Letter in Journal de médecine, chirurgie, pharmacie, &c, vol. 22, 143–51. Paris, 1765. A Catalogue of the Libraries of the Revd. Mr Luckyn, the Revd. Mr. Boys, and of the Counsellor Boys of Essex. Vol. 2. London, 1757. Colombier, Jean. Code de médecine militaire pour le service de terre. Paris, 1772. Delaroche, Daniel. Recherches sur la nature et le traitement de la fièvre puerpérale. Paris, 1783. Encyclopédie méthodique: Médecine. Vol. 3. Paris, 1790. Journal de medécine, chirurgie, pharmacie, &c. Vol. 48. Paris, 1777. Journal des Sçavans. 1754–85. Lecaan, John Polus. Advice to the Gentlemen in the Army of Her Majesty’s Forces in Spain and Portugal. London, 1708. Lind, James. Essai sur les maladies des européens dans les pays chaud. Translated by C.-E. Thion de la Chaume. 2 vols. Paris, 1785. – An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates. 3rd ed. London, 1777. Medical Essays and Observations, Published by a Society in Edinburgh. 6 vols. Edinburgh, 1747. Monro, Donald. Observations on the Means of Preserving the Health of Soldiers. 2 vols. London, 1780. Pitt, William. Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State. Edited by Gertrude Selwyn Kimball. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1969.

88  Erica Charters Poissonnier-Desperrières, Antoine. Traité des fièvres de l’isle de S. Domingue. Paris, 1763. – Traité des maladies des gens de mer. Paris, 1767. Pringle, John. Observations on the Diseases of the Army. 6th ed. London, 1768. – Observations on the Diseases of the Army. 7th ed. London, 1774. – Observations sur les maladies des armées. Translated by [P.-H. Larcher]. Paris, 1771. White, Benjamin, and John White. A Catalogue of a Large and Valuable Collection of Books in all Languages. London, 1793. White, John. A Catalogue of Rare, Splendid, and Valuable Books … Including the Entire Libraries of the Rev Harvey Spragg. London, 1798. Secondary Sources Ackerknecht, E.H. Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794–1848. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Brioist, Pascale. “The Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century.” In Anglo-French Attitudes: Comparisons and Transfers between English and French Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century, edited by Christophe Charle, Julien Vincent, and Jay Winters, 63–77. ­Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Brockliss, Laurence. “The French Republic of Letters and English Culture, 1750–90.” In Anglo-French Attitudes: Comparisons and Transfers between English and French Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century, edited by Christophe Charle, Julien Vincent, and Jay Winters, 98–121. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Brockliss, Laurence, and Colin Jones. The Medical World of Early Modern France. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Butterton, J.R. “The Education, Naval Service, and Early Career of William Smellie.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 60 (1986): 1–18. Charters, Erica. “The Caring Fiscal-Military State during the Seven Years War, 1756–63.” Historical Journal 52, no. 4 (2009): 921–41. – “The Western Squadron, Medical Trials, and the Sick and Hurt Board during the Seven Years War.” In Health and Medicine at Sea 1700–1900, edited by D.B. Haycock and S. Archer, 19–37. London: Boydell Press, 2009. Conway, Stephen. Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth ­Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Crignon-de Oliveira, Claire. “Le rôle des périodiques dans la diffusion du savoir médical en France et en Grande-Bretagne (fin dix-septième – fin dix-huitième siècle).” In Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long

Colonial Disease, Translation, and Enlightenment  89 Eighteenth Century, edited by Ann Thomson, Simon Burrows, and Edmond Dziembowski, 131–45. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010. Crimmin, P.K. “The Sick and Hurt Board and the Health of Seamen c. 1700– 1806.” Journal for Maritime Research 1, no. 1 (December 1999): 1–17. Dziembowski, Edmond. Un nouveau patriotisme français, 1750–1770: la France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept ans. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998. Forget, Evelyn L. “‘At Best an Echo’: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Translation Strategies and the History of Economics.” History of Political Economy 42, no. 2 (2010): 653–77. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A. Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1976. Gay, Peter. “The Enlightenment as Medicine and Cure.” In The Age of the Enlightenment: Studies Presented to Theodore Besterman, edited by W.H. Barber et al., 375–86. Edinburgh: St Andrews University Publications, 1967. Gillispie, Charles Coulston. Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Granshaw, Lindsay, and Roy Porter, eds. The Hospital in History. London: Routledge, 1987. Harrison, Mark. Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies 1660–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Haycock, D.B., and S. Archer, eds. Health and Medicine at Sea, 1700–1900. ­London: Boydell Press, 2009. Hudson, Geoffrey, ed. British Military and Naval Medicine, 1600–1830. New York: Rodopi, 2007. Kopperman, Paul E. “Medical Services in the British Army, 1742–1783.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 34, no. 4 (1979): 428–55. Lawrence, Susan. Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils and Practitioners in Eighteenth-Century London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lifschitz, Avi S. “Translation in Theory and Practice: The Case of Johann D ­ avid Michaelis’s Prize Essay on Language and Opinions (1759).” In Cultural Transfer through Translation: The Circulation of Enlightened Thought by Means of Translation, edited by Stefanie Stockhorst, 29–43. New York: Rodopi, 2010. Lucenet, Monique. Médecine, chirurgie et armée en France: au siècle des lumières. Sceaux, France: I&D, 2006. McClellan, James E. Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

90  Erica Charters McClellan, James E., and François Regourd. “The Colonial Machine: French Science and Colonization in the Ancien Regime.” Osiris 2nd ser., 15 (2000): 31–50. McMurran, Mary Helen. The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Oz-Salzberger, Fania. “The Enlightenment in Translation: Regional and European Aspects.” European Review of History: Revue européene d’histoire 13, no. 3 (2006): 385–409. Pluchon, Pierre. Histoire des medécins et pharmaciens de marine et des colonies. Toulouse: Privat, 1985. Porter, Dorothy. Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times. London: Routledge, 1999. Porter, Roy, and Dorothy Porter. Patients and Practitioners: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989. Porter, Roy, and W.F. Bynum, eds. William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Quinlan, Sean M. The Great Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity and Health Crises in Revolutionary France c. 1750–1850. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Riley, James C. The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Rusnock, Andrea A. Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Schiebinger, Londa. “Scientific Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.” In Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, edited by Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, 294–328. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Stevenson, L.G. “A Note on the Relation of Military Service to Licensing in the History of British Surgery.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 27 (1953): 420–7. Stockhorst, Stefanie. “Introduction. Cultural Transfer through Translation: A Current Perspective in Enlightenment Studies.” In Cultural Transfer through Translation: The Circulation of Enlightened Thought by Means of Translation, edited by Stefanie Stockhorst, 7–26. New York: Rodopi, 2010. Tröhler, Ulrich. “To Improve the Evidence of Medicine”: The 18th Century British Origins of a Critical Approach. Edinburgh: Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 2000. Wallis, Patrick, and Mark Jenner, eds. Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450–1850. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

4 “Under His Majesty’s Protection”: The Meaning of the Conquest for the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada Alain Beaulieu

In the last twenty years, the British conquest of New France in 1759–60 has occupied a distinctive place in the research on the history of the First Nations in Canada. This can partly be explained by the judicial debates that followed the entrenchment into the 1982 Canadian Constitution of special protections for the rights derived from treaties and those arising from the Royal Proclamation of 1763.1 These guarantees gave rise to important rulings by the Supreme Court of Canada, which confirmed the existence of treaties concluded by the British with the Mi’kmaq and the Huron Wendat Nation at the end of the French regime.2 The controversy raised by these rulings stimulated research, which then highlighted the strategic role played by the Aboriginal nations in the colonial history of Quebec and Canada in the mid-eighteenth century. However, by emphasizing the treaties of the Conquest, these rulings helped disseminate an image of the British conquerors treating Aboriginal peoples as equals, that is, dealing with them nation to nation. While this image can serve as a symbol in the Aboriginal nations’ struggle for autonomy, it does not correlate with the concrete history of the exchanges that took place between the First Nations and the Europeans in the second half of the eighteenth century. The reason for this discordance is that the image tends to eclipse the profoundly colonial philosophy at play in these reports. The Conquest certainly did not have the same meaning for the colonials of French origin as it did for the Aboriginal nations. The former were formally conquered in 1760 and became British subjects in 1763; this, however, was not the case for the First Nations, or at the very least, their situation was more complex. Agreements like the one negotiated in August 1760 between the native people of the St Lawrence Valley and the British certainly support the idea that the former allies of the French were not formally conquered

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by the British, but rather, that they sought to negotiate with them directly regarding the conditions of the change in regimes.3 There are in fact some important similarities between the FrancoAmerindian alliance and the one that developed after 1760 between the Aboriginals who had formerly been French allies and the new rulers of Canada, as the British adopted many of their predecessors’ diplomatic practices. Indeed, a few years after Canada was handed over by the French, the American War of Independence (1775–83) strengthened the rationale for alliances, since the British found themselves in a similar position to the one the French had been in, namely, of having to depend on the native peoples’ military participation to defend the colony. As during the New France era, the Aboriginal nations were very much courted by the two rival powers, which bolstered their position in North American geopolitics.4 From this perspective, the pivotal moment in the history of the alliances with the Aboriginals did not occur during the Conquest, but rather after the War of 1812, when the military role of the native people rapidly declined and the British implemented a policy to civilize the Aboriginals.5 This historical division clarifies the significance of the alliance over the long term, in the history of Aboriginal-European relationships in northeastern America. But it can also be misleading if we take insufficient account of the transformations that marked the alliance over this long period of time. Indeed, it underwent some significant evolutions between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, and these evolutions are often embodied in pivotal moments. The idea developed in this essay is that the Conquest was one of those moments. While it did not mark the formal subjection of the Aboriginal people, it nevertheless played a decisive role in the process that led to their integration into a new political order. The most significant shift in this regard was the development of an approach of protection – a harbinger of the guardianship approach that would be adopted by the British and Canadian authorities from the nineteenth century onward. This change is the thread that weaves through this essay. One of the objectives of the essay is to shed light on the way in which the paradigm of alliance, which was still active at the time of the Conquest, carried within it the seeds for the foundation of a guardianship policy. The Franco-Amerindian Alliance (1600–1760) In order to grasp properly the changes introduced by the Conquest of  New France, we must first go back a short way, to consider the

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underlying characteristics of the alliance that developed between the French and the Aboriginal nations from the seventeenth century. This alliance played a central role in the history of the creation of the FrancoAmerican empire, which, outside certain more densely populated zones (such as the St Lawrence Valley), seems primarily an empire of alliance with the Aboriginal peoples. Recent Canadian and North American historiographies clearly highlight this characteristic. The native peoples’ military importance was more crucial at the margins of the empire – the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley,6 and the Maritime colonies7 – though it was not insignificant in zones like the St Lawrence Valley,8 where the bulk of the colonial population was located. Between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the English Conquest of 1760, the Franco-Amerindian alliance underwent several important transformations. At the start, the French occupied only a marginal place in North American geopolitics. They inserted themselves into pre-existing alliance networks: they were first and foremost the allies of Amerindians whose actions were very largely conditioned by Aboriginal rivalries and priorities. Even though their technology fascinated the native people, and their military support could in some circumstances be a major asset, the French were still only marginal actors in this scene. Overall, this stage lasted until 1650–60. The first signs of a repositioning of the alliance’s actors appeared in the 1640s, when the French were called upon by the Iroquois, who wanted to conclude a separate peace treaty with them. From that moment forward, the French acquired a new status: they were no longer merely guests taking part in diplomatic discussions that primarily concerned their allies; they were now independent actors whom the Iroquois wanted to keep away from their traditional enemies (the Innu, Algonquin, and Huron).9 The Iroquois proposals, however, gain new meaning in the light of the ensuing destruction of Huronia in 1650. The French progressively established themselves as central actors in diplomatic relations with the Iroquois. The forays of the Carignan-Salières Regiment against the Iroquois in 1666 and 1667, and further forays that followed in 1680 and 1690, confirmed and strengthened this role, and the French moved from being a marginal power to being a dominant political actor in northeastern America, a status they shared with the English.10 This period is marked by a formidable expansion by the French into the continent’s interior: coureurs de bois, missionaries, and soon soldiers began to make their way west and established outposts and forts, which then became sites for meetings and trade with Aboriginal peoples. This movement was

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accompanied by the re-creation of a Franco-Amerindian alliance network, which was far more extensive and complex than the pre-1650 one. It was in the Great Lakes and the adjacent lands that the French expansion into North America was most apparent; before long, however, they reached the valleys of the Illinois and the Mississippi, as well as Hudson’s Bay. The events of 1701 illustrate the changes that had taken place on the North American political stage. That year, Montreal was the scene of a large-scale diplomatic conference that brought together some thirty Aboriginal nations. Known as the Great Peace of Montreal, the meeting put an end to the Iroquois wars, which had resumed in the 1680s. It was a victory for the French, who successfully imposed a “universal peace” on the Iroquois, which included all of the native allies, and obtained from them a commitment to neutrality in the upcoming conflicts between France and England.11 This large diplomatic meeting was also a turning point in the position occupied within the alliance by the actors present, and it structured these relationships around a new concept: mediation. In fact, in 1701, the First Nations who gathered in Montreal officially recognized a role of armed mediator for the governor of New France, and they agreed to submit to him any disputes that opposed them to each other, so that he could render a decision and have it respected, through force if necessary.12 It was, therefore, an important symbolic victory for the French, whose central position in the alliance was recognized. This recognition did not translate into total domination by the French; far from it. But it did clearly reflect an evolution in the power relations. This evolution had been acknowledged twenty years before the Great Peace of Montreal by one of the important players in the negotiations, Huron chief Kondiaronk. At that time, Chief Kondiaronk had said to Governor Frontenac that while the Hurons had previously considered Frontenac to be their brother, they now saw him as their father.13 While we must not overestimate the power of the role of mediator, neither should we overlook the importance and significance of this transition. The French plan to impose themselves as obligatory arbitrators in the conflicts between First Nations appeared from the very beginning of the Franco-Amerindian alliance. Champlain alludes to it as early as 1630. However, it would be nearly a century before the French succeeded in having that role formally accepted by the Aboriginal peoples. Having begun as allies in pre-existing networks, they now found themselves at the centre of an alliance bringing together several dozen First Nations. The governor of New France, or Onontio, had become

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the father of all these nations. This does not mean that these nations considered themselves direct subjects of the authority of the governor of New France, because the Amerindian parental authority relationship was quite different from the European one.14 But a subordinating relationship still took hold, and while it was still largely symbolic, it was not exclusively so. From the French colonial perspective, mediation was a political tool required for the pacification process, a process that allowed the French progressively to extend their network of alliances and to include in it a multitude of nations that sometimes had diverging interests and that had also often been in conflict with one another prior to their integration into the Franco-Amerindian alliance. The harmonization of these relations would be one of the major recurring problems in the history of the alliance, because the French desire to include an ever-increasing number of First Nations in a single alliance often contradicted the Amerindian geopolitical reality. The French therefore had to play their role of mediator to its full extent. This was a delicate operation that strengthened their authority when it was successful but weakened the alliance when it failed or only partly succeeded. Yet even if the Franco-Amerindian alliance was fracturing in places during the final years of the French regime, particularly in the Ohio Valley, the support of the Aboriginal nations still played an essential role in the colony’s defence during the Seven Years’ War. Given the scale of the European forces involved in the war, one would have thought that the participation of Aboriginal people would only be of secondary significance. That, however, was not the case. Even though the European style of war tended to dominate in the conflict’s final stages, it still did not entirely overshadow the “small scale” warfare made up of raids and ambushes, in which the Aboriginals excelled.15 French documents of that era are full of allusions to the military participation of the Aboriginal people in the hostilities of the Seven Years’ War. At the height of that war, in a memoir addressed to the French court, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville went so far as to claim that without Aboriginal support France could not persist in North America and that this support was the counterweight tipping the balance in favour of the French.16 The Collapse of the Franco-Amerindian Alliance In the mid-eighteenth century, the British, conscious of how the alliances with the Aboriginal nations were advantageous to the French,

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multiplied their proposals for reforms to Indian affairs.17 In 1755, this led to the official creation of an Indian Department, divided into two superintendencies: one for the nations north of the Ohio River, under the leadership of Sir William Johnson, and the other for the nations located to the south, led by Edmond Atkin. In creating this new department, the British authorities wanted to centralize their negotiations with the Aboriginals in order to obtain at the very least their neutrality, if not their support. However, the military success of the British played a more decisive role than did their diplomacy in eroding the FrancoAmerindian alliance. The first signs of this were discernible as early as 1758, when the Ohio nations officially chose neutrality by signing the Treaty of Easton. The erosion grew in the ensuing months, accelerated by the difficulties the French were having in supplying their allies with trade goods and by their military defeats. As of 1759, the Aboriginal allies of the French called on British forts with increasing frequency to trade and to make peace overtures.18 The native people of the St Lawrence Valley, who were part of the flexible Seven Nations of Canada confederation, were among the last to withdraw from the Franco-Amerindian alliance. They opted for neutrality on 30 August 1760, in a treaty negotiated at Oswegatchie (near what is now the town of Prescott on the upper St Lawrence). While this treaty is less famous than the Murray Treaty, because its existence has never been recognized by the courts, it is more fundamental insofar as it rests on true negotiations between representatives of the Seven Nations of Canada – most likely Iroquois from Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Oswegatchie – and the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Sir William Johnson. The text of the agreement has never been found, but the “domiciled” Aboriginal people of the St Lawrence Valley (essentially Iroquois) alluded to it from time to time in the ensuing decades, recalling the content of the commitments that were made on that occasion. These references allow us to identify the main lines of the guarantees given by the parties to the agreement. The Aboriginals of the St Lawrence Valley undertook to withdraw from the conflict and not to intervene in the final British military operations against the French. In exchange, the British promised that the Aboriginals would suffer no reprisals, since they would henceforth be under the protection of the King; that they would keep their land (the limits of which, however, were not formally defined); and that they would continue to enjoy the same rights and privileges they had enjoyed under the French administration (which rights were also not clearly specified).19 These commitments were doubtless confirmed in

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Kahnawake a few days later when the Seven Nations negotiated a new treaty, an alliance this time, with the British, undertaking to offer military assistance in the event of an attack.20 In the Maritimes, the British also signed treaties with the Mi’kmaq in 1760 and 1761.21 These treaties were similar in form and content, and opened with the submission of the Aboriginals to the British Crown and the recognition of the King’s supremacy over Nova Scotia. The Mi’kmaq undertook not to interfere with British subjects established in that territory, not to incite soldiers to desertion, and to redress crimes or thefts committed. They were also to free prisoners taken during the conflict, renounce any contact with the French, and advise the British of any potential French threat.22 These treaties contained no firm or precise commitment regarding the territorial rights of the Mi’kmaq. However, at a conference leading up to the ratification of one of these agreements, Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick Jonathan Belcher announced that English law would henceforth be the best protection for their rights and property, a statement that seemed to indicate the existence of territorial ownership rights.23 For some researchers, the formulas of submission used in the treaties reached in the Maritimes convey the establishment of a relationship of pronounced domination by the British, whose will could be imposed on the Mi’kmaq. This idea is not a new one, since it was proposed as early as the 1930s.24 It has, however, been taken up again and developed more systematically within the context of recent legal debates on the rights stemming from these treaties. Thus, for Stephen Patterson, the Mi’kmaq were, in 1760, in an extremely precarious situation. Having lost their main ally in the region, they were forced to turn to the British for the trade goods on which they had become very dependent. In this reading of events the British took advantage of their new hegemonic position to establish a more aggressive colonial system and to proclaim their sovereignty over Nova Scotia and its Aboriginal communities.25 Jean-Pierre Sawaya develops a similar picture in his study of the integration of the Seven Nations of Canada into the British empire. In it, he emphasizes the establishment of a clear relationship of domination by the British.26 Hidden beneath the appearance of an alliance with the British Crown, argues Sawaya, there was in fact a relationship marked by “subjugation” and “domination.”27 Even if these analyses find partial support in the sources, they tend to underestimate the complexity of the relationships established with the natives who had formerly been French allies. As highlighted by John

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Reid, in the case of the Maritimes, the Mi’kmaq continued to pose a threat, to some extent, after 1760. In the period immediately following the French defeat, colonial authorities continued to take seriously the possibility of an attack by the Mi’kmaq, and the Mi’kmaq found themselves in a position that allowed them “to extract conciliatory responses from reluctant imperial officials.”28 The rhetoric of the treaties, which emphasized the Aboriginals’ submission, did not translate in the short term into a policy to have them rapidly admit their status as conquered peoples. The position of the Seven Nations appears more precarious than that of the Mi’kmaq. The location of their villages at the heart of the colonial world made them more vulnerable to potential British repression. The fact that they were surrounded by a vast majority of former French subjects, their traditional allies, may however have weighed in their favour, encouraging the new masters of Canada to act cautiously. As indicated by the negotiations leading up to the Treaty of Oswegatchie at the end of August 1760, the British were not discounting the military might of these communities. Some English documents of the 1750s continued to present this as a real threat to English colonies.29 While it did not eradicate all capacity for resistance by the Mi’kmaq and Seven Nations, the Conquest still strongly emphasized the imbalance that had slowly set in between the Aboriginal nations and the European powers established in North America since the seventeenth century. Whether or not the British formally subjugated the Aboriginal people of the St Lawrence Valley and the Maritimes is less important here than the geopolitical implications of the French defeat. It deprived the native people of essential support to lead military operations over long periods of time, and it intensified the possibility of repression by the British, who henceforth controlled, either partly or completely, the areas in which the Seven Nations and Mi’kmaq lived. Admittedly, the threat of violence was always a good way to exert pressure on the colonial authorities, but intimidation could quickly reach an impasse if it led to concrete action. For example, in 1762 the Mi’kmaq seemed ready to attack Lunenburg and even Halifax, a threat that was taken seriously by Lieutenant Governor Belcher. Instead of launching the attack, however, the Mi’kmaq sent emissaries to defuse the situation.30 Conscious of the fear they continued to arouse, they were also surely not unaware of the consequences of any violent action on their part. To be effective politically, the threat they represented had to remain a potential one.31

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With the Conquest, the locus of Aboriginal resistance tended to move towards the political arena and to be expressed through a claims process, the foundations of which had been laid by the Conquest treaties. In these treaties, the British had set out the conditions under which they were prepared to extend their protection to the former French allies, by committing to refrain from dispossessing them of their goods and to respect their “just rights.” In return, the Aboriginal nations had to accept the new colonial order and undertake not to contest it openly. These reciprocal agreements emphasize the ambiguity of the Aboriginals’ status. Their subjugation was not (or not always) formally or clearly formulated in the English documents, but their rights were embedded in a new legal framework. The British protection promised in the treaties became at once a defence mechanism for the Aboriginals, who called upon it to assert their rights, and the vehicle through which they were inscribed into a new political unit – the British empire – which set the rules and the criteria within which the invoked rights would either be recognized or not. A Difficult Transition (1760–3) While the transition to a British regime took place relatively peacefully in the St Lawrence Valley and the Maritimes, where the British had established control following large-scale military operations, this was not the case in the continent’s interior. There, paradoxically, the British had gained possession of the forts and outposts occupied by the French without having to engage in battle, since their surrender had been settled by the capitulation of Montreal (8 September 1760). In theory, this peaceful settlement could have facilitated the transition to the new political regime. Instead, it was one of the factors that triggered an extensive resistance movement, which led to a large-scale Aboriginal uprising known as Pontiac’s War, in which many nations from the Great Lakes and Ohio regions took part.32 The decision to take up arms against the British was primarily the result of a radical difference in the way in which Aboriginals and the British understood their respective rights over those territories. For the English conquerors, taking possession of French locations fit into the legal order that had slowly been established since the fifteenth century. Within this framework, the French, by capitulating in Montreal in 1760, had re­ linquished their rights over an enormous territory, which the British

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intended to absorb into their empire. This logic clashed with that of the Aboriginal nations, who did not consider themselves to have been under the authority of the king of France. In fact, the French claim to this immense territory rested on fragile foundations, namely, a few forts and trading posts whose construction had, in most cases, likely been preceded by negotiations with the Aboriginal nations. In the final months of the conflict, the Aboriginal people feared that the British would take advantage of the French defeat to occupy their territory militarily. Thus, during the negotiation of the Treaty of Easton in 1758, the Ohio nations had asked the British not to do so. They apparently received an affirmative response from the English negotiators, as did the Detroit nations the following year.33 The highest military authorities did not, however, conceal their intention to establish a military presence in the continent’s interior. In his messages to the French allies, Jeffrey Amherst said he did not want to dispossess them of their land, but he reserved the right to take land required to erect strongholds.34 This formulation did not leave any room for negotiation with the Aboriginals or any potential for them to refuse. For Amherst, British protection was the protection of a conquering power, which would establish itself in the conquered territories and strengthen its military positions. This intention would soon take very practical shape. In the Ohio Valley, the British rapidly built a fortress to replace Fort Duquesne, which the French themselves had destroyed before abandoning it.35 In the three years between the capitulation of Montreal and the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the English built or reoccupied a dozen other forts.36 The military occupation, albeit peaceful, portended great symbolic violence because it denied Aboriginal peoples the right to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted the British to establish a military presence on their lands. The installation of English garrisons in the former French forts was an essential step in the integration of these new territories into the British empire, and it expressed clearly the British desire to impose a new order on those lands: “They say We mean to make Slaves of them, by Taking so many Posts in their Country,” wrote Major Gladwin in 1763.37 This first manifestation of disregard for Aboriginal sovereignty was followed by many others. In the months following the Conquest, the Aboriginal nations of the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley made recurrent complaints about the attitude of the British, and they criticized the fort commanders for treating them not as allies but as masters would

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their slaves.38 The intransigence of the Indian Policy of Commander in Chief Jeffrey Amherst fuelled the impression that the British were simply imposing their domination over the region. Amherst had decided, for example, to stop the annual distribution of gifts to Aboriginal nations. This policy, which dated back to the French era, was one of the most tangible expressions of a relationship of alliance with the Aboriginals. By revoking it, Amherst was depriving the former French allies of a source of supply for European goods, but more importantly, he was also indicating that the British had no intention of pursuing their predecessors’ alliance philosophy.39 This impression was intensified by restrictions on the sale of munitions and firearms. Because he feared arming future enemies, Amherst had asked outpost officers to limit the sale of weapons to Aboriginals. This measure can be understood, at least in part, in terms of military strategy. Rumours of an uprising had been intensifying since 1761, and Amherst wanted to avoid arming potential enemies. The natives, however, saw this as a prelude to an offensive by their former foes, who, in their view, had decided to weaken them militarily before launching their final assault. The land question was also a significant concern for the former French allies. They did not trust British expansionist plans for the continent’s interior. The British had made commitments about Aboriginal lands in 1760, but there were several indications that they intended rapidly to open up the territories west of the Appalachians to colonization. The presence of the army in these territories and the arrival of settlers in the surrounding areas to service the forts seemed signs of a planned occupation.40 In the end, the hostility towards the British fed into a messianic movement that advocated a return to traditional Aboriginal practices and the breaking-off of relations with the Europeans. This movement, which emerged in the Ohio Valley in the 1750s, played a decisive role in the outbreak of the conflict. It acted as the ideological ferment for the Aboriginal coalition that took up arms against the English. The movement’s originator, the Delaware prophet Neolin, had his first visions in 1760–1.41 He emphasized the need to put an end to the wars among Aboriginal nations and advocated a return to a purer moral order, which would exclude the harmful influence of the Europeans and their material culture. Armed resistance to stop the advance of the British was also part of the prophet’s message.42 At first this message was delivered only to Neolin’s Delaware disciples, but it then spread to

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several nations in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes regions (to the Potawatomi, Sandusky Huron, Shawnee, Miami, Tsonnontouan, Odahwah, Chippewa, etc.).43 Pontiac preached Neolin’s message in the month before the uprising, inciting Aboriginals from the Great Lakes and Ohio to take up arms to drive out the British.44 Preceded by numerous rumours, the Aboriginals’ military offensive began in May 1763, shortly after the news about the Treaty of Paris arrived upcountry. The news spread dismay among the native peoples, who could not understand how the French could have relinquished lands that did not belong to them. It was this, without a doubt, that sparked the crisis. Of the twelve forts attacked by the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley nations, nine fell into their hands. Only the forts in Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Niagara, which were better defended, resisted the Aboriginal siege. Though it was remarkable in its scope, the uprising quickly lost momentum because the Aboriginals could not sustain their siege of the strongholds for long periods of time, particularly as they had to return to their territories in the fall to hunt. And it did not take long for the British to organize their suppression. The forts that had resisted the Aboriginals’ assault received reinforcements, and the others were quickly reoccupied by British troops. Two military expeditions were undertaken in 1764. They did not, however, result in the devastation that had been announced by Amherst because the battles were limited in extent, and the two British officers who were responsible for the operations demonstrated a willingness to launch peace talks. Nevertheless, these expeditions demonstrated the British capacity to lead large-scale military operations in Aboriginal territory, if needed. Moreover, the commercial embargo imposed by the military authorities in August 1763 had demonstrated the deleterious commercial impact of waging war against the British without support from another European nation.45 Despite its short duration, Pontiac’s Uprising struck the British imagination. For the first time, a number of Aboriginal nations had successfully formed a large military coalition and acted in a relatively concerted way. Even without French support, Aboriginal warriors had seized several British forts, and their raids had resulted in the deaths of some four hundred soldiers and two thousand civilians along the borders.46 This wide-scale uprising forced a quick response from London. Jeffrey Amherst, an advocate of the hard line, was quickly recalled to London and replaced by Thomas Gage. In an attempt to reassure Aboriginal ­nations about their intentions, the British publicly outlined their new Indian policy through a Royal Proclamation.47 This policy, which had

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already been in the works for several years, took shape as a series of reports that were prepared in the months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The first part of the Proclamation was concerned with the establishment of borders for three new colonies (Quebec and the two Floridas), the establishment of a civil government in these provinces, and the development of a framework for land concessions for soldiers and officers who had served in North America during the Seven Years’ War. The provisions regarding Aboriginals are found at the end of the document.48 The policy stated in the Royal Proclamation was part of a broader management plan for the immense territory ceded by France. One of the major concerns of the authorities in London was their desire to limit the westward expansion of the American colonies. They feared that such an expansion would intensify the colonies’ separatist sentiment and ultimately weaken the empire. This conception accorded with the need to adopt measures to provide the former French allies with reassurances about their land, and it led to the creation, by Royal Proclamation, of an immense territory provisionally reserved for the Aboriginal peoples. This territory encompassed the lands west of the Appalachians and outside the three new colonies of Quebec and the two Floridas, which had been created by the Proclamation.49 The Royal Proclamation also set precise rules for acquiring land from Aboriginals. Such land could only be purchased by representatives clearly mandated by the Crown and by means of treaties concluded with the major chiefs of the affected nations. London thus reaffirmed the British state’s exclusive power in this area. The purchase of land by individuals was not only subject to abuse and fraud, but such purchases also weakened British claims in America, because they reinforced an underlying assumption that the Aboriginal nations had the power to transfer a real title deed on the land, a legal capacity generally associated with the exercise of sovereignty. By prohibiting this type of purchase, the Proclamation was in fact restricting Aboriginal rights to their own lands. In one way, the Royal Proclamation was a victory for the Aboriginals. After taking up arms against the British, they received recognition for certain rights over their land. It was a true founding text, one that would be cited on multiple occasions by Aboriginals from the last decades of the eighteenth century onwards. Some Aboriginal nations from central and eastern Canada, particularly those in the St Lawrence Valley who received copies of the Proclamation, cited it repeatedly at the end of the eighteenth century and in the century following to assert

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their rights (sometimes by itself and sometimes in conjunction with the Conquest-era treaties).50 This success, however, should not obscure the fact that it was the first document through which the British openly and clearly declared their sovereignty over their new North American empire. The Proclamation recognized Aboriginal territorial rights but unilaterally dictated the nature of those rights: they were usage rights that could only be ceded to the British Crown. The Royal Proclamation thereby directly prolonged the conquest of New France. Generally presented as a protective measure for Aboriginal people, it in fact made their dispossession official, first by limiting the nature of the rights Aboriginals had over their land, and then by establishing the means to extinguish those rights. The creation of an enormous territory reserved for Aboriginal people was also a clear affirmation of Great Britain’s sovereign claim. After having compelled by force the recognition of the borders of its American empire, it was now dividing up the sections it wanted to open up or close to colonization. The establishment of a vast hunting territory for Aboriginals was merely another way to take possession of that land. Underlying its apparent generosity, this gesture officially inaugurated the process of confining Aboriginals to increasingly limited spaces, a development that took place through the transformation of the treaties – those quintessential instruments of diplomacy – into tools of colonialism.51 In this way also, the Royal Proclamation is a founding text. Conclusion The Conquest did not end the Aboriginal peoples’ capacity for resistance. It did not reduce them to silence. It did not even make them disappear as political and military actors on the North American scene. Both Pontiac’s War and the subsequent participation of Aboriginal nations in the American War of Independence and the War of 1812 are eloquent expressions of this. But this does not mean that the Conquest changed nothing. It certainly marked a significant stage in the way of seeing Aboriginal rights. From that time on, the idea of rights guaranteed and protected by the colonial state established itself as one of the central elements in the conception of Aboriginal-colonizer relations. This British protection, however, relied on a postulate that could not be questioned, namely, the existence of a colonial power able to define native rights by marking them out and qualifying them. These rights were henceforth inscribed within the domestic order of the British empire, which established itself by absorbing new territories, which it then

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delineated with new borders, and by incorporating the communities or nations that lived there. Aboriginal communities did not disappear as political entities. They retained varying degrees of autonomy and continued to administer their own affairs according to their own rules or customs. They did so, however, within a broader political unit that established itself as the authority that could determine the value and the extent of their rights. In this sense, the Conquest occupies a distinctive place in the history of Aboriginal-European relations, not because it eclipsed the philosophy of alliance but because it located it within a new paradigm. The treaties concluded in 1760 are clear symbols of the new relationship. Outwardly, they continue in the line of those negotiated with the French. But in fact, there is a fundamental underlying difference, stemming from the imbalance caused by the Conquest. After the defeat of the French, the Aboriginals found themselves faced with a single colonial power that could take advantage of its hegemonic position to impose a new order. In a way, these treaties, with their promises regarding the protection of rights, privileges, and lands, naturalized the power of the British to set rules, within which Aboriginal claims would either achieve the status of “just rights” or be relegated to the status of “contentions.” The Royal Proclamation prolonged and strengthened this philosophy. Certainly we can see in the document a recognition of some degree of autonomy for the Aboriginal nations, who were required to give their assent before their land could be ceded; however, this recognition took place within a political order that demarcated this autonomy by subjugating it to rules established by the colonial power. With this document, the king of England appropriated for himself the power to define the nature of the Aboriginals’ rights – rights that did not go as far as sovereignty and that could be summed up as usage rights – and to establish unilaterally the conditions under which those rights could be extinguished. It is without a doubt one of the document’s greatest strengths: it relied on Aboriginal political structures to make the substance underpinning those rights – land – disappear. NOTES 1 Renée Dupuis, Le statut juridique des peuples autochtones en droit canadien (Scarborough, ON: Carswell, 1999), 107–9; Sébastien Grammond, Aménager la coexistence: Les peuples autochtones et le droit canadien (Brussels: Bruylant and Éditions Yvon Blais, 2003), 111–13.

106  Alain Beaulieu 2 Simon v. The Queen, [1985] 2 S.C.R. 387; and R. v. Marshall, [1999] 3 S.C.R. 456. See also William C. Wicken, Treaties on Trial: History, Land, and Donald Marshall Junior (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); R. v. Sioui, [1990] 1 S.C.R. 1025; Denis Vaugeois, La fin des alliances franco-indiennes: Enquête sur un sauf-conduit de 1760 devenu un traité en 1990 (Montreal: Boréal, 1995); Thomas Peace, “The Slow Process of Conquest: Huron-Wendat Responses to the Conquest of Quebec, 1697–1791,” in Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective, ed. Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 115–40; and Jean-François Lozier, “History, Historiography, and the Courts: The St Lawrence Mission Villages and the Fall of New France,” in Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory, ed. Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 110–35. 3 This refers to the Treaty of Oswegatchie, which has not yet been recognized by the courts, but whose existence is substantiated by historical documentation; see Alain Beaulieu, “Les garanties d’un traité disparu: le traité d’Oswegatchie, 30 août 1760,” Revue juridique Thémis 34, no. 2 (2000): 369–408. See also Denys Delâge and Jean-Pierre Sawaya, Les traités des Sept Feux avec les Britanniques: Droits et pièges d’un héritage colonial au Québec (­Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2001). 4 On the role of Aboriginals as allies after the conquest of New France, see, for instance, Robert S. Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies: British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada, 1774–1815 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1992); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John G. Reid, “Pax Britannica or Pax Indigena? Planter Nova Scotia (1760–1782) and Competing Strategies of Pacification,” Canadian Historical Review 85, no. 4 (2004): 669–92; John G. Reid, “Empire, the Maritime Colonies, and the Supplanting of Mi’kma’ki/Wulstukwik, 1780–1820,” Acadiensis 38, no. 2 (2009): 78–97. 5 This change of paradigm after the War of 1812 has been discussed by several researchers. See, for example, John L. Tobias, “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada’s Indian Policy,” in Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada, ed. James R. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 127–44; Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 168–94. 6 There are numerous studies on both these regions, the most outstanding of which include the following: Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians,

“Under His Majesty’s Protection”  107 Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Gilles Havard, Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’en Haut, 1660–1715 (Quebec: Septentrion, 2003). 7 In the Maritimes, the alliance with the Mi’kmaq played a very important role in France’s imperial strategies. See, for instance, L.F.S. Upton, Micmacs and Colonists: Indian-White Relations in the Maritimes, 1713–1867 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1979), 31–60; Stephen E. Patterson, “Indian-White Relations in Nova Scotia, 1749–61: A Study in Political Interaction,”Acadiensis 23, no. 1 (1993): 23–59; John G. Reid, “Imperialism, Diplomacies, and the Conquest of Acadia,” in “The Conquest” of Acadia, 1710: Imperial, Colonial, and Aboriginal Constructions, ed. John Reid et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 101–23; Reid, “Pax Britannica or Pax Indigena?”; Reid, “Empire, the Maritime Colonies.” 8 For more on the military importance of the so-called domiciled Aboriginal people, who were part of the Seven Nations of Canada confederation, see D. Peter MacLeod, The Canadian Iroquois and the Seven Years’ War (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1996); Sawaya, La fédération des Sept Feux de la vallée du Saint-Laurent, XVIIe–XIXe siècle (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 1998); Alain Beaulieu and Jean-Pierre Sawaya, “L’importance stratégique des SeptNations du Canada (1650–1860),” Bulletin d’histoire politique 8, nos. 2–3 (2000): 87–107; Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 55–77. 9 For more on the Franco-Iroquois negotiations of 1640 and 1650, see, for instance, José António Brandão, “Your Fyre Shall Burn No More”: Iroquois Policy toward New France and Its Native Allies to 1701 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 92–116. 10 Samuel Mourin, Porter la guerre chez les Iroquois: les expéditions françaises contre la Ligue des Cinq Nations à la fin du XVIIe siècle (Sainte-Foy, QC: Gide, 2009). For the context behind these forays, see, in particular, Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North California Press, 1992), 162–89. 11 J.A. Brandão and William A. Starna, “The Treaties of 1701: A Triumph of Iroquois Diplomacy,” Ethnohistory 43, no. 2 (1996): 209–44; Gilles Havard, The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).

108  Alain Beaulieu 12 For more on the government’s role as mediator, see White, The Middle Ground, 142–86; Maxime Gohier, Onontio le médiateur: La gestion des conflits amérindiens en Nouvelle-France, 1603–1717 (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2008); Havard, Empire et métissages, especially chaps. 3, 4, and 7. 13 Denys Delâge, “Modèles coloniaux, métaphores familiales et changements de régime en Amérique du Nord, XVIIe–XIXe siècles,” Les Cahiers des Dix 60 (2006): 33–4. 14 For more about metaphors in the alliance, see Havard, Empire et métissages, 215–19, 360–73; Delâge, “Modèles coloniaux,” 33–6; Peter Cook, “Kings, Captains, and Kin: French Views of Native American Political Cultures in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624, ed. Peter C. Mancall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 307–41. 15 Louise Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada sous le régime français (Montreal: Boréal, 2008,), 194–8, 287–307, 379–87. 16 Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, “Mémoire sur l’état de la Nouvelle-France (1757),” in Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1923–1924 (Quebec: L.-Amable Proulx, 1924), 49 and 58. 17 John R. Alden, “The Albany Congress and the Creation of the Indian Superintendencies,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (1940): 193–210; Jack Stagg, “Protection and Survival: Anglo-Indian Relations, 1748–1763: Britain and the Northern Colonies” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1984), 148, 160–3; Timothy J. Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 67–76. 18 Alain Beaulieu, “Les Hurons de Lorette, le ‘traité Murray’ et la liberté de commerce,” in Les Hurons de Lorette, ed. Denis Vaugeois (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 1996), 287–92. 19 The treaty also included a provision allowing them to continue to practice the Catholic religion freely (Beaulieu, “Les garanties d’un traité disparu,” 369–408). 20 “Indian conference [Montreal, 16 September 1760],” in The Papers of Sir William Johnson, ed. James Sullivan et al., 14 vols (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1921–65), 13:163–6. 21 The first treaty was signed on 10 March 1760, with two Mi’kmaq bands. It would eventually be ratified by all the other bands, but the process would take over one-and-a-half years. See Stephen E. Patterson, “EighteenthCentury Treaties: The Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy Experience,” Native Studies Review 18, no. 1 (2009): 26. 22 Patterson, “Eighteenth-Century Treaties,” 43–5; Patterson, “Indian-White Relations in Nova Scotia,” 55.

“Under His Majesty’s Protection”  109 23 This allusion to British law was made by Lieutenant Governor Belcher before representatives of several Mi’kmaq bands in Halifax, on 22 June 1761; see Jeffers Lennox, “L’Acadie Trouvée: Mapping, Geographic Knowledge, and Imagining Northeastern North America, 1710–1763” (PhD diss., ­Dalhousie University, 2010), 435–7. 24 John Bartlet Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony during the Revolutionary Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 71. This general idea has been taken up by several researchers: Olive Patricia Dickason, “Amerindians Between French and English,” in Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada, ed. J.R. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 45–67; Daniel N. Paul, We Were Not the Savages: A Micmac Perspective on the Collision of European and Aboriginal Civilization (Halifax: Nimbus, 1993), 166. For a critique of this interpretation, see Reid, “Pax Britannica or Pax Indigena?” 669–92. 25 Patterson, “Indian-White Relations in Nova Scotia,” 58–9; ­Patterson, “Eighteenth-Century Treaties,” 41–5. 26 Jean-Pierre Sawaya, Alliance et dépendance: Comment la Couronne britannique a obtenu la collaboration des Indiens de la vallée du Saint-Laurent entre 1760 et 1774 (Quebec: Septentrion, 2002). 27 Sawaya, Alliance et dépendance, 74. 28 Reid, “Pax Britannica,” 683; Reid, “Empire, the Maritime Colonies,” 80. See also Upton, Micmacs and Colonists, 61–78. 29 Beaulieu and Sawaya, “L’importance stratégique,” 90–4. 30 Upton, Micmacs and Colonists, 62; see also Reid, “Pax Britannica,” 683–4, who however sees this episode as a very clear indication of the balance of power tipping in favour of the Mi’kmaq. 31 For more on the role played by threats and rumours in diplomacy, see Gregory Evans Dowd, “The Panic of 1751: The Significance of Rumors on the South Carolina-Cherokee Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1996): 527–60; and Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “‘Dark Cloud Rising from the East’: Indian Sovereignty and the Coming of King William’s War in New England,” New England Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2007): 597. 32 This name is misleading because it emphasizes only one of the uprising’s leaders, namely, the Odahwah Chief Pontiac, when, in fact, the movement required the intervention and participation of many other Aboriginal chiefs. This uprising has been the subject of numerous studies. An older work by Howard Henry Peckham (Pontiac and the Indian Uprising [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947]) provides a great deal of information to recreate the uprising. The most up-to-date and stimulating study is that of Gregory E. Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

110  Alain Beaulieu 33 See James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: Norton, 1999), 242–9; Dowd, War Under Heaven, 58. 34 See “A conference with the Western Nations of Indians, 12th day of August, 1760,” in Samuel Hazard, Pennsylvania Archives, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: Joseph Severns & Co., 1853), 746. 35 Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 55. 36 Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen, 55. 37 Gladwin to Amherst, 20 April 1763, in Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen, 56. Gladwin was then the commander in Detroit. 38 See Dowd, War Under Heaven, 59 and ff. 39 Dowd, War Under Heaven, 75. 40 As one Iroquois chief reminded William Johnson shortly after the uprising, “The chief cause of all the late wars was about Lands, we saw the English coming towards us from all Parts, and they cheated us so often, that we could not think well of it.” Quoted in David L. Preston, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontier of Iroquoia, 1667–1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 228. 41 For more on Neolin and his message, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (­Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 33–5; Dowd, War Under Heaven, 102–5; Alfred Cave, “The Delaware Prophet Neolin: A Reappraisal,” Ethnohistory 46, no. 2 (1999): 265–90. 42 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 34. 43 Dowd, War Under Heaven, 31, 39–41, 53, 91–2, 101. 44 Dowd, War Under Heaven, 101–5. 45 The British were fully conscious of the power that their commercial hegemony gave them, and they did not hesitate to make the point to the Aboriginals. This is perfectly illustrated by a statement made by William Johnson to the Chenussio nation, which had fought against English troops: “You are not ignorant that we can reduce you to Beggary without fighting, by only Debarring you of Trade, … If you deceive us any more, or continue Obstinate, your Ruin is inevitable” (“An Indian Congress, Niagara July 17–August 4, 1764,” Papers of Sir William Johnson, vol. 11, 293). 46 Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York: Norton, 1988), 446. 47 The text of the Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763 is reproduced in Adam Shortt and Arthur G. Doughty, eds, Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1759–1791 (Ottawa: J. de L. Taché, 1918), Part I, 163–8.

“Under His Majesty’s Protection”  111 48 These provisions were originally intended to appear not in the Royal Proclamation, but rather in the instructions for the governors of the different colonies. But the 1763 native uprising incited London authorities to change their plans and to include this section in the Proclamation (“The Lords of the Board of Trade to Egremont, Whitehall, 5 August 1763,” in Shortt and Doughty, eds., Documents, 125–6; “Halifax to the Lords of the Board of Trade, 19 September 1763,” ibid., 154). 49 These colonies, along with Nova Scotia, were to receive the colonists who were officially barred from the Western territories. For more about the formation of the British Indian policy and the British desire to draw a line demarcating the native hunting grounds from those open to colonization, see Jack M. Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760–1775 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 52–78; Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 19–45. 50 The British observed that these Aboriginal people attached a quasi-sacred nature to the text. The symbolic power of the document has not decreased over the years. Quite the contrary. It is not uncommon to read or hear that this document is the great charter of Indian rights. This symbolism is so well-established that a few years ago, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples suggested publishing a new Royal Proclamation to set new, more solid and respectful, bases for relations with Aboriginal Nations (Canada Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, vol. 5 [Ottawa: The Commission, 1996], 5). 51 For a discussion of the transformation of the treaty system, see Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Legal Documents Canada Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. 5 vols in 6. Ottawa: The Commission, 1996. R. v. Marshall, 3 S.C.R. 456 [1999]. R. v. Sioui, 1 S.C.R. 1025 [1990]. Simon v. The Queen, 2 S.C.R. 387 [1985].

112  Alain Beaulieu Historical Documents Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de. “Mémoire sur l’état de la Nouvelle-France (1757).” In Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1923–1924. Quebec: L.-Amable Proulx, 1924. “A conference with the Western Nations of Indians, 12th day of August, 1760.” In Samuel Hazard, Pennsylvania Archives. Vol. 3. Philadelphia: Joseph Severns & Co., 1853. Johnson, William. The Papers of Sir William Johnson. Edited by James Sullivan et al. 14 vols. Albany: University of the State of New York, 1921–65. Shortt, Adam, and Arthur G. Doughty, eds. Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1759–1791. Ottawa: J. de L. Taché, 1918. Secondary Sources Alden, John R. “The Albany Congress and the Creation of the Indian Superintendencies.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (1940): 193–210. Allen, Robert S. His Majesty’s Indian Allies: British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada, 1774–1815. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1992. Beaulieu, Alain. “Les garanties d’un traité disparu: le traité d’Oswegatchie, 30 août 1760.” Revue juridique Thémis 34, no. 2 (2000): 369–408. – “Les Hurons de Lorette, le ‘traité Murray’ et la liberté de commerce.” In Les Hurons de Lorette, edited by Denis Vaugeois, 287–92. Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 1996. Beaulieu, Alain, and Jean-Pierre Sawaya. “L’importance stratégique des Sept-Nations du Canada (1650–1860).” Bulletin d’histoire politique 8, nos. 2–3 (2000): 87–107. Brandão, José António. “Your Fyre Shall Burn No More”: Iroquois Policy toward New France and Its Native Allies to 1701. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Brandão, José António, and William A. Starna. “The Treaties of 1701: A Triumph of Iroquois Diplomacy.” Ethnohistory 43, no. 2 (1996): 209–44. Brebner, John Bartlet. The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony during the Revolutionary Years. New York: Columbia University Press, 1937. Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. – The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cook, Peter. “Kings, Captains, and Kin: French Views of Native American Political Cultures in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.” In The

“Under His Majesty’s Protection”  113 Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624, edited by Peter C. Mancall, 307–41. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Dechêne, Louise. Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada sous le régime français. Montreal: Boréal, 2008. Delâge, Denys. “Modèles coloniaux, métaphores familiales et changements de régime en Amérique du Nord, xviie–xixe siècles.” Les Cahiers des Dix 60 (2006): 33–4. Delâge, Denys, and Jean-Pierre Sawaya. Les traités des Sept-Feux avec les Britanniques: Droits et pièges d’un héritage colonial au Québec. Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2001. Dickason, Olive Patricia. “Amerindians Between French and English.” In Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada, edited by J.R. Miller, 45–67. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Dowd, Gregory Evans. “The Panic of 1751: The Significance of Rumors on the South Carolina-Cherokee Frontier.” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1996): 527–60. – A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. – War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire. ­Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Dupuis, Renée. Le statut juridique des peuples autochtones en droit canadien. S­carborough, ON: Carswell, 1999. Gohier, Maxime. Onontio le médiateur: La gestion des conflits amérindiens en Nouvelle-France, 1603–1717. Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2008. Grammond, Sébastien. Aménager la coexistence: Les peuples autochtones et le droit canadien. Brussels: Bruylant and Éditions Yvon Blais, 2003. Griffin, Patrick. American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Haefeli, Evan, and Kevin Sweeney. Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Havard, Gilles. Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’en Haut, 1660–1715. Quebec: Septentrion, 2003. – The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Hinderaker, Eric. Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Jennings, Francis. Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America. New York: Norton, 1988. Jones, Dorothy V. License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

114  Alain Beaulieu Lennox, Jeffers. “L’Acadie Trouvée: Mapping, Geographic Knowledge, and Imagining Northeastern North America, 1710–1763.” PhD diss., Dalhousie University, 2010. Lozier, Jean-François. “History, Historiography, and the Courts: The St Lawrence Mission Villages and the Fall of New France.” In Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory, edited by Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, 110–35. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. McConnell, Michael N. A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. MacLeod, D. Peter. The Canadian Iroquois and the Seven Years’ War. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1996. Merrell, James H. Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier. New York: Norton, 1999. Mourin, Samuel. Porter la guerre chez les Iroquois: les expéditions françaises contre la Ligue des Cinq Nations à la fin du XVIIe siècle. Sainte-Foy, QC: Gide, 2009. Patterson, Stephen E. “Eighteenth-Century Treaties: The Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy Experience.” Native Studies Review 18, no. 1 (2009): 25–52. – “Indian-White Relations in Nova Scotia, 1749–61: A Study in Political Interaction.” Acadiensis 23, no. 1 (1993): 23–59. Paul, Daniel N. We Were Not the Savages: A Micmac Perspective on the Collision of European and Aboriginal Civilization. Halifax: Nimbus, 1993. Peace, Thomas. “The Slow Process of Conquest: Huron-Wendat Responses to the Conquest of Quebec, 1697–1791.” In Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective, edited by Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, 115–40. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Peckham, Howard Henry. Pontiac and the Indian Uprising. Princeton, NJ: ­Princeton University Press, 1947. Preston, David L. The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontier of Iroquoia, 1667–1783. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Pulsipher, Jenny Hale. “‘Dark Cloud Rising from the East’: Indian Sovereignty and the Coming of King William’s War in New England.” New England Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2007): 588–613. Reid, John G. “Empire, the Maritime Colonies, and the Supplanting of Mi’kma’ki/Wulstukwik, 1780–1820.” Acadiensis 38, no. 2 (2009): 78–97. – “Imperialism, Diplomacies, and the Conquest of Acadia.” In The “Conquest” of Acadia, 1710: Imperial, Colonial, and Aboriginal Constructions, edited by John Reid et al., 101–23. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. – “Pax Britannica or Pax Indigena? Planter Nova Scotia (1760–1782) and Competing Strategies of Pacification.” Canadian Historical Review 85, no. 4 (2004): 669–92.

“Under His Majesty’s Protection”  115 Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North California Press, 1992. Sawaya, Jean-Pierre. Alliance et dépendance: Comment la Couronne britannique a obtenu la collaboration des Indiens de la vallée du Saint-Laurent entre 1760 et 1774. Quebec: Septentrion, 2002. – La fédération des Sept Feux de la vallée du Saint-Laurent, XVIIe–XIXe siècle. Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 1998. Shannon, Timothy J. Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Sosin, Jack M. Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760–1775. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. Stagg, Jack. “Protection and Survival: Anglo-Indian Relations, 1748–1763: ­Britain and the Northern Colonies.” PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1984. Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Tobias, John L. “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada’s Indian Policy.” In Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada, edited by James R. Miller, 127–44. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Upton, L.F.S. Micmacs and Colonists: Indian-White Relations in the Maritimes, 1713–1867. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1979. Vaugeois, Denis. La fin des alliances franco-indiennes: Enquête sur un sauf-conduit de 1760 devenu un traité en 1990. Montreal: Boréal, 1995. Wicken, William C. Treaties on Trial: History, Land, and Donald Marshall Junior. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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PART TWO Imagining Conflict: Literature and the War

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5 Paper Wars: Literature and/as Conflict during the Seven Years’ War Thomas Keymer

The relationship between writing and war, arts and arms, was a matter of keen debate in the “year of victories,” and for Edward Young – veteran poet yet also, in many accounts, herald of Romantic modernity – literary authorship could both resemble and advance the attainment of geopolitical mastery. It is not simply that the exponents of original genius celebrated in Young’s landmark treatise of 1759, Conjectures on Original Composition, “extend the Republic of Letters, and add a new province to its dominion.” They do so in competition with rival authors in rival nations, and when successful, in a kind of hegemonic effect, they enhance the standing and influence of their own nation. They win in the arts a global pre-eminence that, as Young went to press, was also starting to be won by force of arms – and it is maritime power in particular that Young has in mind. “Bacon, Newton, Shakespeare, Milton, have showed us, that all the winds cannot blow the British flag farther, than an Original spirit can convey the British fame … and what foreign Genius strikes not as they pass?” he asks. “Why should not their posterity embark in the same bold bottom of new enterprize, and hope the same success?”1 Young published his long-meditated treatise just as the tide of war was turning in Britain’s favour, and so now, he suggests, there was a tide in the affairs of authors to be caught, also in promotion of the nation’s fortune. Literature might even become (pace Clausewitz) the continuation of war by other means. This may not be exactly the project that General James Wolfe had in mind when reportedly declaring a few months later that he would rather be the author of Gray’s Elegy, or specifically Gray’s sentiment that “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” than take Quebec. (The anecdote, though not reported in print

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until much later, is traceable to an individual present at the time and may well be authentic.) That said, Wolfe’s celebrated yielding of the palm to Gray – “perhaps the noblest tribute ever paid by arms to letters,” wrote a nineteenth-century disseminator of the story – is a good enough reminder that the paths of literary glory and military glory, arts and arms, were by no means seen at the time as unconnected.2 In the wake of Fred Anderson’s magisterial Crucible of War (2000), recent historical studies have placed the Seven Years’ War at the centre of our thinking about the rise of the British empire, the origins of American independence, and the emergence of global war as a modern phenomenon.3 Yet recognition of the war’s defining historical importance has not been matched by a sense that it produced its own significant literature of war, and the few scholars to have looked for such a thing have found little to compare with the turbulent output of the 1640s, say, or the plangent verse of 1914–18. John Richardson notes the conscious efforts that were made, following the formal declaration of hostilities in 1756, to encourage a rousing literature of war for patriotic ends, but concludes that “if the war was militarily successful for Britain, it did not produce the martial muse for which the poets of 1757 had hoped.” Instead, the most striking features of poetry during these years are “avoidance and imaginative contradiction”: avoidance of what technologically sophisticated mass warfare might now entail, and a contradictory tendency to represent as defensive a war that became, from its midpoint, a project of global expansion.4 In this context, broad overviews of war poetry such as James Anderson Winn’s recent study, billed on its dust jacket as exploring how “poets from Homer to Bruce Springsteen have given voice to the intensity, horror, and beauty of war,” largely ignore the mid-eighteenth century – and indeed Winn’s book devotes more pages to the Boss than to the entire output of the Seven Years’ War. Winn dwells on just one work from the period, George Cockings’s turgid War: An Heroic Poem, which on the face of it richly demonstrates the failure of poets to fashion from the classical idiom they inherited a poetry equal to the scale and nature of modern warfare.5 First drafted in Newfoundland following the capture of Louisbourg in 1758, and published in London in 1760 with a supplement about Quebec, this Shandean attempt to narrate the ongoing conflict in heroic couplets finally ballooned into a ten-book epic as victories accumulated around the world. “So repeated, and rapid, were our conquests, both by sea, and land, in Europe, Africa, and America ... my fancy took fire! the rapt’rous joy grew too great to be contain’d within

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bounds,” recalls Cockings, a mid-ranking colonial administrator, in his massive editio ultima of 1765, which by then could claim to cover the entire war “from the Taking of Minorca by the French, to the Reduction of Manilla.”6 Perhaps the most interesting feature of this otherwise unreadable work (which plainly embarrassed reviewers at the time) is its status as a global poem in practice as well as theme. Written by a minor participant in its own unfolding action, War: An Heroic Poem was published in increments around the world – expanded interim editions came out from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Boston, Massachusetts, in 1761–2 – wherever the author’s wartime duties took him. Yet half a century forward or back from this apparent hiatus in the history of war poetry – forward to the Napoleonic Wars, back to the War of the Spanish Succession – the story looks very different. In the later period, Romanticism and war has emerged as a key area of current debate, and the figure of the Romantic poet in self-absorbed retirement or Parnassian detachment from the momentous military events of the day, and from the social and human consequences of these events, is a long-discarded stereotype. Yet even while restoring “wartime” to view as a shaping context for the broad range of writers from Wordsworth to Austen, and as imaginatively pervasive for Romanticism in general, many scholars have continued to stress the suppression of war, and in particular the rhetorical elision of its costs, as a matter of more or less conscious literary strategy.7 In classic studies by Marilyn Butler and A.D. Harvey, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars generated a reinforcement of cultural nationalism in which victory was eulogized and defeat lamented, but they generated also a reinforcement of class allegiance that left little attention for frontline suffering and loss in the rank and file; war was represented instead in insulating or idealizing modes of romance or gothic that airbrushed battlefield realities out of view.8 The most influential development of this line is by Mary A. Favret, for whom literary conventions filtered out the unsettling truths of war and rendered physical or psychological trauma largely invisible. In its patriotic commitment to the cause of an embattled nation, literature came to function as a mediating, sanitizing prophylactic between war and the reading public, withholding profound or intimate engagement with the consequences of military violence, and thereby working to consolidate support for the prolongation or expansion of war. As Favret puts it in a metaphor derived from Freud’s account of psychological defence against external trauma, “publicity raised a paper shield – a shield of newspaper reports, pamphlets, songs and poems – against the destructive violence of war.”9

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Other scholars have found a fuller, more complex, and more troubled engagement, especially in poetry, than is recognized by arguments for the Romantic representation of war as spectacle or evasion. For Simon Bainbridge, the most eloquent poetry did not extend so much as bridge the gap separating the public from direct experience of the Napoleonic Wars, making war imaginatively present to readers and modelling a broad range of attitudes and approaches to its course. Far from functioning to distance or veil, literature could bring home to the domestic audience a sobering understanding of battlefield costs, whatever the overall tendency (bellicose or eirenic) of the work concerned. “Rather than protecting the British public from the destructive violence of conflict,” writes Bainbridge, “much of the poetry of the period aimed to make the reader feel war’s pain and suffering; war poetry was more like a paper bullet than a paper shield.”10 The revelatory qualities emphasized here were often accompanied by invocations of necessary sacrifice, calls to patriotic arms, or classical-republican valorizations of war as the exercise of uncorrupted virtue, and Bainbridge is careful not to make the case for pacifism – of course an early twentieth-century coinage – as a primary sensibility in Romantic verse. What he insists on, persuasively, is a more rounded and unflinching engagement with violence, disruption, trauma, and loss than is proposed in the “paper shield” model. His humanist account is reinforced by Philip Shaw with specific reference to the Waterloo era; and for Richard Cronin violent conflict, whether between national armies or private duellists, could set the tone of a combative literary culture in the post-war years. For one belligerent journalist in 1820, “the same turn of the wrist will do to cut a flourish on paper and on the face of an enemy; and it would be only fancying myself in the field, marshalling a parcel of soldiers, when I sat in my closet symmetrising a heap of words; and that for the same purpose too – namely of defending ourselves, and of attacking our enemies.” Another journalist met his end when an exchange of “paper-shot” (as one close observer called it) between the London Magazine and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine led to a fatal duel in 1821.11 No comparable attempts have been made to claim the formation of a new sensibility about wartime in the reign of Queen Anne, when Britain and her allies were again – comme d’habitude – locked in long-running, multi-theatre conflict with resurgent French power. Instead, the issue here is what could be done with received conventions for representing war in post-heroic conditions that made mock epic look more viable than the thing itself. (Witness numerous instances of Scriblerian satire,

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from Swift’s teasing Battel of the Books to the risibly diminished skirmishing – “How keen the war, if Dulness draw the sword!” – of Pope’s Dunciad.12) For John Richardson, the outpourings of panegyric to Marlborough that followed Blenheim and later victories were an aesthetic failure, though in the long run a salutary failure. Poets such as Addison, Blackmore, Cobb, Dennis, and John Philips had “the double ambition of celebrating victory in heroic forms derived from the ancients and of representing modern battle with a degree of accuracy,” but in so doing they pursued incompatible aims, since ancient conventions and classical forms could not contain or express modern warfare.13 As a result, no impressive war poetry survives from the period, though a new realization emerges concerning the obsolescence of heroic modes, clearing the way for future writers to innovate in fresher modes – modes that might let us see a work like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), published half a century after the fact, as a more serious response to the War of the Spanish Succession than the endless Utrecht poems that it generated at the time. Even so, Richardson detects little progress by Sterne’s day, and cites as evidence of an enduring reluctance to confront the impasse encountered by Marlborough’s poets the scarcity and brevity of panegyrics to later generals: “Wars later in the century would not be greeted by any comparable effort at representation, and one quite elaborate pastoral elegy of 1759 on the death of General Wolfe even has Apollo forbidding the poet to sing of war.” The poem in question is the anonymous Daphnis and Menalcas, in which Wolfe’s stature renders the poet unequal to “a theme, / That asks a Homer’s or a Virgil’s flame” (no mention of Springsteen at this point). Instead, the poet retreats to the protected realm of pastoral verse: “But here Apollo checks my soaring wing, / Of wars, and fighting fields forbids to sing.”14 Larger claims have been made for the Augustan poetry of war by Abigail Williams, who finds not a debilitating mismatch between form and content but thoughtful transformation of inherited idioms. For Williams, here is a mode given urgency by the bellicosity of party literature or “poetic warfare” during the political turmoil of Anne’s reign, and a mode that among its Whig exponents achieves “full triumphant voice in the celebration of … Marlborough.”15 That said, the material described by Williams is militarist, celebratory verse with little time for trauma: a robust idiom of martial panegyric in which active military leadership and battlefield bravery are central terms of national selfvalidation. Nor can we look to Tory verse for more nuanced or troubled

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ways of representing war. The Treaty of Utrecht brought with it a revival of Tory rhetoric and a wave of peace poems, sometimes self-­ consciously critical of the warmongering Whiggish muse, and here Williams cites the anonymous Peace: A Poem (1713) as directly confronting the rhetoric of Whig triumphalism: “Too long have We indulg’d our Martial Flame, / Disgrac’d by Triumphs, pillag’d into Fame.”16 But in the major Tory poems of Utrecht, most obviously Windsor-Forest, war is almost entirely occluded, glimpsed only as displaced in Pope’s hunting scenes, with their poignant attention to the fiery wounds and leaden deaths of pheasants or plovers. In later decades, the poetry of opposition, whether Tory or Patriot Whig, went little further than this in its treatment of war, not least because for much of the Walpole era one of the Great Man’s foremost crimes in opposition eyes was that of appeasement. In James Thomson’s ubiquitous “Rule Britannia!” (1740), which so effectively caught the national mood during the War of Jenkins’s Ear, the rhetoric of militarism and the rhetoric of liberty could be harmoniously aligned, as they more elaborately were in Samuel Johnson’s London (1738), where the absence of war, especially naval war, becomes a deplorable mark of luxury and corruption. Here is little short of a call to arms, expressed in tones of nostalgia for Elizabethan virtue, which, if now revived, might still ­“the blissful Age renew, / And call Britannia’s Glories back to view; / Behold her Cross triumphant on the Main, / The Guard of Commerce, and the Dread of Spain, / Ere Masquerades debauch’d, Excise oppress’d, / Or English Honour grew a standing Jest.”17 Even in moments of respite from the overwhelmingly partisan character of poetry before 1750, it is hard to find the direct, revelatory engagement with war that emerges with Romanticism. Consider the outstanding war poem of the first half of the century, Pope’s English translation (1715–20) of the Iliad. For Edward Young, this work was an ignoble travesty of Homeric virtue, a riot of “effeminate decoration” that “put Achilles in petticoats a second time.”18 A less derogatory way to pin down the incongruous modernity of Pope’s Homer would be to note the abstraction and harmonious patterning of warfare that characterizes his translation, most emphatically in the rendering of set-piece battles. One of the Iliad’s best-known epic similes compares the invading Greeks to the incoming sea, and here the classic early modern translation by George Chapman (1611) catches, with its broken rhythms and hissing diction, a primitive sense of swarming energy and disorderly violence, intensifying the effect with a secondary metaphor of bestial aggression:

Paper Wars  125 And as when with the West-wind’s flawes, the sea thrusts up her waves One after other, thicke and high, upon the groning shores, First in her selfe lowd (but opposd with banks and Rocks) she rores And (all her backe in bristles set) spits everie way her fome: So (after Diomed) instantly the field was overcome With thicke impressions of the Greekes.19

None of this unruly vehemence survives in Pope, whose euphonious rendering certainly suggests power, but of a different kind – the power of an irresistible universal order, expressed in a relentless crescendo of regimented movements, with corresponding figures of balance in the verse: As when the Winds, ascending by degrees, First move the whitening Surface of the Seas, The Billows float in order to the Shore, The Wave behind rolls on the Wave before; Till, with the growing Storm, the Deeps arise, Foam o’er the Rocks, and thunder to the Skies. So to the Fight the thick Battalions throng, Shields urg’d on Shields, and Men drove Men along.20

In place of Chapman’s raging boar, Pope achieves the poetic equivalent of the stylized formations and elegant symmetries of engraved battle plans – those diagrammatic representations that mediated war to armchair military enthusiasts of the day, the mayhem and slaughter polished and sanitized in orderly arrangements of lines and bars. At the same time it is hard not to hear, in the epanaleptic elegance of Pope’s line about shields and men, a droll echo of the genteel frivolities of The Rape of the Lock, “Where Wigs with Wigs, with Sword-knots Swordknots strive.”21 War here is schematized, aestheticized, seen from afar as a phenomenon of cultivated beauty and rational order. So what might one say about the literature of war in 1756–63, midway between the panegyric and celebration of Augustan verse and the more complicated engagements of Romanticism? To the extent that the question has really been asked, scholars have focused more on anxieties of empire than on war per se. For Linda Colley, the territorial gains confirmed at the Treaty of Paris brought with them an alarming imaginative challenge, and left Britons “in the grip of collective agoraphobia,

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captivated by, but also adrift and at odds in a vast empire abroad and a new political world at home which few of them properly understood.”22 Dustin Griffin invokes this point to argue that Goldsmith’s post-war poems, The Traveller (1764) and The Deserted Village (1770), “helped focus the widespread discussion about the country’s new imperial identity,” and it tacitly underlies Carol Watts’s account of new conceptions of subjectivity, family, and nation that began to emerge in “a polity seeking to accommodate the demands of empire by forms of consolidation and centralization at home.”23 War itself is a more direct concern in M. John Cardwell’s book on literary partisanship in the period, but as a political historian Cardwell views his sources primarily as illustrations of popular sentiment, influences on public opinion, and – since many satires of the time were written by parliamentarians like Charles Hanbury Williams, Soame Jenyns, and George Bubb Dodington – insider perspectives on decision making. Cardwell also pays valuable attention to popular sources such as street ballads, but in general he applies a restricted understanding of what constitutes political writing, which in turn reinforces his tendency to find in “literature” a monolithic category of opinion, formed by the unifying pressure of external threat. His analysis leaves room for vigorous dispute about strategic decisions, relations with allies, terms of peace, and the conduct of ministers, but underlying all this “there was a general consensus about the  imperial and commercial aims of the war,” in which “literature’s uncompromising, confrontational attitude encouraged the political ­nation’s demands for military action.”24 It may be because Cardwell makes just five passing mentions of Johnson that he finds such uniform enthusiasm for empire in the period, and his primary bibliography excludes not only Rasselas but also Tristram Shandy and Smollett’s Sir Launcelot Greaves; no poems by James Macpherson, Christopher Smart, or even Charles Churchill feature on the list. An alternative approach would give pride of place to works like these – works that, without being poems or novels on affairs of state, are nonetheless political below the surface – and would probe points at which the consensus detected by Cardwell comes under scrutiny or strain. For strain is an evident fact on all sides, and though one (centripetal) effect of the conflict may indeed have been to promote a shared view of national interest and peril, or to rally authors to an expansionist flag, a more centrifugal effect of war as a constant presence in the public sphere – from sanguinary newspaper reporting of battles to the rancorous parliamentary debates of the day – may well have been to intensify

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division and aggression in the culture at large. In the literary world, the contagion is observable even in superficially apolitical works such as Tristram Shandy and Macpherson’s Temora, with their partisan dedications to William Pitt and Lord Bute, respectively, while more frankly engaged writers such as Smollett and Churchill pitted themselves against one another in disputes they approached self-consciously as proxy wars on behalf of political patrons, or as wars upon paper. In time, these wars took on ferocious lives of their own as the mutual hostility of rival journalists increasingly displaced from view, or rendered nominal, the larger political targets first in play. Observers began by viewing the Briton/North Briton conflict as a literary fight between Bute and Pitt – one expressed dismay on finding “a Man of the E— of B—’s extreme Sagacity and Penetration carrying on a direct Paper-War with Mr. P—; for I can look upon the Briton in no other Light, than as a Bolt leveled by his L——p at that Gentleman” – but too much was in excess of political argument in both journals for this view to be tenable for long; the war was between Smollett and Wilkes.25 It was 1717 when Pope famously declared that “the life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth,” and Sterne develops this observation in Tristram Shandy, adding a pun on “composition” as ceasefire or truce, as though literature had now come to reflect in its own mode of being the infectious bellicosity of national and global politics.26 According to OED Online in its current state, the expression paper war (“an acrimonious feud or argument conducted in print”) originates a few years before Pope’s declaration, while the War of the Spanish Succession was still in progress. The earliest OED example is dated 1710, followed by “paper warfare” in a satirical poem of 1718 by Nicholas Amhurst, who as editor of the Craftsman was to become one of the foremost paper warriors of the Walpole era – the incorruptible, freedom-loving prosecutor, as one ally put it, of that “Paper War between the Craftsman and his Adversaries,” which was also “a War in Defence of the Liberties, Rights, and Honour of the British Nation.”27 In fact, earlier occurrences exist for both expressions, including several that involve Defoe and other dissenting authors as “Aggressors in the Paper-War” about occasional conformity, or again as perpetrators of “a Paper War, / Where Scriblers, like our Daniel, fear a Peace.”28 But it does indeed seem to be during and immediately after the actual war of 1702–13 that “paper war” and “paper warfare” enter widespread currency, not as a dead metaphor, but with an active sense of analogy between military and literary combat. As the Examiner put it on signature of the Treaty of Utrecht, the

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bloodiest war that “ever infested Europe, is happily at an End, and the Paper War, as Dreadful as any that ever Infested the Common-wealth of letters, ought at the same time draw to a conclusion.”29 Some memory may also have survived here of formulations from the Civil War period, when the idea that militant print might generate military action extended far beyond Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), with its famous account of books as dragons’ teeth that spring up armed men. Elizabeth Sauer finds the same performative assumptions in Thomas May’s 1647 diagnosis of the causes of civil war, in which “those Paper-contestations became a fatall Prologue to that bloudy, and unnaturall War, which afterward ensued,” or again “those long and tedious Paper-conflicts ... were turned into actuall and bloody Wars, and the Pens seconded by drawn swords.”30 At the Restoration, the Royalist author Richard Atkyns looked back with horror on unlicensed printers of the Tudor era who “fill’d the Kingdom with so many Books, and the Brains of the People with so many contrary Opinions, that these Paper-pellets became as dangerous as Bullets.”31 Wit as warfare, and publication as paper war, were to become the default state of print culture in the age of Walpole, and after the temporary lowering of political temperatures that followed Walpole’s fall in 1742, the same structures and dynamics of partisan allegiance and proxy battle between ministerial and opposition writers (charted for the 1730s by Bertrand Goldgar, Christine Gerrard, and Alexander Pettit) revived in the late 1750s.32 Everyone, it would seem, was embroiled in paper warfare during the Seven Years’ War, and not only on political matters; literature became a mechanism for waging war as well as a vehicle for describing it. Even before 1756, self-conscious preliminary skirmishes involved major figures such as Fielding and Smart, and by the end of the war it is as though all public discourse had come to be brutalized, whatever the subject.33 “A Paper War is now a favourite topic,” one observer regretted in 1763: “let a man’s intentions be what they will, no mercy is shewn him if he dissents from the present mode of political writers.”34 To the high-minded commentator in colonial Williamsburg who wrote that “whenever any Matter of Dispute is brought before the People by Means of the Press, it is commonly then called a Paper War,” the mode could be a useful way of eliciting public scrutiny and adjudication. Sometimes, however, paper warfare was merely manufactured as a ruse for doing “more service to the stationer, publisher, and printer than to the public,” and more often it worked not to resolve but to polarize or inflame, as when the Utrecht negotiations

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of 1711–13 – a standard point of comparison in 1761–3, when negotiations prior to the Treaty of Paris revived the same toxic effects – “produced a paper war between the Whig and Tory parties, and such a torrent of falsehood, scurrility and abuse was poured forth on both sides, as seemed to bid defiance to truth, decency and good manners.”35 At some level, the idea of paper warfare may even have embodied a recognition that print culture had more than a trace of bloodshed in its very substance, for the bandages of war casualties were notoriously a source of the boiled, bleached rags from which paper was milled, and, as William St Clair writes, “the battlefields of Europe were picked over before the blood was dry for every scrap of cloth that could be sold in the rag fairs and on to the international markets.”36 Wars on paper were everywhere at this time, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Halifax, Yorkshire. One broke out in Dublin over management of the Smock-Alley Theatre, and thus, writes a supporter of Thomas Sheridan, “was the first Blow struck, and the Paper War opened”; another erupted in London over management of the Foundling Hospital, even though, protests an embattled Jonas Hanway, “I did not chuse to engage in a paper war.”37 Theologians went to war with special relish, even as they mocked or disavowed belligerent print: thus the Bedfordshire Methodist John Berridge looked without fear on “a Paper War (which is almost as terrible a Thing as a Paper Kite with a flaming Lanthorn at the Tail of it in a dark Night),” while an Oxford wit warned the author of a recent All Souls sermon against stirring up “a Paper War, by making any Reprisals” to his own pamphlet. A newspaper correspondent reported from France, with some glee, that “a very acrimonious paper war” had broken out between the bishops of Paris and Lyons concerning “the duration of the sufferings of the wicked in a future state.”38 Paper warfare even starts to be theorized in the expanded second edition of Fulke Greville’s Maxims: I scarce know any thing so ridiculous as what is called a paper war, whether public or private: each party is perfectly convinced that he is in the right, and attacks the other with arguments which seem unanswerable and irresistible to himself, but for the same reason have no effect upon his antagonist; for both are so far from weighing the allegations that make against themselves, that they do not attend enough to them to know their purport: thus each combatant attacks the very place that is covered by prejudice with impenetrable armour, and is therefore invulnerable; each wearies himself with striking, and each is astonished that his blows are not felt.39

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No warnings about the futility of paper war could deter political controversialists, however, and it was on affairs of state, and above all the management of the real-world war, that paper wars assumed their most violent form. In so doing, they resembled the debilitating war of attrition, or the unproductive trench warfare, diagnosed in Greville’s Maxims. At the riotous Liverpool election of 1761 – when one author complains that as “a Reader of the Paper-War carrying on by each Party, I find, what one asserts the other denies, which makes it very difficult to come at the Truth” – we even witness the fog of paper war.40 Throughout the period, writers talked self-consciously about the relationship between paper warfare, practical politics, and war in the field – about the comparable pursuits of “paper-staining warriors, and castle-building politicians” – and represented their literary encounters as having their own protocols and rules of engagement. Challenged by Owen Ruffhead’s Pittite Con-test in 1757, Arthur Murphy, author of the Foxite Test, thought himself “in the right to decline a paper war” with an adversary “whose powers of stile are so uncouth.” But by the culminating journalistic encounter of the war, between the Butite Briton and the Wilkite North Briton of 1762, few if any holds were barred, and as an instant historian of the encounter put it, “a Paper War was formally commenced, by periodical publications on both sides, full of equal scurrility.”41 These wars also generated side engagements, as when Wilkes broke off from one North Briton leader to attack Philip Francis, a secondary combatant who had been hired to satirize Pitt by Henry Fox, and whose efforts in Mr. Pitt’s Letters Versified (1761) “began the personalities of the present paper war, and invented the most shameful falsehoods.” As though in recognition of the autonomy of their conflicts, Wilkes darkly adds that he now speaks “only of the personalities of the present paper war.”42 Another pamphleteer sought to limit the analogy between writing and violence when observing of his pugnacious fellow authors “that a paper war, is not deadly, and seldom or never after the exchange of two or three broadsides this way, do they proceed to try their skill at other weapons.”43 Yet he may have underestimated the sheer bellicosity of political discourse at the time. Wilkes did in fact fight a duel in 1762 arising from North Briton 25 (a second duel, in 1763, was provoked by later issues), and if there is any difference in character between paper wars in the Walpole and the Pitt-Bute eras it lies only in a preference for effective wounding over poise or style. The rhetorical manoeuvres of the 1730s were revived after twenty years with aggressively diminished

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finesse, and the stiletto knives of Pope and his allies at the Craftsman or the Grubstreet Journal gave way to bludgeoning and mauling. To make the point, one need only look at William Hogarth’s celebrated caricature The Bruiser (1763), published following Churchill’s vicious Epistle to Hogarth, which portrays the poet as a drunken, club-wielding bear. Indeed, Churchill makes the same point himself in his 1763 satire The Prophecy of Famine, an attack on Bute via the proxy targets of Macpherson, Smollett, and other Scots, framed as the sneering antithesis of a peaceand-plenty Utrecht poem. The poem includes Churchill’s self-portrait as an embattled writer, which works through complex allusive reversals based on Pope, disavowing the Dunciad’s “quick springs of sense” and the subtle dexterities celebrated in the Essay on Criticism (1711): Me, whom no muse of heav’nly birth inspires, No judgment tempers when rash genius fires, Who boast no merit but mere knack of rhime, Short gleams of sense, and satire out of time, Who cannot follow where trim fancy leads By prattling streams o’er flow’r-empurpled meads; Who often, but without success, have pray’d For apt Alliteration’s artful aid, Who would, but cannot, with a master’s skill Coin fine new epithets, which mean no ill, Me, thus uncouth, thus ev’ry way unfit For pacing poesy, and ambling wit, Taste with contempt beholds, nor deigns to place Amongst the lowest of her favour’d race. Thou, Nature, art my goddess – to thy law Myself I dedicate – 44

For this uncouth paper warrior, this gleefully amoral poetic Edmund, anything now goes in the war between wits. Authorship becomes a series of confrontations between rival attack dogs, funded and sponsored by political grandees, that in many respects outdo the ferocity of the parliamentary “pitched battles” for which they function as proxies.45 From The Test and Con-test near the outbreak of war to the Briton and the North Briton near the peace, not only periodicals and pamphlets – “Pamphlets, and other Offensive Weapons,” as Swift memorably puts it in The Tale of a Tub – but also poems and satires draw mutual blood in ways rarely equalled on the floor of Parliament, and bring public

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discourse to levels of acrimony beyond even the campaign against Walpole at its zenith.46 As Smollett himself put it on finally retiring from the fray, paper wars had turned the nation into “a scene of illiberal dispute, and incredible infatuation, where a few worthless incendiaries had, by dint of perfidious calumnies and atrocious abuse, kindled up a flame which threatened all the horrors of civil dissension.”47 Yet there were also writers who sought to resist the discursive bellicosity around them, and took a cue instead from the reflective prevailing mood of Gray’s Elegy, a poem that in other ways – composed in the 1740s, published in 1751, in Wolfe’s hands as he eyed the Heights of Abraham in 1759 – is the paradigmatic text of the Seven Years’ War. With varying degrees of indirection, these writers represented war, or wrote literature pervaded by the atmosphere of wartime, in ways that challenge our view of Romanticism as the period in which a modern literature of war begins to take shape. It would require another essay to outline this picture in full, but there is space here to indicate a few major cases, in different ways political without being stridently partisan, and all inflected by the war-torn topicality of the day, even as they seek a position outside (or elsewhere in) history. Consider, for example, the poems of Ossian, and specifically Fingal (1761), which Macpherson heralded in the preface to his inaugural Ossianic publication of 1760, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, as an epic concerning native British resistance to, and arduous repulsion of, foreign invasion. To be sure, at one level the entire pseudo-corpus of Ossian is a celebration of martial virtue, and Richard B. Sher persuasively associates Macpherson’s bardic patriotism with the Edinburgh-based campaign for a Scots militia.48 Yet celebration is constantly undercut by a mood of melancholy commemoration that emphasizes sympathy and feeling, and the focus of the poems on bereavement and extinction is poetically amplified by terse evocations of a desolate landscape, with its transient clouds and winds. These are poems of memory, and poems of tears, where battlefield victory is outweighed by human loss, and the poet survives in enfeebled old age as the last voice of a race and a culture that have exhausted themselves, indeed rendered themselves all but forgotten, in military struggle. As one of Macpherson’s doomed heroes laments, likening his impending extinction to the shifting landscape: “Oscar is like the mist of Cona: I appear and vanish. – The bard will not know my name. – The hunter will not search in the heath for my tomb.”49

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If the relentless patterns and characteristic images of Ossianic lament are ever related by scholars to trauma in Macpherson’s own world, it is usually to suggest a parallel between, on one hand, the human and cultural losses deplored in the poems and, on another, the failure of the Jacobite rising at Culloden, with the decline of clanship and the Gaelic language that accompanied this defeat. Macpherson himself specifies the opening of the Highlands to the forces of commercial modernity, and hints at measures such as the Proscription and Heritable Jurisdictions Acts, with their corrosive effects on cultural traditions and social practices.50 But a further aspect of the poems is indicated by the minor verse produced by Macpherson, and more generally in his Edinburgh circle, shortly before he hit his Ossianic stride. His elegy “On The Death of Marshal Keith,” the Scots-born Prussian general who died in battle against Austria in 1758, is one of several wartime poems in the same vein, notably “To the Memory of an Officer Killed Before Quebec,” first published in the Scots Magazine for October 1759. In some ways these are fairly conventional poems, but with hindsight they reveal traces of Ossianic themes and diction beyond the standard routines of battlefield elegy: not only the imagery of desolate nature but also the characteristically Ossianic horror of annihilation, unnamed and forgotten, without posterity and with no promise of an afterlife in a seemingly godless world. Not only does the death of the officer at Quebec (presumably a member of Fraser’s Highlanders, which included former Jacobites) express the tenor of “life’s dark current” or again “the dreary wastes of war.” His lack of name, buried “On some cold bank,” “honour’d living, but neglected dead,” completes the fact of his extinction. Here is an early poem to the unknown soldier, whose erased identity and “nameless grave” are the worst of fates, condemning him “To mix obscurely with the nameless dead.”51 In this light, and in light of other poems lamenting the loss of hopeful Scots gentry on the global battlefields of the Seven Years’ War, Macpherson’s return to the same tropes in his Ossian poems assumes a more topical resonance and cannot be dissociated from the battlefield deaths that filled the newspapers and magazines as he wrote. Like Macpherson’s elegies to the victims of Hochkirch or Quebec, his Ossianic writings articulate a sense of desolation and irretrievable loss that eclipses the triumph of victory. At the same time, the vast unpeopled landscape evoked in these writings – a landscape in which one might sense the daunting wilds of Nova Scotia or Quebec as much as ancient Scotland – suggests not the fruits of conquest but the futility of wartime death.

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It would be speculative to find in the dedication to Bute of both Temora (1763) and the collected Works of Ossian (1765) an attempt to enlist the poems, attuned though they were to growing sensitivities about wartime losses, in support of Bute’s peace policy. The 1765 dedication certainly indicates Bute’s post–Treaty of Paris unpopularity when identifying as “this similarity between the Statesman and the Poet” a lack of public recognition for their achievements, and when Fingal first appeared, Wilkite poets such as Churchill and Robert Lloyd had been quick, in Philip Connell’s words, “to implicate the English vogue for Ossianic primitivism within a broader attack on Bute.”52 Yet a preference for emphasizing the costs above the fruits or glories of victory cuts across party affiliation in the period and is just as much a feature of Tristram Shandy (dedicated to Pitt in its first London volumes of early 1760, with a reaffirming dedication to Pitt-as-Chatham in the closing volume of 1767) as of Macpherson’s work. Sterne’s opening volumes came out at a moment when dedications to Pitt were commonplace or even mandatory – when to do anything else, as Charles Johnstone put it a few months later, would be “a breach of the general gratitude, which, at this time, swells every honest heart, in Britain.”53 Yet far from repeating the routine triumphalism of most dedications to the foremost ministerial proponent of expansionist war, Sterne adopts an incongruously pacific, isolationist tone. Eschewing Pitt’s exuberant rhetoric of conquest and empire (which Sterne privately mocked when noting Pitt’s withdrawal from a key parliamentary debate on the war upon his suffering “a political fit of the gout”), the dedication stresses instead the placidly withdrawn, Little Englander character of a work “written in a bye corner of the kingdom, and in a retir’d thatched house, where I live in a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth.”54 It would misrepresent the delicacy and evasiveness of Tristram Shandy to call this incongruity simply ironic, and we know that Sterne moved at the time in Whig political circles whose attitudes and outlook he broadly shared. Also on record, however, is his personal sense of shock at the toll of war, and indeed his letters of the early 1760s eloquently demonstrate the kind of consciousness at home of losses overseas that we associate more naturally with the First World War. “Never was known such havock amongst troops,” Sterne writes at one point, and though the havoc itself may not have been new, the degree of public awareness probably was: “I was told yesterday by a Colonel, from Germany, that out of two battalions of nine hundred men, to which he belong’d, but seventy-one left!”55

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The same mixed feelings are on display within Tristram Shandy, above all in the figure of Uncle Toby, with his wounded body, traumatized mind, and regression to the poignant second childhood of his bowling-green wars, obsessively re-enacted in ways that evoke at once his active experience in the War of the League of Augsburg, the War of the Spanish Succession in the time of narration, and the reading-time present of the Seven Years’ War. Recent critical commentary has focused on the perplexing implications of Toby’s “apologetical oration,” a heartfelt defence of the necessity and dignity of war that originally occurs (as Sterne knew someone would someday spot) in a satirical critique of war by Robert Burton. As Paddy Bullard sums up the problem, “this superimposition of contradictory discourses has been read as a symptom of larger strategies of indeterminacy in Tristram Shandy,” but is at the same time pressingly topical in implication, given strong contemporary resonance through echoes of a contribution to a paper war discussed elsewhere in the present volume, a 1760 pamphlet about the Sackville court martial entitled An Apologetical Oration on an Extraordinary Occasion.56 The same volume of Tristram Shandy contains the episode of Le Fever, a sentimental tale of military anguish and loss that complements the Toby subplot and gains further resonance from Sterne’s decision, innocent or mischievous, to dedicate the episode specifically to Lady Spencer, wife of the Duke of Marlborough’s greatgrandson.57 Sterne is characteristically deadpan about this unusual play on the traditions of Marlborough panegyric, which intensifies the enigmatic relationship between his wry narratives of war damage and the public context of the day. As political commentary, the effect is no more clear than in the bogus key appended to Sterne’s earlier satire, A Political Romance (1759), which reports the ham-fisted attempts of politically minded readers to decode the work as an allegory of shifting alliances and unfolding events in “all Europe; comprehending, at least, so many of its different States and Dominions, as we have any Concern with in the present War.”58 Like Sterne’s obvious inspiration at this point, Pope’s teasing Key to the Lock (1715), the key offers a plainly nonsensical account of the text as an allegory of European war, while also creating a frustrating sense of genuine but unreachable political ambience. And so it is with Tristram Shandy as a whole: neither a novel against war nor a novel for war, but a novel that is inescapably about war, even following the exuberant moment when (in the 1765 volumes of the novel) Tristram whimsically claims credit for laying the cornerstone of the Peace of Paris.59

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There is no space here to write about Johnson, whose provocative puncturing of just-war rhetoric as hostilities broke out – “The American dispute between the French and us is therefore only the quarrel of two robbers for the spoils of a passenger” – set the iconoclastic tone of his writing about war and empire throughout the period, and most profoundly in Rasselas.60 But other writers of Johnson’s circle are no less relevant, among them Christopher Smart, whose oracular masterpiece Jubilate Agno, written as a matter of daily regime between 1758 and 1763 but not published until 1939, was framed by more conventional poems at either end of the war. Following its outbreak, Smart uses Swiftian cadences to poke fun at the platitudes of belligerent jingoism in “A Story of a Cock and a Bull,” using now-familiar analogies between writing and fighting: Yes – we excel in arts and arms, In learning’s lore, and beauty’s charms; The sea’s wide empire we engross, All nations hail the British cross; The land of liberty we tread, And wo[e] to his devoted head, Who dares the contrary advance, One Englishman’s worth ten of France. These, these are truths what man won’t write for, Won’t swear, won’t bully, and won’t fight for?61

Yet for all Smart’s alertness to the pitfalls of patriotic rhetoric and his ironies at the expense of imperial ambition (his sly rhyming here of “cross” with “engross,” as the ocean itself becomes a commodity monopolized by the fiscal-military state, is masterly), he later invokes a more straightforward martial muse in celebration of global victory, notably in odes at the end of the war to Admiral Sir George Pocock, whose fleet captured Havana in 1762, and General William Draper, best known for leading the expeditionary force that captured Manila. More original and compelling than these brief panegyrics is Smart’s remarkable Epistle to John Sherratt, Esq. (1763), addressed to the benefactor who had sprung him from the madhouse earlier the same year, and whose sponsorship of wartime privateering raids on French shipping becomes a complex metaphor for the poet’s personal sense of physical and spiritual release. But it is above all in the midst of his incarceration, in the 1759 section of Jubilate Agno, that Smart writes his most individual poetry of war

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– though the incomplete survival of the manuscript limits our sense of the creative use he made of the uncanny chronological match between his isolation and confinement (“Seven years in Madhouses,” he laments in a late letter) and the global conflict playing out beyond the madhouse walls.62 Fragment B, which from internal evidence Smart began to write in July 1759, is in one respect a poetic journal of imprisonment, its claustrophobic sense of captivity complicated by the imaginative agoraphobia described by Colley, as news of victories pours in from around the world. Yet this is also a work in which the longed-for release of the private poet finds as its public counterpart a longing for the end of war, in victory but above all in peace. Public and private kinds of “jeopardy” (which in Smart’s distinctive usage connotes especially a state of captivity during wartime) coalesce in the poet’s mind, the conflicts between European states with the grief of the poet disowned and shut away by his kin, whose lot it is to “meditate the peace of Europe amongst family bickerings and domestic jars.”63 In one superbly complex pairing of versicle and response, Smart connects the peace-bringing Jael of the Old Testament and the proverbial elusiveness of hunted plovers (perhaps with a glance at The Rape of the Lock) to the redemptive nails of the crucifixion and his own imagined role as a captive prophet who looks beyond war to peace and salvation: “Let Jael rejoice with the Plover, who whistles for his life, and foils the marksmen and their guns. / For I bless the PRINCE of PEACE and pray that all the guns may be nail’d up, save such as are for the rejoicing days.”64 In this context – and the thread of war runs through the rest of Fragment B, which breaks off in the autumn of 1760 – it is oddly fitting that the belated publication of Smart’s great work took place so close to the outbreak of the Second World War. Directed to the poem by W.H. Auden, the composer Benjamin Britten was quick to grasp its aptness, and gave a selective musical setting to Jubilate Agno in his cantata Rejoice in the Lamb, first performed in war-ravaged Britain in 1943, a year after Britten’s two uncomfortable encounters with the official Tribunal for the Registration of Conscientious Objectors.65 In the cantata, Britten finds in Smart’s embattled self-representation as a prophet, wise but marginalized and denigrated as mad, the perfect resource to articulate his own sense of alienation from, and stigmatization in relation to, the wartime mindset of the day. (There is an obvious anticipation here of Britten’s well-known identification with the outsider hero of his opera Peter Grimes [1945], derived from George Crabbe’s The Borough [1810].) Fresh from the sceptical Tribunal, he adds in the dissonant climax of the

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cantata a new layer of irony to Smart’s lines (juxtaposed in the libretto) about officers of the peace in time of war, and about the allegation of madness levelled against him: “For I am under the same accusation with my Saviour—for they said, he is besides himself. / For the officers of the peace are at variance with me, and the watchman smites me with his staff” (B151, B90).66 Smart’s pacificism – as Britten no doubt saw it – was just one strain in his thinking and writing, and it coexists elsewhere in his verse with hearts-of-oak bellicosity of a familiar kind. By the same token, even Johnson’s persistently contrarian responses to the Seven Years’ War – from his trenchant account of European territorial claims in North America as “usurpation,” through his Idler malediction on Britain and France from the perspective of a dispossessed Iroquian, to his almost Bismarckian recognition in Rasselas that modern warfare is won by technological advance and industrial power – cannot be simply assimilated to a post-Romantic sensibility about war.67 It is clear enough, however, that the transformative global conflict of 1756–63 generated not only urgent political paper wars but also a thoughtful and detached literature of war, in which writers of the period engaged with the imaginative and ethical challenges posed by events in creative and often startling ways. NOTES 1 Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (London, 1759), 10, 76–7. To strike is in this sense “To lower sail, haul down one’s flag; esp. to lower the topsails or haul down the flag or colours as a sign of surrender or as a salute”: OED, s.v. “strike,” IV.17.c. 2 James Grahame, The History of the United States of North America, 4 vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1836), 52. On the reliability of the anecdote, see Dustin Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 168 and n. 3 Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000). 4 John Richardson, “Imagining Military Conflict during the Seven Years’ War,” Studies in English Literature 48 (2008): 587, 588. 5 See James Anderson Winn, The Poetry of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 168–9; Winn discusses a Virgilian echo (Nisus and Euryalus) in Cockings’s third book.

Paper Wars  139 6 George Cockings, War: An Heroic Poem, 4th ed. (London, 1765), iii–iv, titlepage. 7 The term “wartime” is most obviously associated with the experience of war by home-front populations in the twentieth century, as in Paul Fussell’s classic Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Mary A. Favret applies it to the Romantic period as registering “the experience of war mediated, of time and times unmoored, of feeling intensified but also adrift”: War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 9. 8 See Neil Ramsay’s valuable survey of the critical history in his “Romanticism and War,” Literature Compass 3 (2006): 118. 9 Mary A. Favret, “Coming Home: The Public Spaces of Romantic War,” Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994): 539. See also her much more nuanced and flexible War at a Distance, 159; in this later study, Favret significantly modifies the prophylactic model, with greater recognition of the audibility of battle in many of the texts she discusses. 10 Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 31. 11 Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002); Richard Cronin, Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 99 (citing Thomas Hope, Anastasius [1820], 292), 155 (citing William Maginn in Blackwood’s Magazine [December 1820], 207). 12 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, ed. Valerie Rumbold (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 1999), 233 (iii.120). 13 John Richardson, “Modern Warfare in Early Eighteenth-Century Poetry,” Studies in English Literature 45 (2005): 557. 14 Richardson, “Modern Warfare,” 573; Daphnis and Menalcas: A Pastoral, Sacred to the Memory of the Late General Wolfe (London, 1759), 1, 2. 15 Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681– 1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 135. 16 Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 164, quoting Peace: A Poem Inscrib’d to the Right Honourable the Viscount Lord Bolingbroke (London, 1713), 1. 17 The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith and Edward L. ­McAdam, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 68–9 (lines 25–30). 18 Young, Conjectures, 59. 19 Chapman’s Homer, ed. Allardyce Nicoll, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 1:104–5 (iv.449–55).

140  Thomas Keymer 20 Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, Books I–IX, ed. Maynard Mack et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 242–3 (iv.478–85). 21 Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, 3rd ed. (­London: Methuen, 1971), 34 (i.101). 22 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 105. 23 Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry, 205–6; Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 10. 24 M. John Cardwell, Arts and Arms: Literature, Politics and Patriotism during the Seven Years War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 280. 25 St James’s Chronicle, 19 June 1762. 26 The writer’s life is “not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare,” writes Tristram, echoing the 1717 preface to Pope’s Works: Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New et al., 3 vols (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978–84), 2:447 (V.xvi) and n. 27 The Doctrine of Innuendo’s Discuss’d (London, 1731), 23, partly quoted by Edward A. Bloom, “Neoclassic ‘Paper Wars’ for a Free Press,” Modern Language Review 56 (1961): 481–97. See also Amhurst’s poem Protestant Popery (London, 1718), a mock-heroic account of the Bangorian controversy in terms of “Paper Warfare” (5), “Paper-War … Pamphlet Fight” (50), and “Paper-Fight” (57). 28 Charles Leslie in Rehearsal 17 (18–25 November 1704); “Jure Divino Toss’d in a Blanket,” in Poems on Affairs of State, 4 vols (London, 1707), 4:8. 29 Examiner (22 May 1713), quoted by Patrick J. Daly, Jr, “John Gay’s The Fan and the ‘Paper War’ of 1713,” Clio 29 (2000): 257. 30 Elizabeth Sauer, “Paper-contestations” and Textual Communities in England, 1640–1675 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 8, quoting May, The History of the Parliament of England (London, 1647), part ii, 20, 96. Similarly, Hobbes writes of the build-up to civil war in the 1640s by means of “Declarations or other paper Warre”: Behemoth, ed. Paul Seaward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 261. 31 Richard Atkyns, The Original and Growth of Printing (London, 1664), partly quoted by Harold Weber, Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 150. 32 Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976); Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Alexander Pettit, Illusory

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33

3 4 35

36 37

38

39 40 41

4 2 43 44 45

46 47

­ onsensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Response to Walpole, 1730–1737 C (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997). Thomas R. Cleary, “Henry Fielding and the Great Jacobite Paper War of 1747–49,” Eighteenth-Century Life 5 (1978): 1–11; Lance Bertelsen, “‘Neutral Nonsense, neither False nor True’: Christopher Smart and the Paper War(s) of 1752–53,” in Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, ed. Clement Hawes (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 135–52. Lloyd’s Evening Post, 20 July 1763. John Camm, Critical Remarks on a Letter Ascribed to Common Sense (Williamsburg, 1765), 5; A Compendious History of England (London, 1758), 251; Edward Seymour, The Complete History of England, 2 vols (London, 1764), 2:224. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 178. Benjamin Victor, The History of the Theatres of London and Dublin, 2 vols (London, 1761), 1:108; Jonas Hanway, A Candid Historical Account of the Hospital (London, 1759), 14. John Berridge, A Fragment of True Religion (London, 1760), [24]; Elisha’s Pottage at Gilgal (London, c. 1759–60), 22; Lloyd’s Evening Post, 23 December 1761. Fulke (and Frances) Greville, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections, 2nd ed. (London, 1757), 206 (Maxim DXXIX). An Entire and Impartial Collection of All the Papers … Concerning the Late Election at Liverpool (Liverpool, 1761), 87. A Full and Candid Answer to … Considerations on the Present German War (London, 1760), 71; Test, 33 (25 June 1757); An Impartial History of the Late Glorious War (Manchester, 1764), 280. North Briton, 25 (20 November 1762). A Letter to the Right Honorable the Earl of E – t (London, 1762), 7. The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: ­Clarendon Press, 1956), 197. The expression is Sterne’s as he describes, on 17 February 1761, “a pitched battle in the House of Commons” concerning the German war: The Letters, Part I: 1739–1764, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 183. Jonathan Swift, The Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Marcus Walsh (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 25. Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, ed. Frank Felsenstein (­Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 2.

142  Thomas Keymer 48 Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 213–61. 49 James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 115. 50 Murray G.H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 178–86; Macpherson, Poems of Ossian, 51–2. 51 James Macpherson, “To the Memory of an Officer Killed before Quebec,” in A Collection of Original Poems, by Scotch Gentlemen, Volume II (Edinburgh, 1762), 134–7. 52 Macpherson, Poems of Ossian, 41; Philip Connell, “British Identities and the Politics of Ancient Poetry in Later Eighteenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 49 (2006): 169. 53 Charles Johnstone, Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea, 2 vols (London, 1760), 1:iv. 54 Sterne, Letters, Part I, 184 (17 February 1761); Tristram Shandy, 1: n.p. (I.Dedication). 55 Sterne, Letters, Part I, 178 (25 December 1760). 56 Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 2:554 (VI.xxxii); Paddy Bullard, “Tristram Shandy, Lord George Sackville, and Uncle Toby’s Apologetical Oration,” Shandean 14 (2003): 101. See also Robert W. Jones’s essay in this volume (pages 213–34). 57 Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 2:499–513 (VI.vi–x), 2:405 (V.Dedication). 58 Laurence Sterne, A Political Romance (York, 1759), 33. 59 Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 2:638 (VII.xxxv). 60 Samuel Johnson, Political Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 188. On Johnson, war, and empire, see also Michael J. Griffin’s essay in this volume (pages 169–87). 61 Christopher Smart, Miscellaneous Poems, English and Latin, ed. Karina Williamson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 324; see also the comparable satire of “The English Bull Dog, Dutch Mastiff, and Quail,” 299–302. 62 The Annotated Letters of Christopher Smart, ed. Betty Rizzo and Robert ­Mahony (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 132 (26 April 1770). 63 Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, ed. Karina Williamson (Oxford: ­Clarendon Press, 1980), 13 (line B7). On “jeopardy” in Smart, see Tom Keymer, “Presenting Jeopardy: Language, Authority, and the Voice of Smart in Jubilate Agno,” in Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception, ed. Howard

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6 4 65 6 6 67

Erskine-Hill and Richard McCabe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 97–116. Smart, Jubilate Agno, 12 (B4). For the biographical background, see Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin ­Britten: A Biography (London: Faber, 1992), 188–9. Smart, Jubilate Agno, 36 (B151), 27 (B90). Johnson, Political Writings, 187; The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W.J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L.F. Powell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 252–4 (No. 81, 3 November 1759); Rasselas, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 46–7.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Churchill, Charles. The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill. Edited by Douglas Grant. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Cockings, George. War: An Heroic Poem. 4th ed. London, 1765. Daphnis and Menalcas: A Pastoral, Sacred to the Memory of the Late General Wolfe. London, 1759. A Full and Candid Answer to … Considerations on the Present German War. ­London, 1760. Greville, Fulke [and Frances Greville]. Maxims, Characters, and Reflections. 2nd ed. London, 1757. Hanway, Jonas. A Candid Historical Account of the Hospital. London, 1759. An Impartial History of the Late Glorious War. Manchester, 1764. Johnson, Samuel. The Idler and The Adventurer. Edited by W.J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L.F. Powell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963. – The Poems of Samuel Johnson. Edited by David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. – Political Writings. Edited by Donald J. Greene. Volume 10 of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. – Rasselas. Edited by Gwin J. Kolb. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Johnstone, Charles. Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea. 2 vols. London, 1760. Macpherson, James. The Poems of Ossian and Related Works. Edited by Howard Gaskill. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.

144  Thomas Keymer Pope, Alexander. The Dunciad in Four Books. Edited by Valerie Rumbold. ­Harlow, UK: Pearson, 1999. – The Iliad of Homer, Books I–IX. Edited by Maynard Mack et al. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967. – The Rape of the Lock. Edited by Geoffrey Tillotson. 3rd ed. London: Methuen, 1971. Smart, Christopher. The Annotated Letters of Christopher Smart. Edited by Betty Rizzo and Robert Mahony. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. – Jubilate Agno. Edited by Karina Williamson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. – Miscellaneous Poems, English and Latin. Edited by Karina Williamson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Smollett, Tobias. Travels through France and Italy. Edited by Frank Felsenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Sterne, Laurence. The Letters, Part I: 1739–1764. Edited by Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Edited by Melvyn New et al. 3 vols. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978–84. – A Political Romance. York, 1759. Swift, Jonathan. The Tale of a Tub and Other Works. Edited by Marcus Walsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Young, Edward. Conjectures on Original Composition. London, 1759. Secondary Sources Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. London: Faber and Faber; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Bainbridge, Simon. British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Bertelsen, Lance. “‘Neutral Nonsense, neither False nor True’: Christopher Smart and the Paper War(s) of 1752–53.” In Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, edited by Clement Hawes, 135–52. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999. Bloom, Edward A. “Neoclassic ‘Paper Wars’ for a Free Press.” Modern Language Review 56 (1961): 481–97. Bullard, Paddy. “Tristram Shandy, Lord George Sackville, and Uncle Toby’s Apologetical Oration.” Shandean 14 (2003): 98–103. Cardwell, M. John. Arts and Arms: Literature, Politics and Patriotism during the Seven Years War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Carpenter, Humphrey. Benjamin Britten: A Biography. London: Faber, 1992.

Paper Wars  145 Cleary, Thomas R. “Henry Fielding and the Great Jacobite Paper War of 1747–49.” Eighteenth-Century Life 5 (1978): 1–11. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Connell, Philip. “British Identities and the Politics of Ancient Poetry in Later Eighteenth-Century England.” Historical Journal 49 (2006): 161–92. Cronin, Richard. Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Daly, Patrick J., Jr. “John Gay’s The Fan and the ‘Paper War’ of 1713.” Clio 29 (2000): 249–69. Favret, Mary A. “Coming Home: The Public Spaces of Romantic War.” Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994): 539–48. – War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Fussell, Paul. Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Gerrard, Christine. The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Goldgar, Bertrand A. Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976. Griffin, Dustin. Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Keymer, Thomas. “Presenting Jeopardy: Language, Authority, and the Voice of Smart in Jubilate Agno.” In Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception, edited by Howard Erskine-Hill and Richard McCabe, 97–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. – Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pettit, Alexander. Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Response to Walpole, 1730–1737. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Pittock, Murray G.H. Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Ramsay, Neil. “Romanticism and War.” Literature Compass 3 (2006): 117–26. Richardson, John. “Imagining Military Conflict during the Seven Years’ War.” Studies in English Literature 48 (2008): 585–611. – “Modern Warfare in Early Eighteenth-Century Poetry.” Studies in English Literature 45 (2005): 557–77. Sauer, Elizabeth. “Paper-contestations” and Textual Communities in England, 1640–1675. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Shaw, Philip. Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002.

146  Thomas Keymer Sher, Richard B. Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2004. Watts, Carol. The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Weber, Harold. Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Williams, Abigail. Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Winn, James Anderson. The Poetry of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

6 Shakespeare, Voltaire, and the Seven Years’ War: Literary Criticism as Cultural Battlefield Frans De Bruyn

This essay examines the impact of the Seven Years’ War on the growing reputation of William Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century he was acknowledged to be a playwright of great powers, but he was deemed flawed and disordered in his greatness. By late century he had been canonized as one of Britain’s foremost geniuses and was seen as a fitting emblem of the country’s national character and imperial ambition. The Seven Years’ War had a catalytic effect on this transformation, as is evident in the critical reception of the playwright, which shifted from an apologetic mode in the early decades of the century (in deference to the prevailing orthodoxy of classical, rule-based critical theory) to one of unabashed, self-confident celebration of Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic powers. His genius, critics argued, eclipsed any faults that might be imputed to him. In the pages that follow, I document how the critical study of Shakespeare in mid-century became caught up in a militant rhetoric of great-power rivalry between Britain and France, and I argue that this polemical use of the playwright exerted a lasting influence on English critical discourse by stimulating the development of alternative modes of critical appreciation and theoretical justification. The cultural authority of classical critical principles, it was alleged, had been compromised by the French, who had deceitfully (and reductively) codified them as prescriptive “rules” designed to perpetuate French cultural hegemony. Armed with the spurious authority of “rules,” French criticism – which mid-century English readers associated almost exclusively with the single, polarizing figure of Voltaire – dismissed as savages and barbarians those, like Shakespeare, who staked a rival claim to cultural pre-eminence. I conclude by showing how this bitter polemical confrontation subsequently

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bore fruit in perceptive re-evaluations of Shakespeare by such eminent critics as Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Montagu, and Horace Walpole. Shakespeare and the Rhetoric of War and Empire In 1777 the literary scholar and colonial administrator Maurice Morgann prognosticated an immortal future for William Shakespeare. In sentiments that echo the Bard’s own vision (in Julius Caesar) of a prospect “ages hence” when “this our lofty scene [shall] be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown,” Morgann declares that “When the hand of time shall have brushed off his present Editors and Commentators, and when the very name of Voltaire, and even the memory of the language in which he has written, shall be no more, the Apalachian mountains, the banks of the Ohio, and the plains of Scioto shall resound with the accents of this Barbarian.”1 The geographical specificity of Morgann’s affirmation is revealing, for it identifies the reach of Shakespeare’s fame and cultural sway precisely with the territories of the Ohio Valley, where the global conflict of the Seven Years’ War first ignited. Owing to British triumphs in that conflict, the Ohio Country between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, hitherto claimed by France and the Iroquois Confederacy, as well as by Britain, and occupied largely by native peoples (the Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo), had become a territory not only for the expansion of British settlement and trade but for the imagined extension of English language and culture. Henceforth, the accents of an uncouth barbarian, and not the courtly French that set the linguistic and cultural standard for Europe, would be heard across the vast spaces of North America. Morgann was not alone in linking an ongoing critical debate about Shakespeare’s merits as a playwright and poet with Britain’s imperial successes over its perennial rival. He took his cue from Voltaire himself, who in 1765 wrote that Shakespeare “was a savage who had some imagination. He has written many happy lines; but his pieces can please only at London and in Canada.”2 Voltaire’s acquaintance with Shakespeare dated back to an almost three-year sojourn in England during the late 1720s. From the first he felt a deep ambivalence about Shakespeare’s achievement, impressed by the dramatist’s sublimity but appalled by his vulgarity. He recognized, as Haydn Mason aptly puts it, that “Shakespeare was no ordinary playwright,” but he found himself wrestling “unavailingly with conflicting aesthetic perceptions: Shakespeare was a genius; Shakespeare was a barbarian.”3 These conflicting attitudes

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crystallized around the tragedy of Hamlet, in which, he declared, “It seems as if Nature had amused itself by assembling in Shakespeare’s head the greatest imaginable power and grandeur, and the lowest and most detestable forms of witless vulgarity.”4 For Voltaire, nothing more vividly captured the bathos to which he saw Shakespeare repeatedly descending, in oblivious disregard of the sanctified rules of tragic drama, than the gravediggers’ scene in the final act of the play. Throughout his career he reverted obsessively to Hamlet – and the gravediggers – as a central exhibit in his case against the playwright. Remarks on the paradox of Shakespeare’s achievement are scattered across Voltaire’s writings in the 1730s and 1740s, but with the advent of the Seven Years’ War, his strictures grew louder and longer, and they became increasingly shrill and hostile. Animated by the war, his critical pronouncements on Shakespeare during the last two decades of his life were repeatedly embellished with martial metaphors. At the height of the conflict, he consciously characterized his crusade against the spread of Shakespeare’s reputation as a new battleground, a patriotic cultural front, in the war against Britain. Mason notes that, “From 1760 the Shakespeare question is associated with Voltaire’s awareness of the new British hegemony.”5 The first salvo on this cultural front was his publication in 1761 of an Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe, an attack prompted by two articles in the Journal encyclopédique that drew unflattering parallels between Shakespeare and Corneille, and between Otway and Racine – unflattering, that is, to the French tragedians.6 The Appel was designed, David Williams argues, to isolate “English taste as an aberrant sport alien to the mainstream of European cultural progress,” and Voltaire made his case, tellingly, with an extended analysis of the absurdities of Hamlet.7 Early in 1764 Voltaire declared the debate over the relative merits of the English and French playwrights to be a serious matter of state: so long as the English had contented themselves with the capture of French ships and the seizure of Canada and Pondicherry, he had maintained a noble silence. But now that they pressed their barbarism to the point of finding Racine and Corneille ridiculous, he felt compelled to take up arms.8 Eleven years later, remarking on an attack on Shakespeare that he had recently penned, which was read at a meeting of the Académie française on 25 August 1776, Voltaire wrote to Jean de Vaines, “I do not know whether, after having declared war against England, I shall be able to make my peace with it. I have no Canada to give it, no Indian company [East India] to sacrifice to it. But I shall not ask pardon

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of it for having sustained the beauties of Corneille and Racine against Gilles and Pierrot, and I do not believe that the English ambassador will ask of the king the suppression of my declaration of war.”9 Here a question of taste, expressed as an opposition between serious drama and pantomime antics, is asserted to be of the gravest national interest, even a casus belli. This call to arms was taken up by Voltaire’s disciples. When Jean d’Alembert reported on the reaction of the Academicians to Voltaire’s discourse in 1776, he lamented that some members of the audience appeared willing to be defeated by the English in the cultural arena as they had been militarily: “[E]ven some of the French [members of the audience], not content to be beaten by them on land and at sea, desire to be defeated again on the stage.”10 Yet Voltaire and his allies had no monopoly on such bellicose and chauvinistic declarations. As early as 1755, Elizabeth Montagu had expressed in very similar terms her frustration over Voltaire’s disparaging opinion of Shakespeare. Writing to her sister after having read Voltaire’s L'Orphelin de la Chine, she exclaims, “When ... I read what the saucy Frenchman calls les farces monstreuses of Shakespear, I could burn him and his tragedy. Foolish coxcomb! rules can no more make a poet, than receipts [recipes] a cook. There must be taste, there must be skill. Oh! that we were as sure our fleets and armies could drive the French out of America, as that our poets and tragedians can drive them out of Parnassus. I hate to see these tame creatures taught to pace by art, attack fancy’s sweetest child.”11 Even Edward Capell, in his 1768 edition of Shakespeare, represented his editorial responsibility as an “object of national concern,” for the works of great authors “are a part of the kingdom’s riches: they are her estate in fame” whose “worth and value ... sinks or raises her in the opinion of foreign nations.” The productions of Shakespeare “stand foremost in the list of these literary possessions; [and] are talk’d of wherever the name of Britain is talk’d of, that is, (thanks to some late counsels) wherever there are men.”12 Following Britain’s recent martial success, Shakespeare was becoming a subject of conversation the world over. It is as if the primary rationale, for these critics, of British imperial expansion was to furnish the playwright with an international audience commensurate with his genius. Shakespeare, Voltaire, and the Rules Shakespeare’s rapid rise at mid-century to the status of exemplary national poet and playwright has been amply documented by literary

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historians. Brian Vickers, for example, stresses in his survey of the playwright’s critical reception “the increased prestige of Shakespeare in the 1750s and 1760s,” and Michael Dobson argues that the Seven Years’ War accelerated the process of elevation by which Shakespeare became “both symbol and exemplar of British national identity.”13 Nor was Shakespeare the first writer to be used as a cultural proxy in the clash of arms between the two countries, as the elevation of Milton to national and imperial status in the 1690s and during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13) attests.14 But the wars of the mid-century propelled Shakespeare for the first time to the vanguard in the cultural rivalry between Britain and France. Promoting Shakespeare as the quintessential Englishman, a cause that achieved its apotheosis in David Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee in 1769, meant insisting that the success of his plays owed nothing to the contaminating cultural influence of France.15 Yet the terms of recognition, the literary standards by which his success was measured, had long been dictated, as the criticism of Voltaire makes clear, by French neoclassical critical canons. For the better part of a century after the return of Charles II and his court from France in 1660, the hegemony of neoclassical critical theory, if not entirely unchallenged, encountered no decisive opposition in England.16 Even at the end of the eighteenth century, as Vickers reminds us, neoclassical formalism lived on, alongside newer critical modes of appreciating and evaluating Shakespeare. “Rather than tidy schemes,” writes Vickers, “according to which one critical trend replaces another, I have found the existence, side by side, of critical systems which are supposed to have annihilated or displaced earlier ones, but which did not.”17 Vickers’s observation is a warning against overstatement; to insist that a sudden mid-century revolution in taste took place would be misleading. Nonetheless, there is convincing evidence to suggest that these years represent the decisive turning point in a long-standing debate about Shakespeare’s lack of conformity with neoclassical critical standards and the damage this was perceived to inflict on his dramatic achievement and literary reputation. One observes an increasing readiness on the part of critics in the middle decades of the century to write about Shakespeare without recourse to ritual apologies for his shortcomings. Defensiveness about Shakespeare’s achievement turned into a willingness to call into question those critical rules by which he had been found wanting. Previously, critics had only fitfully and intermittently associated neoclassical critical theory with French hegemonic

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ambitions; it had been understood first and foremost as a common legacy to Europe from Aristotle and the ancients. Now, in the middle decades of the century, a politicized appraisal of neoclassical formalism argued that the prescriptiveness of the rules was a product of French tyranny and a sign of French servility, rather than a genuine reflection of classical values. In this new battle of the books, Voltaire served proudly as commander general of the French forces.18 English observers had remarked as early as the Restoration period on France’s pursuit of what today would be called a cultural policy designed to supplement its political ambitions. In An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668), for example, John Dryden noted that the seventeenth-­ century reform of the French theatre by Corneille and others had begun at the instigation of the “great Cardinal of Richelieu.”19 When taken up by William Guthrie in the late 1740s, however, Dryden’s observation received a radically different spin. The opening paragraph of Guthrie’s An Essay upon English Tragedy underscores the role of Richelieu, who established the French Academy and fostered an atmosphere of critical learning that allowed Corneille to flourish. But the poets and critics of the Academy, Guthrie argues, were merely a screen for the true objective of the cardinal, who appointed to it several “men of sense and knowledge of the world ... entrusted with the secret of their government’s noble design; that of establishing an universal empire, in arts as well as arms.”20 Peter Whalley recounts a similar story in his Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare (1748), though he emphasizes that the French absolutist court has aimed at the enslavement not only of Europe but of the French people as well. This purpose, he concludes, has met with unqualified success: “It would agree, I believe, as little with their Tempers to be freed from a sovereign Authority in the Empire of Wit and Letters, as in their Civil Government. An absolute Monarch must preside over Affairs of Science, as well as over those of the cabinet; and it is pleasant enough to observe what Pain they are put to, upon the least appearance of offending against the Laws of the Stagyrite.”21 In Guthrie’s and Whalley’s accounts, the rules of the ancients have been co-opted by the French to serve their nationalist and imperialist designs. Aristotle is for them no more than a stalking horse employed to promote a second-rate dramatic tradition, and French allegiance to the rules of the stage is mere “pretence.” Guthrie remarks on the cynical “management of the French” in their manipulation of neoclassical precept: “Where no real genius appears, (as they have none in tragedy,) the strict adherence to the rules

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and purity of the drama covers all defects. But where (as in Moliere) there is great merit, the offences against the rules are pardoned.”22 Whalley observes further how the expressions “barbarous” and “savage” came to be applied to Shakespeare as evaluative terms to denote his deviations from neoclassical orthodoxy. The “French Connoisseurs have fixed on [Shakespeare] the Imputation of Ignorance and Barbarism” because the playwright’s dramatic plots routinely violate “the Unities, as prescribed by Aristotle.”23 Among these “Connoisseurs” was Voltaire, who almost invariably figured as the chief villain in the anti-Gallic critical polemics of mid-century. Voltaire’s repeated use of the term “barbarism” in reference to Shakespeare reflects the original meaning of the word, which entered the English language from the French and Latin as a grammatical or stylistic term to denote the “use of words or expressions not in accordance with the classical standard of a language” (OED). Even more revealing is the etymological derivation of the term from a word in ancient Greek that denoted one who spoke or behaved like a foreigner. To deviate from correct usage – to speak barbarously, in short – was to disclose oneself as an alien. In a slightly more extended sense, as Chambers’s Cyclopædia (1778) notes, “barbarism” refers to “that rudeness of mind, wherein the understanding is neither furnished with useful principles, nor the will with good inclinations,” and in this sense it could be applied to Shakespeare’s apparent ignorance or wilful disregard of Aristotelian precept.24 Inevitably, in an age of heightened contact with the native peoples of the New World and contestation over their lands, the term resonated as well with political and ideological implications. The semantic tension of “native” versus “foreigner” inherent in the word “barbarous,” to say nothing of the more figurative connotations it acquired – “uncultured, uncivilized, unpolished; rude, rough, wild, savage” (OED) – takes us to the heart of the mid-eighteenth-century debate over the cultural authority of the rules. In the preface to his edition of the plays (1725), Alexander Pope had acquitted Shakespeare of his most egregious faults by blaming them on the illiteracy of his audience, which had no notion of a well-wrought play before Ben Jonson appeared on the scene: “Till then our Authors had no thoughts of writing on the model of the Ancients.” The barbarous was native to England in Shakespeare’s time, a circumstance that prompts Pope to hint at a necessary reversal of values when it comes to critical judgments on the playwright: “To judge therefore of Shakespear by Aristotle’s rules, is like trying a man by the Laws of one Country, who acted under those of another.”25

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Pope was nowhere nearly so radical as this declaration might seem to suggest, nor were he and his contemporaries prepared to jettison their conviction that universal values, believed to have been discovered and codified by the ancients, mattered. But implicit in his statement is a tension between universality and particularity, between an affirmation of universal laws, grounded in nature, that govern human behaviour everywhere and a growing recognition of historical and cultural differences among nations and communities that produce quite distinct local expressions of those laws. One way to negotiate this tension was to argue, as Thomas Wilkes did in 1759, that the rules of the ancients were but one iteration of nature’s truths, and the works of Shakespeare another, of equal validity: “as nature is always the same, though at different times she may wear different aspects ... I see no reason why our Shakespear may not have as good a right to vary from, or reject, the ancient model, by drawing from something more grand and august than had been before discovered.” Since Aristotle had simply derived “his rules from a model or example ready drawn to his hands,” there ought to be no reason why “they should be imposed as a perpetual rule or obligation for any future poet to observe.”26 By renegotiating in this way the relation between the general and the particular, critics became increasingly adept at sidestepping the issue of classical authority without repudiating it. Anglo-French rivalry added a further edge to this critical debate, as well as an irresistible rhetorical opportunity. The opportunity lay in the triangulation of national particularity (France/Britain/ancient Greece) authorized by the French obsession with rule-based criticism. Rather than question openly the classical basis of the rules, critics took to attacking the excesses of neoclassical criticism as the quibbles of over-fastidious French critics, among whom they took pains to single out Voltaire. The anonymous author of Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet (1736), for example, remarks on the “unnecessary Slavery” the French have imposed on themselves by their allegiance to the “Rules of Criticism”: [A]ll this is owing to the false Notions of Decency, and a Refinement of Taste among our Neighbours, which is getting now to such a Height, that so far from being able to bear the Representation of Tragical Actions, they are hardly able to bear any Subjects which turn upon the weightier Passions; such as Ambition, Revenge, Jealousy, &c. The Form of their Government, indeed, is of such a Nature, that many Subjects cannot be

Shakespeare, Voltaire, and the Seven Years’ War  155 treated as they ought, nor work’d up to that Height which they are here, and were formerly at Athens, &c. and Love, for that Reason among others is made to be the Basis of almost all their Tragedies.

The very “Education of the People” under an arbitrary regime, concludes this critic, “prevents their delighting in such Performances as pleased an Athenian or a Roman, and now delight us Britons.”27 By contrast, a disregard of neoclassical formalism has freed the British to express more fundamental classical values in their drama, such as the secret springs of human character and motivation: the ambition of Macbeth, the revenge of Hamlet, and the jealousy of Othello. In their intuitive classicism, the British, rather than the French, are the true progeny of Athens and Rome, and British nationhood represents, by extension, a rebirth of ancient greatness. Some years later, on the eve of the Seven Years’ War, Arthur Murphy elaborated on these same themes in The Gray’s-Inn Journal. He grants that “the Rules established by Aristotle and Horace are agreeable to Nature ... and that inferior Geniuses may avail themselves by a skilful Conformity to them.” But the narrow focus of the rules on the conduct of the “Fable,” which is a “secondary Beauty,” has, Murphy argues, obscured the greater unities observed by Shakespeare in “the Exhibition of Character, and the Excitement of the Passions.” Murphy then unfolds a revealing analogy to express his sense of the proper relation between rules of art and the source from which they derive their vitality: It is in Writing as in Gardening; where Nature does not afford spontaneous Beauties, recourse must be had to the Embellishments of slow endeavouring Art, to the Regularity of uniform Vistas, the Intricacy of elaborated Mazes, and a studied Insertion of Evergreens; but when the Course of the Country of itself presents attractive Scenes on every Side, when the Trees branch out with a free Expansion, and the bold Prospect surprizes with the Heath, the Lawn, the Hill, and Valley, in wild Variety, the Littleness of tedious Culture is unnecessary, and trifling Ornaments are unlooked for.28

Murphy invokes in this passage what had become by mid-century a well-worn analogy between the contrasting tastes of the French and English in landscape gardening and the political divergence between the two nations, with the controlling absolutism of the former set against the love of liberty in the latter. What the French eye dismisses as

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barbarous and undisciplined is to the English view a more authentic expression of nature in all its “wild Variety” than an application of rules can ever achieve. With the exception of Guthrie’s essay, each of these critical engagements with the authority of neoclassical precept is acknowledged to have been prompted by the opinions of the same man: Voltaire is the writer’s bête noire on each occasion. The author of Some Remarks on Hamlet identifies “Mr. De Voltaire” as the prime exemplar (and victim) of the “false Notions of Decency” and “Refinement of Taste” that bedevil contemporary criticism; Murphy addresses his remarks explicitly “To Monsieur Voltaire”; and Wilkes, in his vindication of the playwright’s superiority to “all former rules of art,” refers to Voltaire as “one of Shakespear’s most envious defamers.”29 This trend intensified in the 1750s and 1760s, as did the level of invective: Samuel Foote, for example, calls Voltaire “that insolent French Panegyrist”; James Barclay disdains “the petulant raillery of a flimsy Voltaire”; and an anonymous “Ode to Shakespeare” (1771) characterizes him as an envious, captious Momus whom the gods have justly punished: “Jove kick’d the foul Critic from Heav’n’s azure Round, / And, venting his Spleen, now at Ferney he’s found.”30 Thus, by mid-century, rule-based criticism was not simply associated with a rival nation: it had become personified in a single, prominent representative of that nation, who, not coincidentally, had identified himself from the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War as a French patriot “waging cultural warfare,” in David Williams’s phrase, on behalf of the patrie. The war ensured, as Williams notes, “the permanent presence in Voltaire’s pronouncements of a recharged patriotic fervour.”31 This situation was not without its ironies. The martial rhetoric of Voltaire’s denunciations of Shakespeare does not square entirely with the revulsion he expresses in Candide (1759) and elsewhere for imperial and dynastic wars, particularly, as Carol Watts puts it, “the lunacy of the Seven Years’ War.”32 A sense of these contradictions surfaces in an open letter to Voltaire appended by Arthur Murphy to The Orphan of China (1759), a play he adapted from Voltaire’s L’Orphelin de la Chine. Murphy discerns an analogy between Voltaire’s personal animus towards the arts in Britain and the official state of hostilities between the two nations, though he does not go so far as to conflate the two: A Letter to you from an English author will carry with it the appearance of corresponding with the enemy, not only as the two nations are at present

Shakespeare, Voltaire, and the Seven Years’ War  157 involved in a difficult and important war, but also because in many of your late writings you seem determined to live in a state of hostility with the British nation. Whenever we come your way, “we are ferocious, we are islanders, we are the people whom your country has taught, we fall behind other nations in point of taste and elegance of composition; the same cause that has witheld [sic] from us a genius for painting and music, has also deprived us of the true spirit of Tragedy; and, in short, barbarism still prevails among us.”33

Murphy acknowledges that it would be altogether too facile to equate Voltaire’s cause against Britain with that of his country, for “notwithstanding this vein of prejudice ... there still breathes throughout your writings such a general spirit of Humanity and zeal for the Honour of the Republic of Letters, that I am inclined to imagine the author of the English Orphan of China ... may still address you upon terms of amity and literary benevolence.”34 In many ways Voltaire’s primary allegiance remained, as Murphy recognizes, with a cosmopolitan, Enlightenment Europe. His antipathy to Shakespeare can in this sense, as Kathryn Prince suggests, be understood as a reaction to an increasingly nationalistic, anti-cosmopolitan strain in British literary culture that sought out native sources (Celtic and Germanic, among others) to account for the distinctiveness of English writers – whether Shakespeare, Spenser, or Milton. “Voltaire’s Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe (1761),” Prince argues, “thus appeals for solidarity at a moment when England seemed to be turning its back on Enlightenment principles.”35 Indeed, the assumption behind the Appel, which appeared in the midst of the Seven Years’ War, is that notwithstanding the conflict then engulfing Europe, a cosmopolitan readership from Petersburg to Naples – a pan-European jury of nations – could still be counted upon to judge impartially the relative merits of the English and French dramatic traditions. Voltaire intensified his anti-Shakespearean polemic at a time when the tide of fashion and literary taste was turning in France, a circumstance of which he himself was well aware. In 1746 Pierre-Antoine de La Place published a French translation of selected plays by Shakespeare, followed thirty years later by Pierre Le Tourneur’s rendering of the complete works into French. Favourable assessments by the Abbé Prévost, Denis Diderot, and others, and the enthusiastic reception of Garrick in Paris on two occasions (1751 and 1765), attested to the growing infatuation with Shakespeare in French cultural and intellectual circles. Not only was Voltaire increasingly out of step with his own

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countrymen, but the English themselves, by characterizing Voltaire as the very personification of Procrustean French critical attitudes, were caricaturing the complexity of French cultural attitudes and ignoring the transformation in those attitudes already underway in mid-century France. Moreover, English criticism and taste had by no means undergone the paroxysms of a cultural revolution, despite what the polemics on both sides appeared to suggest. Garrick’s 1772 alteration of Hamlet, which jettisoned the gravediggers and the play’s violent dénouement in deference to literary decorum, is a telling witness, as George Winchester Stone observes, to the continuing “significance Garrick attached to French criticism.”36 His audience, too, received his alteration favourably, flocking to thirty-seven profitable performances over eight years.37 English intellectual and cultural attitudes were closer to those of the French than many were willing to admit: the great rivals were in many respects mirror images of each other. Nevertheless, hostility had “its uses,” as Howard Weinbrot observes in remarking on this apparently self-contradictory state of affairs: “British authors frequently define their national literature in contrast with French responses to it. The more the French denigrate Shakespeare and insist on the rules, the more the British elevate Shakespeare the irregular.”38 By personifying Voltaire as a cultural bogeyman, the English created a critical space that permitted them to entertain new ways of understanding and appreciating Shakespeare’s achievement. Voltaire suited their purposes in this regard: demonizing him served to counter his towering literary prestige in eighteenth-century Europe, which needed to be cut down to size in order to make room for Shakespeare. Voltaire had made himself an inviting target, moreover, by his repeated insistence that his critical crusade was a battlefront in his country’s conflict with Britain, a continuation of war by other means. English Critical Reappraisals The outcome of the polarized critical atmosphere fostered by the Seven Years’ War was a series of important reappraisals of Shakespeare in the 1760s and 1770s, including influential and perceptive critical statements by Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Montagu, Lord Kames, Horace Walpole, and Giuseppe Baretti (among numerous others).39 Baretti’s decision to write his Discours sur Shakespeare et sur Monsieur de Voltaire (1777) in French stimulated curiosity about Shakespeare on the Continent; in this sense Voltaire’s ongoing campaign against the English playwright had

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an ironically counterproductive effect. The Seven Years’ War, in other words, by galvanizing critical opinion on both sides of the Channel, shaped to a remarkable extent the critical discourse on Shakespeare in the years that followed. The connection, in the case of Montagu’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769), is clear, for the subtitle of her essay, Some Remarks upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire, makes plain her motivation for taking up her pen. More telling is Johnson’s preface to his landmark edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), since it is in most respects a conservative critical document that exhibits a traditional neo-Aristotelian argumentative structure and owes a large intellectual debt to criticism from the early part of the century, including, as Edmond Malone noted, “Dennis, Gildon, Rymer, [and] Guthrie &c.”40 Whenever Johnson ventures to differ materially with his predecessors, the negative example of Voltaire is invoked to justify the departure. Thus, when Johnson defends Shakespeare against the charge levelled by Rymer and Dennis that the playwright violates the dramatic decorum of character – that his Romans are insufficiently Roman and his kings insufficiently kingly – the chief whipping boy is Voltaire, who “thinks decency violated when the Danish Usurper is represented as a drunkard.” Such objections to the poet’s failure to observe “the casual distinction of country and condition,” declares Johnson in an uncharacteristic flourish of the critical invective that Voltaire consistently attracted from others, “are the petty cavils of petty minds.”41 Similarly, when Johnson defends Shakespeare’s disregard of rigid generic distinctions, especially the playwright’s habitual mixing of tragedy and comedy, it is the Frenchman who is most prominently singled out, through Johnson’s choice of examples from Hamlet, a play Voltaire had notoriously (and repeatedly) condemned for its violations of generic decorum. “When Shakespeare’s plan is understood,” Johnson argues, “most of the criticisms of Rymer and Voltaire vanish away. The play of Hamlet is opened without impropriety by two sentinels; Iago bellows at Brabantio’s window without injury to the scheme of the play ... the character of Polonius is seasonable and useful; and the Gravediggers themselves may be heard with applause.”42 Even the instance in this passage from Othello, which might be taken to recall Rymer’s strictures on that play, is directed at Voltaire, who more than once cited Iago’s crude shouts of alarm under Brabantio’s window as proof of Shakespeare’s barbarity. When Johnson turns to Shakespeare’s disregard of the unities of time and place, the example with which he illustrates the problem – the change of scene in Othello from Venice to

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Cyprus – is similarly calculated, I would argue, to recall not just Rymer’s strictures in A Short View of Tragedy (1693), but more proximately Voltaire, who had cited the same example in objecting to the playwright’s violations of the dramatic unities. Johnson’s final word on the subject reverses the dispassionate tone of his discussion abruptly, with a sharp ad hominem thrust: “Such violations of rules merely positive, become the comprehensive genius of Shakespeare, and such censures are suitable to the minute and slender criticism of Voltaire.”43 The reader is left not with Rymer but with Voltaire as the embodiment of captious criticism. Johnson’s repeated citation of Hamlet at these junctures highlights a noteworthy feature of the patriotic strain in mid-century Shakespeare criticism, for Voltaire’s frontal attacks on the barbarities of that play had struck a nerve. In this particular, too, the compulsion to respond gave rise to perceptive critical commentary. Prompted by Voltaire, Horace Walpole turned to Hamlet in order to justify his generic experimentation in writing The Castle of Otranto. Mixing mirth and solemnity in his “Gothic Story” is, he argues, authorized by Shakespeare himself: “Let me ask if his tragedies of Hamlet and Julius Caesar would not lose a considerable share of their spirit and wonderful beauties if the humour of the gravediggers, the fooleries of Polonius, and the clumsy jests of the Roman citizens were omitted, or vested in heroics? ... These touches remind one of the Grecian sculptor who, to convey the idea of a Colossus within the dimensions of a seal, inserted a little boy measuring his thumb.”44 Walpole’s argument here illustrates again the desire of critics to sidestep, where possible, the question of critical authority, in this instance by affirming Shakespeare’s use of mixed genres, about which Aristotle had nothing to say. Montagu employs the same strategy in her discussion of Shakespeare’s history plays: these, “being of an original kind and peculiar construction, cannot come within any rules which are prior to their existence.”45 Walpole concludes his preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto (1765) by citing Voltaire’s defence of a particularly clumsy couplet of dialogue from Racine’s tragedy Bérénice, in which one character, to preserve “circumstantial propriety,” explains to another the floor plan of the Roman imperial palace. He apostrophizes facetiously, “Unhappy Shakespeare! Hadst thou made Rosencrantz inform his compeer Guildenstern of the ichnography of the palace of Copenhagen, instead of presenting us with a moral dialogue between the Prince of Denmark and the grave-digger, the illuminated pit of Paris would have

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been instructed a second time to adore thy talents.”46 Writing a scant two years after the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, Walpole reverts to the martial trope that continued to define the mode of critical exchange in the 1760s. Anticipating hostile action, he declares his determination to bring his experimental novel into the field under the protective fire of Shakespeare himself: “to shelter my own daring under the cannon of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced.”47 Walpole’s reiterated desire to vindicate Hamlet indicates that the charge of barbarism continued to rankle – as it did also with Morgann, who returned to it twelve years later with his announcement of the Barbarian’s as yet unrealized fame in North America. Morgann’s ringing declaration that the plains of Ohio would one day resound with the accents of Shakespeare is preceded by a wish that echoes prophetically in light of the new continent’s subsequent history: “there are those, who firmly believe that this wild, this uncultivated Barbarian, has not yet obtained one half of his fame.” Morgann, who sojourned in Quebec from 1768 to 1770 as the agent of the Privy Council and who helped shape British policy regarding westward colonial expansion, might well have adapted his own words to express his sense of North America’s potential: this wild, this uncultivated land had not yet come into its own. Certainly, Morgann had a much clearer sense of the continent’s vast possibilities than Voltaire, who, in a dismissive witticism, had characterized the war between France and Britain as a struggle over a few acres of snow: “vous savez que ces deux nations sont en guerre pour quelques arpents de neige vers le Canada, et qu’elles dépensent pour cette belle guerre beaucoup plus que tout le Canada ne vaut” [you know that these two nations are at war over a few acres of snow towards Canada and that on this fine war they are spending more than all of Canada is worth].48 Voltaire underestimated, as Neil Rhodes points out, “the significance of the imperial contest.” His mistake “was not to realize that the colonial losses he was willing to tolerate would in fact lead to the international domination of French by the language and literature of Britain.”49 The dismissal of Canada as a few acres of snow, uttered in Candide (1759) by Martin, echoes views voiced by Voltaire in numerous other contexts, including his Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), where he states that Canada is covered with ice and snow for eight months of the year and that it is inhabited by barbarians, bears, and beavers.50 His use of the words “barbarian” and “savage” here and elsewhere in the Essai complicates our understanding of the ways in which

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these terms were used in the debate over the merits of Shakespeare. There is no space in this essay to give these further complexities the attention they warrant, but a brief summary, by way of conclusion, will illustrate how the very frame of reference within which eighteenth-­ century literary culture understood itself was undergoing an irreversible expansion and alteration, a process accelerated by the Seven Years’ War. New geographical and historical vistas now competed with a world view whose horizons had previously been confined largely to Europe and the Mediterranean, and in this larger context a critical debate circumscribed by a prescriptive set of rules derived from a parti­ cular society at a particular point in time inevitably began to sound parochial. The metropole that had shaped Voltaire could, from a wider perspective, look provincial. That wider perspective is on view in the account Voltaire gives of the savage in La philosophie de l’histoire (1766). There, he recognizes that Europe in fact abounds with people whose condition is no better than that of savages. By contrast, It must certainly be agreed that the people of Canada ... whom we have been pleased to stile savages, are infinitely superior to our own ... The supposed savages of America receive ambassadors from our colonies, which avarice and imprudence have transplanted near their territories. They are acquainted with honour, which none of our European savages ever heard mentioned. They have a country, they love it and defend it; they make treaties, they fight courageously, and often speak with heroic energy. Is there a finer reply from all Plutarch’s great men than that of the chief of ­the Canadians, to whom a European nation proposed ceding their patrimony: “We were born upon this land, our fathers were buried here, can we say to our fathers [sic] bones, Rise up and come with us into a foreign land?”51

This laudatory account of the native Canadians, when set against Voltaire’s observation that Shakespeare can please only “at London and in Canada,” transforms the latter remark into an unintended tribute, for what audience, one might retort, could be more fit to appreciate one of Shakespeare’s Plutarch-inspired plays (such as Coriolanus or Julius Caesar) than the patriotic, courageous, heroic race described here, who appear to have materialized from the very pages of the Roman biographer himself? Voltaire of course intended no such compliment in his application of the terms “barbarian” and “savage” to Shakespeare, yet his deployment of these cultural categories in his criticism at a time of

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ever-widening contact between Europe and the rest of the globe calls attention to a perspective that had the potential to dismantle the very cultural hierarchies he held dear and was at such pains to defend. NOTES The author acknowledges with thanks the research contribution of Arby Ted Siraki in the preparation of this essay. 1 See Julius Caesar, 3.1.111–13; Maurice Morgann, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (London, 1777), 65. I have emended the spelling of the name “Scioto,” a river in central and southern Ohio, which is printed in the 1777 text as “Sciola.” 2 Voltaire to Bernard Joseph Saurin (4 December 1765), in Voltaire on Shakespeare, ed. Theodore ­Besterman, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 54 (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1967), 157: “c’était un sauvage qui avait de l’imagination; il a fait même quelques vers heureux, mais ses pièces ne peuvent plaire qu’à Londres et au Canada.” I have cited the translation of Thomas R. Lounsbury, in Shakespeare and Voltaire (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1902), 318. 3 Hadyn Mason, “Voltaire versus Shakespeare: The Lettre à l’académie française (1776),” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (1995): 173. 4 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Dissertation sur la tragedie ancienne et moderne (1748), in Voltaire on Shakespeare, 57. The translation, by Besterman, is in the introduction, 19–20. 5 Mason, “Voltaire versus Shakespeare,” 175. 6 The full title reads, Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe des jugements d’un écrivain anglais, ou manifeste au sujet des honneurs du pavillon entre les théâtres de Londres et de Paris. 7 David Williams, “Voltaire’s War with Shakespeare: The Appeal to Europe 1760–1764,” in Voltaire and the English, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 179 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1979), 84. 8 “Cecy est une affaire d’État sérieuse. Tant que les Anglais se sont contentés de prendre nos vaisseaux et de s’emparer du Canada et de Pondicheri, j’ai gardé un noble silence. Mais à présent qu’ils poussent la barbarie jusqu’à trouver Racine et Corneille ridicules, je dois prendre les armes.” Letter to the Comte and Comtesse d’Argental, January 1764 (D11645), in Voltaire, The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman et al. (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire; Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1968–), 111:173.

164  Frans De Bruyn 9 “Je ne sais, Monsieur, si après avoir déclaré la guerre à l’Angleterre je pourrai faire ma paix avec elle. Je n’ai point de Canada à lui donner, ni de Compagnie des Indes a lui sacrifier; mais je ne lui demanderai pas pardon d’avoir soutenu les beautés de Corneille et de Racine contre Gilles et ­Pierrot, et je ne crois pas que l’ambassadeur d’Angleterre demande au roi de France la suppression de ma déclaration de guerre.” Voltaire to Jean de Vaines, 4 September 1776 (D20279), in Voltaire, Complete Works, 127:279. Translation by Lounsbury, in Shakespeare and Voltaire, 385. 10 Alembert to Voltaire, 27 August 1776, in Voltaire on Shakespeare, 211n1 (my translation). The original reads, “même quelques François ... ne se contentent pas d’être battus par eux sur terre et sur mer, & ... voudroient encore que nous fuissions sur le théâtre.” 11 Letter to Mrs Scott, 18 November 1755, in The Letters of Mrs. E. Montagu, 4 vols (London, 1809–13), 4:7–8. 12 Edward Capell, Dedication “To the Duke of Grafton,” in William Shakespeare, Mr William Shakespeare His Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, ed. Capell, 10 vols (London, 1768), 1:sig. a3r. 13 Brian Vickers, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974–81), 4:1; Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 185. See also 198–207. 14 For an account of this transformation, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, “Acts of Kind Service: Milton and the Patriot Literature of Empire,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 233–54. 15 On anti-Gallicism and Francophobia as elements in the formation of British national identity in the eighteenth century and beyond, see Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987), esp. 123–56; and Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), passim. 16 There were a few brief, but spirited attacks on neoclassical orthodoxy early in the eighteenth century, most notably by George Farquhar in A Discourse upon Comedy (1702) and Thomas Purney in the preface to his Pastorals (1717), but these instances are not representative of the prevailing critical atmosphere. 17 Vickers, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6:16. 18 Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 153–4. 19 John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. H.T. Swedenberg, Jr, et al., vol. 17 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 34.

Shakespeare, Voltaire, and the Seven Years’ War  165 20 William Guthrie, An Essay upon English Tragedy (London, [1747?]), 3–4. For a discussion of the interrelation of “arts and arms” in the Seven Years’ War period, see Thomas Keymer’s essay in this volume (pages 119–46). 21 Peter Whalley, An Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare (London, 1748), 16–17. 22 Guthrie, Essay, 5. 23 Whalley, Enquiry, 16. 24 “Barbarism,” in Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 5 vols (London, 1778–88), 1:n.p. 25 Alexander Pope, preface to The Works of Shakespear, 6 vols (London, 1725), 1:vi. 26 Thomas Wilkes, A General View of the Stage (London, 1759), 327. 27 Anon., Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet (London, 1736), 61–2. 28 Arthur Murphy, The Gray’s-Inn Journal, no. 41, 4 August 1753; rpt in 2 vols (London, 1756), 1:263–4. 29 Anon., Some Remarks, 62; Murphy, Gray’s-Inn Journal, 1:259; Wilkes, General View, 327. 30 Samuel Foote, The Roman and the English Comedy Consider’d and Compar’d (London, 1747), 21; James Barclay, An Examination of Mr. Kenrick’s Review of Mr. Johnson’s Edition of Shakespeare (London, 1766), 72; J.R., “Ode to ­Shakespeare,” in the St James’s Chronicle, 16–19 February 1771. “Ferney” in these lines refers to the district near the Swiss border where Voltaire lived for the last two decades of his life, effectively in exile from Paris and the court. 31 Williams, “Voltaire’s War with Shakespeare,” 81. 32 Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 30. 33 Arthur Murphy, “To M. de Voltaire,” in The Orphan of China, a Tragedy, as It Is Performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane (London, 1759), 89. 34 Murphy, “To M. de Voltaire,” 89. 35 Kathryn Prince, “Shakespeare and English Nationalism,” in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter Sabor and Fiona Ritchie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 282. 36 George Winchester Stone, Jr, “Garrick’s Long Lost Alteration of Hamlet,” PMLA 49 (1934): 893. 37 Stone cites figures that show how profitable this alteration was for Garrick: “Scarcely any other play brought in more box receipts” (894). 38 Howard D. Weinbrot, “Enlightenment Canon Wars: Anglo-French Views of Literary Greatness,” ELH 60 (1993): 90. 39 Williams, “Voltaire’s War with Shakespeare,” 84. 40 See Vickers, introduction to Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Volume 5: 1765–1774, 24. Vickers cites a marginal note inserted by Malone in his copy of the 1773 edition of Johnson’s Shakespeare.

166  Frans De Bruyn 41 Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare, 8 vols (London, 1765), 1: xii–xiii. 42 Johnson, Preface, xvi. 43 Johnson, Preface, xxx. 44 Horace Walpole, Preface to the Second Edition, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11. 45 Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (London, 1769), 55. 46 Walpole, Preface, 14. The words “a second time” allude to Voltaire’s initial enthusiasm for Shakespeare, which had first brought the playwright to the attention of French readers. 47 Walpole, Preface, 14. 48 Voltaire, Candide, in The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Besterman, vol. 48 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1980), 223 (my translation). 49 Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 217. 50 Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, ed. M. Beuchot, 4 vols (Paris, 1829), 3:329. Voltaire writes of Canada, “pays couvert de neiges et de glaces huit mois de l’année, habité par des barbares, des ours et des castors.” 51 Voltaire, “Of Savages,” in The Philosophy of History (London, 1766), 35.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Anon. Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet. London, 1736. Barclay, James. An Examination of Mr. Kenrick’s Review of Mr. Johnson’s Edition of Shakespeare. London, 1766. Chambers, Ephraim. Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. 5 vols. London, 1778–88. Dryden, John. An Essay of Dramatick Poesie. In The Works of John Dryden. Edited by H.T. Swedenberg, Jr, et al., vol. 17. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971. Farquhar, George. “A Discourse upon Comedy, in Reference to the English Stage.” In Love and Business: In a Collection of Occasionary Verse, and Eipistolary [sic] Prose, 112–59. London, 1702. Foote, Samuel. The Roman and the English Comedy Consider’d and Compar’d. London, 1747.

Shakespeare, Voltaire, and the Seven Years’ War  167 Guthrie, William. An Essay upon English Tragedy. London, [1747?]. Montagu, Elizabeth. An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear. London, 1769. – The Letters of Mrs. E. Montagu. 4 vols. London, 1809–13. Morgann, Maurice. An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff. London, 1777. Murphy, Arthur. The Gray’s-Inn Journal. 2 vols. London, 1756. -– “To M. de Voltaire.” In The Orphan of China, a Tragedy, as It Is Performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane, 89–96. London, 1759. Purney, Thomas. Pastorals. Viz. The Bashful Swain: and Beauty and Simplicity. London, 1717. R., J. “Ode to Shakespeare.” In St James’s Chronicle, 16–19 February 1771. Shakespeare, William. Mr William Shakespeare His Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Edited by Edward Capell. 10 vols. London, 1768. – The Plays of William Shakespeare. Edited by Samuel Johnson. 8 vols. London, 1765. – The Works of Shakespear. Edited by Alexander Pope. 6 vols. London, 1725. Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet). Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe des jugements d’un écrivain anglais, ou manifeste au sujet des honneurs du pavillon entre les théâtres de Londres et de Paris. Paris, 1761. – The Complete Works of Voltaire / Les oeuvres complètes de Voltaire. Edited by Theodore Besterman et al. Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire; Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1968–. – Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations. Edited by M. Beuchot. 4 vols. Paris, 1829. – “Of Savages.” In The Philosophy of History, 34–45. London, 1766. – Voltaire on Shakespeare. Edited by Theodore Besterman. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 54. Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1967. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. Edited by Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Whalley, Peter. An Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare. London, 1748. Wilkes, Thomas. A General View of the Stage. London, 1759. Secondary Sources Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

168  Frans De Bruyn Lounsbury, Thomas R. Shakespeare and Voltaire. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1902. Mason, Hadyn. “Voltaire versus Shakespeare: The Lettre à l’académie française (1776).” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (1995): 173–84. Newman, Gerald. The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987. Prince, Kathryn. “Shakespeare and English Nationalism.” In Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Peter Sabor and Fiona Ritchie, 277–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Rhodes, Neil. Shakespeare and the Origins of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Stone, George Winchester, Jr. “Garrick’s Long Lost Alteration of Hamlet.” PMLA 49 (1934): 890–921. Vickers, Brian. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. 6 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974–81. Von Maltzahn, Nicholas. “Acts of Kind Service: Milton and the Patriot Literature of Empire.” In Milton and the Imperial Vision, edited by Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, 233–54. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999. Watts, Carol. The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Weinbrot, Howard D. Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. – “Enlightenment Canon Wars: Anglo-French Views of Literary Greatness.” ELH 60 (1993): 79–100. Williams, David. “Voltaire’s War with Shakespeare: The Appeal to Europe 1760–1764.” In Voltaire and the English, 79–100. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 179. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1979.

7 “What d’ye call him, Tierconneldrago …”: Oliver Goldsmith and the Seven Years’ War Michael J. Griffin

In his essay “On Public Rejoicings for Victory,” published in the sixth number of The Busy Body (20 October 1759), Oliver Goldsmith adopts the wry persona of a spectator figure perambulating amidst the celebrations for the taking of Quebec. While those around him enjoy Britain’s victory, the spectating narrator remains aloof. Something in his political temperament means that he cannot share the enthusiasm he is witnessing. Britain’s imperial competitor has been defeated, and yet the spectator betrays uneasiness about the nature of the competition and the integrity of the victory. His tone straddles patriotic pride and dismay at patriotism’s shallower excesses. As he observes: “While our British fleets and armies are earning laurels abroad, while victory courts us from every quarter, while our soldiers and sailors not only retrieve the fame of English valour, but raise our reputation above whatever history can shew; and mark the reign of George the Second, as the greater period of British glory; our citizens and mechanics at home are by no means idle, but deal blow for blow, and once more slay the slain.”1 The spectator is here voicing disdain for what might, in recent years, be termed the “gotcha” reflex – the tabloid-led joy supposed to be taken by ordinary citizens in the prowess of the military. When victories are won by the nation’s armed forces, “we shout for the victory at home,” and the fire and fury of battle are echoed by the celebratory fireworks in the streets: if they illuminate a city that soon must fall with infernal fire of bombs and hand-grenades, we illuminate our streets not less with faggots and candles; if their artillery thunders destruction in the ears of the enemy, we echo them with squibs and crackers at home, no less terrifying to a female ear; if some bravely fighting for their country lose their lives and fall dead

170  Michael J. Griffin on the field of battle in its defence; we have our bouts as well as they, and can produce our hundreds who have upon this occasion bravely become votaries for their country, and with true patriotism not disdained to fall dead – drunk in every house. (3:17)

Goldsmith’s spectator proclaims himself to be imperturbable; owing to his own circumstances he cannot gain or lose anything by victory or defeat abroad. He is “disinterested” in a financial sense but not, in a cultural or political sense, indifferent. He confesses himself affected by the celebrations, and indulges “a secret exultation”; as such he is “induced to forget the ravages of war and human calamity, in national satisfaction” (3:17). Yet this is an ambiguous response. In delineating a spectator who forgets the ravages of war and calamity, Goldsmith is reminding his readers of those very ravages. This ambiguity of feeling prompts the narrator to investigate the response to victory of “different ranks of people” (3:17). From Ludgate to Charing Cross, the spectator traverses the city on “the night of the illumination; with all the intrinsic nothingness of a busy man, yet with the seeming importance of a man of business; determined to jostle in every crowd, to mix in every company, and peep in at every frequented place of resort.” First he goes to Ashley’s Punch-house, where the old waiter serves up a mixture of “politics and punch” and belittles the French – much to the pleasure of his clientele – as effeminate and militarily weak. From here, he ventures outside to witness a public row between “a poor tradesman and his wife”: The woman, whose patriotism was by no means so strong as that of her husband, was assuring the mob, who had officially gathered round not to prevent, but to promote a quarrel, that he had sent his waistcoat to the pawnbrokers, in order to buy candles for the illumination. The husband, who was, it seems a journeyman shoemaker, damned her for being a Jacobite in her heart; that she had not a spice of loyalty in her whole body; that she was as fond of getting drunk one day as another: If the French had got the better, continues he, what would become of our property? If Monsieurs in wooden shoes come among us, what would become of the gentle craft, what would become of the nation, when perhaps Madam Pompadour herself might have shoes scoped out of an old pear-tree; (and raising his voice) you ungrateful slut, tell me, if the French popishes had come over, d——n my blood what would become of our religion? (3:18–19)

“What d’ye call him, Tierconneldrago …”  171

The essayist himself affects to be studiously impartial in this dispute, yet the manner in which it is presented here is loaded in ways that have not generally been detected or discussed by critics. Dustin Griffin, in his generally illuminating account of Goldsmith’s peculiarly non-committal brand of patriotism, holds that he “hesitated to join in the celebration of British victories, the acquisition of empire, or the robust health of English political ‘liberty.’” In portraying Goldsmith as a rather old-fashioned and idiosyncratic figure who is, nonetheless, of the “loyal but doubting Opposition,” Griffin certainly has aspects of Goldsmith’s oppositional stance correct, but he is vague on the sources of Goldsmith’s disaffection.2 He refers only glancingly to the particular problem of “national identity and local attachment” in Goldsmith’s critique of empire. If anything, for Griffin, Goldsmith’s anxieties about empire, thought through primarily in English terms, are bound up with his anxieties about the future of poetry. Thus, Goldsmith is a professional author worrying about the longer-term integrity of his poetic vocation in the first instance, and only incidentally a disaffected outsider. This confusion about Goldsmith’s motives extends to more egregious underestimations of his capacity for profound irony in dealing with the Seven Years’ War. In her otherwise absorbing study The Cultural Work of Empire (2007), Carol Watts implicates Goldsmith, and in particular “On Public Rejoicings for Victory,” in popular patriotic sentiment. Goldsmith, Watts argues, contributed to the sense of an imagined community, united in support of an imperial war effort, and sharing a common sense of national purpose in time of conflict. Like many retroactively applied constructs, however, Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community,” much like Habermas’s “public sphere,” is ill-equipped to accommodate the smaller ironies of literary and social compromise, or indeed the ironic modes of expression that compromise often instigates. Goldsmith’s essay, in Watts’s analysis, contributes in its own small way to the hegemonic manufacture of imperialist consent. But her analysis stems, in her inclusion of Goldsmith specifically, from an error of literary analysis, in that she refers to the voice of the essayist as being equally, or fully, that of Oliver Goldsmith himself. For Watts, Goldsmith here creates a monolithic, masculine image of the crowd, “thus defusing the excessive multiplicity of the crowd into an identifiable yet generalised (and non-calculable) national community in which his own ‘satisfaction’ is increased, ‘as if by reflection from theirs.’ This is an image that diverts reciprocity into narcissistic self-affirmation.”3 This argument, however, effaces Goldsmith’s authorial distance; and indeed, to make such an argument work, the

172  Michael J. Griffin

depiction of the crowd cannot be allowed to be anything other than monolithic. Yet an individual member of this imagined community – the silent, and pointedly silenced, wife – is worthy of further consideration. For her lack of patriotism, she stands accused by her husband of Jacobitism. Goldsmith himself was an Irish Tory, and, as Boswell reported with surprise in his Life of Johnson (1791), he was also, however anachronistically, a Jacobite. It is this aspect of his political character, it will be argued here, that informed the critical view of British imperial expansion in his essays and poems of the 1750s and 1760s.4 Goldsmith’s oeuvre is still a contested entity, given that those parts of it which were published in periodicals appeared anonymously. More than this, there is a political wavering in his writings that reflects the different political views of Goldsmith’s editors. For the most part, midcentury periodicals tended to cater to the patriotic interpretation of international events and to the Whiggish belief that Britain’s international power, and the liberties that underpinned it, were grounded in the Glorious Revolution. In this interpretation, the Revolution’s curtailment of monarchical power, in favour of an expanding commercial oligarchy, had inaugurated the present historical moment, in which Britain was accelerating imperial contestation in the New World. Yet Goldsmith himself, by his own admission, was only “half a patriot” when it came to celebrating imperial expansion (4:266). He was as suspicious of Britain’s aims in war as he was of the duplicity of her French opponent. However motivated he may have been by disdain for imperial warring, Goldsmith’s essays were necessarily coy in their rhetorical approach. Mainstream public opinion was treacherous terrain for a dissident to negotiate. Given the lack of autonomy periodical writers often experienced when working for controlling booksellers, there were inevitable constraints on what one in Goldsmith’s professional position as a journalist could say, even anonymously.5 Several writings on the Seven Years’ War attributed to Goldsmith were originally published anonymously; as a result, their attribution to him is not absolutely certain. Yet they are generally allowed to be part of his oeuvre and, as such, their continuities and discontinuities represent an intriguing aspect of the career of Goldsmith: an Irish Jacobite writing professionally on the London periodical circuit in the thick of imperial contest. To tease out this point further, we can begin with a clear, politically suggestive resonance between “On Public Rejoicings for Victory” and another contemporary essay. Goldsmith’s “Description of the Manners and Customs of the Native Irish. In a Letter from an English Gentleman”

“What d’ye call him, Tierconneldrago …”  173

was published two months after the essay on “Public Rejoicings,” in the Weekly Magazine for 29 December 1759. In the later essay, Goldsmith deploys the authorial persona of a mildly pompous English gentleman who has ventured from Dublin into the Irish interior, where he meets a poor family huddled in a hovel. The family, the weary father, and the ragged poverty in which they live are objects of sympathy. The father reflects on recent global events: Lord, my dear Soul, says my Landlord. Taking Quebec, burning the French fleet, ruining what d’ye call him, Tierconneldrago, what signifies all that, where is the wonder there, we have been told here that the king of Prussia, took the whole French army, and fifty pieces of cannon prisoners of war, there is something in such news as that; between ourselves my dear soul, I hate the double hearted French, for they have always deceived the Irish, but for all that my dear I love king James in my heart, and God knows I have a good right for my father lost a very good estate by him. (3:28)

The father is indifferent, as is the poor merchant’s wife in “On Public Rejoicings for Victory,” to celebrations of imperial success in the Seven Years’ War. In the Irish essay, the head of the family is only vaguely aware of the Battle of Ticonderoga as a turning point in the “year of victories,” confusing the name with that of an Irish county, Tyrconnell (Donegal), and with the title of James II’s Irish viceroy, Richard Talbot, the Earl of Tyrconnell. His indifference is telling; what seems like an Irish bull is really a pointed confusion of, and connection between, predicaments in Ireland and America. Aside from his indifference towards both of the protagonists – the English and the French – across the Atlantic, all that this “native” Irishman knows for sure is that the situation has worsened for his family, as it has for his nation, since the Glorious Revolution. The tactic of impersonation allows the Weekly Magazine reader to trust the author-as-traveller; the Jacobite views of the lowly patriarch are not necessarily those of the essay’s author, but they may well be. Both essays present as a brake on chauvinistic excess someone who is, at “heart,” a Jacobite. In “On Public Rejoicings for Victory,” to return to that essay, Goldsmith’s politics are further evidenced by an ironic commentary upon the essayist-persona’s own Whiggery. Having witnessed the row between the husband and wife in which Jacobitism is given as a clear subtext for indifference to the capture of Quebec, the essayist surveys the commotion of joyous celebration, with “the mob shouting, rockets

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flying, women persecuted by squibs and crackers, and yet seeming pleased with their distress.” Amidst the confusion he indulges in Whiggish self-congratulation, regarding himself as blessed to be a citizen “in this glorious political society,” a society in which liberty is guaranteed and by which slavery is vanquished. In his free individuality he is superior to slaves and the equal of a king: “My king, my country, and I, are friends together, and by a mutual intercourse of kindness and duty, give and receive social happiness” (3:19). In a characteristically deflating moment, Goldsmith interrupts these pleasing reflections by having the tails of the spectator’s wig set on fire by a flying firework. The ironies are enhanced as the spectator proceeds through the coffee houses. In the first of these establishments a gentleman is reading, much to the amusement of those gathered around him, “an heroic poem upon the conquest of Minorca” (3:20) – a French conquest that the British victory at Quebec had rendered insignificant. Subsequently, at The Smyrna in Pall Mall, such triumphalism is tempered as the patrons discuss the terms of peace for the enemy. Most seem determined not just to take all of North America from the French but to humiliate them entirely, rather than to arrange an honourable peace. The essayist intervenes in their discussions, rather less ironically in his concluding paragraphs, arguing that “it is very possible for a country to be very victorious and very wretched.” To demand the impossible of a vanquished foe is ultimately to defer the peace, and to render the victor equally ridiculous. Towards the conclusion of the essay, Goldsmith thus converges with his observing persona to make a case against imperial overreach and triumphalism. He begins his final paragraph with a rhetorical flourish: “A country at war resembles a flambeaux, the brighter it burns, the sooner it is often wasted” (3:21). This imagery was subsequently developed and reworked in what is perhaps Goldsmith’s strongest political statement, his anti-imperialist, pro-monarchical, and effectively Jacobite poem, The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society (1765): Yes, brother, curse with me that baleful hour, When first ambition struck at regal power; And thus, polluting honour in its source, Gave wealth to sway the mind with double force. Have we not seen, round Britain’s peopled shore, Her useful sons exchang’d for useless ore? Seen all her triumphs but destruction haste, Like flaring tapers brightening as they waste?

“What d’ye call him, Tierconneldrago …”  175 Seen Opulence, her grandeur to maintain, Lead stern Depopulation in her train, And over fields where scatter’d hamlets rose, In barren, solitary pomp repose? (4:266–7)

Across his poetry and prose, Goldsmith thus drew, with this image of the flaring taper, a symbolic connection between the self-destructive dynamics of commercial expansion and imperial war.6 In The Traveller itself, Goldsmith was entreating his brother to join in the condemnation of a new commercial oligarchy that he regarded as having subverted the central authority of the monarchy in favour of the pursuit of wealth for wealth’s sake. This is a pursuit that leads the elite to covet the “wealth of climes, where savage nations roam” – a form of wealth “Pillaged from slaves to purchase slaves at home” (4:266). The riches and splendour generated by such activity are ultimately revealed to be at the disposal only of the elite, while the rump of the population is exposed to the displacements and vagaries of unregulated commerce. For Goldsmith, the poorer sections of society were doubly neglected towards the end of George II’s reign, as attention was transferred far abroad to a war that Goldsmith himself considered a waste of the nation’s political will and social wealth. Goldsmith’s writing repeatedly and poignantly depicts the plight of the emigrant, as well as that of the returned “broken soldier” (4:293), sacrificing so much in wars not of their making – wars that ultimately depleted the vigour of the mother country. Indeed, Watts concedes a contradiction in Goldsmith’s oeuvre and acknowledges Goldsmith’s pointing up, in the seventeenth of his “Chinese Letters” (collected as The Citizen of the World in 1762), the “strange absurdity” of an imperial acquisitiveness that prompted the nation to exchange “her best and bravest subjects for raw silk, hemp and tobacco; her hardy veterans, and honest tradesmen must be truck’d for a box of snuff or a silk petticoat” (2:75).7 In that letter, titled “Of the War carried on between France and England, with its frivolous motives,” Goldsmith adopts the persona of a Chinese philosopher living in London – a device fitting for an Irish outsider bemused and fascinated by London intellectual, social, and political life – to comment upon the national humour in the midst of war. Goldsmith’s philosopher has little stomach for the fight, and seems nauseated by the violence and by its motives: “They are at present engaged in a very destructive war, have already spilled much blood, are excessively irritated; and all upon account of one side’s desiring to

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wear greater quantities of furs than the other” (2:72–3). Furs, in this barbed summation of the war’s objectives, stand metonymically for the social malaise of luxury back home. As with his great friend and mentor Samuel Johnson, Goldsmith’s indictment of the absurdity of fighting a bloody war to ensure the provision of luxuries was mixed with a sense of the injustice suffered by the natives, a sensitivity expressed rarely enough by commentators at the time. The North American “Indians,” in Goldsmith’s account, might well have been left in peace indefinitely if only the English had not discovered that furs were abundant in their country. A more violent and oppressive period of imperialism activated, and was in turn energized by, an increase in luxurious indulgence at home – “in order,” Goldsmith ironically remarks, “to have the people supplied with proper quantities of this necessary commodity” (2:73). The French, writes Goldsmith, “were as fond of muffs and tippets as the English”; and thus the war was joined when the two monarchs each granted to citizens “what was not his to give”: Wherever the French landed, they called the country their own; and the English took possession wherever they came upon the same equitable pretensions. The harmless savages made no opposition; and could the intruders have agreed together, they might peaceably have shared this desolate country between them. But they quarrelled about the boundaries of their settlements, about grounds and rivers to which neither side could show any other right than that of power, and which neither could occupy but by usurpation. Such is the contest, that no honest man can heartily wish success to either party. (2:73–4)

Goldsmith used the word “savage” or “savages” in tones as various as the registers – poetic, political, and professional – across which he wrote. In the passage just quoted, the word is used in a supercilious way, characteristic of much contemporary natural-historical discourse, to describe the putatively primitive natives of North America. In Goldsmith’s poems, such American “savages” are often dangerous, or “murderous,” as they are described in The Deserted Village of 1770 (4:301), but such murderousness is not morally judged. It is simply the inevitable response of a people defending from usurpers a territory to which it is indigenous. Elsewhere, in Goldsmith’s natural history and journalism, the “savages” are harmless and, what is perhaps worse, ­unintelligent. Whether harmful or harmless, however, America, for

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Goldsmith, belonged by right to its native peoples. Across Goldsmith’s oeuvre, all European designs on that continent are deemed to consist of mere rapaciousness. Goldsmith’s sentiments here are close to, if not directly derived from, those of Johnson, as expressed in the Literary Magazine during the summer of 1756 in the very early stages of the war: The general subject of the present war is sufficiently known. It is allowed on both sides, that hostilities began in America, and that the French and English quarrelled about the boundaries of their settlements, about grounds and rivers to which, I am afraid, neither can shew any other right than that of power, and which neither can occupy but by usurpation, and the dispossession of the natural lords and original inhabitants. Such is the contest that no honest man can heartily wish success to either party.8

Goldsmith clearly took the last sentence of his paragraph and part of the preceding one from Johnson. Johnson’s, however, is the more excoriating of the two essays. In fact, it is a remarkably angry piece, using especially censorious language to indict the belligerents’ motives in America. Donald Greene, in his headnote, describes the essay as “one of Johnson’s finest smaller pieces of writing” and remarks upon the “white heat of the underlying indignation against fraud and injustice” (185n). Though his tone is not as severe, Goldsmith took his cue from Johnson to critique the ideology of supposedly consensual colonization. Johnson takes a highly jaundiced view of the notion that American lands were there for the taking from compliant natives. Nor, in his view, was the struggle for American territory to be thought of as merely a dispute between a benign, liberal European power and a more autocratic one. Rather, “The American dispute between the French and us is … the quarrel of two robbers for the spoils of a passenger” (188). In his own essay in the “Chinese Letters,” Goldsmith proceeds to develop, in line with his larger political argument on the issue of empire, a bodily metaphor: the political body is weakened as it is overextended. “If the limbs grow too large for the body,” he suggests, “their size instead of improving, will diminish the vigour of the whole.” By this analogy, the colonies represent a drain on the home country. There are those who regard the colonies as receptacles for “the refuse of their countrymen, and (as they express it) ... the waste of an exuberant nation.” For Goldsmith, on the contrary, emigrants consist in the main “of the laborious and enterprising, of such men who ought to be regarded

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as the sinews of the people, and cherished with every degree of political indulgence” (2:75). Goldsmith’s commentary on the war is also characterized by a concern for the soldiery itself, which, alongside the peasantry, he considers one of the most robust sections of society. He deplores their exploitation as expendable operatives used to enact, on a global level, a heinous international policy; he regards them as better deployed in the defence of the country itself than in the expansion of its interests in other realms, particularly where that expansion only induces luxury at home. Consequently, Goldsmith’s writing incorporates an early example of that pro-military ideology according to which troops are loved and wars hated. The earliest examples of this perspective in his works are to be found in his early reviews of books and pamphlets relating to the controversy concerning Admiral John Byng (1704–57). To Robert Donald Spector, “no single event better illustrates the climate of despair and hysteria that characterised the English nation” during the opening stages of the war than the fall of Minorca, following which Admiral Byng was relieved of his duty and brought home under arrest, accused of having delayed in reaching the scene of the action and of reluctance to commit his forces fully in battle.9 Byng, in the (manipulated) popular imagination, had let Minorca fall when a defence was possible; upon his return, he was court-martialled and executed. Political circumstances dictated that he was to suffer the very worst penalty, in order to protect the Duke of Newcastle’s administration.10 Newcastle had enlisted pamphleteers to attack Byng, and the controversy over his fate continued from May 1756 to March 1757. The press mediated and often stoked the anxiety and anger generated by the controversy. Pitt had forewarned of the fall of Minorca; thus, inevitably, the Newcastle administration would fall to Pitt. There were roughly sixty pamphlets produced on the Byng affair, and it inspired the withering satire of the twenty-third chapter of Voltaire’s Candide (1759), in which Candide witnesses his execution by firing squad and is told that “Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.”11 Voltaire, indeed, had even campaigned on behalf of Byng. Goldsmith quickly found himself immersed in the Byng debates, but not at first in such a way as to allow him to express critical views. Disaffected with his menial work for a school in London, unconvinced of his prospects for a literary career, and on the point of emigrating, Goldsmith, after a fateful meeting with Ralph Griffiths, entered into an agreement with the latter to write for his Monthly Review in exchange

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for lodgings and a steady income. In conversation with Bishop Thomas Percy in 1773, Goldsmith attested to the compromises entailed by such paid journalism: “In this thraldom he lived for 7 or 8 months, Griffith [sic] & his wife continually objecting to everything he wrote & insisting on his implicitly submitting to their Corrections Interpolations &c.”12 Griffiths himself was pro-Newcastle, and Goldsmith’s pieces for the Monthly Review relating to the Byng affair have, accordingly, an uncharacteristically callous quality about them. There is no mercy for Byng in Goldsmith’s brief lines on the topic in the Monthly Review for May 1757. In his short review of a pamphlet titled The State of Minorca, and its Lost Condition when A___l B___g appeared off that Island, Goldsmith writes only that “this is a vindication, and an attempt to continue a controversy which the public may, by this time, wish to have done with” (1:17). In his equally brusque comment on Observations on the Twelfth Article of War, wherein the Nature of Negligence, Cowardice, and Disaffection, is Discussed, Goldsmith commends a “well written defence of the twelfth article of war, upon which the sentence against Admiral Byng was founded; and of the justness of that unhappy Commander’s punishment” (1:26). There is, however, a glimpse of Goldsmith’s irony in his notice of A Poem for the Better Success of his Majesty’s Arms against the French this Spring, with Part of Admiral Byng’s Tryal Versified. “This garland,” writes Goldsmith, “seems to have been composed by some loyal Soul, who we doubt not, would, upon occasion, be equally ready to testify his zeal at a bonfire, by flourishing his hat, and huzzaing for HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE!” (1:22). In these latter lines, at least, there is some sign of Goldsmith’s wariness of, and weariness with, patriotic excess. The fluctuating tone across these notices, then, suggests a watchful and censorious editorial eye eluded only by flashes of irony. Following his stint with Griffiths, Goldsmith moved on to work for Tobias Smollett at the Critical Review. Unlike the Monthly, which was run by a bookseller, and an intrusive bookseller at that, the Critical, under Smollett, allowed its contributors to operate uncensored.13 Perhaps a consequence of this editorial method was the more flexible stance on the Byng affair taken by the Critical. After initially joining in the general vilification, articles in the journal began to implicate the ministry (which included several of Smollett’s political opponents) in the failure at Minorca. More generally, Smollett’s views on the affair were closer to Goldsmith’s than they were to those of Griffiths. Smollett, for instance, disliked the mob, as he would demonstrate time and again (most vividly in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker [1771]), and the general

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populace’s unthinkingly singular focus on Byng the man, rather than on the regime, irked him. In Smollett’s History of England, Byng is represented as incapable, inexperienced, and perhaps under-resourced, but ultimately as a figure of sympathy and a victim of party considerations, who might justifiably have been given clemency: “and so impartial posterity will judge him, after all those dishonourable motives of faction and fear, by which his fate was influenced, shall be lost in oblivion, or remembered with disdain.”14 In the second volume of Goldsmith’s own History of England (1764), which derives in many respects from Smollett’s historical writing, Byng is similarly represented as inexperienced in real combat and, through no fault of his own, ill-prepared for the task with which he was charged in the Mediterranean. Goldsmith gives a poignant account of the very moment of Byng’s execution, one that commends him to a kinder posterity by virtue of his heroic stoicism in the face of death: The Admiral being thus abandoned to the stroke of justice, resolved at least, by the bravery of his dying, in some measure, to shew the injustice of the imputation of his being a coward. He maintained to the last his natural serenity; and, on the day fixed for his execution, when the boats belonging to the fleet being manned and armed, attended this solemnity in the harbour, the Admiral advanced from the cabbin [sic], where he had been imprisoned, to the deck, the place appointed for execution, with a composed step, and resolute countenance.15

Again, there is something of Johnson in Goldsmith’s tribute. Johnson had reviewed pamphlets on the Byng affair in the Literary Magazine in 1756. The opening of his first review had given a sense of the public ire, by referring to Byng’s “having had his effigies burnt in a hundred places, and his name disgraced by innumerable lampoons.” Yet Johnson also prefaced his review with the stinging imputation that Byng was “stigmatized with infamy, and pursued with clamours artfully excited to divert the public attention from the crimes and blunders of other men, and that while he is thus vehemently pursued for imaginary guilt, the real criminals are hoping to escape” (219).16 As with Goldsmith, Johnson’s defence of the admiral was related to a broader defence of the soldiery against public opinion, in circumstances where public anger at the venality of imperial motive would, in his view, have been more appropriate. In his essay “On the Bravery of the Common

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English Soldiers” in the British Magazine for January 1760, Johnson commended the ordinary British soldier for his courage. Yet his admiration was never given at the expense of glossing over social and political divisions – divisions of ideology and wealth – within the country itself. Although soldiers might fight for liberty, believing the nation they defended to be freer than those under absolute governments, for the common soldier such abstractions had little practical purchase: “Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving; and this choice is, I suppose equally allowed in every country” (283). Johnson had a nationalistic streak, but that sense of the “national” was, as he defined it in his Dictionary, no more than being “bigoted to one’s own country”: his chauvinism, such as it was, never spilled over into an enthusiasm for imperial conquest.17 Quite the opposite: for Clement Hawes, Johnson’s writings constitute a major critique of colonial modernity which is “all the more telling precisely because it arises from within the British Enlightenment.”18 Johnson’s Toryism interpreted commercial adventurism in empire as necessarily exploitative, and Goldsmith concurred. The soldiers who found themselves fighting wars on behalf of commercial interests were to be defended and celebrated for their valour despite, rather than because of, the causes that brought them into action. Accordingly, Goldsmith admired General Wolfe, going so far, in relating his family background to Bishop Percy, to claim a family connection. A sympathetic poem, “On the Taking of Quebec, and Death of General Wolfe,” published in the seventh number of The Busy Body (23 October 1759), has been attributed to Goldsmith, even though it is unusually inflated by his standards: AMIDST the clamour of exulting joys,   Which triumph forces from the patriot heart; Grief dares to mingle her soul-piercing voice,   And quells the raptures which from pleasures start; O WOLFE, to thee a streaming flood of woe,   Sighing we pay, and think e’en conquest dear, QUEBEC in vain shall teach our breast to glow,   Whilst thy sad fate extorts the heart-wrung tear. Alive the foe thy dreadful vigour fled,   And saw thee fall with joy-pronouncing eyes; Yet they shall know thou conquerest, though dead!   Since from thy tomb a thousand heroes rise. (4:413–14)19

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If Goldsmith did write the poem, he did so, according to Alan McNairn, because of his oft-claimed “distant kinship” with Wolfe.20 Beyond the possibility of kinship, however, the poem’s dignifying characterization of Wolfe is echoed in the prose account of Goldsmith’s History of England, which goes further in decrying the motives of the war than does the poem. In the History, Goldsmith laments the barbarous behaviour of the imperial contestants, and he praises by contrast Wolfe, who “disdained these base proceedings, and carried on all the terrors of war with the humanity of a truly civilized European.” The spoils of war fail to tally against the loss of human talent: “Perhaps the loss of such a man was greater to the nation than the conquering of all Canada was advantageous; but it is the misfortune of humanity, that we never know true greatness till that moment when we are going to lose it.”21 If this eulogy is Goldsmith’s, it would have been his first poetic foray into print in London, so it is perhaps worth allowing the poem some of the overwrought sentiment that he would expunge from his later, more honed works. Measured against The Traveller, certainly, it reads something like an apprentice piece. Nonetheless, the similarity of its sentiments to those in the History and in “On Public Rejoicings for Victory” should be borne in mind, for they provide an interesting sidelight on Goldsmith and his thought. The poem contains inflections and sentiments that, when cross-referenced with these other works, seem eminently Goldsmithian. The very scene into which the poem inserts itself, for instance, is similar to that of “Public Rejoicings.” It opens “Amidst the clamour of exulting joys,” much as the essay’s spectator enters into the melee of celebration and chauvinism. In the poem, joys are forced from the “patriot heart,” a phrasing that anticipates key lines in The Traveller: Fear, pity, justice, indignation start, Tear off reserve, and bare my swelling heart; ’Till half a patriot, half a coward grown, I fly from petty tyrants to the throne. (4:266)

In The Traveller, the heart is bared, and in that baring it takes a strange pride in the free expression of indignation. The swelling subsides to a tempered awareness of the questionable legitimacy of patriotic fervour in the context of imperialist and commercial adventurism. Thus, the patriot heart is, in both poems, made to slow and calm itself, and is deflated to, and by, ambivalence. The Wolfe poem’s anticipation and

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reversal of The Traveller’s rhyming of “start” and “heart” is also intriguing. The heart is the figurative seat of the emotions, but those emotions are only started, never allowed to run unchecked. They are always quelled or halved; correspondingly, the patriotic love of a hypothesized freedom is, from a more sober perspective, sternly questioned. Even in this tribute to Wolfe, itself a critique of imperialism, something of Goldsmith’s Jacobitism is to be found, for the valorization of Wolfe corresponded with the positive feeling towards him in the Scottish Highlands, where he was still honoured in legend as a man who, at Culloden, defied the “Butcher” Cumberland’s order to shoot a wounded Highlander.22 His honour as a soldier, whatever his mission, might have been enhanced further for Goldsmith by such behaviour. Goldsmith repeatedly expressed his wish that soldiers be properly cared for upon their return, especially when injured – a conviction informed by his championing of the plight of the lower orders, so often pressed into military service in wars of adventure. In honouring military commanders destroyed by the Seven Years’ War, and in representing them as having been, in one way or another, crucified in a dubious cause, Goldsmith also followed a characteristic pro-Stuart trope, familiar from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). In this trope, noble figures, rendered all the more admirable in the stoical manner of their dying, are sacrificed by, or to, mercantile imperialism.23 This narrative device was less an obsequious fetishization of the heroic individual than it was a means to critique allegorically the factional clamour and prehensile social forces that would, to the Tory and Jacobite mind, prove the undoing of Britain and – more poignantly again for Goldsmith – Ireland. Tory and Jacobite suspicions about the motives and the ethical ramifications of the Seven Years’ War are exemplified in the writings of Johnson and Goldsmith, respectively. Johnson was a cultural arbiter, whose insistence on proper standards in criticism translated and expanded into a broader critique of imperialism (which, for Johnson, lacked a proper ethical compass). Goldsmith stood alongside Johnson as a culturally conservative critic of militarism and expansive nationalism. In comparison with Johnson, Goldsmith was hampered by professional imperatives and by his relative obscurity as a writer during the period of the war. Yet Goldsmith drew upon and cited Johnson’s cultural authority in order more effectively to express his own disdain for uncritical chauvinism. Writing in the constraining and anonymous publishing milieu of mid-eighteenth-century London, Goldsmith nonetheless stands as a compelling example of intellectual dissonance during wartime.

184  Michael J. Griffin NOTES 1 Oliver Goldsmith, “On Public Rejoicings for Victory,” in The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 3:16–17. References to Goldsmith’s writings from this, the standard edition of his works, will be given parenthetically in the text. 2 Dustin Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 205. Griffin’s argument finds support in Ingrid Horrocks’s treatment of the wanderer motif in The Traveller. See Horrocks, “‘Circling Eye’ and ‘Houseless Stranger’: The New Eighteenth-­ Century Wanderer (Thomson to Goldsmith),” ELH 77 (2010): 665–87. 3 Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 156. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991) and Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 4 In Boswell’s Life, the following remark is recorded for 15 April 1773: “GOLDSMITH. ‘Yes; all our happy revolutions. They have hurt our constitution, and will hurt it, till we mend it by another HAPPY REVOLUTION.’—I never before discovered that my friend Goldsmith had so much of the old prejudice in him.” See James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G.B. Hill and L.F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–50), 2:224. On the subject of Goldsmith’s Jacobitism, see Michael Griffin, “Delicate Allegories, Deceitful Mazes: Goldsmith’s Landscapes,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Iris an Dá Chultúr 16 (2001): 104–17. 5 See Richard Taylor, Goldsmith as Journalist (London: Associated University Presses, 1993). Taylor’s impressive account places Goldsmith’s periodical work in a threefold context: that of “the war, the changing demands of his readers, and the innovations and adaptations of an emerging profession” (11). 6 The imagery of the flaring taper appears again in “Some Thoughts Preliminary to a General Peace,” which Goldsmith contributed to the Weekly Magazine for 29 December 1759: “a country may be very wretched and very successful, resembling a lighted taper, which the brighter it blazes, only consumes the faster” (3:32). In this instance, he used the Roman and Ottoman empires as cautionary examples. Goldsmith revised this essay as “Thoughts upon the Present Situation of Affairs” in October 1761 for the Lady’s Magazine, adopting a supposedly “feminine” stance in an added

“What d’ye call him, Tierconneldrago …”  185 opening paragraph: “In imitation of our great queen, I could eagerly desire to see the sword sheathed, and our brothers, fathers, husbands, children, returned to safety. To protract the war may bring an accession of wealth, or honour; but I doubt whether it can add new happiness.” See Goldsmith, New Essays, ed. Ronald S. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927), 90. 7 See Watts, Cultural Work, 16, 80, 95. 8 Samuel Johnson, “Observations on the Present State of Affairs,” in Political Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 186. All further references to Johnson’s periodical writings on the war are from this volume, and page numbers will be given parenthetically in the text. 9 Robert Donald Spector, English Literary Periodicals and the Climate of Opinion during the Seven Years’ War (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1996), 16. 10 For a sympathetic account of Byng’s fate, see Gerald French, The Martyrdom of Admiral Byng (Glasgow: William Maclellan, 1961). For a more even, neutral account, see Brian Tunstall, Admiral Byng and the Loss of Minorca (London: Philip Allan & Co., 1928). 11 Voltaire, Candide ou l’optimisme, in Romans et Contes de Voltaire, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), 238. 12 Cited in Goldsmith, Works, 1:3. See Katherine C. Balderston, The History and Sources of Percy’s Memoir of Goldsmith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 15–16. 13 Taylor, Goldsmith as Journalist, 35. 14 Tobias Smollett, Continuation of the Complete History of England, 5 vols (­London, 1763), 1:480. 15 Oliver Goldsmith, An History of England, in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son, 2 vols (London, 1764), 2:211. The phrasing of the first line of this description derives from Smollett, who had written that “The unfortunate admiral being thus abandoned to the stroke of justice, prepared himself for death with resignation and tranquillity”: Smollett, Continuation, 1:477. 16 There follows in Greene’s volume of Johnson’s political writing a “Review of the Conduct of the Ministry impartially examined” (252–60), in which Johnson inveighs against some of the alarmism, manipulated by government and vested interests, which fired public opinion. For an account of Johnson’s response to the Byng controversy, see James A. Butler, “Samuel Johnson: Defender of Admiral Byng,” Cornell Library Journal 7 (Winter 1969): 25–48. 17 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London, 1755), n.p.

186  Michael J. Griffin 18 Clement Hawes, The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (­Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 170. 19 Goldsmith did write for the Busy Body at the time of composition, and the poem was reprinted in The Poetical and Dramatic Works just six years after his death in 1780. See The Poetical and Dramatic Works of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B., Now First Collected, 2 vols (London, 1780), 1:118. The poem appears again in the 1786 edition of this collection and in volume 70 of The Works of the English Poets. With Prefaces, Biographical and Critical by Samuel Johnson (London, 1790), 82. It was also published in The Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith. In One Volume (London, 1792), 80. 20 Alan McNairn, Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 54. 21 Goldsmith, History of England, 2:240, 241. 22 See W.A. Speck, The Butcher: The Duke of Cumberland and the Suppression of the ’45 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981). 23 See Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early EighteenthCentury Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 58.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Boswell, James. Life of Johnson. Edited by G.B. Hill and L.F. Powell. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–50. Goldsmith, Oliver. The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith. Edited by Arthur Friedman. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. – An History of England, in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to His Son. 2 vols. London, 1764. – New Essays. Edited by Ronald S. Crane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927. – The Poetical and Dramatic Works of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B., Now First Collected. 2 vols. London, 1780. – The Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith. In One Volume. London, 1792. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. London, 1755. – Political Writings. Edited by Donald J. Greene. Volume 10 of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Smollett, Tobias. Continuation of the Complete History of England. 5 vols. ­London, 1763. Voltaire. Candide ou l’optimisme. In Romans et Contes de Voltaire. Edited by René Pomeau. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966.

“What d’ye call him, Tierconneldrago …”  187 Secondary Sources Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Balderston, Katherine C. The History and Sources of Percy’s Memoir of Goldsmith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926. Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Butler, James A. “Samuel Johnson: Defender of Admiral Byng.” Cornell Library Journal 7 (Winter 1969): 25–48. French, Gerald. The Martyrdom of Admiral Byng. Glasgow: William Maclellan, 1961. Griffin, Dustin. Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Griffin, Michael. “Delicate Allegories, Deceitful Mazes: Goldsmith’s Landscapes.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Iris an Dá Chultúr 16 (2001): 104–17. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Hawes, Clement. The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Horrocks, Ingrid. “‘Circling Eye’ and ‘Houseless Stranger’: The New Eighteenth-Century Wanderer (Thomson to Goldsmith).” ELH 77 (2010): 665–87. McNairn, Alan. Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Speck, W.A. The Butcher: The Duke of Cumberland and the Suppression of the ’45. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. Spector, Robert Donald. English Literary Periodicals and the Climate of Opinion during the Seven Years’ War. The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1996. Taylor, Richard. Goldsmith as Journalist. London: Associated University Presses, 1993. Tunstall, Brian. Admiral Byng and the Loss of Minorca. London: Philip Allan and Co., 1928. Watts, Carol. The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

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PART THREE Individuals and Identities: Status, Gender, and Race

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8 The View from St James’s Palace in 1759: A Court Perspective on the Annus Mirabilis Nigel Aston

Nowhere was news of what would be known to posterity as the Seven Years’ War awaited more anxiously in 1759 than at St James’s Palace.1 Here was the seat of royal authority situated adjacent to the agencies of administration in Whitehall, all presided over by a doddery seventyfive-year-old monarch: George II, entering the thirty-third year of his reign as king of Great Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanover.2 At St James’s, government activity, court observances, and the private lives of the royal family intersected and were keenly and sometimes wryly observed by the subject of this essay, John, fifth Baron Berkeley of Stratton (1697–1773). As Captain of the Honourable Band of Gentlemen Pensioners (the royal bodyguard created by Henry VIII at his accession in 1509), Lord Berkeley was a senior member of the royal household, with ceremonial, administrative, and political duties to discharge, acting alongside the Lord Chamberlain (the fourth Duke of Devonshire), the Lord Steward (the third Duke of Rutland), the Treasurer of the Household, and other senior officers to make the court function. He was frequently present in person as couriers came and went with their dispatches and politicians arrived to see the king and meet one another at the levees and drawing rooms. Berkeley missed very little of importance, or apparent importance, for unofficially he was also a confidant of the royal family and held private and privileged information about their view of the politicians, public affairs – and each other. Many of these delicate details went into the run of diaries that he kept from the mid-1750s through to the early 1760s, which has recently come to light. This important new source of evidence for Anglo-Hanoverian high politics discloses the reactions of some leading participants in British public life to events in the annus mirabilis, and confirms that the general

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apprehensiveness that marked the beginning of 1759 (which was registered by the royal household) changed to near-universal delight as the news of British martial and naval accomplishment came in. The diaries also serve to remind historians of the continued centrality of the court to the daily lives of the British political elite in the 1750s. It was an arena that remained vital, to quote Hannah Smith, “for the negotiation and practice of patronage, social display, and politics.”3 The achievements of the British armed forces in 1759 did nothing but confirm the centrality of this royal theatre to the life of the polity. None of its members could afford to ignore the court without appreciable cost to their own political fortunes. All this was self-evident to Berkeley the diarist. Hence these volumes. Berkeley was himself a man of strong political views that he was careful to veil: it would not be seemly for a polite courtier (and an impolite courtier was almost a mid-eighteenth-century contradiction in terms) to exhibit them publicly. He was there to serve the king and his family, and any advice he offered them on public affairs would be disclosed sub rosa. Berkeley otherwise kept his opinions to himself – and poured them out into his diaries. For this minor peer turns out to be one of the unrecognized and unpublished chroniclers of his times. After an earlier attempt at keeping a diary, his appointment to court office in 1756 appears to have encouraged him to try again, and this time he stuck to the task. Most days he returned home to offer a digest of public events supplemented by moralizing reflections and, from time to time, almost verbatim details of conversations he had had with other men and women about court. There is a fascinating mixture in the diaries of reflections on major public and military events combined with the comparative minutiae of court forms and gossip. Berkeley darts easily from small-scale to large-scale concerns. Thus he can turn from who and how many were at Prince George’s birthday party and in the next breath be observing the dramatic arrival at St James’s of the news of the Battle of Minden and Lord George Sackville’s disgrace. Berkeley appears to have sensed that he was living in interesting (military) times and should witness to what he saw as well as offer frank and critical comments about himself that are almost without parallel for a man of his rank. Such an attempt at scrupulous honesty in itself should encourage historians to take Berkeley seriously as a witness to events in the mid-eighteenth century. Another reason to relish the intelligent partiality of the diaries is that Berkeley was writing for himself. To publish would have been an act of vulgarity and a major breach of confidence

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that he would have deplored. And since he was the last of his line, without an heir to the barony, his sense of posterity was extremely nonspecific. He left his diaries to his descendants and they came through the Brownlow family without a stir until they were finally deposited in the Lincolnshire Archives Office some years after the death of the sixth Lord Brownlow in 1978. Berkeley may have been a professional courtier, but he was one endowed with an acute and sardonic sense of the bustling self-importance of ministers and courtiers alike (including himself). In pedigree and wealth he wanted for nothing, being a member of the Bruton (Somerset) branch of the family and, as such, a distant cousin of the Berkeleys of Berkeley Castle, one of the oldest families in England.4 He owned large amounts of freehold property in the expanding West End of London (including Berkeley Square, Stratton Street, and Bruton Street), and could also draw on the income of estates in four English counties. He was separated from his wife (an extremely shadowy figure) and lived instead without scandal with his first cousin, Lady Elizabeth Ariane Egerton, and her daughter, Anne. In politics, Berkeley’s paternal tradition was that of moderate Toryism but, like others of that kidney, he had tempered it to offer his services to the new Hanoverian dynasty. He was, above all, a courtier, for royal service was in his blood, the barony having originally been awarded in 1658 by Charles II, in exile, for the family’s unswerving devotion to the Stuarts. Berkeley first held court office in Lord Wilmington’s brief administration of 1742–3, as Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard – a post he relinquished in February 1746 after the Pelhams had triumphed against the efforts of the king, Granville, and Lord Bath to construct a ministry without them.5 For most of his life, the fifth Baron was the friend and follower of the onetime rival of the Pelhams, John, second Earl Granville, the accomplished cosmopolitan statesman whom George II admired for his mastery of Continental politics. It was Granville’s rapprochement with Henry Pelham and the Duke of Newcastle in June 1751 (accelerated by the sudden death of Frederick, Prince of Wales) that led to his appointment as the Lord President of the Council, the duke rightly judging that Granville’s ambition to form his own administration had expired.6 This nomination in turn allowed Berkeley fresh opportunity for holding office. He was made a Privy Councillor in February 1752, was appointed Treasurer of the Household in January 1756, and exchanged that post for the Captaincy of the Gentlemen Pensioners in November the same year.7 Apart from Granville, the other leading politician for whom he

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held a torch was Henry Fox, once the Lord President’s special protégé. Yet by 1759 Fox had missed out politically to William Pitt, the dominant force in the coalition with Newcastle that had existed since June 1757. Berkeley came to esteem Pitt as much as he deplored Newcastle, the politician he blamed (with some justification) for having kept Granville from earlier exercising the dominant political role to which his talents – as Berkeley believed – entitled him. It was Granville rather than Pitt who had helped Berkeley into the captaincy, a post he held from 1756 to 1762. He took its duties seriously, as one would expect given the king’s own care for the observation of ceremonial forms at court. The Pensioners, dressed in their light grey stockings, their Ramillies wigs, and their buckskin gloves, mounted guard daily in the king’s presence chamber, and they formed the immediate protective cordon around the monarch.8 Berkeley would be at their head on formal occasions, carrying an ebony staff with a gold head (the “gold stick”).9 Thus he was habitually present at St James’s Palace both on and off duty, which afforded him a privileged and intimate observation post on court life. He took his reportage of rumours, whispers, and events seriously and was bent on keeping embroidery in his diary to a minimum, reminding himself and an imagined reader that “I write down Reports as I hear them. If they prove false, I shall contradict them upon better information.”10 He may in 1757 have disclaimed knowledge about public matters because he saw few people, but he was being unduly modest: he saw things as close up as his predecessor diarists at George II’s court, notably John, Lord Hervey, and the Earl of Egmont, had done twenty-five years earlier. The year 1759 was, to say the least, one of anticipation, foreboding, and excitement for the royal court, with the threat of French invasion present for most of the year – an alarming possibility tempered by the prospect of further colonial gain (the great fortress of Louisbourg had been captured in 1758) and the achieving of a decisive breakthrough in the Continental war being waged in Germany.11 George II followed events with the engaged concern to be expected of a monarch with a profound knowledge of his armies and their officers, and a personal experience of service on the battlefield.12 By 1759 he could at least rest easier knowing that his son-in-law, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, had expelled French troops from his Electorate of Hanover the previous year, though the possibility of their return could never be discounted: the defeat of his son, the Duke of Cumberland, at the Battle of Hastenbeck, followed by the humiliating Convention of Klosterzeven, was not two years past.13

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The king was the principal royal resident of St James’s Palace.14 Having reigned for over thirty years, George had a familiarity with other monarchs and courts that was internationally acknowledged. Lord Berkeley of Stratton’s depictions of the septuagenarian king are shrewd, sympathetic, and often pungent. In mid-1758 he noted how the seventy-fouryear-old monarch “walks across the Drawing Room as easily, & lightly as possible, & has an elasticity in his muscles, that is very uncommon in so advanced an age.”15 Even so, the king was slowing down, reducing the frequency of routine court events after an illness in November 1758.16 In 1759 the king’s health may have been precarious, but his appetite for information remained, and he would not be easily fobbed off or left unconsulted about strategies and the appointment of generals and admirals.17 George expected to be the first to hear of news from the front, in accordance with his constitutional entitlement, for foreign policy remained technically a prerogative of the Crown. One might say that his interest in the war helped keep him alive: on the thirty-second anniversary of his accession to the throne (22 June) Berkeley was struck by how well the king looked, noting that he “seems as remote from his Dissolu­ tion as his great age will allow of.”18 Berkeley liked him. He was not blind to his master’s faults and foibles, but he did not permit them to obscure his sense of a dutiful and experienced sovereign who deserved sympathy for having to cope with wily and ambitious politicians. The only other resident member of the royal family at St James’s Palace was the king’s youngest, unmarried daughter, Princess Amelia (1711–86). Berkeley doted on her, no doubt delighted that she was prepared to be as snide as he was about the inadequacies of the Earl of Hardwicke, the long-standing cabinet minister and twin pillar with the Duke of Newcastle of the Pelhamite supremacy. Not that she had anything like the political clout required to temper their importance in government.19 Berkeley was desperately keen to help the princess in any way he could, and their relationship had a flirtatious element that both fanned, especially after the death of her long-term admirer, the second Duke of Grafton, in 1757. As he confided to his dairy: “as long as I live, whether in the service of the Crown, or in a private station, I shall be always ready to obey her orders, with inexpressible zeal & alacrity.”20 In February 1759 he was so enthused about the possible revival of the rank of Princess Royal for her that he made a list of all the previous holders of the title and searched various precedent books.21 Another presence at court was the king’s dignified, intelligent, and long-­standing mistress, Amalie van Wallmoden, Countess of Yarmouth, “a kind of

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stepmother to the royal family,” who supported the king and was not without some discreetly exercised political influence of her own.22 Berkeley has relatively little to say about her role in 1759.23 Instead, the charmingly waspish Amelia – a possible bride for Frederick the Great while he was Crown Prince of Prussia – was his feminine lodestar at St James’s. She could not singly fill the vacuum left at court by her formidable mother, Queen Caroline of Anspach (d. 1737), but without her presence, it would have been a gloomy arena.24 As a political space, the court was in no sense marginal to the life of the British state. It was a prime site for news, gossip, tittle-tattle, intrigue, and speculation, “the most public space in the land for the representation of politics and elite political feeling.”25 In this hothouse atmosphere, where time could hang heavy on the hands of the insiders of St James’s, the arrival of a courier bringing news from the front could break up the monotony of attendance on the king and have a political importance that would be first registered at the palace. Conversely, the absence of hard news invariably started the rumour mill of gossip grinding, and courtiers undoubtedly spent much of their time at St James’s looking out of the window and watching the palace weathercock to be sure that the wind was in the right direction to speed the courier along the roads from the south and west. Courtiers like Berkeley of Stratton were, after all, no less anxious for good news from the front than any other Briton. The New Year at St James’s was characterized by a mood of quiet optimism founded on the hope that successes in the 1758 campaigning season marked a turning point in the war. Government had at last got into wartime gear and the Pitt-Newcastle coalition possessed a working momentum that kept the old rivalries more or less under control. As Paul Langford has asserted, there was a general awareness that “Everything depended on the success or failure of British arms.”26 Britain was, in Berkeley’s view, surprising herself and her neighbours with her purpose and her willingness to pay for the war, irrespective of cost. In November 1758 the House of Commons had voted £13 million for the war budget earmarked for 1759, the largest wartime appropriation ever granted, and approved without ministers previously earmarking the taxes to finance it.27 That vast sum was a token of the country’s commitment to the global contest against the French and the Habsburgs, and yet the sheer scale of this involvement carried its own dangers. Like other commentators, Berkeley was worried that the burden of debt was unsustainable and that fiscal disaster could be a greater threat to national well-being

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than defeat on land or at sea: in the pages of his diary he speculated about the ways the government might pay the interest of the money borrowed for the supplies of the year and proposed to himself a tax on sugar.28 He saw no mirror of his own sombre reflections on the perils facing the state in the behaviour he saw going on around him at the New Year reception at St James’s Palace, where courtiers were offering each other facile congratulations all round. These were given “with a sincerity ­usual in courts; where Friendship & Enmity shew the same kind of Countenance & the affections of the Heart are as much conceal’d as its substance.”29 Berkeley usually succumbed to the temptation to see himself in temperament and judgment as a cut above the average courtier and to indulge in some plausible moralizing in his journals. It was not long before the first shadow was cast over St James’s by an event that had nothing to do with the war: news arrived that the king’s eldest daughter, Anne, Princess Royal and Dowager Princess of Orange, aged fifty, had died from dropsy on 12 January 1759, requiring the court to go into public mourning. Such observance was no more a problem for Berkeley than it was for George II: whatever others might do, they governed themselves by the demands of a stiff code of etiquette. Yet wartime successes made keeping up appearances a bit of a strain, as was shown when news came in on 27 January of the surrender of the major slave-trading station at Gorée on the West African coast to Commodore Augustus Keppel in the last days of 1758.30 Courtiers shared in the delight found in the country at large, and yet they were expected to go on wearing black in memory of the princess. Berkeley was in waiting on Princess Amelia at the time and sensed the rumblings, but he had scant sympathy for any appearance or admission of discomfort either in himself or in others.31 As he and other courtiers waited for tidings of the expedition that had left Portsmouth in November 1758 to capture Martinique, the jewel of the French West Indies, Berkeley subscribed to the popular view that the presence of Pitt at the head of the government had made all the difference to British affairs. Coming in on a conversation between Pitt and Newcastle over the treatment of Sir James Gray, the envoy to the kingdom of Naples, Berkeley overheard Pitt complaining about “The Spirit of Procrastination” in administration and, while not doubting the justice of this charge, wondered whether it was wise to voice it so openly.32 Yet this was typical of the great man’s open style, and it was worth indulging, for the longer Pitt remained in office the more his policy successes astounded Berkeley. In a diary entry for June 1760, at the noontide

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of the Southern Secretary’s dominance of the government, Berkeley would go on to reflect: “How can any Person of honour, upon little party considerations, join in disturbing the measures of a minister, who carries all the marks of being an instrument of Providence, raised for the promotion of its beneficent purposes towards us, & our Posterity, to distant Generations?”33 The “persons of honour” Berkeley had in mind were invariably the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Hardwicke, both of whom he cordially despised. They stood at the head of the “Old Corps” Whigs, men who had dominated the king’s government from the start of his reign and whom he had called two years previously “those vile and pitiful Politicians.”34 Even in 1759, two years since the formation of the coalition, Berkeley thought he detected signs that Newcastle and Hardwicke both nursed resentment of Pitt, while being unable to vent their spleen because they were also in awe of him. Berkeley was, of course, prejudiced against the Pelhamite Whigs but his judgment was, as ever, acute. As he noted in his diary in March 1759: “D. of New: & the Ld: Hardwicke are in infinite Perplexity; they rejoice at & improve every opportunity of undermining the Minister; & when some progress is made, they tremble at their own Work, & continue to submit to his Dictates.”35 The possibility of an invasion of the British mainland by French forces in 1759 concerned Berkeley as it did most of the king’s subjects. As Horace Walpole later wrote, “The invasion, though it ended in smoke, was very seriously projected, and hung over us for a great part of the summer; nor was it radically baffled till the winter following.”36 The threat created a varying set of responses within the government that, for Berkeley, highlighted the crucial differences between ministers. He first recorded talk of an invasion threat in his diary during the spring and was aware of cabinet discussions on the subject. He lambasted “the cowardly & ignorant part of it” (his shorthand for the Pelhamites) who were “full of apprehensions,” while claiming that Granville and Pitt “laugh at the intelligence but take active measures.”37 Having thus inspired himself to follow what he perceived as the statesmanlike leadership of his political mentors, Berkeley returned to the subject of the build-up of invasion barges in the Channel ports and the prospect of the French coming over.38 Despite ministers putting the militia on an active footing in May, he judged it logistically unlikely that the French would commit themselves to action when they dared not let their fleet come out of the ports.39 And why would they when Britons were exhibiting such a spirit of manly unity? As Berkeley concluded, “the ancient

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spirit of the nation has exerted itself, & except in some very weak men, I see no marks of apprehension of danger from these solemn threats, trumpeted by Foreign Gazetteers, their Pensioners, who must soon be exercising their Parts, in finding excuses for their change of measures.”40 The victories at sea of Boscawen at Lagos Bay (18 August) and Hawke at Quiberon Bay (20 November) seem to have confirmed his calculations: the forces of Louis XV were on the back foot and if the French really were in earnest about an invasion, his view was that it was simply driven by the distress of their own people.41 This perspective was uncharacteristically blustering and suggests that, on occasion, both Berkeley’s information and his insight were defective.42 Berkeley may have been something of a gossip but he was also an exceptionally well-informed one. That is not particularly surprising. Mid-eighteenth-century courtiers were not permitted to be merely decorative and dignified; they were expected to play their part in the routine business of administration, which is why so many of them were admitted to the Privy Council (Berkeley was sworn a member in 1752). To be a household officer was to be, at least formally, a member of the government, and there was much low-key public business in the British state to be discharged that historians have rather neglected, such as Berkeley’s consideration of the procedure for the Great Seal to be put in commission when no one man held the office of either Lord Chancellor or Lord Keeper.43 He noted several times the difficulty of conducting formal business at court through lack of participation, one instance of which was the pricking of sheriffs and the problems encountered in making up a quorum of six Privy Councillors on the occasion.44 It is clear that Berkeley had regular and detailed access to cabinet discussions, which were sometimes leaked to him by Lord Granville as when, on 10 November 1759, he heard and recorded a full statement about Pitt’s objectives in public business.45 On other occasions, he gleaned information at first hand from attendance at ministerial dinners. Berkeley was also made a confidant of members of the government other than the Lord President and Pitt, particularly Sir Robert Henley, the Lord Keeper, who felt keenly his junior status in the conduct of Lords’ business by comparison with the senior law lords, Hardwicke and Mansfield. Berkeley had at least two important conversations with Henley in the autumn of 1759. On the second occasion, Henley cornered him to give vent to his discontent about the way his cabinet colleagues ignored him and denied him a peerage despite his being Speaker of the House of Lords. Berkeley, ever wily, was unsure how to

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read this outpouring. He suspected a degree of stage management with Pitt in the background.46 One key policy area where Berkeley differed from Pitt concerned the British alliance with Frederick the Great, for whom 1759 was an annus horribilis.47 In 1757 and 1758, when British military success seemed elusive, Frederick had been much praised at home as the Protestant, Prussian hero, though rarely in Berkeley’s diaries.48 Berkeley was ambivalent about the value and nature of this alliance that, by mid-summer 1759, was proving the least successful dimension of the British war effort, especially after Frederick came under immense pressure following his defeat by the Russians and Austrians at Kunersdorf near the river Oder on 12 August 1759. There was a sense in which this could be viewed as poetic justice, for had not the king of Prussia, Berkeley asked himself, “been the original cause of all the late commotions in Germany”? These opinions he had not aired publicly, but he felt able to confide them to his diary, suggesting that if Frederick were reduced to the Electorate of Brandenburg “it would not be the worse for Europe. One great Power is wanted in the Empire, & but one, for the tranquillity of the world.”49 It was as if Berkeley could not shake off the long-standing attachment to the Austrian Empire as the lynchpin of Britain’s European alliance system. Berkeley’s faith in Frederick’s capacities was briefly restored by the king’s resourceful response to adversity. As he observed in September, the Prussian monarch’s “immortal spirit sustains itself still, & maintains an air of being an instrument in the hands of Providence for arduous purposes, not yet accomplished.”50 However, it is significant that no further comments were made after news came to St James’s of Frederick’s subsequent defeats at Maxen (20 November) and Meissen (3–4 December). These constituted the only slightly sour note to British celebrations of a year of extraordinary achievements. Frederick’s brother-in-law and the Allied Commander-in-Chief, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, had more success in 1759. Given George II’s lifelong preoccupation with his beloved Electorate, it is not surprising that the dominant fear at court in the summer of 1759 was the renewed threat to Hanover from the French. Months earlier, Berkeley had reported that Prince Ferdinand was anxious to join battle. He found it hard to explain the delay although he deeply suspected that Newcastle and the Secretary of State for the Northern Department, Lord Holdernesse, were hesitating about whether to authorize it.51 The French army had the advantage over Ferdinand in combat at Bergen on 13 April and went on to occupy Münster and Minden by mid-July. At this point, Ferdinand

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stopped his retreat and determined to halt the advance of Contades’s forces. He did so in fine style at the Battle of Minden fought on 1 August. His victory saved Hanover from occupation and offset the disappointing setbacks incurred by Frederick. St James’s heard of the engagement just short of a week later; the receipt of the news is dramatically conveyed in Berkeley’s diaries. He was present when Colonel Edward Ligonier, followed by Lord Charles Fitzroy, brought the news of Hanover’s deliverance to the court, with the dramatic details of the failure of Lord George Sackville (Ferdinand’s deputy) to throw in the cavalry under his command and thereby turn victory into a rout. As Berkeley heard it, George II made a rare resort to scripture on learning ­of the scale of his forces’ achievement: “that God Almighty sent out a de­ stroying Angel.”52 The peer’s account confirms that the news of Minden was not much expected at St James’s except, it seems, by the king: George had two days earlier received Sir Joseph Yorke’s German courier (he arrived before Ligonier and Fitzroy) and “owned that he had had Prince Ferdinand’s plan in his pocket for ten days, without communi­ cating it to a single person.”53 There are many later references in the diaries to the Sackville affair and its repercussions; including, at the close ­of the year, the various views in cabinet on Sackville’s court martial.54 Lord George had originally been a protégé of that other courtly circle of 1750s London, the one at Leicester House, home to the young Prince of Wales and his mother, Augusta, the Dowager Princess of Wales.55 Every passing year and every new health scare focused the attention of the courtiers and the politicians in that direction and away from George II. Berkeley came to admire the Prince of Wales increasingly as his acquaintance deepened. Naturally, Berkeley was one in the large crowd of those who attended Leicester House for Prince George’s twenty-first birthday party on 4 June 1759. As usual, a wry note of humour crept into his commentary. This was not “a Temple spacious enough for the worship of the rising Sun, of whose future Influence every single Idolater expects a particular Portion.”56 Berkeley sedulously followed the doings of the Princess of Wales’s other children, noting the occasions on which Prince Edward (her second son) appeared at court to meet his grandfather. He also lamented the passing of one young princess now almost entirely forgotten. This was Princess Elizabeth, the physically disabled second daughter of Princess Augusta, who died at the age of eighteen in the autumn of 1759. Berkeley’s simple tribute to this young woman reads: “She was a Dwarf, but much to be lamented in this world by her Family, for she was sensible, good, & accomplished.

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Her innocence it is to be hoped, will make her happy in the next.”57 Her loss was a numbing blow to her mother and her brothers that the king scarcely noted. Berkeley was aghast that George II had offered the Prince of Wales no words of comfort, “tho’ one would think a Heart of Steel could hardly be so insensible, as not to utter a tender expression, to a Grandson, visibly affected with the loss of a sister, so suddenly snatch’d away in the Prime of her Youth.”58 As the diaries make clear, George II was cautious about accepting the offers of his grandsons to participate actively in the armed services of the Crown, much as other young men were doing. In August 1759 it had even been suggested that the army should be in the hands of the Prince of Wales (legally of age since 4 June) with the Duke of Cumberland under him. Any such plan was soon scotched.59 As heir to the throne, his life could not be lightly imperilled. Prince Edward was slightly more dispensable. He had seen naval service during 1758 on Commodore Howe’s flagship, HMS Essex, during the raids on Cherbourg and St Malo. At the start of the year Berkeley had reported that “Prince Edward had an audience of the King, to ask his leave to go on board the Fleur, that is fitting out for North America. His Majesty received him graciously, but was pleased to say, he should not employ him in that service. The spirit of the young Prince, & the paternal tenderness of the King, appear with equal lustre.” Instead he served for a while on HMS Phoenix, part of the Channel Fleet blockading Brest.60 Edward thus missed out on participating in Wolfe’s successful expedition to Quebec, which Berkeley depicts as succeeding despite the best efforts of the Duke of Newcastle. In the pages of the diaries, Newcastle predictably appears as bewildered to the point of incapacity regarding Pitt’s 1759 North America campaign. We find the Captain of the Gentlemen Pensioners eavesdropping to good effect on 9 September: “The DN [Newcastle] is so far from taking any share in the success in NA [North America], that he seems amazed at it, and I overheard him Today attempting to explain to the king the plan of the country in those parts, and their Connexions and Distances, about which he boggled, and hesitated, & blundered in such a manner, that I am confident he has not as yet a common knowledge of the map of it.”61 Berkeley even indirectly blamed Newcastle for Wolfe’s death as a result of keeping him short of money: “Every thing miscarries in his hands from procrastination, ­ignorance, or design.”62 If Berkeley consistently deprecated Newcastle and Hardwicke, the diaries repeatedly bring home to historians the neglected yet pivotal

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importance of Lord Granville in keeping the wheels of the Pitt-Newcastle coalition oiled and on the road.63 A healthy veteran approaching seventy with a political career that had started in Queen Anne’s reign, he emerges as the real elder statesman of George II’s last decade, still the old king’s personal favourite among the politicians and serving his country with a nicely cultivated line in worldly wisdom. Berkeley never has a bad word to say about him, and his diaries make some compensation for the absence of anything that can be called a Granville archive for these years. Admittedly, this partiality had much to do with Berkeley’s being Granville’s regular drinking and dining companion for many years, yet the judgment is not without persuasion even if it is a touch Manichean.64 In the final analysis, Berkeley had no hesitation in placing the credit for British recovery in 1759 with Pitt, Granville, and their colleagues and blaming Newcastle and Hardwicke for the setbacks that had occurred when they had tried to govern without Pitt. Here was the genuine war winner who had tapped into national resources in a manner that other politicians were incapable of doing. “The Plains of Minden, the coast of Africa, the East India Seas, the Wilds of Canada,” Berkeley wrote in November, “shew what a latent spirit there is in this noble Nation, when wisely directed, & properly exerted, & how soon it is recovered from that abject state, to which the pusillanimity, and despicable measures of the late pitiful administration, had reduced its antient virtue.”65 The Berkeley diaries for 1759 have plenty of absences for the student of the annus mirabilis: there is nothing on India and not much reference to naval affairs or the great victories at Lagos Bay and Quiberon Bay. As to the West Indies, there are details of the abortive operation to capture Martinique in March, and Berkeley subsequently reported the fall of Guadeloupe in June.66 But there is not much. These silences and minimal reportage speak eloquently about the priorities of an intelligent courtier who worried about the niceties of etiquette and deplored many aspects of his age: for Berkeley, as for many of his ilk, “1759” was far from being just a matter of headline stories dependent on the arrival and departure of couriers and the clamouring of the press. The value of these diaries lies elsewhere, in indicating Berkeley’s fascination with details: the sidelong glances at his elite contemporaries as they came from and went to St James’s Palace, and the vanities of the politicians as they manoeuvred for pre-eminence. He could be pompous, he could be very human, and he showed no trace of self-pity even as he contemplated his own demise. A colicky complaint in the early spring of 1759

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made him suspect that death could be imminent. He wrote his will, filled his diary with pages of unflattering comments about his own former ways of life, and restated his Christian commitment in these terms: “whoever practices the rules of the Gospel, as coming from God, is a good Christian.” Berkeley was no enthusiast, but he never denied the need for sincere repentance.67 As he noted elsewhere: “The religion of a good man is not pompous, but solid; not the shew of his life, but the comfort of his soul.”68 It is too easily forgotten that the politicians directing the Seven Years’ War had a personal stake in it, in the form of sons and nephews caught up in the fighting whose lives were on the line. Lord Berkeley of Stratton was one of those whose family had known loss: his nephew, James Cocks (the son of his sister, Ann, and the nephew of Lady Hardwicke), was an ensign who had been killed aged twenty in the St Cast expedition of September 1758, despite his uncle’s imploring him not to go and his very recent recovery from a wound received during the amphibious attack (or “Descent”) mounted on Cherbourg only the month before.69 Berkeley, the great supporter of what he would have called “our ancient nobility,” thus had to contemplate the extinction of his family line in the collateral as well as the direct line. The view of the annus mirabilis that Lord Berkeley gives students of that year is not in essentials different from that of most other Britons, for, like most eighteenth-century courts, St James’s was far from hermetically sealed off. He was delighted at the turn of events and in September 1759 saluted “that happy unanimity, wch now prevails among all ranks of men; & gives such strength & vigour to the Government.”70 Such celebratory sentiments made him the more contemptuous of those immediately around him, of “Those stickling courtiers, who labour to make the Prerogative rather tall than great, affect a wonderfull regard for the Person of the king, but in effect care little either for that or his real interest, for as no man can be a good Patriot, who is not truly loyal, so no one can be truly loyal, who is not also a good Patriot.”71 He judged their numbers to be diminishing in the heightened atmosphere of patriotic expectation that penetrated right to the heart of palaces. For the view from St James’s was a critically important one, situated at the centre of news networks in the capital: war made news and courtiers wanted to be the first to receive the latest updates on British campaigning in different parts of the globe. If power was slowly passing to other parts of Westminster, St James’s Palace remained the epicentre of the high political world, a cockpit that counted. This was a locus no politician could

The View from St James’s Palace in 1759  205

afford to ignore unless he was making a political statement through absenteeism; it was the place where business and pleasure mingled much as they had always done, and it had no metropolitan parallel as a centre of gossip. Berkeley had no intimation that it would not always be thus. He was both participant and reporter at the heart of a political world that revolved around the person and personality of the king, even as George II’s life neared its end and courtiers cultivated his grandson, George, Prince of Wales. At the end of September 1759 he observed how few there were in attendance at St James’s, how thronged the precincts of Leicester House as the bon ton flocked to attract the notice of the Prince of Wales. “It is amazing,” he noted, “what numbers of persons were collected together to pay their respects there. So mankind are made! And no experience, no examples will ever cure their idolatry. The Prince if he lives long enough, will see the same comedy played over again.”72 In exactly a year, on the death of George II at Kensington Palace, his prophecy would be confirmed when, shorn of a reversionary interest, there would be a single-minded courtly focus on George III and Lord Berkeley of Stratton would be there to offer his singular commentary on the resignation of Pitt and the winding down of the war. Though he was quick to observe his own slowing down as age crept up on him, it does not seem to have affected Berkeley’s desire to observe and report on the ways of the court, much as he had done to such colourful and important effect throughout 1759, the year that, his diaries confirm, threw such refulgent light on Pitt, the monarchy, the armed forces of the Crown, and the British nation. NOTES 1 For the palace in this period, see Kenneth Scott, St James’s Palace: A History (London: Scala, 2010), 66–81; Wolf Burchard, “St James’s Palace: George II’s and Queen Caroline’s Principal London Residence,” Court Historian 16 (2011): 177–203. 2 The king’s capacities are at last being taken seriously by historians. See A. Newman, The World Turned Inside Out: New Views on George II (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988); Jeremy Black, “‘George II and All That Stuff’: On the Value of the Neglected,” Albion 36 (2004): 581–607; Black, George II: Puppet of the Politicians? (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2007). Andrew Thomson’s George II: King and Elector (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011) appeared too late for me to use in this essay. There is

206  Nigel Aston much new scholarship on the Anglo-Hanoverian composite monarchy in Brendan Simms and Torsten Riotte, eds, The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 3 Hannah Smith, “The Court in England, 1714–1760: A Declining Political Institution?” History 90 (2005): 41. 4 His principal seat was at Bruton Abbey, purchased from Henry VIII after its dissolution in 1539 by the king’s Standard Bearer, Sir Maurice Berkeley. See Phyllis Couzens, Bruton in Selwood (Sherborne, UK: Abbey Press, 1972). 5 Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/37/8ff., 14 February 1746; J.C. Sainty and R.C. Bucholz, Officials of the Royal Household 1660–1837, Part 1: Department of the Lord Chamberlain, 2 vols (London: Institute of Historical Research, 1997), 1:60. The captain was paid £1000 annually. 6 Newcastle wrote to Pelham in 1750 that “My Lord Granville is no longer the terrible man.” Quoted in William Coxe, Memoirs of the Administration of the Right Honourable Henry Pelham, 2 vols (London, 1829), 2:388. 7 London Gazette, 11 February 1752, issue 9140; John Carswell and Lewis Arnold Dralle, eds, The Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 146. 8 Henry Brackenbury, The History of His Majesty’s Bodyguard of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms (London, 1905), 91; James Bunce Curling, Some Account of the Ancient Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms (London, 1850), 190–207. 9 Brackenbury, Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms, 99–101, 167. 10 Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/43/2. 11 The siege at Louisbourg was the first major British victory in the Seven Years’ War and was accompanied by national celebrations. See Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 113–14. 12 Black, George II, 225, 253; Black, The Hanoverians: The History of a Dynasty (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2004), 102–3; Edmond Dziembowski, Les Pitt: L’Angleterre face à la France, 1708–1806 (Paris: Perrin, 2006), 115. 13 His son had “ruined me and disgraced himself,” the king judged: Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second, ed. John Brooke, 3 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 2:282. Writing in 1759, Berkeley adjudged the duke’s post-Klosterleven conduct admirable, calling it “A notable Instance of filial Piety, & at the same time, of the highest magnanimity”: Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/6/23–5, 15 March 1759. 14 For the royal family in the 1750s and their social life, see Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 202–3.

The View from St James’s Palace in 1759  207 1 5 Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/48/6. 16 F.J. Manning, ed., The Williamson Letters, 1748–1765 (Streatley, UK: Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 1954), 36. 17 For the king’s continuing involvement in the business of government in the late 1750s, see Black, George II, 249–51. 18 Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/6/31–2. 19 Hers was a formidable intelligence. Elaine Chalus has justly noted that Princess Amelia’s “sharp tongue and long history of political intrigue ensured that she remained a political force to be reckoned with as long as her father was alive”: Elite Women in English Political Life c.1754–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 119. See also Chalus’s ODNB entry on the Princess. 20 Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/43/19, 2 January 1758. 21 Ibid., BQ 2/52/9ff., 20 February 1759. He concluded that the title was unknown at common law and depended entirely on the king’s pleasure. 22 Lucy Worsley, Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 310. 23 Black, George II, 246–7. 24 Veronica Baker-Smith, “The Daughters of George II: Marriage and Dynastic Politics,” in Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: ­Manchester University Press, 2002), 197–8. 25 Smith, Georgian Monarchy, 218. 26 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 334. Langford argues that disagreements over reforming the law of Habeas Corpus in 1758 almost wrecked the coalition (335–6). There were also ructions in the autumn of 1759 when Pitt was insistent that Earl Temple should be awarded the Garter: Lewis M. Wiggin, The Faction of Cousins: A Political Account of the Grenvilles, 1733– 1763 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), 219–23; Dziembowski, Les Pitt, 110; Jeremy Black, Pitt the Elder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 184. 27 Frank McLynn, 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 104. 28 Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 4/52/12, 25 February 1759. 29 Ibid., BQ 2/6/16. 30 Walpole, Memoirs, 3:49; McLynn, 1759, 99. 31 Berkeley was a stickler for the observation of precedence and decorum at court. Thus he had acute reservations about the City of London’s address, presented to the king on 8 June 1759, congratulating him on his grandson’s

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32

33

3 4 35

36

37

38

39

4 0 41 42

twenty-first birthday. He had doubts about the address’s appropriateness, but then reflected that the delegation was essentially vulgar: “Such a set of awkward Fellows I never saw together. One would not think they belong to any Country that Gentlemen inhabit” (Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/6/29–30, 8 June 1759). Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/6/1–2, 15 March 1759. ­Marie Peters concludes that “Pitt could cajole by force of personality; but he never exercised an unquestioned dominance, nor could he manage even his spheres of the war without the co-operation of colleagues”: The Elder Pitt (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1998), 103, 105, 109–10. Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/4/19, June 1760. There is a fine recent discussion of Pitt’s strategies in Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane, 2007), 422–62. Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/2/13, 23 January 1757. Ibid., BQ 2/6/23, 23 March 1759. Compare Paul Langford’s statement that they were “suspicious of his intentions and fretful at his imperiousness”: A Polite and Commercial People, 334. Dziembowski notes the generally polite cooperation of Pitt with Newcastle: Les Pitt, 116–17. Walpole, Memoirs, 3:58; Stephen Conway, War, State, and Society in MidEighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 28–9, 215–16. Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 4/55/12, 13 May 1759. Berkeley’s information in this instance left something to be desired. Pitt was quite slow to appreciate the extent of the invasion threat and, when he did, placed his trust in strategic naval defence: Black, Pitt the Elder, 189–90; McLynn, 1759, 232–4. C. Nordman, “Choiseul and the Last Jacobite Attempt of 1759,” in Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759, ed. E. Cruickshanks (­Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), 201–17; Black, Pitt the Elder, 187–8. Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 107–12; Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 4/56/11–12, 13 June 1759, and see also BQ 4/56/16–17, 17 June 1759. Ibid., BQ 4/57/1–2, 29 June 1759. Ibid., BQ 2/6/35, August 1759. Berkeley was not alone in his disparaging estimate of the French invasion plan. Voltaire opined that the scheme sounded like something out of the Arabian Nights: McLynn, 1759, 247. David Garrick, in his celebrated pantomime Harlequin’s Invasion, first performed at Christmas 1759, also patrioti-

The View from St James’s Palace in 1759  209

4 3 44

45 46

47 4 8 49 50 51

52

53

54

55

56 57

cally sent up the idea. “Hearts of Oak” was first sung at its première. See John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760 (­Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 222. Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/1/31–2, 19 November 1756. Ibid., BQ 2/6/5, November 1758; ibid., BQ 2/54/2, April 1759. “Pricking” was the conventional name given to the king’s endorsement of sheriffs for English and Welsh counties. Ibid., BQ 2/7/9–11, 10 November 1759. Only Granville, Newcastle, and Holderness were present. Ibid., BQ 4/58/4–5, 4 October 1759; BQ 4/7/11–13, 10 November 1759. The main reason was in fact George II’s protracted resentment of Henley’s prominence in the late Prince Frederick’s Leicester House faction. Henley was not awarded a British barony until 1760. As McLynn puts it, 1759 was “as black a year for Prussia as it was for France and Louis XV”: 1759, 281. Conway, War, State, and Society, 148–9, 219–20. Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 4/57/14, 26 August 1759. Ibid., BQ 4/7/5, 20 September 1759. Ibid., BQ 2/6/21–2, 15 March 1759. In fact, Ferdinand was building up his numbers and trying to counter the strategic resourcefulness of the duc de Broglie. Ibid., BQ 2/6/36, 8 August 1759. For Ligonier and Fitzroy, see Piers Mackesy, The Coward of Minden: The Affair of Lord George Sackville (London: Allen Lane, 1979), 35, 121–2. Sackville was ordered home and replaced by the Marquess of Granby. Walpole, Memoirs, 3:60; Mackesy, Coward of Minden, 77–80; Hardwicke to Newcastle, 9 August 1759, in The Life and Correspondence of Philip, Earl of Hardwicke, ed. Philip C. Yorke, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 3:233–4. Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 4/7, book 7, p. 20ff., 10 December 1759. For the public controversy surrounding Sackville’s conduct see also Robert W. Jones’s essay in this volume (pages 213–34). Aubrey Newman, ed., “Leicester House Politics, 1750–60, From the Papers of John, Second Earl of Egmont,” Camden Miscellany 23, Camden Society, 4th ser., 7 (1969): 85–228; James Lee McKelvey, George III and Lord Bute: The Leicester House Years (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973). Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/6/29; McKelvey, George III and Lord Bute, 95. Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/57/17, 4 September 1759; Walpole, Memoirs, 3:70; Stella Tillyard, A Royal Affair: George III and His Troublesome Siblings (London: Chatto and Windus, 2006), 80.

210  Nigel Aston 5 8 Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/7/1–2, 20 September 1759. 59 Ibid., BQ 2/6/36, August 1759. Prince George subsequently wondered if he might serve as a volunteer. The vexation these denials caused ended the brief outbreak of amity between the two courts and would be further aggravated by the Sackville affair. See McKelvey, George III and Lord Bute, 95–100. 60 Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/51/11, 10 January 1759. Prince Edward’s service is summarized in Tillyard, A Royal Affair, 42–4. See also Matthew Kilburn’s ODNB entry on the prince. 61 Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 2/6/42, 9 September 1759. 62 Ibid., BQ 4/58/18–19, 19 November 1759. 63 Compare Peters, The Elder Pitt, 107. 64 When Granville went out of town Berkeley talked of it as a personal misfortune since they usually spent three or four evenings together: Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 4/57/16, 1 September 1759. Pitt himself later publicly stated that “to his [Granville’s] friendship, and instruction, I owe whatever I am”: House of Lords, 22 November 1770, Parl. Hist., xvi, col. 1097. 65 Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 4/58/11, 6 November 1759. 66 Ibid., BQ 4/52/16 ff., 6 March 1759; BQ 4/56/3, 13 June 1759. 67 Ibid., BQ 2/53/9–10, 26–9 March 1759. 68 Ibid., BQ 4/62/5, n.d. 69 See Walter Thomas, A Journal containing every Transaction of Consequence of the Guards as well as of the Rest of His Majesty’s Troops in the Late Expeditions on the Coast of France (London, 1758), 52–3; Yann Lagadec, Stéphane Perréon, and David Hopkin, La bataille de Saint-Cast (Bretagne, 11 septembre 1758): Entre histoire et mémoire (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 266. 70 Lincolnshire Archives, Berkeley Diaries, BQ 4/7/3, 20 September 1759. 71 Ibid., BQ 2/61/29. 72 Ibid., BQ 2/58/2–3, 30 September 1759.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Bubb Dodington, George. The Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington. Edited by John Carswell and Lewis Arnold Dralle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Coxe, William. Memoirs of the Administration of the Right Honourable Henry Pelham. 2 vols. London, 1829.

The View from St James’s Palace in 1759  211 Thomas, Walter. A Journal containing every Transaction of Consequence of the Guards as well as of the Rest of His Majesty’s Troops in the Late Expeditions on the Coast of France. London, 1758. Walpole, Horace. Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second. Edited by John Brooke. 3 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. The Williamson Letters, 1748–1765. Edited by F.J. Manning. Streatley, UK: ­Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 1954. Secondary Sources Baker-Smith, Veronica. “The Daughters of George II: Marriage and Dynastic Politics.” In Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics, edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr, 193–206. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Black, Jeremy. “‘George II and All That Stuff’: On the Value of the Neglected.” Albion 36 (2004): 581–607. – George II: Puppet of the Politicians? Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2007. – The Hanoverians: The History of a Dynasty. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2004. – Pitt the Elder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Brackenbury, Henry. The History of His Majesty’s Bodyguard of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms. London, 1905. Burchard, Wolf. “St James’s Palace: George II’s and Queen Caroline’s Principal London Residence.” Court Historian 16 (2011): 177–203. Chalus, Elaine. Elite Women in English Political Life c.1754–1790. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Conway, Stephen. War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Couzens, Phyllis. Bruton in Selwood. Sherborne, UK: Abbey Press, 1972. Curling, James Bunce. Some Account of the Ancient Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms. London, 1850. Dziembowski, Edmond. Les Pitt: L’Angleterre face à la France, 1708–1806. Paris: Perrin, 2006. Harris, Bob. Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century. ­Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lagadec, Yann, Stéphane Perréon, and David Hopkin. La bataille de Saint-Cast (Bretagne, 11 septembre 1758): Entre histoire et mémoire. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009. Langford, Paul. A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

212  Nigel Aston Mackesy, Piers. The Coward of Minden: The Affair of Lord George Sackville. London: Allen Lane, 1979. McKelvey, James Lee. George III and Lord Bute: The Leicester House Years. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973. McLynn, Frank. 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004. Middleton, Richard. The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Newman, Aubrey. The World Turned Inside Out: New Views on George II. ­Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988. – ed. “Leicester House Politics, 1750–60, From the Papers of John, Second Earl of Egmont.” Camden Miscellany 23, Camden Society, 4th ser., 7 (1969): 85–228. Nordman, C. “Choiseul and the Last Jacobite Attempt of 1759.” In Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759, edited by E. Cruickshanks, 201–17. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982. O’Brien, John. Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760. ­Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Peters, Marie. The Elder Pitt. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1998. Sainty, J.C., and R.C. Bucholz. Officials of the Royal Household 1660–1837, Part 1: Department of the Lord Chamberlain. 2 vols. London: Institute of Historical Research, 1997. Scott, Kenneth. St James’s Palace: A History. London: Scala, 2010. Simms, Brendan. Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783. Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane, 2007. Simms, Brendan, and Torsten Riotte, eds. The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Smith, Hannah. “The Court in England, 1714–1760: A Declining Political Institution?” History 90 (2005): 23–41. – Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Thomson, Andrew. George II: King and Elector. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Tillyard, Stella. A Royal Affair: George III and His Troublesome Siblings. London: Chatto and Windus, 2006. Wiggin, Lewis M. The Faction of Cousins: A Political Account of the Grenvilles, 1733–1763. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958. Worsley, Lucy. Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Yorke, Philip C., ed. The Life and Correspondence of Philip, Earl of Hardwicke. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913.

9 “Unfit to Serve”: Honour, Masculinity, and the Fate of Lord George Sackville Robert W. Jones

“It is an opinion almost universally received amongst the vulgar, that every man who discovers any symptoms of timidity in an engagement has a turn to the most odious and unmanly vices.” So argued the anonymous author of A Letter from a P**m**e in I**l**d to a Certain Great Man (1759).1 Confronting the pride and prejudice that inform this claim, this essay explores the role played by competing and sometimes new definitions of masculinity in the controversy that surrounded Lord George Sackville. Sackville’s troubles arose because he had been the commander of the allied cavalry at the Battle of Minden in August 1759, a role in which he signally failed to distinguish himself. At the climax of the battle, the cavalry squadrons under his command appeared reluctant to execute an order to advance; when the cavalry were finally put in motion, they advanced with painful slowness. By the time they arrived on the field, the infantry, who had required their support, no longer needed it. The crisis had passed and a great victory had been gained while Sackville dressed his lines. Sackville’s commanding officer, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, made clear his disgust at his subordinate’s waywardness, even as he dispatched news of his success, comparing Sackville unfavourably with his peers and speculating vaguely about what might have been achieved had the cavalry arrived in better time. However, as Piers Mackesy has argued, Sackville’s reputation as the “Coward of Minden” is unfair, at least in degree. His orders were by no means clear, nor were they delivered in a manner likely to resolve their ambiguity. Equally, the cavalry’s slow advance, tedious and fussy as it was, was not without justification.2 Alarmed and angered by what had been alleged, Sackville sought to build a defence, first in letters of vindication, and then by demanding a court martial – which, despite the possibility of a death sentence, remained the best way to clear his name. Sackville’s trial was the

214  Robert W. Jones

event of 1760, eclipsing several other capital trials and becoming, in turn, the occasion for a vicious, if often inventive, pamphlet war. Throughout his ordeal, Sackville sought to defend himself not just as a commander who had been given orders too imprecise to follow, but as a gentleman whose honour had been impugned without good cause. It was, therefore, a bitter blow when the jury concluded that he was “unfit to serve His Majesty in any military Capacity whatsoever.”3 While the minutiae of the legal process are themselves compelling in their recreation of a moment of military confusion, what is most striking about the trial and subsequent pamphlet war is the extent to which differing ideas of masculinity were brought to bear on this single moment. This opposition played itself out most dramatically between those who accepted Sackville’s claims to a permanent fixed character – as a man of honour – and those who thought his identity more dubious and more fluid. There is a palpably felt class politics to this confrontation, but also a significant reformulation of what constituted character, and masculine character in particular. It is worth noting here that “masculinity” was not a term much used in the eighteenth century, appearing as it did mostly in grammatical and botanical manuals. Nonetheless, the term usefully captures the combination of gendered norms that were, by the third quarter of the century, beginning to combine into a prescriptive account of social and sexual behaviour.4 Complaints about delinquent or “effeminate” men – men who were too soft, too interested in their dress or in the pleasures of fashionable life (including the pursuit of women) – had risen markedly by mid-century. For the most part, moralists wished to return men to a mode that, while it enabled them to behave acceptably in the presence of women, removed them from the taint of effeminacy. Homosexuality was not cited as a particular problem, though prejudices were becoming more clearly defined, as Randolph Trumbach has argued.5 The military and political situation of the Seven Years’ War intensified these anxieties, making masculinity a central concern. John Brewer, Linda Colley, and Kathleen Wilson have drawn attention to the evermore-emphatic demand to remasculinize the public sphere that characterized politics in the second half of the century. Although this movement only reached its full force during the American and French wars, its pressures were felt strongly before then, especially during the Wilkite agitation.6 Wilson identifies a new and largely middle-class imperial politics, observable from the 1750s onwards, whose predominant mode relied upon repeated “injunctions to ‘manliness’ aimed at countering

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alleged aristocratic, degenerate softness by requiring an assertive, forceful, disciplined and powerful subject to predominate in the public realm.”7 This militantly middle-class rhetoric disavowed women (and indeed much of the population) but, more radically, demanded resistance to the menaces of contemporary luxury which it saw embodied in the perceived degeneracy of the upper classes. The proximity of this general formulation to John Brown’s much-quoted assertion that Britain had succumbed to a “vain, luxurious, and selfish EFFEMINACY” will be evident to most scholars of the period.8 Even had Sackville not failed at Minden, he might have fallen foul of these injunctions – but other factors also aided his downfall. Unlike his convivial second-in-command, the Marquess of Granby, Lord George was not a popular figure, nor did he accommodate himself easily to the new ideal of the soldier as a man of refined feelings – a role that Granby assumed easily (as did, to grander effect, the fallen General Wolfe).9 Contemporary discourses demanded a form of masculinity that was unquestioned in its fortitude and sexual orientation, but equally open to “feminine” forms of charity and refinement. In such a heteronormative environment Sackville was a perpetually awkward figure. Nor was he trusted in the confidently homosocial sphere of the military. Aspersions against his character, especially insinuations of same-sex liaisons, ensured that he fell short of contemporary injunctions to manliness.10 That the disputed orders at Minden were given to an officer of noble birth (Sackville’s father was the Duke of Dorset), serving under a German commander in a war not always fully supported in Britain, added to the tension. There were, then, several pressures coming to bear here on a single debate: British involvement in a European war; British troops under German leadership; aristocratic manners and their association with luxury; and Sackville’s own equivocal character. Examination of the trial and the tensions evident in the pamphlet literature between ideas of character and conduct reveals a critical shift in the definitions of these terms at a time when character – as a concept – was under immense pressure. As Deidre Shauna Lynch has argued, the conception of character inherited from classical times no longer made sense in a fast-changing commercial and colonial world.11 Sackville’s tragedy, if it can be called that, was to become the figure through whom these complicated anxieties were expressed and mediated. Sackville’s troubles began long before sentence was passed upon him. Even in published accounts celebrating the victory at Minden, there

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were hints that he had been less than courageous.12 Sackville was quick to recognize the extent of his exposure. On the day after the battle, he wrote to Colonel Fitzroy hoping to limit the scope of the case against him. Sackville was at pains to point out that the orders he had been given had been ambiguous, and had seemed to ignore the terrain upon which the cavalry were to operate. Fitzroy’s reply was noticeably unhelpful: he refused to vindicate Sackville, though he accepted that the situation had been confused. Sackville nevertheless published their correspondence (though he would later deny his involvement).13 The Vindication is a rather dry text, the only flourish coming when Sackville insists that it is “impossible to sit silent under such Reproach” as that implied by Prince Ferdinand’s dispatch. As pressure upon him mounted, Sackville also published A Short Address from Lord George Sackville to the Public. The main aim of the Short Address was to assure the public that Sackville would make every effort to “prevent the ruin of my character.”14 Both texts were confined to specific points. Sackville disputed little beyond the micro-narratives of his orders and the slow advance of the cavalry towards the plain of Minden. If a strategy can be detected here, it is that he sought a military trial, trusting that a detailed explication of his conduct would clear his name. Throughout the controversy, Sackville and his supporters offered a deliberately forensic approach, patiently reconstructing the events of the battle, especially the fateful orders. Care was taken to show both their ambiguity and Sackville’s efforts to resolve the uncertainty. Hints might be made that a deeper cause for the confusion lay in the nature of a combined Anglo-German operation and, especially, in the German command of that operation, but such insinuations were kept to a minimum. Sackville did not wish to question the conduct of the war or risk the charge of disputing George II’s European policy. Where Sackville was more assertive was on the question of his honour. On most occasions, he claimed that his honour was a property or function of his character, a fixed identity that he understood partly as inherited and akin to pedigree, and partly as the residue of his past actions – the credit, in effect, that he had built up through years of dedicated service. Sackville had to make this case in an arena crowded with alternative readings of his personality, often supported by (or in the service of) entirely different accounts of public and political entitlement. In the wake of Minden, discussion of Sackville’s character was extensive, in scores of essays, poems, and squibs. Some of these pamphlets were pro-Sackville (and there is some evidence that they were sponsored by him or his

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associates); most were hostile. The controversy placed considerable demands on readers, who were required to sift and evaluate different kinds of text, and to appreciate their relationship to one another. Many were written as responses; others acquired postscripts and other addenda that adjusted the polemic to respond to the latest turn of the debate. An indication of the nature of the journalism prompted by Sackville’s predicament can be gleaned from the title of just one pamphlet, published by Ralph Griffiths in late 1759. The pamphlet, entitled Farther Animadversions on the Conduct of a Late Noble Commander, announces itself as a Reply to a Pamphlet, intitled, An Answer to a Letter to a Late Noble Commander, &c. To which is Annexed an Answer to a Pamphlet, intitled, “Colonel Fitzroy’s Letter Considered, ...” by the Author of the Two Letters to a Late Noble Commander. The title page thus advertises a location in the print culture of the period, marking out the text’s status partly as continuation and partly as refutation. Faced with such abundance (something that many contributors remarked upon), one text, styling itself The Black Book and purporting to be by a “Blacksmith,” reviewed some sixteen publications. Among those surveyed are Letters to and from Sackville, and also to Granby; an examination of the True Cause of a Certain General Officer’s Conduct; and a poem, The Art of Preserving, which was addressed to Sackville as the “Confectioner in Chief.”15 It is a wide and varied array, and one that seems beyond the grasp of an individual reader, requiring as it does cross-referencing and rereading of a kind that could best occur in a coffee house. The condemnation of Lord George Sackville clearly played a role in the formation of the newly aggressive middle-class politics described by Wilson, but it also relied upon the prior existence of the material institutions of public opinion.16 Although publishing activity in the Sackville case was opportunistic as well as varied, it is possible to distinguish the kinds of writing and the arguments produced on each side. As has already been suggested, Sackville and his supporters favoured a defence that limited itself to the question of his orders and his honour. Their argument essentially was that Sackville’s failing was only apparent and arose merely from a mistake; indeed, if he was guilty of anything, it was of an over-scrupulous attention to his orders. Sackville’s honour, signalized by his willingness to stand trial on these grounds, proved, so it was claimed, that his character remained intact. It was only his conduct on a single occasion that had been remiss.17 His opponents, by contrast, had more scope, and were able to deploy both more aggressive forms of satire and more intricate historical forms. Sackville’s assailants drew on Roman precedents,

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Juvenal and Tacitus most obviously. Though they did not ignore the details of the battle or the allegedly confusing orders, they strove to read the story of Minden in two mutually supporting ways. They contended, first, that Sackville’s conduct revealed his true character. This was an essentially Tacitean claim, as it assumed that character was permanent and fixed, something that the action of history disclosed (in this case cowardice and delinquency). Conduct by contrast was merely circumstantial and temporary, a technical matter and not adequate to a defence of honour. Second, Sackville’s opponents contended that his character was itself indicative of the wider delinquency of Britain, especially of her most privileged sons. The pamphlet The Conduct of a Noble Lord Scrutinized, for example, dismissed the issue of Sackville’s orders, focusing instead on the question of whether his conduct represented disobedience and, if so, whether a corrupt personality was the cause. The pamphleteer was unrelenting in his efforts to prove the latter case. In this vindictive spirit the pamphlet opined that an officer “who sollicits the command, and betrays, should if possible, suffer a twofold punishment; for he is an officer without resolution, conduct or knowledge, and a man without veracity; and if we may believe history, always an ignorant, assuming, officious, fribbling pretender.” The pamphlet’s gendered rhetoric suggested that there was an unbreachable distinction between those animated rightly by the “spirit of a man” and those for whom neither rank nor fortune could prevent a dereliction of both duty and personality.18 Sackville’s claims to honour were thus thrown aside, replaced by an account of an essentially deviant character. In response, pro-Sackville texts such as A Seasonable Antidote against the Poison of Popular Censure complained that attacks on Sackville would prevent that necessary spirit of “emulation” which had long fired the sons of the nobility to serve their country, but such defences were often overwhelmed by the unyielding vituperation of their opponents.19 Among the more pointed and persistent of those writers who joined  the campaign against Sackville was the author of the Farther Animadversions, who began his campaign with A Letter to a Late Noble Commander of the British Forces in Germany. The Letter locates its attack on Sackville more explicitly within contemporary debates about masculinity than most pamphlets of the period. It also makes effeminacy (as an identity revealed by events) central to its wider case. Unsurprisingly, it provoked angry responses from Sackville’s supporters. The move to cast the debate in gendered terms occurs early in the

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text, when the writer chooses to attack Sackville for wasting a terrific opportunity for personal and national glory: No troops were ever animated with more distinguished Ardour. Commanders among the first rank of Nobility, Volunteers of Fashion and Fortune, all nursed in the downy Lap of Ease, forsook at once the Pomp of a Court, the Joys of new-wedded Love, with all the Pleasures of a luxurious Town; and crowded to the German Shore to experience Hardships, brave Dangers, and stand in the Front of Death.20

The passage rehearses a fairly familiar argument. Luxury is everywhere and has sunk masculinity into softness, here characterized as marriage and fashionable living. Happily, the men sent to Germany, like the citizens of the ancient world, were able to rise above such depravity, regaining, in the process, their masculine fortitude. The possibility for national and personal glory seemed strong, yet To your Country’s Detriment, and your own Dishonour, the Expectations of the Public are disappointed. We looked for a Commander, and we find a Commentator. We depended on an active Warrior, and we meet with an ideal Disputant: One, who, in the Field of Battle, debates upon Orders with all the Phlegm of an Academic, when he ought to execute them with all the Vigour and Intrepidity of a Hero.21

The reference here is to Sackville’s detailed analysis of his orders, a dispute which the pamphleteer affects to find of only “academic” interest and which, he suggests, confirms Sackville’s underlying cowardice and effeminacy. Sackville, he alleges, is a close reader of texts, not a commander of men.22 What makes a true commander and how he can be judged are of crucial significance to the Letter. For the most part the case is made negatively. What has made Lord George’s conduct so “shameful” is his inactivity, especially when British soldiers were fighting and dying (the writer suggests that Sackville watched them die).23 The Letter makes it clear that the public (not the king, strikingly) expects “devotion” from its officers, using the term to signify not merely obedience, but sacrifice. Good commanders, the argument runs, do not debate orders or allow doubt to intrude, but act regardless of the consequences. The rejection of any distinction between loyal service and a willingness to throw lives away is made emphatic when the pamphleteer tells

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Sackville that “you had nothing to lose – but your Honour: For a Soldier’s Life cannot be properly called his own.”24 We should pay attention to the precise terms in which the debate is conducted here, and how these diverge from Sackville’s own. The language of “honour” provided the vocabulary through which upper-class males, especially army officers, articulated their identities; it was honour that gave a man character. As Markku Peltonen has argued, honour was most frequently defined along a horizontal axis that united elite males in a culture where mutual esteem vied with pent-up antagonism. It was self-reflexive insofar as it required a sense of the approval of other men (hence the pressure towards duelling). By the mid-­eighteenth century, this potentially destructive arrangement had replaced an older notion of honour as the reward for service to the monarch (which Peltonen terms honour’s vertical axis).25 At his trial, Sackville strove to articulate his honour along both axes, while also insisting that it was more obviously contained within his person, and not, consequently, something that could be questioned by others. The Letter to a Late Noble Commander anticipates and rejects that assumption. It is not for Sackville to assert his honour, the Letter suggests; rather, his honour can only be maintained by actions that fulfil public duties and expectations. This deliberate emphasis on public expectations removes honour from the echelons of the nobility, where it had been fostered, and into the more critical realm of public opinion. The writer’s Second Letter continues this argument, insisting that citizens have a right to judge even “Persons in exalted stations.” Having established this claim, the writer moves to assault Sackville’s Letter to Colonel Fitzroy and his Short Address.26 Sackville had tried to claim not only that his orders were confusing, but that when he sought to have them clarified he had acted from good intentions. The Second Letter dismisses this argument, asserting that it was not for Sackville to analyse the orders, but to follow them. To make the point, ancient precedents – Caesar, Alexander, and Pompey – are cited, all of whom risked their own lives. From this perspective, it mattered little whether the orders were even executable; Sackville’s duty required him to act as he was told, not as he thought fit.27 Having established the nature of Sackville’s dereliction, what the two Letters claim, and the Farther Animadversions also elucidates, is that, under pressure to advance towards the enemy, Sackville simply buckled, whereupon the innate flaws of his personality became plain. He had always been on the verge of delinquency, these texts imply, but it had taken Minden to confirm this. His flaws had been understood first by those officers near

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him, such as Fitzroy, but were now evident to the public, as the court martial undoubtedly confirmed.28 If the rhetoric of the Letters and of other anti-Sackville texts is harsh and unforgiving, they nonetheless move creatively between opposed accounts of personality. The Letters assume that Sackville’s bad character was always present and only waiting for an opportunity to show itself. Other texts argued that his poor character emerged only under the pressure of the emergency. By contrast, those writing in Sackville’s defence tended to announce that his personality, which they saw as signalized and literalized by the scars that his body bore from earlier engagements, was unchanged in its nature.29 This clash between different accounts both of Sackville and of the nature of character itself is most evident at his court martial. The trial began in March 1760, when Sackville was formally charged with disobeying orders. This was a broad charge, but one containing subordinate accusations of reluctance, tardiness, and, ultimately, refusal. Specifically, the court investigated Sackville’s conduct in the period immediately prior to the battle, and the time and place of his arrival at his station on the morning of the battle (it was suggested that he had arrived late). More seriously for Sackville, witnesses were asked to describe his reaction to the order to advance the cavalry of the right wing. The court heard testimony on the speed of the cavalry’s advance and the question of whether they could ever have assisted the infantry.30 Yet it was not these details that attracted the attention of the poet, Thomas Gray, who wrote to a friend that Ld G:S: proceeds in his defence. People wonder at (& some there are that celebrate) his dexterity, his easy elocution and unembarrassed manner. He told Gen: Cholmondeley, one of his Judges, who was asking a Witness some Question, that it was such a question as no Gentleman, or Man of honour, would put, & it was one of his misfortunes, to have him among his Judges, upon which some Persons gave a loud Clap. But I do not find that the court either committed or reprimanded them. Ld Albemarle only contented himself with saying, he was sure, that those Men could be neither Gentlemen, nor Men of Honour.31

Gray’s sceptical commentary examines Sackville’s assertion of his honour as a property inherent in his own character, as well as his efforts to insist on honourable dealing as a standard required of the court itself. The account Gray provides of Sackville’s supporters clapping, alongside responses from other members of the court, reveals how this claim

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was supported or resisted by different parties present at the trial. What all participants seemed to share (Gray included) was the notion that character was fixed – that men were either honourable or dishonourable by nature. The task was to discover which, or at least to notice when their behaviours disclosed their true natures. This understanding of the trial and, indeed, of Sackville’s character was most clearly challenged when Colonel Robert Sloper gave his evidence on the third day of the proceedings. Sloper, who held his commission in the Dragoon Guards, had been stationed “on the Right of the right Wing of the Cavalry,” and so was well placed to observe Sackville when his orders were delivered to him first by Colonel Ligonier and finally, and most confusingly, by Colonel Fitzroy.32 Sloper was a hostile witness and rarely missed an opportunity to stress lapses in Sackville’s conduct. What Sloper’s evidence pointed to was a more complex sense of Sackville’s failure because it revealed that personality was arguably more mutable and required much closer reading. His most devastating contribution was the account he gave of Sackville’s receipt of his orders. Sloper recollected urging Ligonier: “For God’s Sake, Sir, repeat your orders to that Man … that he may not pretend not to understand them … but you see what condition he is in.” Asked to clarify what he meant, Sloper reflected that “Lord George Sackville was alarmed to a very great degree,” adding that when ordered to advance “he seemed in the utmost confusion.”33 These short sentences, recorded in the official Proceedings, do scant justice to the explosive nature of Sloper’s testimony. Sloper’s description of Sackville’s apparent collapse skirted the question of his conduct without invoking the more stable idea of either a good or bad character. It introduced instead a third term when Sloper alleged that Sackville had suffered some calamity of mind: something he glossed as a “condition.” On this account, Sackville was unmanned by the pressures of battle and so disclosed a far messier and uncertain internal life in which character and conduct seemed to collapse into each other. The official Proceedings omitted Sackville’s outraged reaction to Sloper’s claims. However, the more sympathetic account of the court martial provided by The Trial of the Right Honourable Lord George Sackville quoted Sackville’s assertion in court that “This sort of attack, I never heard before, from any gentleman whatever, excepting from the private insinuations of this gentleman.” Sackville’s words began to make insinuations of their own (that Sloper was an unmannerly gossip), but he was interrupted by the Earl of Albemarle, who objected to the breach of

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protocol occasioned by his complaint. Sackville was, however, undeterred, and asserted himself again: Lord G. Sackville. Your Lordship may imagine what I must feel upon such an occasion; and it is difficult not to express it instantly. Lord Albemarle. I am very sensible of what your Lordship must feel, and sorry to interrupt; but the course of proceeding — Lord G. Sackville. I submit to the opinion of the Court, and must beg leave to suppose, for the present, that no such evidence has been given … and shall treat that gentleman … with the contempt he deserves.34

The feelings at issue are those connected to honour, feelings that Sloper’s evidence had besmirched. Sloper’s evidence was ambiguous in this respect. Honour, however defined, was generally assumed to be the public manifestation of an essentially public personality. If the possession of honour was the basis for a public character, Sackville’s “condition” was necessarily its obverse. Sloper’s evidence consequently defined a different kind of character, or rather account of character, in which personality was a matter of shifting and evolving layers, an instability disclosed in moments of trauma. This was a more modern suggestion, one that would find further elaboration in the mid-eighteenthcentury novel, but that would also influence the debate about Sackville.35 Responding, seemingly sympathetically, to Sackville’s plight, for instance, was An Apologetical Oration. The Oration appeared to refute the notion that Sackville had been in a “strange condition,” but an expanded second edition speculated that his cowardice might be constitutional and hence deserving of compassion. Paddy Bullard has argued that this pamphlet lies behind Sterne’s depiction of Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, whose faults are tolerated in precisely this way. But by making this connection, the Oration exposed Sackville to even greater assault as it seemed to confirm his faulty personality – a personality that came increasingly to be seen as effeminate. The Oration was certainly answered in terms that accepted the premise that a dubious private personality was the cause of Sackville’s inability to advance to glory.36 Crucial in this respect was the notion, so luxuriantly displayed by Uncle Toby, that private character, rather than public responsibility, determined personality. Sloper’s evidence had certainly hinged on the revelation of a private weakness, a revelation that Sackville had sought to contest. The author of A Parallel between the Two Trials of Lord George Sackville was particularly exercised by this point. It was not

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obvious to him that Sloper could know what Sackville felt, and it was certainly improper for him to speculate.37 Other writers were less circumspect. A Consolatory Letter to a Noble Lord seized on Sloper’s evidence and turned it into a subject of mockery. Sloper, the writer suggested, had failed to appreciate how “COURAGE, and a soldier’s HONOUR waged war within your breast, against PRUDENCE, TENDERNESS, ­COMPASSION, HUMANITY, and a hundred other VIRTUES.”38 The effect of the bogus or misdirected generosity of texts like An Apologetical Oration and the Consolatory Letter was to feminize Sackville, who was increasingly seen to possess the virtues and inner life of a kindly woman. That “feminine” values of charity, benevolence, and compassion gained a progressively higher status during the eighteenth century is a commonplace requiring no further elaboration here. However, what occurs in the response to Sackville is a far more prejudicial “feminization of discourse,” one that is still “bourgeois” in orientation, but that is directed more explicitly at decrying the modern culture of luxury that aristocrats were thought to embody.39 A Letter to a Late Commander and Privy Counsellor went further still; Sloper’s evidence, the pamphlet argued, had revealed that Sackville was an “improper person,” whose private failings debarred him from all public office. Such dereliction ensured that Sackville merited a rebuke from the nation’s “illustrious dead”: “Learn hence” may say the shade, … “know proud mortal, that publick virtue is of all the virtues the most inestimable. Your effeminate and unmanly life had almost produced an increase of low spirits and nervous disorders, whose natural and unalterable character, is that of fear, while your notion of delicacy like the fashionable world, effectively disqualified you from enduring toils, or facing danger. The debility of your modern honour, makes you, that you cannot produce one spark of manly spirit.”40

As the passage progresses, Sackville’s delinquency is elaborated into a wider failing, such that he stands as the epitome of modern “debility,” raised to that bad eminence by his own refusal to understand that his honour required sacrifice. The idea that Sackville’s private personality rendered him unfit for the manly activity of war had been anticipated in The Art of Preserving; Sackville, the poet suggested, had a soul “Whose Smell’s delicate, we hear, / It can’t the Scent of Powder bear.”41 As Anna Clark has noted, the suggestion of same-sex passion allowed Wilkites to represent Sackville in a number of unpleasant satiric prints that connected his

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sexuality to his cowardice.42 By far the most thoroughgoing assault on Sackville in this respect was the Letter from a P**m**e in I**l**d, the text with which this essay began. The Letter claimed to be the work of George Stone, the Archbishop of Armagh. Stone and Sackville had been allies in Irish politics during the early part of the decade, when Sackville’s father was Lord Lieutenant. Stone’s support for the Dublin Castle administration had exposed him to a welter of personal attacks, which frequently alleged homosexuality. The archbishop was not, therefore, an ideal correspondent. The Letter, in common with a number of other texts produced during the controversy (notably the Consolatory Letter), claimed to sympathize with Sackville, deploring the way in which his conduct at Minden had been linked to accusations about his sexual proclivities. The Letter regretted that this had been the fate of many men before Lord George, citing his own case, that of Admiral Byng, and even William III.43 Some pious reflections are made about the nature of the press (“hireling scribblers” are condemned) and about the credulity of the populace, whose acceptance of scandal is cast as comparable to their belief in ghosts. Tacitus is even summoned to condemn them. The effect of this ostensible charity was to besmirch Sackville more fully with the ordure of his private crimes.44 Like Sloper’s evidence, the Letter’s claim points to a complex personality unable to meet the test of either war or honour. The pamphlet ends more curiously with a comparison between modern Britain and ancient Carthage. Both were great maritime powers, but the British have “by a long intercourse with the French acquired so much of their politeness that they no longer resemble the Carthaginians in one respect”: they do not execute their generals when they fail.45 Although this text is striking in its emphasis on North African rectitude (the Romans seem oddly suspect here), it was not unusual for anti-Sackville texts to compare the ancient world with the modern, only to find the latter lacking. The Letter to a Late Noble Commander, for example, appeals to Roman law and especially to “Roman severity” – a move that, eccentrically, installed the Duke of Dorset as the ideal reader of his son’s delinquency. The point, perhaps, was to associate Sackville more widely with corruption and privilege; though equally, the pamphleteer suggested that, such was his degeneracy, even his father could not fail to censure it.46 By the end of 1760, Sackville had preserved his life but not his reputation. His career as an army officer was over and his seat in the Commons was maintained only by the extent of his family’s patronage. Political

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rehabilitation came in 1775 when, under the new name of Lord George Germain, he entered Lord North’s cabinet as Secretary of State for the American Department. He had regained his place, in part, with a series of speeches in which he had argued, without a flicker of irony, for the need for the Americans to be treated with “Roman severity.”47 Sackville’s prominence as Secretary of State meant that his character and “condition” remained in the public gaze. This later phase of Sackville’s career (effectively the afterlife of the trial) shows that the account of deficient personality debated at the time of the court martial had come to be the dominant way of judging Sackville and, by extension, other members of the political and social elite. Pamphlet culture was central to this shift, for scurrilous satires had pressed this argument most vividly. Sackville’s appointment coincided with the first performances of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Duenna. Sheridan’s comic opera follows the adventures of Antonio and Ferdinand as they subvert the prescriptions of Ferdinand’s father, Don Jerome, and the mischievous plans of Isaac the Jew, in order to woo Clara and Louisa. Sheridan’s work was soon appropriated for more satirical purposes by Israel Pottinger, who produced The Duenna: A Comic Opera the following year. Like other political appropriations of Sheridan’s works, this text includes a dramatis personae that makes plain its scurrilous intentions.48 Pottinger’s “Don Louis,” partly based on Sheridan’s Louisa, is meant to bring to mind George III. The role of Don Jerome is assumed by Mac Boot (plainly the Earl of Bute), while “Boreas” (Lord North) appears in Isaac’s role. Sackville appears as “Minden,” cast in the character of Clara. “Minden” is clear in its reference, but Pottinger was probably also allowing the name to chime with “Maiden,” a name associated on the stage with homosexuality. Even without this echo, it is clear that, cast as a woman, Lord George’s sexual orientation, as well as his failure in battle, will be at issue.49 These political swipes elaborated the suggestion made on Pottinger’s title page, which explained that the work was presented as “performed by His Majesty’s Servants.” By late 1776, when Pottinger’s text was published, the performance of His Majesty’s Servants appeared lamentable, as the war in America had already stalled. What Pottinger does best is to provide a comic conflation of the cabinet’s most anti-American members with a set of hasty Spanish lovers. Confusions of gender, especially as they affect the king and “Minden,” add to an unrelenting satire that mixes political complaint with lurid accusation. Pottinger shows a deft touch, however, when transforming a love song into an ode to self-interest. In Sheridan’s Duenna, Clara

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sings of the torments of her love for Ferdinand: “When sable night, each drooping plant restoring / Wept o’er the flowers her breath did cheer.”50 Pottinger replaces Clara with Minden, who sings: When on the German plain each soldier battled, To the dread music of the drum, And with terrific looks, their weapons rattled, I much frightened, long’d for home.51

The satire appears crude: Sackville is clearly the “Coward of Minden.” Rather than lead his cavalry in a charge, he had remained stationary, or as he sings here, “At Ferdinand’s stern orders / I wish’d me from those borders.” What had been an anxious lover’s lament becomes here a confession of cowardice. Yet at another level the text is more complex. When Clara sings in Sheridan’s Duenna, she is reflecting on her decision not to let Ferdinand steal her from her father’s house. Her song reveals her ambiguous response: Endless faith he swore,   But soon I chid him thence,   For had his fond pretence,   Obtain’d one favour then,   And he had press’d again I feared my treacherous heart might grant him more.52

In performance, this song (based on the Scots air “De’il Take the Wars”) gave Clara a more complex character, caught as she is between duty and desire.53 The parallel offered in Pottinger’s version is intriguing. Minden, facing equally intrusive requests, though from his commanding officer, also hesitates, fearing to commit himself: Ah! What oaths he swore!   But soon I hied me thence:   For had his mad pretence   Oblig’d me to fight then –   I must have fought again; And I was well resolved to fight no more.

Conflated with Sheridan’s eager lover, Prince Ferdinand appears rather urgent, even importunate, while Minden’s now girlish hesitation

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becomes, oddly, more explicable. The unconfident Minden cannot see why “foolish folks … wrangle / And cut each others throats for fame.”54 In this guise Sackville is clearly feminized, and his relationship with Prince Ferdinand, which had been characterized by miscommunication, becomes one of girlish mistrust. The feminized persona attributed to Sackville nearly twenty years before is thus recalled still more emphatically. It is not an excess of compassion that baffles him now, but a kind of lovesickness. Sloper’s evidence attributed Sackville’s hesitation to a debilitating “condition” that prevented all movement and rational thought. Honour was consequently lost and Sackville’s claim to a masculine character thrown into question. Pottinger’s satire equally exploits a sense that Sackville’s character collapses, but it more completely feminizes him. Honour, if it exists at all, persists only in its feminine form, as virginal reluctance. Pottinger’s Duenna is a reminder that Sackville’s character could not be redeemed, even after his entrance into government. Pottinger’s image of “Minden” as a man-woman confused by her pushy lover exploited the persistent charges raised against Sackville’s sexual orientation. Earlier in 1776, these charges had been renewed in William Jackson’s Sodom and Onan. In his mocking dedication to Samuel Foote, Jackson referred to Sackville as a “Hero; who by the strange misrepresentation of unrefin’d Men of Valour, was degraded as a Coward, for turning his back towards his Enemies; of which charge he must now stand acquitted, since it is known he distinguishes his dearest Friends by receiving them in the same Manner.”55 Later, the poem represents George III as Inveigled by Scotch Insinuation To pardon Sodomites and damn the Nation. S–––––––e, both Coward, and Catamite, commands Department hon’rable, — and kisses hands, With lips that oft’ in blandishment obscene Have been employ’d, yet now, (oh shame!) he’s seen An haughty headstrong Minister of State, Controulling Men of minds immaculate.56

As this short but unpleasant extract makes clear, Sodom and Onan is all but obsessed with the idea of same-sex desire. Jackson’s homophobia is unrelenting. His text is littered with breathless references to sodomy, to sexual misconduct (including the notorious case of Robert Jones), and to

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tales of young men falling easy prey to the sexual predations of the king’s ministers.57 Sodom and Onan confirms what other texts of the period only hint at: that there was a virulent and ultimately homophobic culture of opposition active by the 1770s. Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), it should be noted, sails close to this wind when it talks insinuatingly about closets and backstairs alliances.58 The revival of attacks on Sackville in the 1770s confirms the increasingly prescriptive account of gender identity with which Dror Wahrman characterizes the later eighteenth century. Wahrman’s ambitious claim is that, during the last decades of the century, identity ceased to be a matter of collective or social formation and became more obviously a matter of individual traits and characteristics that were thought to originate from within the individual.59 In Sackville’s case it is possible to witness this evolution in terms of his failure to preserve the social aspects of honour and class, just as his opponents (enabled to no small degree by Sloper’s evidence) focused attention on the inner workings of his deviant personality. Wahrman’s argument is perhaps too confident in its sense that there was a sudden, inevitable restriction of personal styles and identities, complemented by the simultaneous creation and imposition of new forms of being. There are grounds to be suspicious of such all-encompassing arguments, even as they open new possibilities for research. As this essay has shown, a concentration simply on the performance of gendered identities risks underestimating the political motivations of those making their presence felt in the debate. The wretched homophobia of the pamphlet wars should not obscure the class-based, progressive politics of those who pursued Sackville. Many of the pamphlets of 1759 and 1760, especially those attacking Sackville, were keen to rehearse their right to speak on the issue. Even writers who defended Sackville insisted not on deference but on discussion. The desire to discipline deviant forms of masculinity emerges from a deeper desire to discipline the public sphere by removing from it any hint of elite decadence. The status and role of the aristocracy were consequently debated and often challenged. That some of the debate is unpleasant, even in the extreme, should not eclipse the significance of this campaign to re-establish and broaden the public sphere. What it should do, however, is lead to a questioning of the cost at which publicity and participation were achieved during the eighteenth century. What also occurs in these exchanges is a fundamental rethinking and refashioning of the discourse on character. Personal identity emerges

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from the Sackville trial as worryingly slippery and temporary. Roman certainties – the appeal of fixed character – were sought, but not found. This apparent loss represents an important shift in the history of selfhood and its articulations. Sackville’s exclusion might not bother us much today (he seems not to have suffered as much as he might have done), but his fate is a reminder that the creation of the new public sphere during the eighteenth century was often achieved by a strategic and restrictive recasting of what political selfhood entailed, and even what it meant to be human. NOTES This essay begins a much larger project on honour and its relation to masculine character in the long eighteenth century. I am grateful to Shaun Regan, David Fairer, and Kate Dossett for helping me to bring to completion this first piece. 1 A Letter from a P**m**e in I**l**d to a Certain Great Man (London, 1759), 18. 2 Piers Mackesy, The Coward of Minden: The Affair of Lord George Sackville (London: Allen Lane, 1979). 3 The Proceedings of a General Court-Martial held at the Horse Guards (London, 1760), 224. See also Mackesy, Coward of Minden, 216–24. 4 See G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: 1660–1800 (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000); and Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen, eds, English Masculinities, 1660–1800 (London: Longman, 1999). 5 Randolph Trumbach, “Sodomy Transformed: Aristocratic Libertinage, Public Reputation and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Homosexuality 19 (1990): 105–24. 6 John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 163–200; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 237–81; and Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 7 Wilson, Sense of the People, 202. 8 John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London, 1757), 29, 53–4, 66–7, 71–84. 9 See Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, 89–92, 108–11.

“Unfit to Serve”  231 1 0 Mackesy, Coward of Minden, 28–34. 11 See Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4, 11. 12 See, for instance, An Ode on the Glorious Victory Obtained by the Allied Army in Germany (London, 1759). 13 Lord George Sackville’s Vindication of Himself in a Letter to Colonel Fitzroy, 2nd ed. (London, 1759), 11. 14 A Short Address from Lord George Sackville to the Public (London, 1759), 3. 15 See The Black Book; or, A Complete Key to the Late Rattle at Minden (London, 1759). 16 Wilson, Sense of the People, 40–1, 226–35. 17 See Mackesy, Coward of Minden, 175–8. 18 The Conduct of a Noble Lord Scrutinized (London, 1759), 19–20. 19 A Seasonable Antidote against the Poison of Popular Censure (London, 1759), 18. 20 A Letter to a Late Noble Commander of the British Forces in Germany (London, 1759), 10. 21 Letter, 11. 22 Letter, 27. 23 Letter, 29–33. 24 Letter, 18. 25 Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 26 A Second Letter to a Late Noble Commander (London, 1759), 3, 25. 27 Second Letter, 36–41, 44–5. 28 Letter, 53–5. 29 See An Address to the People of England (London, 1759), 24, 27–33; and An Answer to a Letter to a Late Noble Commander (London, 1759), 43–4, 50–3. 30 See The Proceedings of a General Court-Martial, 8–10. 31 Thomas Gray to James Brown, 28 March 1760, in Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 2:663. 32 Proceedings, 30. 33 Proceedings, 32–3. 34 The Trial of the Right Honourable Lord George Sackville (London, 1760), 40–1. 35 Lynch, Economy of Character, 24, 27–9. 36 An Apologetical Oration on an Extraordinary Occasion, 2nd ed. (London, 1760). See Paddy Bullard, “Tristam Shandy, Lord George Sackville, and Uncle Toby’s Apologetical Oration,” Shandean 14 (2003): 98–103; and An Answer to Asgill’s Apologetical Oration (London, 1760).

232  Robert W. Jones 3 7 A Parallel between the Two Trials of Lord George Sackville (London, 1760), 14–16. 38 A Consolatory Letter to a Noble Lord (London, 1760), 15. 39 For the “bourgeois ‘feminization of discourse,’” see Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 13–14. 40 A Letter to a Late Commander and Privy Counsellor (London, 1760), 17–19, 24. 41 The Art of Preserving: A Poem (London, 1759), 3. 42 Anna Clark, Scandal: Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 30–1, 233–4. 43 Letter from a P**m**e, 19–20, 24. 44 Letter from a P**m**e, 33–4, 29–30. 45 Letter from a P**m**e, 42–3. 46 Letter, 58–9, 63–4. 47 R.C. Simmons and P.D.G. Thomas, eds, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783 (New York: Kraus International Publishers, 1982–), 5:318–19. For discussion, see my Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain during the War for America, 1770–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 37–8. 48 See David Francis Taylor, “‘The Fate of Empires’: The American War, Political Parody, and Sheridan’s Comedies,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (2009): 379–95. 49 An effeminate character called Maiden had appeared in Thomas Baker’s Tunbridge Wells; or, The Yeoman of Kent (1703). See also Laurence Senelick, “Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the Eighteenth-Century London Stage,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990): 45–52. 50 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. Cecil Price, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 1:241. 51 Israel Pottinger, The Duenna: A Comic Opera (London, 1776), 9. 52 Sheridan, Dramatic Works, 1:242. 53 Linda V. Troost, “The Characterizing Power of Song in Sheridan’s The Duenna,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 20 (1986–7): 153–72. 54 Pottinger, Duenna, 9. 55 William Jackson, Sodom and Onan (London, 1776), pp. i–ii. 56 Jackson, Sodom and Onan, 17–18. 57 Jackson, Sodom and Onan, 14, 18–20, 28. 58 Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford, 9 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–), 2:258, 261. 59 Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

“Unfit to Serve”  233 BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources An Address to the People of England. London, 1759. An Answer to Asgill’s Apologetical Oration. London, 1760. An Answer to a Letter to a Late Noble Commander. London, 1759. An Apologetical Oration on an Extraordinary Occasion. 2nd ed. London, 1760. The Art of Preserving: A Poem. London, 1759. The Black Book; or, A Complete Key to the Late Rattle at Minden. London, 1759. Brown, John. An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times. London, 1757. Burke, Edmund. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, edited by Paul Langford et al. 9 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–. The Conduct of a Noble Lord Scrutinized. London, 1759. A Consolatory Letter to a Noble Lord. London, 1760. Gray, Thomas. Correspondence of Thomas Gray. Edited by Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935. Jackson, William. Sodom and Onan. London, 1776. A Letter from a P**m**e in I**l**d to a Certain Great Man. London, 1759. A Letter to a Late Commander and Privy Counsellor. London, 1760. A Letter to a Late Noble Commander of the British Forces in Germany. London, 1759. Lord George Sackville’s Vindication of Himself in a Letter to Colonel Fitzroy. 2nd ed. London, 1759. An Ode on the Glorious Victory Obtained by the Allied Army in Germany. London, 1759. A Parallel between the Two Trials of Lord George Sackville. London, 1760. Pottinger, Israel. The Duenna: A Comic Opera. London, 1776. The Proceedings of a General Court-Martial held at the Horse Guards. London, 1760. A Seasonable Antidote against the Poison of Popular Censure. London, 1759. A Second Letter to a Late Noble Commander. London, 1759. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Edited by Cecil Price. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. A Short Address from Lord George Sackville to the Public. London, 1759. The Trial of the Right Honourable Lord George Sackville. London, 1760. Secondary Sources Barker-Benfield, G.J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

234  Robert W. Jones Brewer, John. Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Bullard, Paddy. “Tristam Shandy, Lord George Sackville, and Uncle Toby’s Apologetical Oration.” Shandean 14 (2003): 98–103. Carter, Philip. Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: 1660–1800. Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000. Clark, Anna. Scandal: Sexual Politics of the British Constitution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Eagleton, Terry. The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. Hitchcock, Tim, and Michèle Cohen, eds. English Masculinities, 1660–1800. London: Longman, 1999. Jones, Robert W. Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain during the War for America, 1770–1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Lynch, Deidre Shauna. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Mackesy, Piers. The Coward of Minden: The Affair of Lord George Sackville. ­London: Allen Lane, 1979. Peltonen, Markku. The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Senelick, Laurence. “Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the EighteenthCentury London Stage.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990): 45–52. Simmons, R.C., and P.D.G. Thomas, eds. Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783. New York: Kraus International Publishers, 1982–. Taylor, David Francis. “‘The Fate of Empires’: The American War, Political Parody, and Sheridan’s Comedies.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (2009): 379–95. Troost, Linda V. “The Characterizing Power of Song in Sheridan’s The Duenna.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 20 (1986–7): 153–72. Trumbach, Randolph. “Sodomy Transformed: Aristocratic Libertinage, Public Reputation and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of Homosexuality 19 (1990): 105–24. Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in ­Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Wilson, Kathleen. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

10 Olaudah Equiano and the Seven Years’ War: Slavery, Service, and the Sea Shaun Regan

First published in 1789, Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative presents a view of naval life during the Seven Years’ War from a perspective that is unusual in at least two respects, being both from below decks and from a seaman of African extraction. While other accounts from below decks certainly exist for this period – William Spavens’s Narrative of 1796 being perhaps the most significant – Equiano’s is by far the fullest and most detailed recollection of eighteenth-century maritime experience from the point of view of a black sailor. In terms of narrative technique and the kinds of “adventures” they relate, the accounts of Spavens and Equiano are not entirely dissimilar. The portion of The Interesting Narrative that covers the period of the war usefully complements Spavens’s memoir, not least its account of the most significant action that Spavens was involved in: Admiral Hawke’s victory at Quiberon Bay in November 1759.1 And yet, though the narratives of Spavens and Equiano are similar in combining matters of public record with more personal recollections of life at sea, Equiano’s status as a black slave informs his own memoir in ways that necessarily differentiate it from that of a white European seaman. In this essay, I examine in detail Equiano’s account of the war, in terms of his status and identity, his representation of personal experience, and his mode of narration. My discussion focuses, first, on the connections and distinctions Equiano makes between slavery, service, and his sense of self; second, on his interlacing of personal experience and public history (the historical record); and finally, on the relationship between the lively immediacy of Equiano’s description of his maritime “adventures” and the retrospective narration of them, from a vantage point thirty years later. As I shall argue, within the miniature sailor’s journal that The Interesting

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Narrative incorporates, Equiano inscribed an important, first-person account of the conflict at sea, but one that sees him shifting between positions of centrality and marginality, heroism and buffoonery, a sense of belonging and a reassertion of outsider status. With good reason, the black experience of British ships during this period is more usually examined in relation to the Middle Passage, not least in discussions of Equiano himself. As David Richardson reminds us, “Equiano’s Narrative remains alone among contemporary writings to provide an African’s perspective on the Atlantic crossing.”2 While it is not quite as unique in its coverage of the Seven Years’ War, Equiano’s narration of his time in the Royal Navy nevertheless gives us the most extended account of the war from an African’s perspective. Considered in terms of his publishing venture in The Interesting Narrative, this miniature sailor’s journal can be said to have added a further generic component to the textual patchwork of Equiano’s autobiography.3 In important ways, though, this section of the text differs significantly from the narrative material that surrounds it. The adjacent chapters of The Interesting Narrative, which contain accounts of the Middle Passage and the Americas, formed part of Equiano’s contribution to the late-century abolition movement, written to expose the abuses and impositions of the British slave trade and the institution of slavery in the colonies. Instructively, Equiano does not make explicit connections between these accounts of his experiences of an Atlantic slave ship and of slavery in the British West Indies, and the intervening account of his time at sea during the Seven Years’ War. Rather than critiquing the colonial slavery that underpinned Britain’s commercial empire, in fact, the chapters of The Interesting Narrative that focus on the Seven Years’ War are tonally triumphalist, glorying in the victories by which Britain had secured its global dominance over France. Equiano’s textual relation of these years shows him working in the service of empire, via his role in the navy – something he evidently remained proud of when he came to write his autobiography in the late 1780s. For Equiano, certainly, the war years represented something of a high point in his early experience of the white, Western world. Whereas the first white Europeans he encountered appeared to Equiano as “spirits,” Equiano now sought to imbibe the “spirit” of the English (78). The verbal playfulness of this moment itself conveys the new sense of liberty and national affiliation that Equiano experienced during his years in the navy, albeit in a seafaring role that was not freely chosen. Indeed, as this essay will outline, the chapters of The Interesting Narrative that cover the war period ultimately present a double vision of Equiano: as

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not just an enslaved seaman, without significant rank, but as someone whose involvement in the war was both worthy of note and capable of being narrated in a heroic (if, at times, self-deflating) idiom. Taken in its entirety, The Interesting Narrative encapsulates a range of maritime experience, from coastal work in the Caribbean to deep-sea adventures, with stints aboard both commercial and naval vessels, and labour as both a slave and a freeman, and in a number of different capacities. The range of roles and activities recorded in Equiano’s text reflects the complexity of black maritime experience at this time, the extent and variety of which can be glimpsed in the works of the first black authors to have written in English, from the 1760s onwards. The importance of seafaring to the narratives of early black autobiographies and the identities of their author-narrators has been usefully outlined by W. Jeffrey Bolster, who notes that “seamen wrote the first six autobiographies of blacks published in English before 1800.”4 A number of these narratives display an investment in what, along with Margaret Cohen, we might term the “maritime picaresque”: the relaying of seaborne dangers and miraculous escapes; shipboard discipline and skirmishes with the enemy; global travel, curiosity, and adventure.5 Within the context of the present discussion, it is particularly noteworthy that, like Equiano, the black autobiographical writers Briton Hammon and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw also saw action at sea during the Seven Years’ War, though in the Caribbean rather than the North Atlantic. As he recorded in his Narrative (1760), Hammon served on a series of naval vessels in 1758–9 and, while on the Hercules, found himself involved in “a very smart Engagement” with a French ship, during which he was wounded and many men died. Gronniosaw worked on a privateer during the war, and was similarly involved in “a very smart engagement” with five French merchantmen near Saint-Domingue, after which they joined other English ships in attacking a French fleet (with much blood again being shed). Later in the war, Gronniosaw also enlisted in the 28th Regiment of Foot, sailing from New York with Admiral George Pocock as part of the force that took Martinique from the French and Cuba from the Spanish in the summer of 1762.6 As these narratives remind us, if naval power was crucial to British imperial success during the Seven Years’ War, the sea as conflict zone was also an important crucible of black experience during these years.7 The account of Equiano’s own time in the navy comprises the bulk of chapters 3 and 4 of The Interesting Narrative, in a section of the work that

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was advertised – in the proposals for subscription that were issued in 1788 and 1789 – as “An Account of Five Years Transactions in the Wars, under Admiral Boscawen, &c. from 1757 to the Peace in December 1762” (346, 349). Significantly, these years in Equiano’s life and text were framed by two periods of slavery in the Americas. Beforehand, by his own account, Equiano had been transported from Africa to the West Indies and purchased by Michael Henry Pascal in Virginia. At the end of the war, Pascal then sold Equiano to Captain James Doran of the West Indiaman the Charming Sally, thereby returning him to West Indian slavery. While he remained Pascal’s property during the intervening years, in practice Equiano’s status differed significantly from that of chattel slaves in the Indies and was far closer (though not identical) to the type of naval service undertaken by many other seamen during this period, particularly those who had been involuntarily impressed into service. It is this relationship, between slavery and service at sea, that I wish to tease out more fully here. As The Interesting Narrative attests, Equiano’s time in the navy shadowed that of his master, as Pascal was promoted and moved among various ships: the men-of-war the Roebuck, the Preston, the Namur, the Jason, and the Royal George, and later the Aetna fireship. As he recalls, on occasion it was Equiano himself who ensured that he wasn’t parted from his master, as for instance when he successfully pleaded with Pascal to take him along when Pascal moved from the Preston to the Royal George at the turn of 1757–8, being unable, as he puts it, to “think of leaving my master” (72). Revealingly, Equiano made this appeal to Pascal despite the fact that it meant leaving behind his best friend, the white American Richard Baker (who would die not long after, in 1759). As his conduct here suggests, Equiano’s assertion of loyalty to Pascal – “I would not leave him” (68) – verged on an article of faith during these years. If such loyalty might be read as subservience on Equiano’s part, it was also highly pragmatic, and serves as a useful reminder of the desirability to Equiano of maintaining his master’s protective presence. Equiano’s vulnerability when he was separated from Pascal is revealed by an episode in 1757 when he narrowly avoided impressment just before he made it onto the Roebuck, as the sloop that was carrying him was approached by a press gang and his makeshift hiding place (a hen coop) was discovered (69). From his close association with Pascal, moreover, Equiano enjoyed privileges that were not available to most white naval servants (excepting those who were training to become officers), in particular the educational opportunities from which he benefited both at sea and on land during these years.8

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Equiano’s determination to remain with Pascal and, more broadly, his primarily positive recollection of these years prompts a consideration of the contemporary treatment of blacks at sea, and in the navy specifically. The issues at stake in assessing the black maritime experience during this period are usefully clarified in Bolster’s Black Jacks. As Bolster observes, while the lives of many black sailors might justify us in thinking of them in somewhat cosmopolitan terms as “citizens of the world” (and Equiano, certainly, was remarkably well travelled), there were also important differences between the experiences of black and white sailors, not least the fact that blacks sailors often occupied “special billets”: roles as cooks, musicians, officers’ servants (like Equiano during the war), and hairdressers (like Equiano in later years).9 Moreover, while the “egalitarian undercurrents” in maritime life have been noted in scholarship on the early black Atlantic, Equiano’s own experience testifies that the sea hardly offered a utopian existence for black, any more than for white sailors – either in merchant or in navy vessels.10 Even during his time with the navy, for instance, the youthful Equiano was treated partly as a figure of fun and sport, forced to box other boys on deck for the amusement of the crew and passengers (70). Equiano also found himself materially disadvantaged at sea owing to his status as a slave, being deprived by Pascal of his wages and of any share in the spoils from the taking of prizes. Nevertheless, while the image of happily egalitarian (and comfortably multi-ethnic) shipboard life has rightly been challenged in recent scholarship on eighteenth-century maritime culture, for Equiano himself the years of war were paradoxically a time of comparative security and belonging. Notably, The Interesting Narrative represents the perils of naval service as far preferable to the perilous lot of the black man in the Americas. Indeed, in the context of chattel slavery, we see an ironic division opening up between the experiences and status of whites – many of whom resented their enforced, metaphorical slavery (or slavery-byanalogy) on naval vessels – and blacks, for whom entry into the navy could offer relief from the brutality of plantation slavery.11 While life at sea undoubtedly represented a hard existence during this period, for black sailors especially the alternatives were liable to be far harsher, and naval service in particular presented opportunities for identity formation that stood in stark contrast to the “social death” – the denial even of human identity – that characterized West Indian slavery. The identity that Equiano formed for himself during the Seven Years’ War was as much communal and national as it was personal or mobile.

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In much writing on eighteenth-century maritime life and the early black Atlantic, the sea has functioned as a metaphor for the performance of a fluid, uprooted selfhood. As Marcus Rediker observes, “mobility, fluidity, and dispersion were intrinsic to the seaman’s life”; and the relationship between the sea and mobility, dispersion and identity, has proven attractive to scholars of ex-slave narratives of the era. Writing about Equiano himself, for instance, Helen Thomas argues that “in Equiano’s text, emphasis upon the sea (that ‘no man’s land’) functions as a signifier of the author’s cultural displacement and territorial dispossession, together with the fluid, protean nature of his efforts to reconstruct his identity within the diaspora.”12 This is in itself a rather complex statement, which associates the sea both with the dispossession that accompanies enslavement and with the subsequent reconstruction of a dispersed (diasporic) identity. In other ways, also, this notion of the sea as a symbol for a fluid, mobile, and shifting selfhood is not entirely adequate to the construction of Equiano’s own identity, especially during his years in the navy. For, in these pages, Equiano writes of himself as part of a larger, and relatively stable collectivity, both as a crew member on various ships and as a sailor in the navy at large. Increasingly, and especially after his participation in the action at Lagos Bay, Equiano adopts the collective pronoun “we” in relation to particular engagements and to movements of the fleet. Although still in effect Pascal’s personal property during these years, the enslaved seaman also acts in at least two ways that resemble the voluntary undertaking of “service,” as he labours for the navy both in the manner of a public servant and with a sense of occupational duty.13 Significantly, it was during these same years that Equiano developed a sense of patriotic “English,” or British, identity. The status of an English-identifying slave at sea was, necessarily, fissured with contradictions, not least within the context of a war conducted in defence of Britain’s “empire of the seas.”14 For David Garrick, in the popular patriotic song “Hearts of Oak” (1759), Britons were “free men not slaves / For who are so free / As the sons of the waves.”15 Despite the evident contradiction between his own personal status and these symbolic connections between liberty, empire, and the sea, Equiano’s naval employment was crucial to his forging of an English national self-identification during these years. Indeed, as The Interesting Narrative implies through verbal association, Equiano’s time in the navy in effect reversed his earlier experience of the Middle Passage, as the “terror” that he had experienced on his first view of a slave ship on the African coast became his

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invulnerability to “terror” whilst in the navy. His experience on “shipboard,” Equiano claims, now makes him “a stranger to terror of every kind,” such that he becomes, “in that respect at least, almost an Englishman” (77).16 Equally significant to his burgeoning sense of national belonging during these years was Equiano’s participation in Pascal’s press gang, towards the end of 1758. Such involvement was not, of course, necessarily surprising. As Richard Middleton notes, “the main administrative challenge to the fleet in the period 1756 to 1759 was that of manning”; and, as Nicholas Rogers confirms, impressment “expanded dramatically” during the Seven Years’ War.17 Of particular note in The Interesting Narrative, however, is the form of words in which Equiano expresses the aim or rationale of the gang: “to complete our complement” of “hands.” Ironically here, in helping to deprive other men of their liberty, Equiano presents himself as securely part of the collective (British, naval) unit. William Spavens – himself an impressed seaman who also formed part of a press gang – reflected in his own Narrative on the contradiction involved in pressing in order “to obtain seamen for the service in this land of liberty.”18 While Equiano’s narrative also displays this contradiction, it is a contradiction that Equiano himself doesn’t explicitly draw out, as he endeavours to identify himself staunchly with the British war effort. It would be possible, of course, to argue that Equiano was simply naive in his belief that he could play a full role in this enterprise, and be fully accepted within the British navy. The same might also be said of his youthful attitude to naval warfare. These two elements come together in his reiterated desire for an “engagement” with the enemy, which registers in The Interesting Narrative as part of a deeper longing for the more intensely communal experience that is forged during battle (70). If this battle lust partly reflects Equiano’s immaturity and unfamiliarity with the human cost of war at this point, it also confirms his patriotic desire to contribute to British naval success. In an essay that focuses on Equiano’s religious conversion, Lincoln Shlensky has argued that The Interesting Narrative is the “chronicle of a man who has lived his life in a state of fundamental solitariness and even detachment, and whose personal quest is concomitantly a search for a collective identity.” This quest remains unfulfilled, in Shlensky’s view, for Equiano subsequently acquires a “profound yet unspeakable awareness of the distance between the promise of full English subjecthood and the reality of his continuing subordination.”19 Yet a firm sense of “collective identity” is precisely what Equiano records himself as having acquired during these

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years in the navy. Even if he found his national affiliation with Britain increasingly fraught in later years, his naval service was a period when Equiano felt he belonged, to the extent that he began to feel “tolerably easy” in his situation on board the Roebuck, and both “inured” to the “service” and “happily situated” in 1759, during the period between the engagements at Louisbourg and Lagos Bay (70, 77). At an emotional high point in this part of The Interesting Narrative, Equiano shares in the celebrations towards the end of 1762: the “very great joy” and “loud huzzas” that followed news of peace (92). Given his experience of relative security and a sense of community in the navy, it is no surprise that he felt keenly his abrupt removal back to the West Indies, this time to Montserrat, on 13 February 1763, just three days after the signing of the Peace of Paris. As Equiano reflects, compared with the “new slavery” into which he is plunged in “this land of bondage,” all his “service” hitherto had been “perfect freedom” (95, 98).20 Yet even at this point in the Narrative it is noticeable that Equiano eschews apportioning blame for his re-enslavement, either to Britain as a nation or to British colonial interests. Rather than castigating his adopted homeland and its inhabitants, Equiano ascribes this movement back into West Indian slavery to the mysterious determinations of “allpowerful fate” and to his profane presumption in believing that he could determine his own future (91, 95).21 In recounting his experiences in Montserrat itself, Equiano proceeds to differentiate sharply between his time in England (and in the navy) and his life in the Indies, noting the difficulty of being “daily exposed to new hardships and impositions, after having seen many better days, and been, as it were, in a state of freedom and plenty” (119). His desire to return to what he nostalgically calls “Old England” is intensified, subsequently, by his new understanding of the “state of a free negro” in the Indies. To Equiano, the situation of free blacks, who are ever in danger of re-enslavement and no more immune to ill-treatment than are slaves, represents a “new scene of horror” that he had not previously conceived (122). The threats that faced free black men and women in the Americas serve as a pertinent reminder of the practical limitations to Africans’ enjoyment of liberty throughout the Western world at this time. Yet even when enslaved in Montserrat, Equiano continued to benefit from the relative freedom provided by his period of service during the war. As Vincent Carretta notes, it was from his time in the navy that Equiano gained the skills that helped to improve his situation in the West Indies, allowing him to avoid the more usual field work on the

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plantations.22 Indeed, as he goes on to reflect, rather than being treated as a “common slave,” during his Montserrat years Equiano received “better treatment ... than any other I believe ever met with in the WestIndies in my situation” (100, 116). Prior to his shipment back to the West Indies, Equiano saw action in some of the major encounters of the Seven Years’ War. A close analysis of his account of these strategic victories will illustrate more precisely both the extent of Equiano’s identification with the British national cause and the necessary limits to this identification. As we have seen, it was service in the British navy that facilitated Equiano’s self-fashioning as “English.” Defined against the servitude that he experienced both before and after, this military service encouraged Equiano to present himself as a kind of national citizen (a citizen-soldier, or citizen-seaman), serving the interests of his “new countrymen” (77). The action he saw at sea also gave Equiano an opportunity to cast himself in a more exalted light. The opening paragraph of The Interesting Narrative declared that Equiano’s history was that of “neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant” (31). Nevertheless, in his first-hand account of naval conflict, Equiano veers close to casting himself precisely as a heroic figure. At the moment of the Narrative’s publication in 1789, this account tapped into the late-century nostalgia for the period of the Seven Years’ War, which had come to be viewed by many as a happier era of British martial triumph. Even through this idealizing, retrospective lens, however, Equiano would find it increasingly difficult to reconcile his self-presentation as a citizenhero with his actual role in Britain’s naval campaigns. The first of the major British successes in which Equiano found himself involved was the taking of Louisbourg in June–July 1758. This was the “first clear-cut Anglo-American victory of the war,” as Stephen Brumwell observes, and a victory that served to rectify the previous, failed attempt at Louisbourg in June–September 1757.23 Observing events from the Namur, a second-rate 90 (on which Pascal was sixth lieutenant), Equiano recounts the two main parts of the combined military and naval operation: both the landing at Anse de la Cormorandière in Gabarus Bay (Cape Breton) and the subsequent taking of the Louisbourg fortress on 27 July 1758. Notably, this was the first time that Equiano’s ship had formed part of a fleet (“this mighty fleet,” as he calls it), prompting him to adopt the collective pronoun “we” to describe parts of the action at Louisbourg. It was also the first time that Equiano, as he had wished, was “gratified in seeing an encounter between our

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men and the enemy,” during the landing itself (73). In his packed and fast-moving account of this key strategic victory, Equiano is especially taken with events on the water. In particular, he records the damage done to a number of French ships by shells from the British batteries, and the capture, on 25 July, of the French squadron’s flagship, the Bienfaisant (along with the burning of the Prudent and the taking of four frigates) – the manner of which James Wolfe also praised as “quite unexpected and astonishing.”24 Equiano also intersperses a number of “remarkable” personal experiences and observations in his account, such as the passing of a musket ball into a lieutenant’s mouth and out through his cheek, and the “scalp of an Indian king” that he records having held in his hands (73). This scalping formed part of the revenge enacted upon the native allies of the French by the British Rangers, for what was regarded as their barbaric treatment of the defeated British and colonial forces at Fort William Henry in 1757.25 As critics occasionally remark, Equiano gradually loses his defamiliarizing perspective in The Interesting Narrative, as he becomes increasingly accustomed to the Western world. Nevertheless, his experience outside Africa was still partly a scene of wonders to him at this stage, and this brief account of the siege at Louisbourg concludes with him marvelling at the “most grand and magnificent spectacle” of the sea-parade that followed the victory: a “most beautiful procession” of British ships and officers, decked out in colours and full regalia, which he recalls with unmitigated enthusiasm (74).26 Following a period back in England (during which he participated in Pascal’s press gang), Equiano’s next involvement in a major encounter saw him back on the Namur, Boscawen’s flagship, during the victory over the Mediterranean fleet of Rear Admiral la Clue (Jean-François de la Clue-Sabran) at Lagos Bay in August 1759. In his “particular account” of this engagement, Equiano evokes the “noise, hurry and confusion” that followed upon the escape of the French fleet through the Straits of Gibraltar, as the unprepared British – many of whom were on shore – rushed to ready the ships for a pursuit that would last all night and into the following day. Notably, Equiano describes this battle from two vantage points, giving his readers both the historical facts of the matter, as though viewed from above decks, and his own personal viewpoint from the middle deck of the Namur. As he records, Boscawen took on seven French ships during this engagement with only the seven ships of his own division, rather than the full complement of fifteen British ships (82). Here, Equiano evokes the dramatic tension among the crew,

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as the British held fire until they came alongside la Clue’s flagship, the eighty-gun Ocean, before receiving the order to “pour the whole three tiers into her at once” (83). The outcome of the engagement, as Equiano notes, was that the British captured three battleships (the Temeraire, the Modeste, and the Centaur) and forced onto rocks the Ocean and the Redoubtable, which were subsequently set alight with a “dreadful explosion” – an “awful” spectacle to match the “magnificent” one that had followed the victory at Louisbourg (83). For Equiano, the success that culminated at Lagos Bay was a key moment in his involvement in the war, and one that also forms a highlight in The Interesting Narrative itself, being advertised in the heading to chapter 4 as “the celebrated engagement between Admiral Boscawen and Mons. Le Clue” (77). Evidently, Equiano’s view in 1789 was more akin to Frank McLynn’s assessment, that Lagos Bay was a “stunning victory for Britain,” than to Fred Anderson’s downplaying of its significance in comparison with Hawke’s victory at Quiberon Bay.27 As at Louisbourg, Boscawen, “our gallant admiral,” comes in for particular if somewhat modest praise (82). This respectful yet subdued assessment is more in keeping with the paucity of literary responses to Boscawen’s successes during the war than with the toasting of the admiral that took place during the widespread celebrations that followed news of the victories at Louisbourg and Lagos.28 Indeed, in The Interesting Narrative’s account of the latter, more to the fore than Boscawen is Equiano himself, as he struggles to avoid the enemy’s fire and to keep one of the guns powdered in the thick of battle. While his personal experience of this sea battle is vividly recollected in Equiano’s first-person narration, his earlier lust for battle – his longing “to be gratified with a sea-fight” (73) – is increasingly tempered by an understanding of the human cost of such engagements. More so than at Louisbourg, Equiano is witness here to the deaths of many of those around him: “I was frequently stunned with the thundering of the great guns, whose dreadful contents hurried many of my companions into awful eternity” (83). Such a stark demonstration of the human toll of battle went beyond the testaments to the less glorious side to warfare that Equiano had previously glimpsed while stationed at Gibraltar: a soldier who had drowned in attempting to desert, a sailor who had been hanged, and the master of a frigate towed in a grating as “a mark of disgrace for cowardice” (80). Once more giving voice to a sense of loss that begins to displace the (narrative) excitement of battle, Equiano is now drawn to reiterate his sense of the horror of such

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“sea-fights”: “here I was a witness of the dreadful fate of many of my companions, who, in the twinkling of an eye, were dashed in pieces, and launched into eternity” (83). This balancing in the Narrative, of triumphant excitement with a remembrance of the human cost of the conflict, mirrors the dual perspective with which the Annual Register for 1759 concluded its own account of the annus mirabilis. As the Register noted, while “in no one year since she [Britain] was a nation, has she been favoured with so many successes, both by sea and land, and in every quarter of the globe,” it was nonetheless to be hoped that peace would soon follow, in the wake of “so many scenes of horror.”29 His own testimony to the human toll and the bloody horror of the war notwithstanding, Equiano shared in the celebrations of the British victory at Lagos – the “loud huzzas and acclamations” that followed the defeat of the French fleet (83) – while also developing further a sense of his own heroism and involvement in the victory. As Wilfred D. Samuels notes, Equiano, in his account of his role in the gunnery, possibly insinuates that “this historical battle could not have been won without the brave Ibo’s role,” if only because, had Equiano actually blown up the ship (which he recalls running “a very great risk” of doing), the battle may well have turned out very differently (84).30 Having cast off his fears in the face of French fire and gone through “the whole of my duty with alacrity,” Equiano also solaces himself with the thought that, should he escape with his life, he will be able to relate the engagement “and the dangers I had escaped” to the Misses Guerin back in Britain – perhaps hoping, like Othello, that he would be loved for “the dangers I had passed.”31 Instructively, Equiano concludes his account of Lagos Bay firmly in the collective, positioning himself more decisively as part of the navy: “we left Admiral Broderick to command, and we, with the prizes, steered for England” (84). Written in the bold tones of triumph, Equiano’s conclusion here actually reads more like one of Boscawen’s dispatches back to the Admiralty than like a fair reflection of his own role in the decision-making process. The latently heroic idiom of this account of Lagos Bay continues into the narrative of the final key encounter in which Equiano saw action during the war: Commodore Keppel’s taking of Belle-Isle (Belle-Île-enMer), off the Breton coast of France, in April–June 1761. Introducing this new phase in his maritime exploits, Equiano declares that “we sailed once more in quest of fame” (185), fashioning the tale as a kind of chivalric adventure, rather than what it in fact was: a renewal of Pitt’s policy of raiding the French coast to unsettle the French Continental war

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effort. However, having established a sense of collective, noble action, Equiano is immediately forced to pull back, recording the initial missteps in the campaign, which left a number of troops dead or taken prisoner, and describing his own misadventures during the second attempt on the garrison, on 21 April. Here again, the public narrative of the siege becomes a more intimate recollection of a private experience. Curious to see “the mode of changing the mortars, and letting off the shells” (89), Equiano gets himself into a dangerous and somewhat foolish situation. Caught between French and English fire, nearly hit by shells, shot at, and reprimanded by a sergeant, he makes a hasty escape on an out-of-control horse. This ludicrous episode effectively subverts the heroic, masculine identity that Equiano had been developing in his account of his service in the navy. On land at least, it seems, he falls somewhat short of the “warrior” figure that critics sometimes make him out to be: he is far from epitomizing the “kind of muscular, sinewy masculinity” that, in Felicity Nussbaum’s view, manifests itself during The Interesting Narrative’s account of “naval battles during the Seven Years’ War.”32 Reading this another way, we might say that Equiano’s fantasy of public significance had become insupportable by the end of the war, in the face of his actual, personal status. His confessed ineffectuality during his final campaign thus foreshadows Equiano’s return to the abasement of slavery in the West Indies, even as the buffoonish comedy of the account of his conduct (or misconduct) at Belle-Isle stands in stark contrast to what will follow in his Narrative: the horrified enumeration of slaves’ sufferings in the colonies. Its undignified ending notwithstanding, Equiano’s narrative of his involvement in the Seven Years’ War is remarkable on a number of fronts. Uniquely full as an account by an African serving in the Royal Navy, these chapters of The Interesting Narrative provide a lively, first-person evocation of some of the most significant engagements during these years. Intriguingly, Equiano goes in for a fair amount of name-dropping in these chapters, accumulating references to well-known admirals and generals in what adds up to a kind of military and naval celebrity spotting. In passing, the reader is given fleeting glimpses of a number of figures whose names would have been associated with disgrace or defeat: Admiral Byng, who stood trial in 1757 (and earlier) while Equiano was in Portsmouth; William Augustus, “the late duke of Cumberland,” who was shipped back to England on the Preston that same year, while Equiano was also on board (72); and Admiral Conflans,

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who would be remembered for his defeat by Hawke at Quiberon Bay and whom Equiano manages to mention in passing (albeit erroneously) as having possibly been in command of a French squadron that gave the English fleet a broadside on the voyage back from Louisbourg in 1758 (75).33 As this latter example highlights, along with the central encounters at Louisbourg and Lagos Bay, Equiano also recorded his involvement in, and witness to, a number of smaller-scale skirmishes at sea. Off Spain prior to the victory at Lagos Bay, for instance, he witnessed a “smart fight” between the Culloden and the Conqueror (on the British side) and the French fleet, while later, on board the Aetna fireship, he was also involved in protecting the British fleet from the firefloats that the Nassau sent towards them following the campaign at Belle-Isle (81, 91). More generally, The Interesting Narrative is notable for its overall accuracy as historical reportage, when set against the known facts of the events described. As Carretta observes, Equiano may possibly have kept a journal during these years, just as he later did during the Phipps expedition to the North Pole in 1773.34 At the same time, we should remember (as Nicholas Rogers emphasizes in his essay in this volume) that details of battles such as those at Louisbourg and Lagos Bay would have been easily available in printed form. The dispatches of Amherst and Boscawen, for instance, were widely extracted in the newspapers and magazines, where they were joined by other eyewitness reports, such as the lengthy account of the taking of Louisbourg that appeared in two parts in the London Magazine in November and December 1758.35 If we add to such eyewitness accounts the various book-length histories of the war that were available by the 1780s (such as John Entick’s fivevolume A General History of the Late War, published in London in 1763– 4), it becomes clear that Equiano would have found little difficulty in supplementing his own memories with details gleaned from a variety of printed sources. Whether or not the accuracy of Equiano’s wartime recollections derived purely from memory, his narrative record of the war was in a broader sense not only (necessarily) selective, but also shaped by the circumstance of its composition some considerable time after the war itself. A case in point here (and another example of retrospective namedropping) is an important moment in the account of the Louisbourg campaign that I left out of the picture earlier: Equiano’s interaction with James Wolfe. In The Interesting Narrative, the account of this interaction is placed prior to the landing at Gabarus Bay. While Equiano doesn’t

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himself provide a date, one possible occasion for such an encounter would have been 28 May 1758, when Major General Amherst and Brigadiers General Lawrence and Wolfe were all on board the Namur.36 At the same time, Equiano refers here to frequent occasions of interaction with the general, at least some of which might have occurred as Wolfe voyaged back to Britain on the Namur in the weeks following the siege at Louisbourg.37 In Equiano’s retrospective portrayal, Wolfe is presented to us as “the good and gallant General Wolfe ... whose affability made him highly esteemed and beloved by all the men,” a notably positive character sketch that, in one short sentence, manages to term the general “good,” “gallant,” “highly esteemed,” “beloved,” and possessed of “affability” (73). We can contrast this account to a modern debunking of Wolfe, such as that of Fred Anderson. For Anderson, rather than good, gallant, highly esteemed, beloved, and affable, Wolfe was indecisive, savage, vainglorious, lucky, and less successful than he has often been portrayed.38 In the Narrative, Equiano places himself at the centre of Wolfe’s time on the Namur, stating that “he often honoured me, as well as other boys, with marks of his notice; and saved me once a flogging for fighting with a young gentleman” (73). As Carretta observes, Wolfe’s sparing Equiano a whipping functions to mark the latter out as a gentleman also, not only because he is noticed by the general, but because Wolfe treats Equiano as one deemed to be above such a physical punishment as a flogging.39 Here, then, is the popular idea (or ideal) of Wolfe as a man of sensibility, willing to interact with the men and to uphold standards of justice and moral behaviour. This is the view of the general that became dominant in Britain after the victory of 13 September 1759, and that, prior to Equiano’s penning of his autobiography, had gained renewed appeal following the public exhibition of Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe (1770) in 1771.40 In his reflections upon Wolfe, which occupy no more than a few lines in a packed account of his years with the navy, Equiano thus presented a capsule portrait of the general as a sympathetic, benevolent soldier, in a sketch that situates Equiano himself at the centre of important events in the American campaign. That this account was written some thirty years after the transactions it describes brings into sharper focus the extent to which Equiano’s representation of Wolfe is filtered through the lens of his victory at Quebec and the subsequent construction of his reputation as a brave, generous, and self-sacrificing leader. Had Wolfe not succeeded in North America, Equiano’s text would presumably have read rather differently at this point, as an encounter with an unfortunate

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or cowardly Wolfe, say, rather than with a “good” and “gallant” one. In the final paragraph of The Interesting Narrative, Equiano declares that his work is “written by one who was as unwilling as unable to adorn the plainness of truth by the colouring of imagination” (235–6). Yet inevitably there were limits to verbal rectitude and unadorned plain speaking where extraordinary events were concerned. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham irrevocably adorned the plain truth of Wolfe’s former actions. Equiano’s 1789 depiction of General Wolfe in 1758, that is to say, was imaginatively “coloured” by the events of September 1759, and the subsequent “making” of Wolfe’s heroic reputation.41 The filtering of earlier events through the lens of later knowledge is, undoubtedly, an integral characteristic of autobiography. Yet it is a characteristic that bears particularly on Equiano’s recording of his experiences during the Seven Years’ War. To confirm the point, it is possible finally to conduct a kind of narrative “control” experiment in relation to other contemporary figures who, by contrast to Wolfe, do not appear in The Interesting Narrative. As noted above, for instance, while Amherst and Lawrence were also on board the Namur in 1758, only Wolfe’s presence is noted – even though, at the time being recalled, Wolfe was no more senior in rank than Lawrence, and less senior than Amherst. Also relevant here is another major historical figure whom Equiano would go on to sail with but who had not yet made his name by the time that Equiano was producing his Narrative. The voyage on this occasion was the Phipps expedition to the North Pole, and the figure in question was travelling on board the Carcass, the sister ship to the Race Horse (on which Equiano journeyed during the expedition). Had Equiano lived to publish further lifetime editions of his Narrative into the early nineteenth century (or even up until 1797, when his polar companion first made a public name for himself), it seems safe to assume that he would have quickly updated the work to record his voyage of discovery alongside the new hero of the British navy – the man known to us now as Lord Nelson. NOTES For suggestions, clarifications, and references, I would like to thank Nicholas Rogers, Britt Zerbe, Jeremiah Dancy, David Dwan, Roland Pietsch, and Stephen Brumwell. I am especially grateful to Hugh Boscawen for sharing the findings of his extensive researches into the British victories at Louisbourg and Lagos Bay.

Olaudah Equiano and the Seven Years’ War  251 1 The Narrative of William Spavens, a Chatham Pensioner. Written by Himself (London: Chatham Publishing, 1998). Originally published by subscription in Louth, and also titled The Seaman’s Narrative. 2 David Richardson, “Through a Looking Glass: Olaudah Equiano and African Experiences of the British Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Black Experience and the Empire, ed. Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 71. 3 On the genres of the Narrative, see Vincent Carretta, Equiano, The African: Biography of a Self-made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 303, and the revised Penguin edition of The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. xxvii. Parenthetical references to The Interesting Narrative appear in the text and are to this edition. 4 W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 4. The writers Bolster has in mind here are Briton Hammon, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Equiano, Venture Smith, and Boston King. 5 Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 6 Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 23, 44–5, and 56 (note 84). 7 Though see also Nicholas Rogers’s caveats about the navy’s resistance to enlisting slaves in the Caribbean, and about the relative lack of racial diversity within the service, in The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and Its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London: Continuum, 2007), chap. 5. 8 I am grateful to Roland Pietsch for this point. 9 Bolster, Black Jacks, 12, 37, 32. These roles were not, of course, exclusive to black seamen. 10 Robert J. Desrochers, “‘Surprizing Deliverance’?: Slavery and Freedom, Language, and Identity in the Narrative of Briton Hammon, ‘A Negro Man,’” in Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001), 155. 11 Bolster perhaps overstretches the point in arguing that “whereas white seamen were among the most marginalized men in white society, black seamen found access to privileges, worldliness, and wealth denied to most slaves” (Black Jacks, 36). 12 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 159; Helen Thomas, Romanticism and

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1 3 14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

2 2 23 24 25

Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 229–30. I draw here on the OED entry on “service.” On the “empire of the seas,” see Robert Harris, Politics and the Nation: ­Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 3. Quoted in Frank McLynn, 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 392. The song first appeared in Garrick’s Harlequin’s Invasion (1759). The “Englishing” of Equiano was furthered by the fact, as he wrote to Bishop Lowth in 1779, that he had “embraced the Christian faith in the year 1759” – a statement that ties his Christian conversion to Britain’s victorious annus mirabilis (221). Richard Middleton, “Naval Administration in the Age of Pitt and Anson, 1755–1763,” in The British Navy and the Use of Naval Power in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Jeremy Black and Philip Woodfine (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1988), 119; Rogers, Press Gang, 7. Narrative of William Spavens, 20. On the paradox of using unfree labour in the defence of liberty, see also Nicholas Rogers’s essay in this volume (pages 25–52). Lincoln Shlensky, “‘To Rivet and Record’: Conversion and Collective Memory in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative,” in Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807, ed. Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007), 123, 121. It is not entirely clear whether by “service” here Equiano means his former slavery, before his arrival in England, or his years in the navy, for which he has previously used the word “service.” On this latter point, see my “Learning Not to Curse: Swearing, Testimony, and Truth in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative,” The Eighteenth Century 54, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 339–57. Carretta, Equiano, The African, 96. Stephen Brumwell, Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006), 158. Wolfe to his father, 27 July 1758, in Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (London: William Heinemann, 1909), 384. As Frank McLynn notes, the taking of Louisbourg was “a triumph marred by atrocities,” as General Amherst let the irregulars (including the Rangers) off the leash: 1759, 45. Intriguingly, Equiano himself appears to view the scalping more as a curiosity than as an atrocity.

Olaudah Equiano and the Seven Years’ War  253 26 This procession, which took place on 4 August, is recorded in the ships’ logs of the HMS Vanguard and HMS Sutherland. I am grateful to Hugh Boscawen for this corroborating information. 27 McLynn, 1759, 252; Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 377–84. For a detailed narrative of the victory at Lagos Bay, see also Sam Willis, “The Battle of Lagos, 1759,” Journal of Military History 73 (July 2009): 745–65. 28 In the newspaper reports of the celebrations that followed these victories, Boscawen is specifically mentioned as being toasted in such places as Canterbury and Falmouth (following Louisbourg) and London, Portsmouth, and Penryn (following Lagos Bay). However, the notable success at Lagos Bay, particularly, appears to have elicited just a sprinkling of (generally poor) verse. See, for instance, the poem by “Britannicus” in the Universal Chronicle, or Weekly Gazette for 8–15 September 1759 (issue 76, p. 296), which casts him as “The ruling Monarch of the wat’ry plain” and a “check” to “Gallic pride,” and the separately published ode on the occasion of the victory, which appeared the following month: An Ode: ­Occasioned by the Success of Admiral Boscawen (London, 1759). 29 The Annual Register; or, A View of the History, Politicks, and Literature, of the Year 1759 (London, 1760), 56. 30 Wilfred D. Samuels, “Disguised Voice in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African,” Black American Literature Forum 19 (1985): 67. 31 William Shakespeare, Othello, I.iii.166. Othello’s status as a military leader is also suggestive here. 32 Samuels, “Disguised Voice,” 67; Felicity A. Nussbaum, “Being a Man: Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho,” in Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001), 58. 33 This fleet was actually under the command of Capitaine de vaisseau LouisCharles, comte du Chaffault de Besné. See Jonathan R. Dull, The French Navy and the Seven Years’ War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 107. 34 Vincent Carretta, “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20 (1999): 102. 35 “An Authentick Account of the Reduction of Louisbourgh,” in London Magazine 27 (1758): 549–52, 615–17. The “Authentick Account,” which was also published separately as a pamphlet, was probably written by

254  Shaun Regan

36

37

38

3 9 40

41

Valentine Neville, purser of HMS Orford. I am indebted to Hugh Boscawen for this attribution. J. Clarence Webster, ed., The Journal of Jeffrey Amherst: Recording the Military Career of General Amherst in America from 1758 to 1763 (Toronto: The ­Ryerson Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 46. Wolfe had travelled to Cape Breton on the Princess Amelia. Equiano possibly condenses into one narrative moment interactions with Wolfe that – assuming they occurred – took place both before the landing at Gabarus Bay and during the transatlantic voyage back to Britain. In Anderson’s view, for instance, Wolfe was “bold to the point of rashness, and only good luck (and a timely death) can account for his reputation for tactical brilliance” (Crucible of War, 235). Carretta, Equiano, The African, 63. On Wolfe’s reputation and the arts, see Alan McNairn, Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997). As Nicholas Rogers notes in his essay in this volume (pages 25–52), Wolfe’s star began to rise following his exploits at Louisbourg in 1758. By 1789, though, these exploits were clearly outshone by his victory and death at Quebec. On the construction of Wolfe’s reputation, see also ­Nicholas Rogers, “Brave Wolfe: The Making of a Hero,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 239–59, and Brumwell, Paths of Glory, chap. 10.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Amherst, Jeffrey. The Journal of Jeffrey Amherst: Recording the Military Career of General Amherst in America from 1758 to 1763. Edited by J. Clarence Webster. Toronto: The Ryerson Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931. The Annual Register; or, A View of the History, Politicks, and Literature, of the Year 1759. London, 1760. “An Authentick Account of the Reduction of Louisbourgh.” London Magazine 27 (London, 1758): 549–52, 615–17. Entick, John. A General History of the Late War. 5 vols. London, 1763–4. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Edited by ­Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin, 1995; revised edition, 2003.

Olaudah Equiano and the Seven Years’ War  255 Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw. “A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, As Related by Himself.” In Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century, edited by Vincent Carretta, 32–58. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Hammon, Briton. “Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man.” In Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century, edited by Vincent Carretta, 20–5. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. An Ode: Occasioned by the Success of Admiral Boscawen. London, 1759. Spavens, William. The Narrative of William Spavens, a Chatham Pensioner. Written by Himself. London: Chatham Publishing, 1998. Secondary Sources Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. London: Faber and Faber; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. ­Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Brumwell, Stephen. Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006. Carretta, Vincent. Equiano, The African: Biography of a Self-made Man. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. – “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity.” Slavery and Abolition 20 (1999): 96–105. Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Desrochers, Robert J. “‘Surprizing Deliverance’?: Slavery and Freedom, Language, and Identity in the Narrative of Briton Hammon, ‘A Negro Man.’” In Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, edited by Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, 153–74. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001. Dull, Jonathan R. The French Navy and the Seven Years’ War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Harris, Robert. Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. McLynn, Frank. 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004.

256  Shaun Regan McNairn, Alan. Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Middleton, Richard. “Naval Administration in the Age of Pitt and Anson, 1755–1763.” In The British Navy and the Use of Naval Power in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Jeremy Black and Philip Woodfine, 109–27. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1988. Nussbaum, Felicity A. “Being a Man: Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho.” In Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, edited by Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, 54–71. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001. Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Regan, Shaun. “Learning Not to Curse: Swearing, Testimony, and Truth in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative.” The Eighteenth Century 54, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 339–57. Richardson, David. “Through a Looking Glass: Olaudah Equiano and African Experiences of the British Atlantic Slave Trade.” In Black Experience and the Empire, edited by Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins, 58–85. The Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Rogers, Nicholas. “Brave Wolfe: The Making of a Hero.” In A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, edited by Kathleen Wilson, 239–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. – The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and Its Opponents in Georgian Britain. ­London: Continuum, 2007. Samuels, Wilfred D. “Disguised Voice in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African.” Black American Literature Forum 19 (1985): 64–9. Shlensky, Lincoln. “‘To Rivet and Record’: Conversion and Collective Memory in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.” In Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807, edited by Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson, 110–29. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007. Thomas, Helen. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Willis, Sam. “The Battle of Lagos, 1759.” Journal of Military History 73 (July 2009): 745–65. Willson, Beckles. The Life and Letters of James Wolfe. London: William ­Heinemann, 1909.

PART FOUR Empire and the Arts

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11 Setting the Empire in Stone: Commemorating Wolfe in the Gardens at Stowe Joan Coutu

Historians of British politics recognize that the two years from the late summer of 1759 to the autumn of 1761 were a period of uncharacteristic unity in a governing system that had long been riven by party and faction. William Pitt the Elder had entered into a coalition with the Duke of Newcastle, thereby allowing a place for almost every person of influence and thus effectively disabling any significant opposition. With the annus mirabilis of 1759, when the tide of the Seven Years’ War had turned so dramatically and decisively in favour of the British, followed by the accession in 1760 of the young king George III, who proudly proclaimed he was “British born and bred,” events appeared to suggest that Britain’s rise to unprecedented world power was irreversible. Yet, as many of the same historians have pointed out, that unity was tenuous at best. The Pitt-Newcastle coalition was a delicate balance that embraced a wide spectrum of competing interests. The euphoria of the annus mirabilis cut across partisan and class lines, but, like any wartime patriotism, the effects were short-lived. Furthermore, within months of the king’s accession, it became clear that the young monarch was determined to be more than simply a silent figurehead. Political unity would be shaken as early as late 1759 by speculation over the terms of peace with France, and it would emphatically collapse with the joint resignation on 5 October 1761 of Pitt from the House of Commons and his brother-in-law, Richard, Earl Temple, from the House of Lords.1 Nonetheless, this brief moment of uneasy unity is significant, for it  occurred at a critical point in the shaping of a national identity, as Britain moved from being a trading nation with a few colonies to a major world empire. The response to Wolfe’s victory at Quebec was a watershed in that transformation of self-perception. Of the tributes to

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Wolfe that followed, Benjamin West’s painting The Death of General Wolfe has undoubtedly enjoyed the longest legacy. The painting was not, however, executed until 1770, eleven years after the fateful battle. As such, it was not primarily a reaction to Wolfe’s victory but rather a discourse about the state of the empire when the work was painted, as well as about history painting, the role of history painting within the newly founded Royal Academy, and West’s own reputation in British society.2 By contrast, the most immediate responses to Wolfe’s victory were ephemeral: as soon as news of the victory was published on 16 October 1759, guns and cannons were fired, bonfires were lit, whole oxen were roasted, fireworks were set off, people rioted in the streets, and transparencies extolling Wolfe and his victory illuminated windows across the nation. All of this was on an unprecedented scale.3 These fleeting displays were made more permanent by reports published in the press and by the transcription, in print, of the texts of the illuminations. Tributes intended to be more lasting soon followed, with the penning of sermons, eulogies, and various other panegyrics, also faithfully recorded in the press. The idea of a sculpted monument, a mode of commemoration intimately connected with ancient Rome and thus richly imbued with imperial pretensions, also surfaced, and the path to a monument followed a similar trajectory from ephemerality to permanence. Initial calls for a monument were no more than responses to the moment, coming from individuals caught up in the euphoria of the occasion who had no real authority to proceed.4 In early November 1759, however, the rhetoric gained substance when George II declared he would erect a monument at his own expense (up to £3000) in Westminster Abbey.5 Slightly more than a week later, Pitt outmanoeuvred the king and issued a call in the House of Commons for a monument to be paid for by the House.6 A competition was called immediately, designs were submitted by the end of the year, and in July 1760, still fired by the exhilaration of the annus mirabilis, the Duke of Devonshire, with the approbation of Pitt, chose the winning entry.7 No one could foresee that it would be another thirteen years before the monument was finally completed and unveiled in the Abbey. As I have discussed elsewhere, this monument to Wolfe was part of Pitt’s political agenda, standing as a legacy of his own overarching ambition.8 The amorphous “public,” which had previously been inconsequential in the political realm, became a necessary component of his “measures not men” strategy and his drive for empire. To this end, he

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challenged his opponents by seemingly playing to the public.9 The very first tributes to Wolfe were orchestrated by Pitt and were immediately instrumental in effecting a huge outpouring of apparently spontaneous patriotism, tinged with soulful grief for the loss of Britain’s new young hero. The trope of Wolfe as the everyman who rose to the rank of major general, who left behind his widowed mother and his fiancée to fight for his country, who conquered the odds and was triumphant at Quebec, and yet who was magnanimous and peace loving at heart, closely paralleled Pitt’s emphasis on the public and his own constructed reputation as the “Great Commoner.” Indeed, those who knew of Wolfe’s ruthless ambition, his confused leadership, and his merciless attitude towards the enemy, whether soldier or civilian, soon realized that it was best to keep their thoughts to themselves in the face of such a tide of uncritical praise.10 The design of the final monument, conceived by Joseph Wilton but redolent of Pitt’s involvement, is also a manifestation of the trope (see plate 1). Wilton’s design is a complex narrative of triumph, magnanimity, grief, loss, and New World exoticism. At one level, it plays to the lowest common denominator of the public, pulling at the heartstrings of even the lowest orders of society, who, like their social betters, had access to the Abbey and had the monuments within explained to them.11 The monument is also rich in allegory, thereby addressing a more sophisticated audience. In its pose, the figure of Wolfe invokes the patriotic dying Meleager from classical mythology, as well as the dying Christ and the young Isaac from Judaeo-Christian history. While the former reinforces a link with the classical past, the latter allusions present the British as the new Israelites, the chosen people of God, a theme that was widely promulgated in sermons and panegyrics after Wolfe’s victory.12 The narrative speaks of the apparent munificent, liberty-­loving nature of the new British empire at a time when, for many, empire meant tyranny and oppression, the French providing a contemporaneous example near at hand. Another monument to Wolfe, erected at precisely the same time as the one for the Abbey was being planned, is visually more straightforward but is much more difficult to place within the conceit of the magnanimous and munificent empire. This was an enormous obelisk to Wolfe in the landscape garden at Stowe, Buckinghamshire (see figure 11.1). It was designed and erected by Richard, Earl Temple, owner of Stowe, who was perhaps the richest nobleman in England, as well as Lord Privy Seal in the House of Lords in the Pitt-Newcastle coalition. The

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11.1 Obelisk to Major General James Wolfe at Stowe, 1761–2. By kind permission of the National Trust, Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire. Photo: Joan ­Coutu.

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obelisk was part of a comprehensive program of landscape design, architecture, and sculpture at Stowe, intended as an unabashed expression of imperial pre-eminence, which for Temple also embraced factional partisanship and personal triumphalism. Temple was the eldest of the Grenville brothers, of gentry but untitled stock. In 1749 he inherited, along with his mother, the estates of Stowe and Wootton from his uncle Richard, Viscount Cobham, who himself had ascended to the peerage only in 1718. Upon his inheritance, Temple pushed for the title of countess for his mother, thereby securing the earldom for himself. Temple, along with Pitt, the Lytteltons, and the other Grenville brothers, had associated with Viscount Cobham at Stowe in the 1730s, forming the Grenville Cousinhood, otherwise known as the Boy Patriots or Cobham’s Cubs. Along with others, including the earls of Chesterfield and Westmoreland and later Frederick, Prince of Wales, they collectively stood in opposition to Robert Walpole as the Whig Patriots in the fallout after the Excise Crisis of 1733. Cobham, who used Stowe as the unofficial base for the Whig opposition, was a formative mentor for the young men. His sculpture and landscaping program in the Elysian Fields in the 1730s and early 1740s was a biting political commentary directed at Walpole and his administration, esoterically obfuscated in classical allegory. The message was understood by those who constituted the political realm of the time: men of the aristocracy or landed gentry who could understand the classical tropes.13 For those who could not, or would not, visit Stowe, Cobham publicized his improvements through notices in the popular press about the various garden features and multiple editions of guidebooks to the estate. The notices and guidebooks were published either anonymously or by members of his extended family – George Lyttelton wrote many – or the local Buckingham writing master. To engage overtly in such acts of publicity would have been beneath Cobham’s standing.14 Pitt built upon that exposure and experience and adapted it to the less sophisticated constituency he sought to cultivate: the lower orders of the public (whom he feigned to represent) and the merchants and traders of the City, who were less conversant with the classics than the gentry and aristocracy, but who were no less politically powerful in the late 1750s and 1760s. Thus, Pitt made masterly use of the press and exploited the varying levels of interpretation invited by the design of the Wolfe monument destined for the Abbey. Temple was equally well versed in the persuasive potential of sculpture and the printed word, but unlike his brother-in-law (Pitt had married Temple’s sister, Hester

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11.2 The Grecian Temple at Stowe, begun 1747, dedicated as the Temple of ­Concord and Victory, 1762. By kind permission of the National Trust, Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire. Photo: Joan Coutu.

Grenville, in 1754), Temple followed in the footsteps of his uncle, restricting his focus to Stowe, at least ostensibly, and also anchoring his projects firmly in the classics. The obelisk to Wolfe was part of a large program centred on the Grecian Valley in the northeastern part of the garden, which had initially been begun in the late 1740s as a celebration of the termination of the War of the Austrian Succession. However, Cobham and his cronies felt that the terms of the peace were not favourable to Britain, so consequently the valley and its Grecian Temple, built at the end of the valley closest to the house, languished in undedicated limbo throughout the 1750s (see figure 11.2). On 11 June 1761, after he had conceived of the obelisk to Wolfe, Temple wrote to Pitt that he intended to consecrate the Grecian Temple as the Temple of Peace and to install fourteen medallions inside, each commemorating a British victory in the current war. He also proposed to erect a female statue personifying Peace

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inside the temple opposite the entrance.15 Shortly thereafter, he began the transformation by removing Peter Scheemakers’s relief of the four quarters of the world bringing riches to a benevolent Britannia, which Cobham had installed on the rear wall of the Palladian Bridge in the late 1730s, reconfiguring it and inserting it in the pediment of the Grecian Temple. Typical of Temple (and in contrast to his uncle), he avoided expensive talent and hired a provincial sculptor to make the necessary adjustments to the relief. The result was an odd mix of elegant statuary combined with some comparatively crudely executed exotic animals in the lower points of the triangle.16 Most of the plaster medallions inside were likewise not original designs; many derived from medals designed by James “Athenian” Stuart for the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and for the idiosyncratic virulent Whig, Thomas Hollis (see figure 11.3).17 Several medallions portray classical personifications of the battle sites coupled with site-specific emblems: beavers, palm trees, and the like. From the portico of the temple, one could look left and see the obelisk to Wolfe towering in the distance. The view straight on from the Temple of Peace, several hundred metres up the spine of the Grecian Valley, was to be filled with a massive triumphal arch.18 Such a forthright celebration is, at first glance, entirely in keeping with the heady euphoria of the time, an understandable expression of Britain’s victories and rise to imperial dominance on the crest of the annus mirabilis. Rich in emblem, Temple’s allegory of imperial dominance at Stowe is consistent with Wilton’s monument for the Abbey, Francis Hayman’s imperial paintings for Vauxhall Gardens, and any number of heartwrenching yet euphoric tales penned by ministers, poets, and journalistic hacks alike in the early 1760s.19 Yet Temple’s, and Pitt’s, efforts marked a much more partisan victory. The defining characteristic that distinguished the emerging British empire was that it was not the product of monarchical ambition. Rather, for the Whig Patriots, the British version of empire was the culmination of the natural destiny of Britain. In common with other Whigs, Pitt and Temple embraced liberty, balanced government, and support for the Hanoverian succession, but their Whiggism also included a decidedly imperial dimension, firmly grounded in trade and commerce. The inscription on the base of the obelisk to Wolfe – “Ostendunt terris hunc tantum Fata” (“the Fates but show him to the world”) – comes from Book VI of the Aeneid. While entirely appropriate for a landscape garden that purported to be an Elysium, the verse also expresses the destiny of Rome/Britain to become a great empire.

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11.3  Interior, the Temple of Concord and Victory at Stowe. By kind permission of the National Trust, Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire. Photo: Joan Coutu.

Beyond a celebration of a particular ideology, Temple’s program at Stowe was also a brazen commemoration of the two men’s accomplishments amidst the political squabbles of the day. Wolfe’s victory at Quebec was, for Temple, equally a victory over Temple’s political opponents. The epigraph chosen from the Aeneid connects Pitt and Temple with Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of ancient Rome, for the inscription refers to the young Marcellus, nephew and heir to Augustus, who died at the tender age of sixteen.20 Wolfe, Britain’s Marcellus, was very much Pitt’s and Temple’s protégé, hand-picked by them to lead the assault on Quebec over far more experienced officers, men who had little time for Pitt’s and Temple’s aspirations to transform Britain’s dismal performance in battles leading up to the charge on Quebec.21 Temple’s self-righteous expressions of victory are also entirely consistent with his own perceived self-worth, the latter evidenced by his aggressive place-hunting. In addition to securing an earldom in 1750,

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Temple threatened the fall of the shaky administration in 1759 if the king did not award him the vacant Garter.22 Above the intended statue of Peace, Temple puffed himself as the dedicator of the temple: “Riccardus Comes Temple / noblissimi ordinis Periscelidis Eques / ex voto” (“dedicated by Richard, Earl Temple, Knight of the most noble Order of the Garter”). Inside the temple, one of the medallions commemorates Pitt, who is portrayed as the god Virtus – “a certain gentleman with a Roman nose … & a Roman spirit” as Temple described him to Hester, his sister and Pitt’s wife.23 God of military courage, Virtus wears a cape and holds a phoenix, alluding to the renewal of empire. The temple thus takes on the aura of the temple dedicated to Virtus built by Caesar Marius, where the senate meeting took place at which Cicero, who was regularly embraced by the Pitt-Temple axis as a model for Pitt, was recalled from exile.24 Acutely cognizant of the air of legitimacy that British society conferred upon family lineage, with its related implication of permanence, Temple also kept Cobham in the dialogue at Stowe, although Cobham had died over a decade before Temple began the transformation of the Grecian Valley. Indeed, Cobham’s Britannia relief on the Palladian Bridge was a particularly early example of imperial bravado, and the rostral column dedicated to Temple’s brother Thomas Grenville, which Cobham had originally sited in the Grecian Valley and which Temple later moved to the top of the Elysian Fields, also carried intimations of empire. Similarly, the enormous pillar topped with a statue of Cobham, which Cobham’s widow and Temple erected shortly after Cobham’s death in 1749, alludes to the ancient Pharos or Lighthouse of Alexandria, overseeing the landscape and the world beyond (see figure 11.4). The pillar is located on a southeastern diagonal vista from the Grecian Temple. In Temple’s schemes of the early 1760s, the significance of the pillar was heightened by the placement of the obelisk to Wolfe on a balancing diagonal to the northeast, thus energizing the Grecian Temple as a visual fulcrum and as a site that joins the generations. By linking the generations and thus emphasizing familial distinction (so much a part of the perception of legitimate imperial dominance), Temple further strengthened the legitimacy of his and Pitt’s claim to leadership and their drive towards empire. Freemasonry is another thread that ties the generations together, and it also became intertwined with the emerging empire. Cobham was an active Freemason in an era when Freemasonry was extremely popular and fell along political lines. Official Freemasonry, begun after the

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11.4  Cobham’s Pillar at Stowe, 1749. By kind permission of the National Trust, Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire. Photo: Joan Coutu.

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consolidation of four London lodges in 1717, embraced a great proportion of Whigs of various shades in the 1720s and 1730s, while Tories and Jacobites tended to practice the Craft in more secretive orders. By midcentury, these political demarcations were less pronounced, and what had been a highly fashionable practice of the beau monde had settled down to be, for many, an integral facet of modern life.25 At Stowe, Cobham’s very decision to work in architecture and sculpture – “hewing the rough stone” – implies his Masonic leanings. Consistent with its penchant for the enigmatic, the Masonic content runs as an undercurrent: like Cobham’s stinging political attack on Robert Walpole and his perceived excesses in government, which he had cloaked in allegory, the Masonic allusions are implied in the vistas, circular temples, and pyramidal features that first and foremost constitute a happy Elysium. For those in the Craft, the Masonic text added yet one more stratum to what was already a richly layered narrative. Temple, on the other hand, seemed incapable of such subtleties. Although we cannot be sure he was a Freemason – definitive proof does not exist, as no membership lists survive from mid-century – Masonic predilections appear to reverberate in his naked use of big, bold, unmitigated emblems such as the all-seeing eye of the lighthouse, the obelisk, the arch, and the temple, as well as his evident interest in numismata (indicated by the enlarged medals inside the temple) and the incorporation of the phoenix in the portrait of Pitt. Although Temple had learned from Cobham the power and potential of communication via architecture, sculpture, and landscaping, he lacked his uncle’s ability to shroud his political statements and self-promotion in the kind of esoteric allegorical narrative that simultaneously displayed Cobham’s refined erudition. Rather than delicate, elegant garden features with sophisticated, sometimes witty inscriptions, Temple’s boldfaced inscriptions and emblems are big, brash, and oppressive in their ponderous classicism.26 In this sense, they parallel the portrait that Temple commissioned of himself from Allan Ramsay following his acquisition of the Garter. In this full-length view, Temple is portrayed in a classical stance quite literally puffed up, with the chain and insignia of the Garter prominently displayed on his chest.27 With characteristic zeal, Temple relished the accession of the young George III in 1760, perhaps even more than most, given his personal hatred of George II and the fact that the new king’s father, Frederick, Prince of Wales, had, before his untimely death, been a member of Cobham’s inner circle of Whig Patriots. A few days after he had written

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to Pitt in 1761, Temple wrote to his sister Hester of his intention to dedicate the Temple of Peace in the Grecian Valley to George III with an inscription in the frieze: “Diva Paci Reduci & Triumphanti suls auspiciis / fortunatissimis Georgii / terbii Principis optimi P.P. / anno regni primo” (translated by Temple as, “To the Goddess of Peace returning in triumph / Under the most fortunate auspices of / George the Third, the best of Princes / the father of his Country / In the first year of his reign”).28 A year later, however, when Temple announced the dedication of the temple in the Lloyd’s Evening Post, any reference to the king had been expunged.29 Within months of Temple’s revelation to Pitt and his sister of his intentions to transform the temple and marry it to the obelisk to Wolfe, support had dwindled for Pitt’s and Temple’s further prosecution of war. Indeed, Temple sat alone in the House of Lords in his bellicosity. The timing of Temple’s announcement in the newspaper had less to do with the completion of the temple – many of the features that were announced had yet to be installed – than with his increasing frustration with Bute and the king. Acutely attuned to the political machinations of the day and wary of the power that Pitt and Temple, together with the extended Grenville Cousinhood, had accumulated on the momentum of the annus mirabilis, Bute and the king sought ways to undermine that power. Along with Pitt’s and Temple’s other opponents, who further feared the growing cost of war, they refused to advocate engaging Spain in the war. The stand-off culminated in the resignations of both Pitt and Temple on 5 October 1761. George Grenville, however, remained in his position as Treasurer of the Navy; Bute and the king had thus succeeded in cleaving the faction of cousins. The fact that the king – whom even Temple himself had touted at his accession as the titular head of the new empire – continued to embrace that role after Pitt and Temple were no longer at the head of government must have further irked Temple. The resignation of Pitt and Temple coincided with the finishing touches being put to the extraordinary new state coach that the king had commissioned from William Chambers, Joseph Wilton, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Nicholas Collett, and others (see plate 2). Prefigured only by William Kent’s opulent state barge for Frederick, Prince of Wales (1732), the coach was an exuberant explosion of gilding and colour, with gilded tritons heralding the young king and his new empire.30 After his resignation, Temple found himself in much the same position as Cobham had been in the 1730s: in exile at Stowe. In two lines taken from Cicero’s De Officiis and engraved around the base of

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Cobham’s Pillar in 1762, Temple expressed his aggrieved sense of unfair treatment by drawing parallels between his uncle and the ancient Roman general Licinius Lucullus, who had been enormously successful in the Asian campaigns but who had run foul of Pompey and ended up in exile, lavishly ensconced in his villas outside Rome with their extraordinary gardens. The inscription was also a swipe at George Grenville, for Lucullus’s brother-in-law had actively tried to undermine Lucullus’s authority. In another inscription, Temple articulated the true essence of the new British empire. Over the door to the Grecian Temple, rather than a dedication to the king as initially planned, he inscribed the following: “Quo Tempore Salus eorum in ultimus Angustias deducta nullum Ambitioni Locum relinquebat” (“The times with such alarming Dangers fraught, / Left not a hope for any factious thought”).31 To claim that faction had disappeared because Britain was under threat actually underscored the truth that the emergence of Pitt’s and Temple’s empire was, in fact, faction-driven, especially since the inscription was composed after Pitt and Temple had fallen from power. Two additional medallions, placed in the pronaos of the temple, were also highly charged accusations that the king and Bute had undone the momentum towards ever greater empire by provoking faction. The medallions commemorate peace amongst the people of Britain (concordia civium) but also peace amongst the allies (concordia fædoratorum), the latter a particularly charged swipe at Bute for having cancelled subsidies to Frederick of Prussia. Temple also resorted to the trope of public virtue, a posture invoked regularly by those who felt their principles had been compromised or by those who simply felt personally affronted. He announced in the Lloyd’s Evening Post that in place of the intended dedicatory inscription in which he had puffed himself, he had inscribed: “CANDIDAS AUTEM ANIMUS VOLUPTATEM PREABUERINT IN CONSPICUO POSITA, QUAE CUIQUE MAGNIFICA MERITO CONTINGERUNT” (“A sweet sensation touches ev’ry breast / Of candour’s gen’rous Sentiment possest, / When publick services with Honour due, / Are gratefully mark’d out to publick View”).32 The intended statue of Peace was also no longer relevant, and Temple instead chose to install a statue of Britannia. A personification of all the virtues of Britain, rather than the king, was for Temple the appropriate figurehead of the empire. Furthermore, he changed the name of the temple from the Temple of Peace to the Temple of Concord and Victory, which, given the machinations of the king and Bute, conveyed a wistful hint of what might have been. Temple and Pitt

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affirmed their disappointment by leaving empty the vista straight on from the temple; the triumphal arch would not be built, at least not there. The Grecian Valley would once again commemorate a war that was not successfully concluded, at least in the eyes of Temple and Pitt. The post-resignation efforts at Stowe take on the aura of so much petulant grumbling from a vainglorious man whose wings had been clipped and who clearly hated Bute and George III. Far more damaging for Bute and the king was the assault Temple orchestrated against them through the popular press in 1762 and into 1763. Horace Walpole remarked, “My father was not more abused after twenty years than Lord Bute is in twenty days.”33 Guided by his uncle’s example and consistent with a man of his standing, Temple did not outwardly associate his name with the attacks. Instead, he provided the financial backing for John Wilkes to launch his tirade against Bute, first in the Monitor and then in the North Briton. He was also said to have authored several of his own libels anonymously. The arrest of Wilkes following the publication of issue 45 of the North Briton further fuelled the fires.34 The assault proved devastating for Bute and he resigned as prime minister in April 1763. The king retaliated and struck at the heart of Temple’s aristocratic privilege by dismissing him as lord lieutenant and custos rotulorum of the county of Buckinghamshire. In response to this and in protest of the king’s and Bute’s perceived attack on liberty by the arrest of Wilkes, Temple announced in the 1763 guidebook to Stowe that the intended statue of Britannia, which had replaced the initial conception of a statue of Peace, would now be displaced in favour of a statue of Public Liberty.35 In one final major work at Stowe aimed at the king, Temple placed his massive triumphal arch not at the end of the Grecian Valley but at the main entrance to the house, filling the vista along the drive from the village of Buckingham and anchoring the view from the southern front of the house. The arch was dedicated to Frederick the Great, former ally and well-known Freemason, for, as Temple wrote to his sister, “[Since I have] done Justice to my own Country in the Temple of Concord & Victory I shall with pleasure perform the rest,” meaning that Temple was now ready to honour his Prussian ally who had contributed to Pitt’s and Temple’s annus mirabilis.36 In his own time, Temple’s irascible character and promotion of faction earned him several enemies, including Horace Walpole, whose assessment of his character informed so many subsequent portrayals of him. As Pitt’s star rose amongst Whig historians of the nineteenth century, Temple’s reputation deteriorated. Thomas Babington Macaulay

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compared him to a mole working behind the scenes – “It was his nature to grub underground. Whenever a heap of dirt was flung up, it might well be suspected that he was at work in some foul, crooked labyrinth below” – and the author of the entry on Temple in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica bluntly described him as “wholly evil,” “entirely without statesmanship,” and governed in his actions only by “an insatiable appetite for intrigue.”37 Yet his behaviour was entirely in keeping with a time when faction was the modus operandi. His bold schemes in the Grecian Valley at Stowe were initially conceived in a period of delicate unity, a hotly contested political battleground in which Pitt and Temple struggled to consolidate their tenuous hold on power. The later stages of the projects at Stowe and Temple’s concurrent support of Wilkes correspond to a time when Pitt’s and Temple’s political fortunes were dismal, and Temple’s actions were consequently even more politically bellicose. The parallel projects of the monument to Wolfe in Westminster Abbey and Temple’s plans at Stowe, as well as George III’s state coach, also point to the rapidly changing nature of the British political system. While politics were still grounded in faction in the early 1760s, the public – an amorphous, indistinct body with no single voice of its own – had within a matter of two generations risen to become a powerful political force. Indeed, the emergence to political significance of public opinion is closely aligned with the Whig ascendancy. Ideologically, the Whig insistence on liberty and on improving the nation, with a concomitant emphasis on patriotism, gave the idea of a public a higher profile. Nominal integration of various levels of society was taking place, a trend that intensified as the century wore on, in such forms as academic societies, philanthropic charities, and Masonic lodges. Pitt harnessed this emerging public opinion, actually using the nascent public as a pawn in the political process. While historians have made much of the way Pitt embraced the press in the increasingly public realm he had helped to foster, he also capitalized on the powerful message inherent in a monument to further his political aims.38 In addition to the location of the monument to Wolfe in Westminster Abbey and its multilayered composition, the very act of commissioning a monument that was to be paid for out of the public purse, for which there was only nominal precedent in Britain, reinforced the prominent role that the public played in Pitt’s claim on power.39 Temple, the arrogant aristocrat ostensibly above such sordid concerns, was as involved as Pitt: it was he who informed the Duke of

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Devonshire (who served as moderator of the competition) that Pitt highly approved of Wilton’s design.40 Remarkably, the elaborate state coach that George III had commissioned indicates how keenly aware the king and Bute were of the perceived public allegiance that Pitt had engendered. They chose to fight fire with fire. Not only did the new state coach metaphorically stress the position of the king as the head of state, but also the new king himself engaged with the public in an unprecedented manner, passing through the crowds in the highly fenestrated coach at the opening of Parliament in November 1762.41 The king had succeeded in taking over Pitt’s and Temple’s public. Just weeks after Pitt and Temple had resigned, the king’s progress through the crowds had the air of a victory parade. Meanwhile, the monument to Wolfe for the Abbey was still a design on paper in the sculptor’s workshop. It was at Stowe that Temple’s, and by implication Pitt’s, ambitions were most clearly and emphatically defined. While the two men drove a political agenda that was ostensibly responsive to the public, they were themselves members of the upper echelons of British society, Pitt of gentry stock and Temple only recently of the aristocracy. Pitt bore his true colours when he accepted a peerage for his wife within weeks of his resignation (another brilliant move by the king and Bute to undermine Pitt’s political support) and then an earldom for himself in 1766. In a society constructed on the primacy of social distinction, Temple was eager, perhaps overly so, to express his. The private landscape garden had become, by the early 1760s, an established means by which members of the landed gentry, Whigs and Tories alike, chose to express their status, their erudition, and, often, their political leanings. Carlisle at Castle Howard, the Marlboroughs at Blenheim, Bathurst at Cirencester, Coke at Holkham, the Hoares at Stourhead, Strafford at Wentworth Castle, and the Rockinghams at Wentworth Woodhouse were just a few of the larger undertakings of the period. When Pitt was bequeathed the Burton Pynsent estate in Somerset in 1765, he likewise lost no time in beginning to transform the landscape by hiring Lancelot “Capability” Brown even before challenges to the bequest had been put to rest.42 Far more politically astute than Temple, Pitt chose not to express his political or ideological leanings in the nominally disinterested realm of the landscape garden. In contrast to the complex narratives in the design of the monument to Wolfe in Westminster Abbey, the messages that landowners built into their landscape gardens almost invariably employed time-honoured classical forms: obelisks, pillars, and temples. At Burton Pynsent, Pitt himself chose to honour his benefactor, Sir William Pynsent, with a

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simple but immense pillar topped with an urn. Such richly connotative emblems constitute not so much a narrative as a matter-of-fact statement of the owner’s place and interests in the world.43 The preponderance of these landscape gardens in eighteenth-century Britain recalls the classical Roman world, where comparably embellished estates of emperors, consuls, and other dignitaries transformed the Roman countryside. In the case of Stowe, the imperial dimension is invoked with particular emphasis. Yet what distinguished eighteenth-century Britain from the Roman Empire was the fact that the British monuments were confined to the private landscape garden. With the exception of the monumental column designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke to mark the Great Fire of 1666, obelisks, pillars, and arches were not at the time part of the London landscape or any of the provincial centres to any great degree.44 Such bold statements in an urban, public setting were to be found in Paris and other French cities, and, for the libertyloving English, these may have been suspiciously redolent of autocracy and tyranny.45 In this light, Pitt and Temple proceeded cautiously with a monument to Wolfe in the public realm. Since they worked with a funeral monument, which was an acceptable part of the apparatus of remembrance in British society, their celebration of victory was mediated by a guise of commemoration. In contrast, Temple could get away with much bolder expressions in his own landscape garden. If he wished, as he often did, to transcend the private sphere and push out into the public realm, he could employ the popular press to disseminate his views. George III and Bute presumably had no wish to visit Stowe – and Temple would hardly have invited them – but they were nonetheless made aware of Temple’s landscaping activities by the announcements he issued in the newspapers and the almost annual publication of new editions of the guidebook to Stowe. Whether a funeral monument in Westminster Abbey paid for by the public purse or several structures in a private landscape garden, such monuments were tangible expressions of the new empire. While the monument in the Abbey was an attempt to construct an official memory of that empire in the public realm, an empire that was closely allied to Pitt’s political rhetoric as well as to his persona, Temple’s work in his private landscape garden at Stowe is an emphatic testament of his and Pitt’s involvement in the gestation and construction of the empire.46 The pursuit of empire was spearheaded by Pitt and Temple in a period of uneasy unity that overlay deeply riven political factions and individual personal aspirations. The sophisticated handling of the commission and

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design of the monument in the Abbey resulted in a monument that accords with that unity. Temple’s work at Stowe, meanwhile, undermined that unity in its bold, brash expression of faction and personal ambition. Fast-forward to 1773: the monument in the Abbey was unveiled with no fanfare. The event was recorded in the press with a perfunctory statement: “Was opened the fine monument of General Wolfe, in Westminster Abbey. The inscription follows …”47 The lack of any sense of occasion at the unveiling is, on the face of it, rather curious. Wolfe had certainly continued to be celebrated throughout the 1760s, and his memory was reinvigorated in 1771 with the appearance of West’s painting, which, in turn, prompted a spate of potential inscriptions for the monument.48 Yet the completion of the monument two years later went nearly unnoticed. The explanation might lie in the fact that the two great proponents of the monument, Pitt and Temple, were no longer the tight political bloc they had once been and were, for the most part, spent forces. Temple’s fervid adherence to faction had rendered him politically ineffective and he grumbled away in self-imposed exile at Stowe. Pitt, who would recognize Temple as a potential liability as early as the mid-1760s, distanced himself when he tried to reconstitute his power amidst the turbulent factional machinations of that decade, yet, by not siding with the Rockingham Whigs, he failed to establish a base of support. Pitt could have enlisted the public in his cause in the early 1770s, as he had done so successfully in 1759–60, and in this context an elaborate unveiling of the monument would have made sense. But the nature of the “public” had changed, the word now carrying a militant edge in the shadow of the Wilkite controversies. For Pitt, it was no longer an effective weapon in his political arsenal. Furthermore, in 1773 the American colonies – the jewels in the crown of Pitt’s and Temple’s empire, the protection of which had validated Wolfe’s death and victory – were moving inexorably towards revolution. The political landscape had indeed altered dramatically. Both empires and monuments connote a sense of permanence; once established, empires and monuments have a resiliency down through history. However, the maudlin tale of the Wolfe monument in Westminster Abbey – announced with passionate enthusiasm yet unveiled with barely any notice – points to the fragility of Pitt’s and Temple’s empire. Theirs was an empire built on political faction, as Temple’s work at Stowe makes resoundingly clear. Indeed, Temple ultimately acknowledged his loss, as Stowe became a place of commemoration for what might have been had he and Pitt remained in power.

Setting the Empire in Stone  277 NOTES 1 On the politics of the 1750s, see Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For a discussion of the art of this period beyond the scope of this essay, see Douglas Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). (See also Fordham’s essay in this collection, pages 284–306.) John Brewer’s seminal work, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), examines the political fallout in the 1760s after the breakdown of unity. 2 Of the extensive scholarship on West’s painting, see Fordham, British Art, 214–48; Martin Myrone, Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art, 1750–1810 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), passim; and David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 209–13. 3 Alan McNairn’s Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997) provides the most comprehensive discussion of the variety of responses to Wolfe’s victory and death. 4 In Behold the Hero, 40–61, McNairn offers an excellent discussion of the poetry and prose written in the aftermath of Wolfe’s victory. 5 Public Advertiser, 1 November 1759. 6 Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 28 (London: HMSO, 1547–): 643. 7 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 1 August 1760, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis, 48 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937–83), 21:428. On Pitt’s involvement, see Richard, Earl Temple to the Duke of Devonshire, 16 March 1760: Chatsworth, the 4th Duke of Devonshire’s Correspondence, 402.7. I am grateful to His Grace the Duke of Devonshire for permission to consult the 4th Duke’s correspondence in the Chatsworth Library. 8 Joan Coutu, Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the EighteenthCentury British Empire (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 103–46; Coutu, “Legitimating the Empire: The Monument to General Wolfe in Westminster Abbey,” in Conflicting Visions: War and Visual Culture in Britain and France, c. 1700–1830, ed. Geoffrey Quilley and John Bonehill (London: Ashgate, 2005), 61–84. 9 On the nature of the public and Pitt’s manipulation of it, see especially Brewer, Party Ideology; Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics

278  Joan Coutu in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Marie Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Prime Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). 10 Amongst the dissenters was George Townshend, who had served under Wolfe and who had penned an acerbic caricature of The Irish Venus Mourning General Wolfe, which he did not release for publication (Fordham, British Art, 204–5; McNairn, Behold the Hero, 49–50). Lord North, who understood what Pitt was up to, grumbled (after the monument was proposed) that “it was proof of Mr. Pitt’s abilities that they sat there securely discerning rewards, while the French fleet sailed from Brest,” intent on attacking Britain once again. See Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second, ed. John Brooke, 3 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 3:80. 11 Pierre-Jean Grosley, a French visitor to London, remarked on the range of social classes who visited Westminster Abbey: A Tour to London, or New Observations on England and Its Inhabitants, 3 vols (London, 1772), 1:205. ­ Westminster Abbey as a public space has been discussed in David Bindman and Malcolm Baker, Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument: Sculpture as Theatre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 9–23; and Matthew Craske, “Westminster Abbey, a Public Pantheon Built upon Private Interest,” in Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea, ed. Richard Wrigley and Matthew Craske (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 57–79. 12 Fordham offers a particularly strong discussion of the Christian tropes evident in Wilton’s composition: British Art, 105–19. 13 Viccy Colton emphasizes how deeply entrenched the classics were in the eighteenth century: Fabricating the Antique: Neo-Classicism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1–16. 14 On Cobham’s work at Stowe, see George Clark’s essays in The Stoic 24 (1970), encapsulated in his “The Gardens of Stowe,” Apollo 97 (1973): 558–65; John Martin Robinson, Temples of Delight: Stowe Landscape Gardens (London: The National Trust, 1990); and Coutu, Persuasion and Propaganda, 148–63. See also Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 15 Richard, Earl Temple, to William Pitt the Elder, 11 June 1761: PRO Chatham mss, PRO 30/8/61 ff. 54–5. 16 Temple hired William Stephenson of Liverpool; see The Henry E. Huntington Art Gallery and Library, Stowe Gardens (STG) Accounts Box 4 (1), 26 September 1761.

Setting the Empire in Stone  279 17 Patrick Eyres, “The Invisible Pantheons of Thomas Hollis at Stowe and in Dorset,” New Arcadian Journal 55/56 (2003): 45–120. 18 I have published two lengthier studies of Stowe: “Stowe, A Whig Training Ground,” New Arcadian Journal 43/44 (1997): 66–78; and Persuasion and Propaganda, 147–78. What I offer here is a more critical analysis of the political context in which the monuments were conceived and built. 19 See Fordham, British Art, 103–54 for an excellent discussion of the exaggerated imperial dimension of the Wolfe monument, of Hayman’s paintings, and of John Gwynn’s grand plan to recast London as a great imperial city. 20 An English translation was provided in the 1763 guidebook to Stowe. See Benton Seeley, Stow: A Description of the Magnificent House and Gardens of the Right Honourable Richard, Earl Temple, Viscount and Baron Cobham (London, 1763), 32. 21 Walpole, Memoirs, 2:290. Pitt and Temple were also still smarting from the disaster of the ill-fated attack on France at Rochefort; see Peters, Pitt and Popularity, 91–102. 22 Pitt to Temple, 13 November 1759, in The Grenville Papers, ed. William James Smith, 4 vols (London, 1852–3), 1:330–1; Peters, Pitt and Popularity, 152–3. 23 Temple to Lady Hester Pitt, 11 June 1761: PRO Chatham mss, PRO 30/8/62 ff. 31–4. 24 Cicero, Pro Sestio, 116, quoted in Nicholas Purcell, “Honos and Virtus,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawford, 3rd ed., rev’d. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 724. 25 For early sources on eighteenth-century English Freemasonry, see James Anderson, The Constitutions of the Free-masons (London, 1723) and The New Book of Constitutions of the Antient and Honourable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons (London, 1738); William Preston, Illustrations of Freemasonry (London, 1775); and Robert Freke Gould, The History of Freemasonry (London, 1882). For modern scholarship, see Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 308–49; Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Margaret Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981); Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, The Temple and the Lodge (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989); and John Money, “Freemasonry and Loyalism in Hanoverian England,” in The Transformation in Political Culture, ed. Echhart Hellmuth (Oxford: Oxford

280  Joan Coutu University Press, 1990), 255–71. For the imperial dimension of Freemasonry, see Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 26 For example, Cobham’s xenophobia was expressed in a lengthy ode to his Italian greyhound inscribed on the back of the Temple of British Worthies. 27 The painting, by Allan Ramsay, is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. 28 Temple to Lady Pitt, 11 June 1761: PRO Chatham mss, PRO 30/8/62 ff. 31–4. 29 Lloyd’s Evening Post, 9–12 July 1762. 30 Jonathan Marsden and John Hardy, “‘O Fair Britannia Hail!’: The ‘most superb’ State Coach,” Apollo 153 (2001): 3–21. 31 The translation appeared in Seeley, Stow (1763), 31. 32 Lloyd’s Evening Post, 9–12 July 1762. The translation is Temple’s. See Temple to Pitt, 1 July 1762: PRO Chatham mss, PRO 30/8/61 ff. 67–8. 33 Walpole to Mann, 20 June 1762, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 22:42. 34 Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 39–40, 69–72, 109–15. 35 Seeley, Stow (1763), 31. 36 Temple to Lady Pitt, 24 October 1764: PRO Chatham mss, PRO 30/8/62 f. 91. 37 Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Works of Lord Macaulay Complete, ed. Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1873), 7:232; Ronald John McNeill, “Richard, Earl Temple,” in Encyclopædia Britannica, ed. Hugh Chisholm, 11th ed., 29 vols (New York: Encyclopædia Britannica Co., 1910–11), 26:601–2. 38 Brewer, Party Ideology, 96–112; Peters, Pitt and Popularity, passim. 39 There were only two such previous commissions in the eighteenth century: a monument to Sir Cloudsley Shovell, approved by Parliament at the behest of Queen Anne, and one to Captain James Cornewall in Westminster Abbey, paid for by Parliament but orchestrated by the Grenville Cousinhood in the late 1740s. 40 Temple to Devonshire, 16 March 1760: Chatsworth, the 4th Duke of ­Devonshire’s Correspondence, 402.7. 41 London Chronicle, 25–7 November 1762. 42 On Pitt’s interest in landscaping, see Michael Symes, “William Pitt the Elder, the Grand Mago of Landscape Gardening,” Garden History 24 (1996): 126–36. 43 Notably, many of the builders of these gardens were also ardent Freemasons.

Setting the Empire in Stone  281 44 The rarity of such monuments is further indicated by the fact that Wren’s column is simply called “The Monument.” 45 John Gwynn’s grand and overzealously imperial plan for London remained on paper. See Fordham, British Art, 103–54. 46 On the Wolfe monument and official memory, see Joan Coutu and John McAleer, “‘The Immortal Wolfe’?: Monuments, Memory and the Battle of Quebec,” in Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory, ed. Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 29–57. 47 Gentleman’s Magazine 43 (1773), 616. The unveiling was recorded in few newspapers. 48 McNairn, Behold the Hero, 82–9.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Archival Sources Chatsworth House, Derbyshire: the 4th Duke of Devonshire’s Correspondence. The Henry E. Huntington Art Gallery and Library, San Marino, California: Stowe Gardens collection. The Public Record Office, London: Chatham mss. Primary Journals and Newspapers The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1773. Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 28 (London: HMSO, 1547–). Lloyd’s Evening Post, 1762. London Chronicle, 1762. Public Advertiser, 1759. Other Primary Sources Anderson, James. The Constitutions of the Free-masons. London, 1723. – The New Book of Constitutions of the Antient and Honourable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons. London, 1738. Grosley, Pierre-Jean. A Tour to London, or New Observations on England and Its Inhabitants. 3 vols. London, 1772. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The Works of Lord Macaulay Complete. Edited by Lady Trevelyan. 8 vols. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1873.

282  Joan Coutu Preston, William. Illustrations of Freemasonry. London, 1775. Seeley, Benton. Stow: A Description of the Magnificent House and Gardens of the Right Honourable Richard, Earl Temple, Viscount and Baron Cobham. London, 1763. Smith, William James, ed. The Grenville Papers. 4 vols. London, 1852–3. Walpole, Horace. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. Edited by W.S. Lewis. 48 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937–83. – Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second. Edited by John Brooke. 3 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Secondary Sources Baigent, Michael, and Richard Leigh. The Temple and the Lodge. London: Jonathan Cape, 1989. Bindman, David, and Malcolm Baker. Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument: Sculpture as Theatre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Brewer, John. Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Cash, Arthur H. John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Clark, George. “The Gardens of Stowe.” Apollo 97 (1973): 558–65. Clark, Peter. British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Colton, Viccy. Fabricating the Antique: Neo-Classicism in Britain, 1760–1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Coutu, Joan. “Legitimating the Empire: The Monument to General Wolfe in Westminster Abbey.” In Conflicting Visions: War and Visual Culture in Britain and France, c. 1700–1830, edited by Geoffrey Quilley and John Bonehill, 61–84. London: Ashgate, 2005. – Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. – “Stowe, A Whig Training Ground.” New Arcadian Journal 43/44 (1997): 66–78. Coutu, Joan, and John McAleer. “‘The Immortal Wolfe’?: Monuments, Memory and the Battle of Quebec.” In Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory, edited by Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, 29–57. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Craske, Matthew. “Westminster Abbey, a Public Pantheon Built upon Private Interest.” In Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea, edited by ­Richard Wrigley and Matthew Craske, 57–79. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Eyres, Patrick. “The Invisible Pantheons of Thomas Hollis at Stowe and in Dorset.” New Arcadian Journal 55/56 (2003): 45–120.

Setting the Empire in Stone  283 Fordham, Douglas. British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Gerrard, Christine. The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Gould, Robert Freke. The History of Freemasonry. London, 1882. Harland-Jacobs, Jessica. Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Harris, Bob. Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century. ­Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Jacob, Margaret. Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in EighteenthCentury Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. – The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. – The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Marsden, Jonathan, and John Hardy. “‘O Fair Britannia Hail!’: The ‘most superb’ State Coach.” Apollo 153 (2001): 3–21. McNairn, Alan. Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. McNeill, Ronald John. “Richard, Earl Temple.” In Encyclopædia Britannica. 11th ed. 29 vols. New York: Encyclopædia Britannica Co., 1910–11. Money, John. “Freemasonry and Loyalism in Hanoverian England.” In The Transformation in Political Culture, edited by Echhart Hellmuth, 255–71. ­Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Myrone, Martin. Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art, 1750–1810. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Peters, Marie. Pitt and Popularity: The Prime Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years’ War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Purcell, Nicholas. “Honos and Virtus.” In The Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited and revised by Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawford. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Robinson, John Martin. Temples of Delight: Stowe Landscape Gardens. London: The National Trust, 1990. Rogers, Nicholas. Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Solkin, David. Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Symes, Michael. “William Pitt the Elder, the Grand Mago of Landscape Gardening.” Garden History 24 (1996): 126–36. Wilson, Kathleen. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

12 George Stubbs’s The Zebra and the Spectacle of Fine Art at the End of the Seven Years’ War Douglas Fordham

From a British perspective “the culture of the Seven Years’ War” is a phrase that contains an implicit geography; culture was fundamentally metropolitan, and while the threat of French invasion persisted, war took place well beyond Britain’s shores. The phrase quite naturally invokes a panoply of plays, songs, prints, paintings, and sculptures that imaginatively recreated victorious battles and represented heroic generals. More difficult to determine, however, are the ways in which the Seven Years’ War conditioned metropolitan culture beyond that of overt subject matter. Clear material links between the disparate forces of culture and war are fragile, fragmentary, and in need of creative reconstruction. Public debate over the Peace of Paris’s terms and timing, heating up in the summer of 1762, offers a powerful convergence of these two forces and a compelling moment for historical reconstruction. It is instructive to begin with the immediate preoccupations of Londoners in the summer of 1762 as a tentative peace took shape. According to the Frenchman Ange Goudar, “Since I have been in London, England, three remarkable persons have furnished this nation with a great deal of talk; the Cock-Lane Ghost, the queen’s ass, and Wilkes, the member of Parliament.”1 Goudar’s list is hardly definitive, but it captures something important about the cultural climate in London at this moment. The summer trial of Richard and Elizabeth Parsons revealed the Cock Lane Ghost to be a hoax perpetrated on a willing, if not entirely gullible, public.2 The “queen’s ass” refers to a female zebra from Cape Town, at the southern tip of Africa, which was sent to Queen Charlotte in honour of her recent marriage to George III.3 Installed in the Buckingham House stables that summer, the zebra was “pestered with visits, and had all her hours employed from morning to

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night in satisfying the curiosity of the public.”4 And John Wilkes was one of the most brilliant polemicists of his generation, co-authoring the North Briton, which mercilessly attacked the king’s confidant and recently appointed Secretary of the Treasury, John Stuart, third Earl of Bute.5 Each of these “remarkable persons” – spectre, animal, and politician – possessed a curious equivalence in the public realm. As E.J. Clery writes about the Cock Lane incident, “the ghost was to be caught up in the machine of the economy; it was available to be processed, reproduced, packaged, marketed and distributed by the engines of cultural production.”6 Real or fictive, agents or products, these three entities belonged to a restless urban population hungry for breaking news, visual spectacle, and consumer goods. All three of these “remarkable persons” entered swiftly into Grub Street pamphlets, satires, and intaglio prints. Ange Goudar notes that the zebra’s “apartments not being fit to receive a large company, some genius of an engraver published a print of it, that they who could not approach its person, might be possessed of its figure; and this contrivance turned to good account.”7 In actuality, the zebra appeared in a great many prints, some sharing the aims of the “Wilkes and Liberty” movement. One of the first appearances of the zebra in print came with the publication of Henry Howard’s bawdy song “The Queen’s Ass,” which included jejune and largely apolitical lines expressing a desire to “Kiss (if no Treason) – Her Majesty’s Ass.”8 Satirists then began to refer to Lord Bute as “the King’s Ass,” in a straightforward attempt at public ridicule.9 None of this amounted to a viable political critique until Mary Darly published The Zebra Loaded or the Scotch Pedler, a Northern farce now playing in the South in September 1762 (see figure 12.1).10 This confidently etched print shows Princess Augusta mounted on a zebra being led by the Scottish-born Bute, who is identified by the motto of the Order of the Thistle, Nemo me impune lacesset (No one provokes me with impunity). Lord Bute then declares, “I’ll forward a peace & oppose the peoples favourite, that antigallican W[illiam] Pitt.” The force of the satire comes from its modification of the headpiece to Henry Fielding’s The Jacobite’s Journal (1747–8) (see figure 12.2). Following the failed Rebellion of 1745, Fielding indiscriminately cast all opposition to the government as Jacobite. The frontispiece, apparently designed by William Hogarth, depicts a Catholic monk leading a reluctant donkey.11 The donkey carries a Scotsman named “Trott-Plaid” and his wife to the Promised Land of London, where they go on to wreak more havoc in government than

12.1  Mary Darly, The Zebra Loaded or the Scotch Pedler [sic], a Northern farce now playing in the South, September 1762, etching, 18.1 × 30 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library.

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12.2 After William Hogarth, Headpiece for The Jacobite’s Journal, Number 6, London, 9 Jan. 1748. Woodblock relief, 11.3 × 18.6 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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the Highlanders ever could with their broadswords. Darly’s The Zebra Loaded appropriated Hogarth’s motif in resonant ways, turning it into a powerful political cipher. The zebra’s stripes pun on the plaid worn by the Scotsmen, emphasizing the primitive, foreign quality of both. The print foregrounds Lord Bute’s desire for an immediate peace, and it implies that Bute would leave England with little more gained than a zebra here and a colony there. In this irreverent triumphal entry, the zebra provides just the right note of carnivalesque absurdity to ridicule Bute’s political pretensions. Henceforth, the zebra featured regularly in satirical prints demonizing Lord Bute, in which she often appears in the inconspicuous role of carriage horse.12 Grub Street harnessed the zebra to Britain’s political and imperial fortunes. These associations were fully in play when George Stubbs exhibited an oil painting entitled The Zebra at the Society of Artists exhibition, which opened in May 1763 (see plate 3). An important question that has yet to be asked of this masterpiece of Georgian art is whether Stubbs painted and exhibited the zebra because, or in spite, of these associations. Related to this question is the degree of autonomy of the art exhibitions in London. How insulated were London’s fine art exhibitions from the spectacle of the Cock Lane Ghost and the polemics of the Wilkes and Liberty movement? Annual contemporary art exhibitions were a recent innovation in London, beginning in 1760. There had been plenty of public venues for contemporary British art prior to this date, including the supper box paintings at Vauxhall Gardens, the Foundling Hospital’s Court of Directors room, and the sculptural monuments in Westminster Abbey. The annual exhibitions that took place at a number of venues in the Strand, however, were the first to emulate the modern aesthetic and spectatorial conditions established by the Royal Academy of Arts in Paris.13 Yet unlike the French Academy’s royal monopoly at the Louvre, the early London exhibitions maintained a tentative and uncertain relationship to the monarchy, the state, and the London public. The improvement of Britain’s “arts and arms” was frequently heralded in the 1760s, but for two different purposes. The phrase articulated, on the one hand, a conscious strategy by London’s artists to claim a portion of the public’s patriotic interest and investment; artists rode Britain’s imperial coat-tails to public prominence. On the other hand, it asserted a clear dichotomy between the nation’s arts and its arms, which encapsulated a desire for artistic autonomy and a strategic distance from political disputes like that stoked by John Wilkes and the Peace of Paris.14

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It is significant, therefore, that the first “modern” exhibition of British contemporary art took place in 1760 and that it followed hard on the heels of the first wave of imperial victories at Guadeloupe, Minden, Lagos Bay, Quebec, and Quiberon Bay. By 1763 three different exhibition societies were competing for the London public’s attention. The Society of Artists exhibition, where Stubbs exhibited The Zebra, had a slight edge over its rivals in terms of artistic quality, but just barely.15 A satirical Sign Painters’ Exhibition, which opened to the public in the spring of 1762, demonstrated just how close the early exhibitions could be to demotic forms of urban spectacle.16 The status of the contemporary art exhibitions, in other words, remained highly fluid. Stubbs’s decision to display The Zebra in the 1763 exhibition was both obvious, given the animal’s broad public appeal, and deeply problematic, for the very same reason. The Zebra featured the first exotic animal to be painted by Stubbs, and the painting remained in his studio until his death, most likely as a showpiece. This distinguishes it from subsequent exotic animal portraits that were commissioned for scientific lectures and publications.17 The painting has long been celebrated for its closely observed details and its highly refined technique, both of which were enhanced by Stubbs’s hard-won knowledge of equine anatomy. For each of these reasons, The Zebra has been viewed as a quintessential painting of the English Enlightenment.18 But this only captures half of the equation. For Stubbs’s subject matter was just as important as his formal accomplishment, and both were in complex dialogue with each other. Adapting a phrase from Leo Steinberg, The Zebra could be viewed as “the philosophical ass,” a painting that operated on an impressive range of formal, thematic, and conceptual planes.19 It should be emphasized that many, and probably most, of the men and women who stood before The Zebra at the 1763 exhibition knew of the queen’s exotic wedding present, and no small percentage had seen it for themselves. The queen’s zebra was one of London’s great popular spectacles, frequently mentioned alongside not just John Wilkes and the Cock Lane Ghost, but also the three Native Americans from the Cherokee nation who arrived in London that summer.20 One particularly telling newspaper entry from July 1762, ostensibly from “a foreign Gentleman in London to his friend in the Hague,” reports that “The character you gave me of the English nation, That they are extravagantly fond of sights, is now fully verified to me.” He goes on to claim that “A Zebra, or wild Ass, having been brought over from Africa, an

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order was given that it should be shewn gratis; this is said to have conciliated the affections of many, who before were dissatisfied on a political point now on the carpet, Whether a Provincial has a right to be a Prime Minister. – Some of their American Governors have sent over three of the Indian Chiefs from that Continent; these have, in their turn, taken off the edge of the populace from viewing the Ass.”21 The deliberate conflation of public spectacle, ministerial politics, and imperial expansion suggests that the author was not a foreigner. Consistent with oppositional aims in the period, the letter creatively implicates the government in a conscious attempt to “conciliate the affections of many” through a parade of imperial exotica. While such spectacles were less calculated and less politically cathartic than this passage suggests, the author views London’s exhibition culture as a natural counterpart to its tumultuous political culture. Stubbs’s own motivations for submitting a popular icon to a fine art exhibition are anything but clear. What we can say is that the shift deepened the subject’s interpretive possibilities. Stubbs represented a lowly beast with a splendid new livery. She was the queen’s ass, and by extension the nation’s. She was an index of national power as well as a figure of inassimilable difference. Trees bend around the zebra’s muzzle, and branches frame a coat that nature designed for concealment. Every stroke of naturalistic detail, in both animal and forest, heightens the artificiality and mystery of the scene. It is as if Puck had taken Bottom’s torment one step further. Or to take a contemporary example, the zebra stands befuddled in an English wood like William Cowper’s dog Beau, who “puzzling set his puppy brains / To comprehend the case.”22 At the same time, the exhibition venue constricted the range of viable popular responses. No one yelled at or taunted the painted canvas, presumably, as they were reported to have done to the actual zebra. Framed and exhibited before the public, the painting resisted the vulgarity of urban spectacle and the didacticism of political satire. As an animal painter, Stubbs eyed warily the new institutional arrangements of the 1760s. In its traditional form, animal painting was a predominantly aristocratic genre that relied on a complex set of social metaphors, naturalistic devices, and heraldic conventions.23 Contem­ porary art exhibitions threatened to undermine animal painting as it existed under the old client economy, relegating it to a subservient ­position within a hierarchy of genres that privileged history painting, portraiture, and other human subjects. Stubbs responded anxiously to  these new expectations through a series of paintings in which he

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represented animals with a literary pedigree, including Phaeton, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (with versions dating from 1762, 1764, and 1775), and Una, from Spencer’s Faerie Queen (1782).24 This type of work had no place in traditional animal portraiture. Contemporary art exhibitions deprived animal painting of its landed and titled raison d’être, leaving it with relatively straightforward virtues such as naturalism and verisimilitude. Phaeton and Una betray a hint of desperation as they turn to literary classics for validation. By comparison, The Zebra was more elusive and conditional in its appeal to cultural authority. A broader shift within the London field of artistic production helps to establish the relation of The Zebra to Wilkite politics. William Hogarth’s unexpected return to partisan graphic satire in the early 1760s shook the London art world.25 With the publication of The Times, Plate 1 in September 1762, Hogarth lampooned the demagoguery of William Pitt and the nation’s mania for war. The opposition, including John Wilkes and the satirical poet Charles Churchill, cast Hogarth as a hired gun willing to sacrifice the nation’s interest for a secret government pension. The import of this episode goes well beyond graphic satire, since Hogarth and his colleagues were locked in a battle over the means and ends of artistic organization. Hogarth had already resisted calls for a regimented public academy, and with the publication of The Times, Plate 1 he moved even further away from public strategies employed by London’s leading artists. An anonymous print titled “Observations on The Times” conveys the general sentiment against Hogarth, for “when Brushes so Vulgar would Statesmen express, / They just prove the Painter an Ass” (see figure 12.3). The press roundly ridiculed Henry Howard, the instigator of the “Ass” pun in 1762, even as the opposition turned Howard’s obvious joke against Lord Bute. Hogarth’s turn to partisan satire was equated here and elsewhere with Howard’s low, bawdy songs. In another print, Howard is represented as an asinine painter who “In painting the Ass, makes an Ass of himself” (see figure 12.4). Stubbs could hardly be accused of making the same mistake. But what if Stubbs was drawn to the animal’s capacity to activate demotic politics and high aesthetic theory? Joshua Reynolds provides one of the best indications of the ways in which The Zebra could be seen to raise formal, aesthetic questions. In November 1759 Reynolds assisted Samuel Johnson with a last-minute publication deadline by contributing an essay to The Idler. Reynolds wrote that “no man can judge whether any animal be beautiful in its kind, or deformed, who has seen

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12.3 Anon., The Times pl. 1st / Observations on The Times, 1762, etching, 22.2 × 18.7 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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12.4 Anon., The Real Ass, Author of the Allegorical One, 1762, etching and type press, 13.6 × 18.8 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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only  one of that species; this is as conclusive in regard to the human figure; so that if a man, born blind, was to recover his sight, and the most beautiful woman was brought before him, he could not determine whether she was handsome or not.”26 The Zebra enacts this perceptual riddle for the animal kingdom. Here is the only zebra the London public has ever seen. Is it beautiful? The “man born blind” dilemma became particularly relevant to an exhibition audience that was largely untutored in a disinterested, aesthetic vocabulary. Reynolds reins in this Aristotelian relativism, however, with a Platonic bridle: “in consequence of having seen many, the power is acquired, even without seeking after it, of distinguishing between accidental blemishes and excrescences which are continually varying the surface of nature’s works, and the invariable general form which nature most frequently produces and always seems to intend in her productions.”27 Here the implications for The Zebra become more complex, and profoundly relevant to eighteenth-century aesthetics. Would someone need to see many zebras, or were the stripes to be viewed as accidental blemishes on the surface of an ass? Was a zebra a debased manifestation of the horse, and if so was it a suitable subject for a genuinely elevated – which is to say, classicizing and idealizing – fine art? One story circulating in the London papers in the summer of 1763 involved a man who exhibited “a beautifully striped” zebra in the provincial town of Chester, where he charged the public an admission fee. The landlord of the inn where the beast was kept had recently lost a mare, and when he examined the “zebra” closely he recognized “a very remarkable blemish in one of her eyes,” which gave away the deception. When brought before the mayor, the showman “confessed he had coloured the mare” and he was promptly imprisoned.28 Here was a popular variant of Reynolds’s conceptual problem, as “accidental blemishes” revealed the falsity of what had been fabricated and presented as the “general form” of a zebra. Quite apart from the zebra’s role in graphic satire, the animal was already bound to notions of public spectacle, counterfeit, and breeding. In the same year that Stubbs exhibited The Zebra, a minor Anglican clergyman and political gadfly named John Kidgell published a collection entitled Original Fables, which included the brief fable “The Zebra and the Horse,” quoted here in full: “A Zebra, distinguished by the beautiful variegation of his birth-day suit, was so insolently vain of it, as to look upon the whole levee with contempt. ‘Silly fop, says an Arabian courser, disgusted at his impertinence, dost think that that embroidery of thine prevents our knowing thee to be an ass?’”29

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Kidgell began his collection of fables with an allegory of Britain’s recent military triumph. Roman deities vie to become the patron of a temple to British glory, but they are informed that the temple has already been consecrated to Liberty. This was Liberty in the abstract rather than “Wilkes and Liberty,” as it was shouted on the streets, for in the very same year that Kidgell published his fables he turned a copy of Wilkes’s notorious “Essay on Woman” over to the Earl of March, the lord of the bedchamber to the king, which enabled the government to expel Wilkes from Parliament.30 Kidgell’s fable of the zebra offers, therefore, a timely commentary on the Wilkite movement, to which he was wholly unsympathetic. Kidgell’s zebra is reprimanded for looking upon a royal levee with contempt, which casts the beast as a Wilkite ass in opposition to the king. Here is a creative inversion of the opposition’s use of the same animal. Kidgell’s fable relies upon a deeply ideological conflation of thoroughbred horses and the English aristocracy.31 The zebra, by contrast, appears arriviste and undomesticated. Stubbs’s painting of The Zebra was a fable in its own right, intrinsically related to normative horse portraiture. Stubbs’s magisterial portrait of the Arabian thoroughbred Whistlejacket forms a dramatic and informative counterpoint to The Zebra (see plate 4). The portrait of Whistlejacket was commissioned by the Whig grandee Charles Watson Wentworth, second Marquess Rockingham. Whistlejacket was a nearly textbook illustration of the Arabian breed, and a racing success. “In his day,” Donna Landry notes, “he was of course also perceived as an English product of improvement, as a creature manufactured in the British Isles in accordance with the tenets of the agricultural revolution.”32 Just as Zeuxis combined the best attributes of several women into a depiction of the incomparable Helen of Troy, Stubbs represented Whistlejacket as the literal, genetic instantiation of this ancient practice. With the advent of scientific breeding, an allegory of artistic practice became a principle of animal husbandry. In this light, Whistlejacket articulated an authentic English version of the Apollo Belvedere. Stubbs’s painting, which measures over nine and a half feet high, continues to astonish today and to attract questions about its purpose and intent. Some of these questions were already being asked in 1772 when Horace Walpole visited Rockingham’s country estate, Wentworth Woodhouse, and came away with the following anecdote: “Many pictures of horses by Stubbs, well done. One large as life, fine, no ground done; it was to have had a figure of George 3d until Lord Rockingham went into opposition.”33 Walpole was visiting the house, not Lord

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Rockingham, and the source for his anecdote is unclear. If Walpole is literally correct about the painting’s inception, then Stubbs had to have begun Whistlejacket prior to November 1762. Judy Egerton dismisses Walpole’s anecdote as politically implausible, while Malcolm Warner has argued that “the story rings true, especially given the painting’s close correspondence in size to the David Morier portrait mentioned by Humphrey as its prospective pendant.”34 There is a final piece of evidence, often overlooked, that deserves greater notice. On 15 June 1801 a tourist named Richard Warner visited Wentworth Woodhouse and recorded having viewed A fine portrait of Whistle-Jacket, a celebrated racer belonging to the late Marquis, by Stubbs. There is no background to this piece, the noble owner of it fearing the introduction of one might spoil the picture. Perhaps, indeed, it may be judicious to omit them in portraits, as the relief is greater without them, and the attention then confined entirely to the subject. There is much nature and spirit in this picture, painted 36 years ago.35

Richard Warner is peculiarly specific about the number of years, and his account dates Whistlejacket to 1765, a moment of cautious optimism, as it was the same year that Lord Rockingham took the helm of a new administration. The background of Whistlejacket was left blank, according to this account, in order to emphasize the horse’s sculptural relief, which corresponds with Rockingham’s own taste for antique sculpture.36 While I favour the latter date, it is useful enough for our purposes here to restate general consensus and date Whistlejacket to sometime between 1762 and 1765. Rockingham invested heavily in the adornment of Wentworth Woodhouse in this period, even offering Benjamin West “a regular, permanent engagement of 700 pounds per annum to paint historical subjects for his mansion in Yorkshire.” West’s friends persuaded him to turn down the annuity, arguing that “he should not confine himself to the service of one patron, but trust to the public,” which perfectly articulates the dilemma confronting so many artists in these years.37 It was also in 1765 that Stubbs was elected a director of the Society of Artists, winning out over Benjamin West and Johann Zoffany.38 In the austerity and grandeur of Whistlejacket one can just make out the stirrings of an alternative British classicism, given slightly different circumstances. The foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 effectively marginalized Stubbs’s classically elegant animals, and rendered them secondary players in academic theory and practice.

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What alternative tracks might British art history have taken barring this event? Independent of Rockingham’s original intentions, Whistlejacket was brought to an astonishing conclusion. As it was framed and displayed at Wentworth Woodhouse, Whistlejacket engaged in a provocative formal dialogue with Morier’s equestrian portrait of George II, which shared nearly the same dimensions. What can be considered genuinely oppositional about Stubbs’s portrait is its insistence on blood and breeding as independent subject matter. No longer was the horse a “vehicle” for royal authority, as it was in the Morier portrait. While the “Old Whig” oligarchy measured its influence through proximity to the Hanoverian monarch, the Rockingham Whigs sought new means of articulating their power and influence independent of George III and Lord Bute.39 Whistlejacket offered a naked assertion of hereditary rights, naturalized through the science of animal breeding and equine anatomy. If Whistlejacket was England’s Apollo Belvedere, then The Zebra was its wild Scythian counterpart: African zebras were undomesticated, in this comparison, but possessed a savage beauty nonetheless. There is an uneasy sense that Stubbs offered the London public precisely what he felt they deserved, a spectacular ass, while he reserved the grandeur of Whistlejacket for the Marquess. The differences between the two paintings were not necessarily political. Lord Rockingham was as vehemently anti-Bute as the anonymous scribblers on Grub Street, and Stubbs’s work for him was capable of articulating an aristocratic critique of royal prerogative.40 The differences tend towards the philosophical and the aesthetic, and they appear to reflect Stubbs’s own presumptions about two very different audiences for fine art. Of the two paintings, The Zebra is the more tormented and telling for this historical moment. In an astute analysis of The Zebra, Robin Blake asks some poignant questions about Stubbs’s motivations: “I wonder if he grieved for the animal. His image of her is not in any way sentimental, let alone lachrymose, yet the zebra is a strange, beautiful creature traduced by incompetent hack artists, recruited by caricaturists to a cause not her own, sung and joked about, gawped at and called out to. Above all she is a long way from home.”41 I would suggest a slightly different emphasis and argue that Stubbs’s empathetic response stemmed from his own artistic plight. As a beautiful novelty held up to the public’s untutored gaze, The Zebra transposed the beast’s original ignominy into a higher cultural register. Transposed rather than transcended, for the ignominy remains, at the very least, implicit.

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For the National Gallery of Art’s Encounters exhibition in 2000, contemporary artists were asked to create a contemporary visual response to any work in the gallery’s permanent collection. The Canadian-born photographer Jeff Wall chose Whistlejacket as his muse and paired with it a large backlit photograph of A Donkey in Blackpool. Whether or not Wall was familiar with Stubbs’s painting of The Zebra, his photograph of a donkey offered a stark juxtaposition to the aristocratic hauteur of Whistlejacket.42 The grey and white donkey stands affectless in a rundown institutional brick enclosure, temporarily relieved from the hard labour of amusing visitors to a hard-bitten seaside resort. Making its debut the same year as the Millennium Dome, that vacuous white elephant astride the Greenwich meridian, A Donkey in Blackpool offered a potent response to Great Britain’s post-imperial malaise. Wall’s modern fable points to a deeper art-historical paradox. While Joshua Reynolds articulated an elitist, civic humanist theory of fine art in his Discourses, he devoted tremendous energy to painting portraits of London’s meritocracy. Meanwhile, Stubbs, for all of his resistance to aesthetic and academic authority, persistently emphasized the importance of blood. Reynolds’s induction into the Royal Academy of Arts and his election as president, in contrast to Stubbs’s conspicuous absence from the inaugural class of royal academicians, makes it clear who benefited from this new institutional arrangement. It was Reynolds who helped to promote a national, civic identity bolstered by imperial conquest, yet tempered by classical idealism. The opposition that I have set up in this essay between The Zebra and Whistlejacket dramatizes a specific set of tensions in the field of artistic production between the foundation of contemporary art exhibitions in 1760 and the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768. It was a moment in which the public for fine art was fragmented by market capitalism, the alluring and disturbing chaos of urban spectacles, and Wilkite politics. The Zebra appealed to London’s fragmented public through a shared, national investment in imperial expansion and exotic subject matter. The painting gestured towards urban spectacles without debasing itself. And it gestured towards the spectacle of the Wilkes and Liberty movement without politicizing itself. Stubbs nonetheless reserved the Neoplatonic and elitist values of Whistlejacket for his private patron Lord Rockingham. It was Reynolds’s 1776 portrait of the Tahitian visitor to England, Omai, that successfully married the exotic and spectacular to the Neoplatonic and classical.43 Portraiture facilitated this marriage more easily than animal painting, and Reynolds exhibited the

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work thirteen years later before a more knowledgeable and established fine-art audience. The fable of the zebra and the horse recounts a pointed dialogue between two very different beasts to determine the parameters of artistic organization, private patronage, and public reception in the immediate aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. The sad fate of the queen’s zebra provides one final insight into Stubbs’s accomplishment as well as The Zebra’s limitations. The Reverend William Mason wrote a deeply coded letter to Horace Walpole in 1773, which ostensibly announced the death of “her Majesty’s zebra” in Lincolnshire. The zebra had either been given away or sold after ten years of service to the queen, only to emerge near Newark as a provincial spectacle. Mason quoted the York Courant as reporting that “the proprietor has caused her skin to be stuffed, and that upon the whole the outward structure being so well executed, she is as well if not better to be seen now than when alive, as she was so vicious as not to suffer any stranger to come near her, and the curious may now have a close inspection, which could not be obtained before.” With tongue in cheek, Mason then asked Walpole: Pray do not you think the fate of this animal truly pitiable? … exposed to the close inspection of every stable boy in the kingdom, [and] severely stigmatized in a country newspaper. I should think this anecdote might furnish the author of the Heroic Epistle [Mason referring to himself in the third person] with a series of moral reflections which might end with the following pathetic couplet: Ah beauteous beast! Thy cruel fate evinces   How vain the ass that puts its trust in Princes!44

Mason’s Heroic Epistle, published by John Almon in 1773, attacked George III’s ministers and placemen with verve and gained the kind of wide public audience not seen since Charles Churchill launched his poetic attacks against Lord Bute in the early 1760s.45 It is little wonder, then, that Mason attended to news of the zebra’s death with interest, relishing the fate of “the Queen’s Ass” as a metaphor for corrupt court patronage. This did not prevent Mason, however, from scorning the “stable boys” and idle spectators who stood in problematic relation to Wilkite populism. A similar ambivalence plagued the early London art exhibitions. Did they inaugurate a new era of cultural enfranchisement or were they intended to bolster the cultural authority of a modestly expanded elite?

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Were they an extension of London’s demotic, spectacular visual culture, or were they islands of polite taste and refinement? Stubbs occupied a precarious position within this altered field of artistic production, and The Zebra responds with dry wit to these pressures. By struggling uphill against popular associations, Stubbs created a veritable primer in disinterested aesthetic appreciation. The Zebra’s stunning mimetic realism impresses us now, as then, with the artist’s masterly technique. Mimesis remains, nonetheless, a form of camouflage in the visual arts, disguising compositional strategies, cultural associations, and ideological assumptions beneath an ostensibly objective veneer. These assumptions remain beautifully disguised in the majority of Stubbs’s horse and dog portraits. The Zebra constitutes a rare moment of cognitive dissonance. When displayed on the walls of the 1763 exhibition, The Zebra stubbornly refused to validate either the state’s imperial ambitions or fine art’s coveted autonomy. She functioned instead as a nearly perfect cipher for London exhibition culture at the end of the Seven Years’ War. NOTES I would like to thank Anne Helmreich for enabling me to present this material at a conference session in 2000. It was in that year that I encountered Jeff Wall’s A Donkey in Blackpool at the National Gallery in London. My thinking about The Zebra has benefited greatly from the delay as well as criticism that I’ve received along the way. Particular thanks go to Tim Barringer, Susan Brady, Judy Egerton, Andrew Hemingway, Dorcas MacClintock, and the bourgeoning field of animal studies. 1 Ange Goudar, The Chinese Spy; or, Emissary from the Court of Pekin, Commissioned to Examine into the Present State of Europe. Translated from the Chinese, vol. 6 (London, 1765), 222. For more on Goudar’s colourful life, see JeanClaude Hauc, Ange Goudar: Un aventurier des Lumières (Paris: Champion, 2004). 2 For a thorough accounting of the event and its contemporary impact, see Douglas Grant, The Cock Lane Ghost (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965). For the event’s relation to eighteenth-century storytelling and literature, see E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), which begins with the Cock Lane episode, and Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, “Sight Unseen: The Cock Lane Ghost Among the Infidels,” in Sustaining Literature: Essays on Literature, History,

Stubbs’s The Zebra and the Spectacle of Fine Art  301 and ­Culture, 1500–1800: Commemorating the Life and Work of Simon Varey, ed. Greg Clingham (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 247–69. 3 The zebra was a gift from Sir Thomas Adams. See Malcolm Cormack, George Stubbs in the Collection of Paul Mellon (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 1999), 39. 4 Cited in Dorcas MacClintock, “Queen Charlotte’s Zebra,” Discovery: The Magazine of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History 23, no. 1 (1992): 4. 5 The literature on John Wilkes is extensive. For two excellent biographies, see Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); and Peter D.G. Thomas, John ­Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 6 Clery, Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 17. 7 Goudar, Chinese Spy, 223. 8 “The Queen’s Ass. A New Humorous Allegorical Song. By H. Howard,” August 1762 (BM 3870). 9 “The K—’s A—; A New Song, Intended as a Companion to the Q—’s A—,” August 1762 (BM 3873). This print includes a portrait of Lord Bute labelled “The K—s Ass.” There appears to have been some fluidity in the use of the terms “ass” and “arse” in the eighteenth century. William Blake provides an example of this in an editorial change that he made in the 1780s to his Island in the Moon: “If I have not presented you with every character in the piece, call me (Arse deleted) Ass.” Cited in the entry for “arse,” OED Online. 10 BM 3899. Jürgen Döring has persuasively attributed the work to Mary Darly: Eine Kunstgeschichte der frühen englischen Karikatur (Hanover: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1991), 210–12. 11 For questions regarding attribution, see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: High Art and Low, 1732–1750 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 361. 12 Examples include BM 3911, “The loaded Boot or Scotch preferment in Motion or Monsieurs will you ride” (3 November 1762); BM 4242, “The Times, or 1768” (8 June 1768); BM 4243, “The Times” (1768); and BM 5487, “The Curious Zebra alive from America! walk in Gem’men and Ladies, walk in” (3 September 1778). 13 Peter de Bolla makes a provocative claim for “the birth of visual culture” (p. 4) in 1760s Britain, in which the contemporary art exhibitions are fully implicated. Less clear is their relation to demotic spectacle. See Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

302  Douglas Fordham 14 I pursue this argument in much greater detail in British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 15 For the relative parity of the three exhibiting societies in 1763, see Matthew Hargraves, “Candidates for Fame”: The Society of Artists of Great Britain 1760–1791 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 46–7. 16 Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War, 146–8. 17 Judy Egerton, George Stubbs 1724–1806 (London: Tate Gallery, 1984), 112, 117–19. 18 In the words of Judy Egerton, “Here he wishes to record an accurate likeness of the first zebra ever seen in England; he takes that likeness with an exact eye for conformation and markings, observing the animal with the same scientific detachment as he brings to the portraits of the rhinoceros, blackbuck and moose. For this purpose, the beautifully painted landscape background is in a sense unnecessary; and indeed, although the dappled light hints at the purpose of the zebra’s stripes, the setting is more suggestive of English woodland than African plain” (George Stubbs, 112). 19 In his classic essay, “The Philosophical Brothel,” first published in 1972, Steinberg noted that Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) had been celebrated for its radical formal innovations at the expense of its sexually charged content. “Indeed, the chief weakness of any exclusively formal analysis is its inadequacy to its own ends. Such analysis, by suppressing too much, ends up not seeing enough.” Leo Steinberg, “The Philosophical Brothel,” October 44 (Spring 1988): 12. Stubbs’s exquisite naturalism has been privileged in a similar manner, overriding thematic possibilities. 20 For representations of the three Cherokee “chiefs,” see Stephanie Pratt, American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840 (Norman: University of ­Oklahoma Press, 2005), 51–60. 21 Lloyd’s Evening Post, 26 July 1762. 22 From “The Dog and the Waterlily,” written in August 1788 and first published in The Gentleman’s Magazine for December 1791. See Rachel Trickett, “Cowper, Wordsworth, and the Animal Fable,” Review of English Studies, New Series 34, no. 136 (November 1983): 473. 23 For an excellent overview of sporting art with an emphasis on its polite reformation in the eighteenth century, see Stephen Deuchar, Sporting Art in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social and Political History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). For a more pointed analysis of the ideological dimensions of the genre, see Alex Potts, “Natural Order and the Call of the

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24 2 5 26

2 7 28 29 30

31

3 2 33 34 35 36

37 38

Wild: The Politics of Animal Picturing,” Oxford Art Journal 13, no. 1 (1990): 12–33. I respond to Potts’s interpretive framework in “George Stubbs’s Zoon Politikon,” Oxford Art Journal 33, no. 1 (2010): 1–23. Malcolm Warner and Robin Blake, Stubbs and the Horse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 118–19, 198–200. See Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War, chaps. 2–5. The Idler no. 82 (10 November 1759), in Samuel Johnson, The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W.J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L.F. Powell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 255. Johnson, The Idler and The Adventurer, 255. Lloyd’s Evening Post, 13 July 1763. John Kidgell, Original Fables by the Reverend John Kidgell, vol. 1 (London, 1763), Fable 28. Kidgell’s exposure as a government informant in the Wilkes affair doomed his career and left him to die in poverty. For more on Kidgell’s pathetically amusing role in the “Essay on Woman” prosecution, see Cash, John Wilkes, 135–6, 147–8, 157–8, 171–2, 202. For a thorough examination of this development, see Donna Landry, Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Landry, Noble Brutes, 150. Cited in Judy Egerton, The British School (London: National Gallery Publications, 1998), 245. Egerton, British School, 245, and Warner and Blake, Stubbs and the Horse, 178. Richard Warner, A Tour Through the Northern Counties of England, and the Borders of Scotland by the Rev’d Richard Warner, vol. 1 (Bath, 1802), 209. See Nicholas Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s Sculpture Collection and the Judgment of Paris by Nollekens,” J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 19 (1991): 5–34. John Galt, The Life of Benjamin West (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1960), Part 2, pp. 9–10. Society of Artists Minutes, SA/10, 7 February 1765: “A vacancy of ye Directors being declared by the death of Mr. Lambert, The following Gentlemen being proposed. Viz – Stubbs, West, Catton, Richards, Zaffany. A Ballot being taken Mr. Stubbs was declared elected.” This was, nonetheless, a contentious moment in the society’s history as divisions began to emerge in the membership over electoral reform, which occasionally echoed the terms of Wilkite dissent. See Hargraves, “Candidates for Fame,”

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39

4 0 41

42

4 3 44

45

83–6. Stubbs would go on to serve as the president of the Society of Artists, although he was elected in 1772 when the society had declined significantly in prestige relative to the Royal Academy. John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 77–95; G.H. Guttridge, The Early Career of Lord Rockingham, 1730–1765 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952), 23–49; and Frank O’Gorman, The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975), 13–94. Fordham, “George Stubbs’s Zoon Politikon,” 1–23. Robin Blake, George Stubbs and the Wide Creation: Animals, People and Places in the Life of George Stubbs, 1724–1806 (London: Pimlico, 2005), 215. Blake generously acknowledges my own discussion of the painting’s relation to print culture in my PhD dissertation from 2003. Steve Edwards, “‘Poor Ass!’ (A Donkey in Blackpool, 1999),” Oxford Art Journal 30, no.1 (2007): 50. Edwards does not invoke The Zebra, and I doubt that Wall intended to either. Wall’s contribution to the Encounters exhibition nonetheless enabled me to recognize a tension between Queen’s Ass and horse that was latent in the historical record. See Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War, chap. 4 and conclusion. The Reverend William Mason to Horace Walpole, 28 June 1773, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis, vol. 28 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), 90–1. Robert R. Rea, “Mason, Walpole and That Rogue Almon,” Huntington Library Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1960): 187–93.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Galt, John. The Life of Benjamin West. London, 1816–20. Facsimile reprint. Gainesville, FL.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1960. Goudar, Ange. The Chinese Spy; or, Emissary from the Court of Pekin, Commissioned to Examine into the Present State of Europe. Translated from the Chinese. Vol. 6. London, 1765. Johnson, Samuel. The Idler and The Adventurer. Edited by W.J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L.F. Powell. Volume 2 of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963. Kidgell, John. Original Fables by the Reverend John Kidgell. Vol. 1. London, 1763.

Stubbs’s The Zebra and the Spectacle of Fine Art  305 Warner, Richard. A Tour Through the Northern Counties of England, and the Borders of Scotland by the Rev’d Richard Warner. Vol. 1. Bath, 1802. Walpole, Horace. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. Edited by W.S. Lewis. 48 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937–83. Secondary Sources Blake, Robin. George Stubbs and the Wide Creation: Animals, People and Places in the Life of George Stubbs, 1724–1806. London: Pimlico, 2005. Brewer, John. Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Cash, Arthur H. John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Clery, E.J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Cormack, Malcolm. George Stubbs in the Collection of Paul Mellon. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 1999. de Bolla, Peter. The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Deuchar, Stephen. Sporting Art in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social and Political History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Döring, Jürgen. Eine Kunstgeschichte der frühen englischen Karikatur. Hanover: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1991. Edwards, Steve. “‘Poor Ass!’ (A Donkey in Blackpool, 1999).” Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 1 (2007): 39–54. Egerton, Judy. The British School. London: National Gallery Publications, 1998. – George Stubbs 1724–1806. London: Tate Gallery, 1984. Fordham, Douglas. British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. – “George Stubbs’s Zoon Politikon.” Oxford Art Journal 33, no. 1 (2010): 1–23. Grant, Douglas. The Cock Lane Ghost. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965. Guttridge, George Herbert. The Early Career of Lord Rockingham, 1730–1765. Publications in History, vol. 44. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952. Hargraves, Matthew. “Candidates for Fame”: The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760–1791. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Hauc, Jean-Claude. Ange Goudar: Un aventurier des Lumières. Paris: Champion, 2004. Landry, Donna. Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

306  Douglas Fordham Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth. “Sight Unseen: The Cock Lane Ghost Among the Infidels.” In Sustaining Literature: Essays on Literature, History, and Culture, 1500–1800: Commemorating the Life and Work of Simon Varey, edited by Greg Clingham, 247–69. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. MacClintock, Dorcas. “Queen Charlotte’s Zebra.” Discovery: The Magazine of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History 23, no. 1 (1992): 2–9. O’Gorman, Frank. The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975. Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth. 3 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991–3. Penny, Nicholas. “Lord Rockingham’s Sculpture Collection and the Judgment of Paris by Nollekens.” J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 19 (1991): 5–34. Potts, Alex. “Natural Order and the Call of the Wild: The Politics of Animal Picturing.” Oxford Art Journal 13, no. 1 (1990): 12–33. Pratt, Stephanie. American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Rea, Robert R. “Mason, Walpole and That Rogue Almon.” Huntington Library Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1960): 187–93. Steinberg, Leo. “The Philosophical Brothel.” October 44 (Spring 1988): 7–74. Stephens, Frederick George. Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Vols 3–4. London: British Museum Publications, 1877–83. Thomas, Peter D.G. John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Trickett, Rachel. “Cowper, Wordsworth, and the Animal Fable.” Review of English Studies, New Series, 34, no. 136 (November 1983): 471–80. Warner, Malcolm, and Robin Blake. Stubbs and the Horse. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

13 Facing Past and Future Empires: Joshua Reynolds’s Portraits of Augustus Keppel Daniel O’Quinn

Augustus Keppel sat for his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds on numerous occasions throughout his lifetime, and it is tempting to see the resulting body of paintings as a complex narrative of the development of both men’s lives.1 The successive portraits capture the progression of the officer through the major naval conflicts of the mid-eighteenth century and the maturation of the artist in his movement to the forefront of British painting. Beyond the relationship of a painter and his subject, the careers of the two men were intimately entwined. Following promotion to the rank of commodore in 1749, Keppel took Reynolds with him to the Mediterranean, which enabled Reynolds to study the Old Masters at first hand. The lessons learned on that European sojourn were fully incorporated into Reynolds’s celebrated 1752 portrait of Keppel: a picture that not only redefined British portraiture, but also acted as a calling card of sorts for future clientele (see plate 5).2 Reynolds’s subsequent portraits of Keppel are less famous, but they constitute an archive that enables us to address transformations in the representation of naval heroism and the vicissitudes of imperial war during a period of both great victory and humiliating loss.3 Augustus Keppel’s naval career started in the 1730s and ended late in the American Revolutionary War. His service in the Seven Years’ War was extraordinarily distinguished. He fought at Quiberon Bay in 1759 and played an instrumental role in the siege of Havana in 1762. This latter action enriched him, but the fevers contracted during the engagement permanently damaged his health. His service in both theatres will play a prominent role in this essay, but the successes from the middle of Keppel’s career cannot be understood fully without an awareness of what happened to his reputation subsequently, as they came to be

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overshadowed by the complex media war that accompanied his court martial in the winter of 1778/9. In the political turmoil that enveloped Keppel’s later career one can discern a symptomatic deployment of past victories to bridge over the disturbing failure to retain the American colonies. By examining how visual art and the daily press intervened in the court martial, this essay will track a very particular brand of wishful thinking in which the glories of the Seven Years’ War were actively invoked to offset the recognition that Britain had lost the American war well before it was technically resolved at the Peace of Paris in 1783. Reynolds’s paintings and engravings from this period allow us to see the complex strategies that were used to resituate memories of the great victories at Quiberon Bay and Havana as vital components in the recalibration of British subjectivity, following the great losses at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781. Reynolds’s practice, like that of many cultural workers during the American war, deployed fantasies of the past to figure forth a future imperium that would not come into being until many years after the deaths of Keppel and of Reynolds himself. That Dark Transaction off Brest In the late summer of 1778, Britain was in the midst of an invasion scare. The French had joined the American cause and were threatening the southern coast of England.4 Keppel, a much-lionized naval hero and Whig parliamentarian, had been hastily called forward to lead the poorly maintained Channel fleet. This was a return to the scene of Keppel’s greatest glory: he was part of the group of commanders who had destroyed the French fleet at Quiberon Bay on 20 November 1759, a victory that had established Britain’s global dominance of the sea. But it was also a very dangerous commission. The fleet was in poor shape and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, was a declared enemy of Keppel and his Whig associates. The Duke of Richmond had warned Keppel that he would be blamed for any and all reverses in the Channel. In late July Keppel had an inconclusive engagement off Ushant with the French fleet commanded by Admiral D’Orvilliers. Keppel’s gazette, which briefly reported on the naval action of 27 and 28 July, was extremely imprecise, and its style generated commentary in the press. The same print column of the Morning Chronicle in which Keppel’s gazette appeared, for example, recorded the following:

Facing Past and Future Empires  309 Admiral Keppel’s letter, in yesterday’s London Gazette Extraordinary, is one of the most singular that ever was written as an official dispatch. It neither mentions where the action was fought, where the French fleet are gone to, nor in what kind the hard blows received by our ships were repaid. The latter may certainly be ascertainable as to the precise quantum of the injury done the enemy, but surely the brave Admiral might have given us some better expression to guess by, than the vague declaration that they were “so beaten.”5

Questions of usage stand in here for an array of anxieties and recriminations. In the weeks and months that followed, the papers were filled with indictments of Keppel’s failure to describe the battle in naval language, and insinuations that he had failed to engage fully with the French fleet. For commentators in the ministerial Morning Post who were hostile to Keppel, his gazette smacked of evasion or, worse, of a wilful attempt to mislead the public. Less factional reports argued that the lack of clarity and precision allowed for the deliberate or innocent misconstrual of events vital to the nation. Keppel’s gazette became a narrative enigma that prompted a proliferation of accounts of the battle: the papers printed accounts from subordinate officers, and they reprinted radically contradictory reports from France that celebrated French victory over the British fleet.6 These latter were of course rebutted and provided the occasion for invective against the perfidious French. Like Keppel’s gazette itself, the Battle of Ushant became an event whose historical interpretation was dangerously inconclusive, and which, it seemed, had to be worked through at every level of its signification.7 The Morning Post captured the nature of the problem when it referred to the battle as “that dark transaction off Brest.”8 From August 1778 through February 1779, the interpretive struggle to resolve the enigmas surrounding Keppel’s actions and his text was played out in various public arenas.9 In the summer and early fall, much of the engagement with the issue took place in the papers, which played a decisive role in the institutional response to the issue. On 15 October Vice Admiral Hugh Palliser, Keppel’s second in command, was publicly impugned in the General Advertiser by one of Keppel’s supporters for failing to obey orders and join Keppel in pursuit of the French fleet.10 Within the week Palliser attempted to exculpate himself, again in print, but Keppel refused to contradict, in print, the attack on Palliser.11 This war of words, like the battle itself, remained inconclusive

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and threatened to destabilize the command structure of the navy.12 On 9 December Palliser brought charges against Keppel; after the Admiralty accepted the charges, Keppel declared in Parliament that he would not serve with Palliser. Keppel’s court martial was the focus of intense conflict in Parliament throughout December, and dominated the press for its duration from 9 January to 11 February. Politically, the court martial was a disaster for the ministry and especially for Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty. At a moment when it was extremely difficult to criticize the government, the opposition was presented with a political gift. At the same time that they were defending one of their own – Keppel was a prominent member of the Rockingham faction and second cousin to Charles James Fox – the Whigs could attack the ministry for malicious prosecution, factionalism, mismanagement, and, perhaps most damningly, a lack of confidence in its own officers. Within the terms set by the court martial, the entire Keppel/Palliser affair turned on the question of whether either commander had failed to act. Keppel himself was charged with failing to pursue the French fleet after the initial battle. Palliser, who was prosecuting Keppel, was forced to demonstrate that his failure to join Keppel in pursuit was caused by the poor condition of his ship following the first phase of the battle. Both officers were attempting to prove not their heroism, but their prudence. In this demonstration, the question of victory was conveniently obviated. This could be seen as a useful deflection, but the more general charge of inaction was even more volatile than the interpretation of any specific engagement. John Burgoyne, William Howe, and now Keppel and Palliser were being publicly criticized for a failure to engage, and each of their attempts to exonerate themselves, either in the press or before Parliament, merely contributed to a growing sense of national torpor.13 There were historical resonances with the dark period prior to the annus mirabilis of the Seven Years’ War when confidence in the military was similarly shattered, but this only emphasized the fact that Lord North had none of Chatham’s strategic acumen. Unlike his predecessor, North’s interventions were infrequent and remarkably ineffective. At the same time, this self-representation of Britain as a torpid nation, however unsettling, forestalled the recognition that the American rebels had defeated the mother country, and thus kept alive the possibility that another annus mirabilis was just around the corner. Beyond its evident factionalism, the press coverage of the Keppel/ Palliser affair, from the beginning, was fascinated by questions of

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diffidence and nervous exhaustion. In the month following the battle at Ushant, readers were repeatedly told that Keppel was too indisposed to return immediately to England, and this delay allowed his enigmatic gazette to spawn all manner of negative insinuations. Rumours of cowardice, of a duel between Keppel and Palliser, and even of orders from the king not to destroy the French fleet, gained circulation.14 The nature of Keppel’s illness was the occasion for much speculation, even satire, in the period prior to his resailing with the Channel fleet. As the Morning Post for 22 August put it, “Admiral Keppel has been for some time much affected with what the medical gentry term a spasmodic affection; if his nervous system had recovered its tone previous to the Admiral’s sailing last Tuesday, it is to be hoped the delirium, during the prevalency of which he dreamt of the French behaving handsomely, has forsaken him.”15 The reference here is to a key passage in Keppel’s gazette that describes the crucial decision not to pursue the French fleet: The fleets, being upon different tacks, passed each other very close: The object of the French seemed to be the disabling the King’s ships in their masts and sails, in which they so far succeeded as to prevent many of the ships of my fleet being able to follow me when I wore to stand after the French fleet; this obliged me to wear again, to join those ships, and thereby allowed of the French forming their fleet again, and range it in a line to leeward of the King’s fleet, towards the close of the day, which I did not discourage, but allowed of their doing it, without firing upon them, thinking they meant handsomely to try their force with us the next morning; but they had been so beaten in the day, that they took the advantage of the night to go off.16

The adverb “handsomely” provoked repeated commentary, in part because the word is so multivalent (beyond its now archaic military usage signifying “valiantly” or “gallantly,” it is synonymous with readily, appropriately, skilfully, elegantly, and in a strictly nautical sense, carefully), and in part because very few of the papers were willing to allow the French any capacity for “handsomeness.” But the suggestion that it was applied in a moment of delirium is curiously double-edged. At one level, it indicates that Keppel’s representation of the battle is suspect, a symptom of nervous disease, but it also implies that Keppel’s failure to represent the events adequately was not an act of malfeasance, but rather a result of temporary disability. The root cause of the failure – that is, Keppel’s “spasmodic affection” – became a crucial issue later in the affair when Parliament became

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involved in the court martial. After the charges were brought on 9 December 1778, representatives of all of the Whig factions took occasion to speak of Keppel’s heroism and to cast aspersion on the allegations of misconduct. These encomiums to Keppel’s valour were enabled by the introduction of a bill on 16 December 1778 in the House of Commons to relocate the court-martial proceedings from on shipboard to a location on land in order to accommodate Keppel’s ill health. Keppel’s illness could be traced back to his service in Havana in the early 1760s and was something of an open secret.17 When this issue was introduced to the House of Commons, the nation was suddenly confronted with the figure of the invalid warrior: Admiral Pigot rose and spoke very humanely on the bad state of health under which Admiral Keppel had for some time laboured. He said, it had alarmed his friends extremely, but that his anxiety and wish to serve his country had prevailed over every other consideration, and had induced him to leave his chamber, to take upon him the command of the western squadron, in the moment of public danger and publick peril. That now, by a most unaccountable change of affairs, that officer, who put his health and character to the hazard, for the sake of saving his country, would be obliged ... to hold up his hand as a criminal, and stand trial for his life.18

Keppel’s vulnerability, his illness, became a sign both of his selflessness and of the Admiralty’s perfidy. Pigot went on at some length detailing risks from “unwholesome damp” and other perils at the “severest season” of the year before stating explicitly that, in taking part in the trial, Keppel “would run the risque of his life.” As the charges against Keppel were themselves capital, the implication was that the trial itself would execute the man regardless of whether he was guilty or innocent, and that to risk such a valued officer in this way was a matter of “great consequence to the publick.” The bill was a tactical coup because, as Nicholas Rogers argues, the trial’s theatricality prevented the Admiralty from containing the humiliation of Palliser when his evidence started to unravel, and the change of venue ensured a large audience for the ministry’s embarrassment.19 The Countenance of Patriotism It is important to recollect that the invalid warrior figured forth here exists in stark contrast to prior representations of Keppel. As noted

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earlier, Keppel was the subject of one of the most famous portraits of the eighteenth century (see plate 5). Reynolds’s vigorous 1752 portrait established the painter’s career and bolstered the officer’s reputation.20 Like most portrait painters before him, Reynolds was interested in exemplifying civic virtue, but he did so by stepping away from the quotation of classical figures of civitas.21 The pose was based on Pierre Legros’s seventeenth-century statue of Apollo, and it was the subject of much admiration and commentary. But, as David Solkin has argued, Reynolds’s key innovation here was to convey the value of the portrait by means of the dignity of its style, so that the sitter gained value by his relation to the historical tradition of great art. In this painting, it is hard to think of Keppel as a “sitter” at all because he is so fully integrated into the turbulent motion of the sky and the surf. Solkin’s remarks here are helpful, because they indicate the precise gains and losses of this compositional decision: for [Allan] Ramsay, as for most of his immediate predecessors, portraiture remained an art devoted to the isolated figure defined against a more or less neutral and unimportant background. While this approach provided Reynolds with his point of departure, his exposure to Italian art ... had given him the means to break away from this essentially sculptural technique, and to concentrate instead on achieving a high degree of pictorial unity. But such unity could only be achieved at the cost of diminishing the capacity of the figure to command attention entirely as an entity unto itself; and at the same time, though Reynolds did not entirely erase the Keppel’s antique source, he generalised it to the point where it could no longer carry the burden of meaning ... With the Keppel he proposed to anchor an imagery of public virtue to another source of cultural authority – that of grand style historical art.22

This blurring of the distinction between history painting and portraiture is intriguing, because in his definition of historical portraiture Reynolds never meant the depiction of contemporary figures engaged in significant actions. Even in the case of Commodore Keppel, who had proven himself capable of heroic deeds, Reynolds did no more than allude to that potential by showing him striding forcefully along a stormswept shore, with turbulent waves tossing pieces of wreckage behind him. Whatever Keppel might actually be doing here, if indeed this amounts to anything more

314  Daniel O’Quinn than striking an attitude of command, is ... far less important than the fact that his action corresponds to his situation; the ensemble is not intended to be read as a narrative ... [Reynolds] had no desire to transform virtue from a state of being into a question of performing.23

I have quoted Solkin’s argument at some length because it allows us to recognize something that is equally important to the aesthetic and commercial success of Reynolds’s style of portraiture and to Keppel’s later self-representation. The picture’s style gives a sense of potential action without actually resorting to narrative. I would argue that that potential amounts to an enigma – “whatever Keppel might actually be doing” – without a conventional narrative resolution. As such, it forces the viewer to imagine an apposite situation of command, which amounts to conjuring a heroic future. It is through this process that the viewer invests in the potential that is nascent in the general allusion to both past artistic glory and future acts of military and civic prowess. What I would like to suggest is that Keppel, at least the Keppel of this 1752 portrait, inhabits the culture as a figure of heroic futurity, of active change. Further, I would argue that his potentiality is a function of the enigmatic relationship between his pose and the painting’s mise en scène, which brings him to the verge of narrative action, and yet forcefully keeps him in the paradoxical state of being actively still. The notion of active stillness, which was so crucial to Keppel’s exemplarity in the 1752 painting, would become a serious problem in a later time of crisis, when inactivity seemed to be undermining the effort to reconquer the American colonies. Like the Reynolds painting, Keppel’s 1778 gazette gives the impression of active command, but it remains remarkably vague about where and how his actions on 27 and 28 July took place. To modify Solkin’s phrase, Keppel’s stylistic innovation in the gazette – and it was widely recognized as a very unusual dispatch – was to transform virtue from a question of performing specific acts into a state of being. But this rhetorical invention of a style of command, however full of potential, was not sufficient to put the question of performance, and hence of history, in abeyance. If we look closely at the immediate response to Keppel’s gazette in the papers, what we see is a consistent acknowledgment of Keppel’s strength of character, but a nagging desire for a supplementary narrative to resolve the very enigma on which this general effect is based. In other words, the papers want both the exemplification of potential heroism and a precise

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narration of heroic deeds actually performed. This amounts to a desire for both future and present victory that could be sustained neither by Keppel’s “character” nor by the events themselves. These two desires are instantiated by the same enigmatic relation between figure and event, and they remain fully active throughout the entire Keppel/Palliser affair. A similar supplemental desire can be found in Reynolds’s own practice roughly twenty years earlier: the powerful rendering of potential action is followed by images celebrating demonstrable acts of victory. For a brief period after the extraordinary 1752 Keppel and the equally powerful portrait of Robert Orme from 1756, Reynolds’s military portraiture seemed to become less pictorially complex. Whereas the Orme portrait can sustain extensive commentary, his paintings of various admirals and officers from the Seven Years’ War have an almost prosaic quality.24 Yet despite the manifest superiority of the 1752 picture, the most frequently reproduced picture of Keppel likely dates from 1759, when Keppel was briefly docked between engagements while his ship was under repair (see figure 13.1).25 Edward Fisher’s 1760 print had a wide circulation and was the source for a host of other engravings that took Reynolds’s pose and his rendering of the face and merely altered the various accessories in Keppel’s hands.26 This print was no doubt put into circulation as part of the general outpouring of celebratory materials to mark the naval victory at Quiberon Bay. Reynolds’s rendering of Keppel’s face has an important afterlife – in reverse – in Francis Hayman’s allegory of the victory that he prepared for Vauxhall Gardens entitled The Triumph of Britannia (see figure 13.2). This large-scale painting of medallion portraits carried by Nereids was remediated into engraved form and established Reynolds’s rendering of Keppel’s face as part of a pantheon of naval heroes. Every subsequent remediation of his face after the Seven Years’ War carries with it this air of satisfied triumph.27 In the lead-up to Keppel’s 1778 court martial, Reynolds’s 1759 portrait had a second life in the media war that enveloped the Royal Navy. The engravings derived from Reynolds’s 1759 portrait were the source for many further engravings, probably without Reynolds’s imprimatur, for those put into circulation in 1778 were less than subtle in their phallicism (see figures 13.3 and 13.4). The Carrington Bowles print especially, with its prominent cannon and balls, hardly needs commentary. We would wilfully have to ignore their placement to argue that the

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13.1  Edward Fisher, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Honourable Augustus Keppel, mezzotint, 1760. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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13.2  John Boydell, after Francis Hayman, The Triumph of Britannia, engraving, 1765. © Trustees of the British Museum.

engraver was simply representing Keppel’s tactical decision to use shot to destroy the hulls of the French ships. Another important element of these images is the clarity with which they represent the ships and the battle scenes behind Keppel. The Reynolds painting on which the likeness is based has no military action in the background, so the engravers in the late 1770s were updating the likeness by placing it in the context of the Battle of Ushant. The Carrington Bowles print is of particular note here because it is as much a portrait of Keppel as it is of his 1778 flagship Victory, which is rendered in detail to his left. The polemical quality of these prints downplays the unresolved issues of what happened in the Channel by inserting a generic image of naval

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13.3 Anonymous, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Honourable Augustus Keppel, mezzotint, 1774–83. Published by Sayer and Bennett. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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13.4 Carrington Bowles, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Honourable Augustus Keppel, mezzotint, 1778–93. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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conflict to stand for the enigma. The remediation of Reynolds’s 1759 painting as part of the vigorously pro-Keppel propaganda helps us isolate its original significance. In a sense, the 1759 painting’s very lack of innovation and pictorial argument rendered it useful not only for commemorating the annus mirabilis, but also for commemorating the factional conflict of the Keppel/Palliser affair, wherein Keppel’s supporters attempted to connect him to the great victories of the Seven Years’ War. Even though the 1752 picture captures vividly the spirit of heroism and civic virtue, patriotic value accrues to the 1759 image because it is narratively linked to naval victory over the Bourbon powers in the Channel. Furthermore, the subtle linking of the scene of certain victory in 1759 with that of the uncertain engagement in 1778 wishfully restylizes anxieties about the present into dubious assertions that Britain can once again return to past glories. But the 1759 portrait and the legion of engravings based upon it are not the only portraits of Keppel that we can trace to Reynolds in this period. Keppel also sat for Reynolds after his delayed return from Havana, and the resulting painting is both simpler and more strange (see plate 6). Painted mainly in 1765, it is a remarkably delicate and intimate rendering of his face. His mouth is partially open and his gaze is slightly averted. Comparison with Reynolds’s other military portraits of the late 1760s underscores the singularity of this work. The famous images of Sir Jeffrey Amherst wearing armour from 1765 and of General John Burgoyne from 1766 are exercises in the postures and accoutrements of power. In contrast to the celebratory rhetoric of those images, the 1765 portrait of Keppel seems imbued with a sense of uncertainty, perhaps indicative of Keppel’s ill health that had kept him in Havana well after the successful siege, but also perhaps permeated by the close affective ties between Reynolds and his subject. There is a vulnerability in Keppel’s glance that is unusual in military portraiture, especially in images of recently victorious national heroes. It is precisely this emotional depth, I shall argue, that rendered the picture useful, both ideologically and commercially, in the aftermath of the Keppel court martial. The Futures of the Past After sitting for twenty-seven days – an unusually long period – the court martial unanimously acquitted Keppel and declared that the “charge was malicious and ill-founded.”28 After Palliser’s endless examination of witnesses, Keppel’s defence was comparatively short,

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and, like his earlier performance in Parliament, an exercise in grace and resolution that turned on the assertion of his “essential” courage.29 More interesting than Keppel’s actual remarks was the effect the acquittal had both in performance and in the press. As Nicholas Rogers has discussed, Keppel’s acquittal generated a wave of jubilation that quickly transformed into some of the most extensive crowd violence in the late eighteenth century.30 The celebrations took a variety of forms and rapidly swept the nation. The speed was due to the remarkably quick dissemination of the news in the papers. William Parker, the publisher of the General Advertiser, received the news within six hours and thus celebrations in London occurred on the day of the acquittal. Yet the alacrity of the rejoicing was also due to a great deal of advance preparation. Celebrations extended over multiple nights and, as Rogers demonstrates, those in the provinces were carefully staged, highly hierarchical events.31 The most important of these occurred immediately following the acquittal and the return of Keppel’s sword. At about twelve o’clock a grand procession left the court led by “A band of musick playing ‘See the conquering Hero comes’” from Handel’s Judas Maccabeus, followed by Keppel and a host of dignitaries, including the Duke of Cumberland and key opposition figures such as the Duke of Portland, the Marquess of Rockingham, and an array of officers.32 As reported in the Morning Chronicle, They all walked with their hats in their hands (in which were blue cockades, stamped in gold letters, KEPPEL) to Admiral Keppel’s house, in High-street; after which, every merchant ship in the harbour, and at Spithead, gave a grand salute of nineteen guns each, the bells were set a ringing, and the evening concluded with bonfires, illuminations, guns firing, and other demonstrations of joy.   A magnificent entertainment was prepared by the Captains of the western fleet, to which the Admiral, and the Members of the Court-Martial were invited; and yesterday, they gave a ball to the ladies. The streets were all illuminated, and an universal joy and festivity reigned amongst every rank of people.33

The catalogue of participants and events here is meant to invoke fashionable sociability: the Duke of Cumberland was a noted bon vivant, and the reporting on the ball was designed to convey civility. But in spite of the Morning Chronicle’s attempt to represent the aristocratic control over these highly choreographed events, they could not be

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dissociated from more violent forms of protest, especially in London. Palliser’s effigy was attacked and burned in numerous towns, and in London a violent mob completely destroyed his house and eventually threatened Lord Sandwich’s residence. Similarly, opposition papers printed large numbers of attacks on Palliser just prior to and immediately following the acquittal, but these were simply a prelude to the more damaging attacks on Sandwich that dominated the press and Parliament for the rest of February and much of March. The Keppel acquittal generated all manner of celebratory responses, with everything from medallions to prints to hastily published summaries of the court martial. Many of these artefacts refashioned already-extant images. The frontispiece to the account of the trial published by John Almon, for instance, incorporates a rendering of Keppel’s face clearly based on the mezzotints derived from Reynolds’s 1759 portrait, and it is printed next to harsh satires of the witnesses and the evidence produced for Palliser.34 However, Reynolds’s 1759 portrait of Keppel was not the only one deployed in the post-acquittal period. Reynolds himself, perhaps in response to the circulation of his earlier renderings, chose to put a different image into circulation. On the day after Keppel’s acquittal, Reynolds wrote to congratulate his friend and inform him of his intervention in the cultural conflict surrounding the admiral: Amidst the rejoicing of your friends, I cannot resist offering my congratulations for the complete victory you have gained over your enemies. We talk of nothing but your heroic conduct in voluntarily submitting to suspicions against yourself, in order to screen Sir Hugh Palliser and preserve unanimity in the navy ... The illumination yesterday was universal, I believe, without the exception of a single house; we are continuing this night in the same manner. Poor Sir Hugh’s house in Pall Mall is entirely gutted, and its contents burned in St. James square, in spite of a large body of horse and foot, who came to protect it. Lord North and Lord Bute had their windows broke. The Admiralty gates were unhinged, and the windows of Lord Sandwich and Lord Lisburne broke. Lord Mulgrave’s house, I am told, has likewise suffered, as well as Captain Hood’s. Tonight, I hear, Sir Hugh is to be burnt in effigy before your door. I have taken the liberty, without waiting for leave, to lend your picture to an engraver, to make a large print from it.35

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Coming after a litany of actual and symbolic violence, Reynolds’s casual remark about transforming his 1765 portrait of Keppel into a “large print” takes on a manifestly political valence. And yet it is a political gesture that is thoroughly saturated by the commercial possibilities of the moment. Reynolds’s barely veiled approbation of the destruction of Palliser’s house and the burning of his effigy is matched by his recognition that such violence provides a political and a commercial opportunity. But what are we to make of the image that circulated so widely after the acquittal? The 1765 painting that Reynolds turned into a print to capitalize on the acquittal is a curious one (see figure 13.5). In this image, Keppel is surrounded by few of the accoutrements of power. His uniform is in a state of undress, but is this supposed to convey a sense of relaxation, or of retirement? It certainly doesn’t give a sense of active command. Furthermore, because the background is an almost generic rendering of clouds in muted greys and yellows, its coherence as a picture, in Solkin’s terms, is very weak, so that the dignity of the sitter is significantly less intact than in the earlier portraits of 1759 and 1752. With little interplay between background and figure, everything turns on the face. How do we read Keppel’s expression? As he gazes past the viewer, we are forced to ask what he is looking at. We are almost called into a position of judgment, as the portrait brings us back to the question of Keppel’s actions, back to a moment before his acquittal. Could it be argued that Reynolds was reactivating the enigma that had been temporarily put into abeyance by the trial? And if so, why? Significantly, the 1765 painting was designed to celebrate imperial peace. Keppel is in a state of official undress because his victories at Quiberon Bay and at Havana were instrumental in the defeat of France and Spain in the Seven Years’ War. By putting this image into mass circulation in 1779, Reynolds, like many of Keppel’s supporters, was allegorically figuring a victorious future by referencing past victories over Britain’s Continental enemies. What is strange is that the victory the 1779 print is designed to commemorate is over an internal, not an external, enemy, and thus the picture comes dangerously close to substituting the decisive judicial victory over Palliser for the nagging inconclusiveness of the Battle of Ushant. There is danger here because the image, when detached from its initial celebratory purpose, offers a new occasion for interpretation. Unlike the 1752 portrait, which broke forcefully with the convention of representing civic virtue by replicating artefacts from the classical past, the print Reynolds commissioned in 1779 uses his earlier

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13.5  William Doughty, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Honble Augustus Keppel, Admiral of the Blue, mezzotint, 1779. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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celebration of imperial victory to allegorize the present. The gesture is tendentious at best, not only because the historical moment has changed so palpably, but also because the fact of the print, its medial status, brings the problem of repetition to the fore. As a doubly repeated image, which both formally replicates the earlier painting and which is itself reproduced for sale, Reynolds’s print raises the question of difference. The mezzotint is markedly distinct from the painting, not only in the obvious loss of colour but also in the crucial darkening of the sky surrounding Keppel. The lower portion of the print is much darker than in the corresponding area of the painting, and Doughty, Reynolds’s engraver, introduces significantly more turbulence into the grey scale of the sky immediately surrounding Keppel’s head. By introducing these signs of unrest, the mezzotint raises cognate questions that pertain both to the sitter himself and to the historical predicaments of 1779. Is this Keppel the same as the one presented in the earlier painting? Is his glance contingent upon the historical moment? Is the present crisis even comparable to the past moment of imperial glory? And does the very gesture of repetition highlight a nostalgia for the Seven Years’ War that comes with an awareness of loss of the American war? These questions are not confined to Reynolds’s print but rather permeated much of the celebratory discourse surrounding Keppel’s acquittal. Attempts to affiliate Keppel with past moments of British glory dominated the celebrations, but these allegorical gestures did more to highlight and specify the particularity of the crisis in 1779. For example, William Hayley’s renowned Epistle to Admiral Keppel casts him as the most recent of a long line of “Departed naval Chiefs,” including Drake and a litany of officers who defeated the Spanish Armada and later the Dutch fleet, but one is left negatively comparing the Battle of Ushant with more decisive and momentous actions in the English Channel.36 Similarly, William Tasker’s Congratulatory Ode to Admiral Keppel narrates his heroic actions from the mid-1740s to the 1760s, but then suddenly moves to closure after its treatment of Keppel’s service at Havana. Formally, the reader is left considering why, at line 205, the speaking voice invokes the “Patriotic Muse” to “conclude this song.”37 It is precisely the difference between these past events and the present that requires a premature end to the poem at this point. The troubled alignment of Keppel with past victories and former heroes may have more to do with the wayward state of the empire in the late 1770s, than with any secure articulation of national purpose. As Rogers has argued, most of the non-radical celebrations of Keppel’s acquittal stopped short of

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adopting the pro-American message, which was in many ways the logical end point of the widespread critique of the ministry. The Rockingham opposition had only recently decided to support American independence, but there was insufficient popular support for this measure for it to become incorporated into the mainstream pro-Keppel rhetoric. Instead, the focus was firmly on critiquing the ministry for mismanagement and on mobilizing anti-Gallican sentiment in that critique. What this meant was that the radical implications of the opposition rhetoric had to be rechannelled into the message of reform. That political process is well documented, but I want to conclude this essay by demonstrating how it unfolded in Reynolds’s own practice, because his supplemental images of Keppel restylize the admiral’s masculinity to suit the tenor of the times. If the print of Keppel both reactivates the enigma that precipitated the crisis and highlights the problem of historical difference, then Reynolds’s remaining paintings of Keppel, themselves commissioned to celebrate the acquittal, are in a sense called forth to put that enigma to rest. This amounts to a double capitalization: the prints make money and consolidate Keppel’s celebrity, but their circulation instantiates the need for further post-trial portraits. These post-trial portraits constitute a counter-narrative to that set in motion by the nostalgic and ultimately wishful thinking behind the replication of the 1765 portrait. The first, a three-quarter-length portrait in his flag officer’s undress uniform, was commissioned by Keppel himself, painted in 1779, and “replicated several times by the artist, versions being presented to his lawyers John Lee and John Dunning and to Edmund Burke” (see plate 7).38 It is an image produced in the immediate aftermath of the trial. The second is also a three-quarter-length portrait of Keppel out of uniform, which Reynolds painted between 1781 and 1783 for the lawyer Thomas Erskine (see plate 8). This later image was produced not only after Keppel’s celebrity had diminished somewhat, on account of his refusal to serve under Sandwich, but also during the period when he replaced Sandwich as First Lord of the Admiralty.39 In both cases, Reynolds painted for a specifically pro-Keppel audience, for the Whig lawyers who either acted for Keppel during the trial or advised him on his defence.40 These paintings share a great deal. Both show Keppel standing on the shore with the ocean behind him. He exudes dignity and grace. Above all, the sword in his right hand is given pictorial prominence. The sword is an important prop in both pictures, not simply because it symbolizes martial command, but because it literalizes the acquittal and the inaugural act of celebration. As the Morning Chronicle recorded:

Facing Past and Future Empires  327 After the verdict had been announced, the whole audience immediately, from the DUKE OF CUMBERLAND, to the meanest mechanick, gave THREE TIMES THREE CHEERS, which were answered by a vast concourse of people assembled on the ramparts and parade. Sir THOMAS PYE’s SPEECH on delivering to ADMIRAL KEPPEL his SWORD. ADMIRAL KEPPEL, It is no small pleasure for me to receive the commands of the Court I have the honour to preside at; that in delivering you your sword, I am to congratulate you with so much honour, hoping ere long, you will be called forth by your Sovereign, to draw it once more in the defence of your country.41

The restoration of Keppel’s sword was the subject of panegyric across the papers and functioned as a crucial sign of Palliser’s and Sandwich’s humiliation. However, the swords in these two pictures are also radically dissimilar. The sword in the 1779 portrait is clearly a military weapon, a ceremonial part of Keppel’s uniform. This is in stark contrast to the civilian sword in the 1783 portrait. The actual rendering of the sword is also different. In the earlier picture, the sword supports Keppel, his hand rests on the hilt, and its very repose signifies calm. In the later image, the sword, by its high placement, is figuratively close to a staff or more likely a trident. This latter possibility is consistent with Desmond Shawe-Taylor’s suggestion that Keppel’s expression is modelled on the face of Neptune in Bernini’s Neptune and Triton.42 In the later painting, the sword also stands between Keppel and the viewer, and the light radiating off Keppel’s hand and the hilt of the sword concentrates attention on the grasp itself. In keeping with the overall air of defiance communicated by Keppel’s stance and expression, the grasp quite literally figures the sinews of power. These two very differently rendered right hands – the shift from repose to a resolute grasp – provide a key for understanding further transformations in Keppel’s image between 1779 and 1783. Perhaps the most remarkable element of the 1779 portrait is Reynolds’s decision to paint Keppel with his hair powdered. According to contemporary sources, Keppel never dressed his hair in this manner, and it has the obvious effect not only of enhancing Keppel’s age, but also of lending him an air of aristocratic formality.43 One could argue that he looks out at the viewer from an earlier era when powdered hair signified patrician exceptionalism. And yet the whiteness of his hair, the vastness of his belly, and the paleness of his complexion combine to give the effect, if not of frailty, then of dignified exhaustion. This picks up

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on the discourse of invalidism that was so tactically important both in shaming Sandwich and in ensuring that the trial would become a theatre of humiliation for Palliser.44 The Keppel staring out at the viewer is a survivor, whose glance seems to be saying, “I stand here in spite of what they have done to me.” This is also why he stands facing westward, for his primary foe here is internal to the British Isles.45 In his very agedness, he stands as an indictment of malicious prosecution and ministerial conspiracy, but his body also signifies a certain outmoded ideal of gentlemanly candour. However, this politically powerful invocation of the past through signs of aging is augmented by a very complex codification of the present. Keppel’s costume, including the sword, is at one level the very embodiment of present command: he wears the current admiral’s uniform. But one can discern a crucial modification of Reynolds’s palette. In comparison with Reynolds’s earlier portrait of Keppel and his famous portraits of Admiral George Rodney and Augustus Hervey, the blue of Keppel’s uniform, like everything else in the 1779 portrait, is muted. By muting the blue, Reynolds produced a double sign that would have been immediately recognizable to Whig supporters and Whig opponents: Keppel’s uniform becomes an expression of the buff and blue of Whiggery adopted by Charles James Fox and others to honour George Washington and the American cause. This careful manipulation of colour has complex political effects: it remodels the present not only to reactivate past tropes of Whig elitism, but also to figure forth a resolutely Whig future, which recognizes America as a continuation of Whig ideals, effectively cancelling the present period of Tory rule and replacing it with a political fantasy perfectly accommodated to the desires of Reynolds’s Whig patrons in general, especially Lee, Dunning, and Burke. At this point, the Rockingham faction was still uncertain about Fox and hadn’t yet embraced the notion of a sovereign America, so Reynolds may well have been nudging Keppel’s supporters towards this new vision of the Atlantic world. Reynolds’s complex rendering of politics in Keppel’s body and dress is magnified by his treatment of the sky. As noted earlier with regard to the 1752 portrait, the integral relationship between figure and background space is crucial to Reynolds’s practice; here he establishes a similar resonance between Keppel the survivor and the atmospheric transition behind him. His outstretched hand and the sword itself direct our view to the area of light on the horizon. His back is to the darkness and the storm has abated. This figures the acquittal itself, but the precise

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quality of the area of light is indeterminate. Is Keppel’s hand moving into the light of redemption, into a new dawn of Whig rule? This very question, which I believe is at the dramatic core of the portrait, ties together the sitter and his environment into one overwhelming sign of history. And yet, in 1779, the potential inherent in this portrait remains a question, or perhaps more accurately a desire within the viewer to get beyond this moment of both internal and external crisis. It is this question that is posed by Keppel’s glance: Reynolds has drawn the viewer, by means of that glance, into a position where a political decision must be made. This is a considerable step beyond the enigma posed by the engraving based on the 1765 portrait, but it nevertheless remains inconclusive. The very question demands a further painting. Despite Reynolds’s general refusal of narrative in these portraits, it is extremely difficult not to read the sequence of pictures as a sequence of historical moments, as a narrative of patriotic and political desire that is inextricable from the ascendance of Rockingham in the early 1780s. And yet the shift from the 1779 portrait to the portrait of 1781–3 involves a fairly startling temporal reversal. Both in his pose and in the rendering of his body, this later Keppel appears to be a younger man. The hair powder is gone, as is the pale complexion. His distended belly – one of the ostensible signs of his “spasmodic affection” – has been absorbed into his burgundy waistcoat, no longer an important pictorial sign. In fact, the entire representation of Keppel is leaner, not only in the sense that he is more slender, but also in the sense that Reynolds reserves painterly detail for his defiant face and his grasping hand, and condenses the rest of his body and costume into a solid mass not that distinct from the surrounding earth. That is the key rhetorical move here, because Keppel – in his resolution, in his defiance, and in his direct gaze eastward – embodies England’s robust confrontation with its perennial enemy, France. He has quite literally become the nation, but this articulation of a national body has obviated the troubling alterity of the Americans in favour of the mythic French other. And this national embodiment is augmented by the shedding of his uniform. This is Keppel the parliamentarian standing before us. There is no need for the buff and blue of Whig opposition, because at this moment Keppel is part of the Rockingham administration. This subtle linkage of governance and the land through Reynolds’s choice of palette and his decision to emphasize his sitter’s title rather than his rank – for this is what is at stake in the substitution of waistcoat for uniform – amounts to a remarkable reassertion not only of property, but also of parliamentary

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history (with all its oligarchical implications) as the defining feature of British identity. In this sense, this later portrait is as much a response to Tory maladministration as it is to the threatening spectre of Wilkite reform, pro-American sentiment, and plebeian discord, which the Whigs, and Keppel himself, were so careful to dissociate from the Keppel celebrations. Keppel, in this picture, adopts more the defiant stance of property than any resolute expression of liberty. This parsing of the defining elements of British political identity is crucial because liberty is a quality that, in the period between 1781 and 1783, must be shared with a soon-to-be sovereign entity. It helps to explain why Keppel faces eastward: the distinction between France and Britain is far more stable than that between America and Britain at this moment. Just as the 1779 portrait impugns Lord North’s ministry and the mismanagement of the war by Sandwich and others, so the 1781–3 portrait carefully consigns radical affiliation with the American cause to pictorial oblivion. Again, it is in the rendering of the sky that Reynolds clinches this political intervention. In the 1779 picture, the light on the horizon is somewhat unreadable: the storm is abating, but it is not certain that it signifies a new dawn. But there is no sense that the sun is setting in the 1779 painting. In the 1781–3 image, Keppel’s back is to the setting sun and he stares resolutely into the darkness that completely dominates the upper half of the picture. One could say that the sun is setting on a turbulent period. In this allegory, the new Whig administration of Rockingham, embodied in Keppel, stands ready for the next day. But the most radical gesture here on Reynolds’s part – and it is the painterly complement to the rendering of Keppel as the massive embodiment of the land – is the remarkable saturation of the sky in blue pigment. At one level, the turbulent sky reflects the turbulent sea, but it is important to recognize that this is not the grey/black sky of the 1779 painting, or of the 1765 or 1752 portraits for that matter. The navy blue that had figured so prominently in Keppel’s uniform in all the previous portraits has migrated to the sky. Each step along this migration of colour is imbued with political significance. In the 1752 picture, his flapping blue uniform captures the animated character of a man of action who had survived an altercation with the French in 1747, and thus this famous image is linked to the consolidation of Britain in the wake of the threat of 1745. In the 1765 picture, the sheer elegance of Keppel’s deep blue coat figures the repose and security of Britain following the Seven Years’ War, and yet his expression carries a hint of the political uncertainty that would eventually

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lead to the American war. That uncertainty makes itself felt in the factionalization of Reynolds’s palette in the 1779 portrait, in which the uniform is recast in the buff and blue of Whiggery and thus forms a muted sign of hopeful exhaustion. As argued above, this last complex intervention almost demands the final portrait of 1781–3, and here the answer to the political question encoded in the 1779 picture is both a robust sign of defiance and a stunning example of wishful thinking. Blue no longer envelops the man, but has become manifest in the world itself. It is as though Keppel’s naval clothing, his outer protective layer, and by extension Britain’s protective layer, has been replaced by a suddenly nationalized natural world. With Admiral Rodney’s reassertion of British dominance of the seas roughly contemporary with this picture, such an imperial gesture should not surprise us in relation to the rendering of the ocean.46 But the intense blue of this sky represents a new political fantasy, for in this image Reynolds has colonized the sky. The Americans may have gained sovereign territorial control over their land, but in a remarkable act of appropriative substitution, Reynolds in this painting has simultaneously reasserted the centrality of the political language of property and postulated for the future an image of global empire that looks to the east, because beyond France lies the future of British imperial activity in India and the totalizing fantasy of global Whig rule that permeates these clouds. One could argue that these blue clouds are a prefiguration of the short-lived fantasy of governance inscribed in Fox’s India Bill of 1783. More profoundly, this picture, with its simultaneous reactivation of mythic property and its naturalization of future imperial domination beyond the Atlantic world, prefigures the most famous work of one of its original owners: Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Perhaps this is why, looking back from the height of the French Terror, Burke nostalgically invoked the Keppel celebrations, “remembering how he partook of the general flow of national joy that attended the justice that was done to his virtue.”47 Keppel was very much in Burke’s thoughts as Britain entered the French Revolutionary Wars in the 1790s. Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord (1796) concludes with a panegyric to Keppel that is explicitly tied to the act of looking at the very portrait Reynolds gave to Burke after Keppel’s acquittal: It was but the other day, that on putting in order some things which had been brought here on my taking leave of London for ever, I looked over

332  Daniel O’Quinn a number of fine portraits, most of them of persons now dead, but whose society, in my better days, made this a proud and happy place. Amongst these was the picture of Lord Keppel. It was painted by an artist worthy of the subject, the excellent friend of that excellent man from their earliest youth, and a common friend of us both, with whom we lived for many years without a moment of coldness, of peevishness, of jealousy or of jar, to the day of our final separation.   I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest and best men of his age; and I loved and cultivated him accordingly.48

The double sense of “ever looking” in this final sentence is a crucial moment in Burke’s lament because it allows him to fuse the act of looking at the portrait with the act of historical reflection. Over the next paragraphs, Keppel, here understood as the wrongly accused patriot, is made to ventriloquize Burke’s contention that “no great commonwealth could by any possibility long subsist, without a body of some kind or other of nobility, decorated with honour, and fortified by privilege.”49 The moment of identification between Burke and Keppel is first established by the repeated notion of friendship between the men, but in this context there is almost a perfect translation between the tone of Burke’s lament and the look of aged dignity so carefully executed in Reynolds’s 1779 portrait of Keppel. Deployed in this fashion, Burke’s aesthetic and historical gaze become one with the look cast on the viewer by Keppel. When we remember that this is a portrait executed for a group of Whig friends, that glance captures the very moment of noble connection and continuity that Burke is elegizing in this text. NOTES This essay was first presented at the 2009 meeting of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I would like to thank the audience at that presentation for their perceptive comments and more specifically Frans De Bruyn and Shaun Regan for their helpful suggestions during the editing of this volume. 1 As David Mannings argues, “Reynolds’s portraits of Augustus Keppel fall into seven basic types” but in some cases he painted subtle variants or copies of the same pose so that the total number of Keppel canvases totals ten (Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000], 287).

Facing Past and Future Empires  333 2 As David Mannings summarizes, “John Steegman described this picture as having ‘little to do with Keppel, being, so to speak, but a preliminary advertisement for the young painter.’ And Waterhouse, taking up this suggestion, writes that the picture ‘presumably remained for a considerable time in the studio so that sitters who came with more moderate intentions could see what possibilities of immortality were available’” (Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue, 288). 3 As this essay went to press I was excited to discover Robert W. Jones’s illuminating discussion of the Keppel affair in Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain during the War for America, 1770–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Jones’s study conclusively demonstrates the cultural importance of all aspects of Keppel’s trial and acquittal. His cogent reading of Reynolds’s portraits of Keppel resonates with much of my argument here, but by opening the analysis to a wider chronology I am hoping to emphasize further the importance of Reynolds’s practice to analyses of political transformation in the period. Jones’s argument regarding the tension between commerce and corruption on the one hand and notions of aristocratic honour and friendship on the other offers a key entryway into the vexed question of how the political valence of honour was itself in transition during the American war. 4 Official declaration of war between Britain and France occurred on 10 July 1778. However, the government had fully mobilized the army at various encampments in the south of England and had activated the Channel fleet in the spring of that year in response to France’s Treaty of Alliance with the Americans. For discussion of the invasion scare, see A. Temple Patterson, The Other Armada: The Franco-Spanish Attempt to Invade Britain in 1779 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1960). Brigadier Charles Herbert offers a useful account of the camp at Coxheath in “Coxheath Camp, 1778–1779,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 45 (1967): 129–48. For discussions of the cultural representations of the camps, see Gillian Russell, “Theatricality and Military Culture: British Army Camps in the 1770s,” Eighteenth-Century Life 18 (1994): 55–64; and Robert W. Jones, “Sheridan and the Theatre of Patriotism: Staging Dissent during the War for America,” Eighteenth-Century Life 26 (2002): 24–45. 5 Morning Chronicle, 4 August 1778. 6 See Morning Chronicle, 7 and 10 August 1778. 7 For a discussion of how the enigma was handled in the newspapers and in various print satires, see my Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 186–94. 8 Morning Post, 28 August 1778.

334  Daniel O’Quinn 9 The history of the trial and its mediation in the press have been superbly discussed by Nicholas Rogers in two separate essays: Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 122–51, and “The Dynamic of News in Britain during the American War: The Case of Admiral Keppel,” Parliamentary History 25, no. 1 (2006): 49–67. See also J.H. Broomfield, “The Keppel-Palliser Affair, 1778–79,” Mariner’s Mirror: The Journal of the Society for Nautical Research 46 (1961): 195–207. 10 The identity of the letter’s author, Lieutenant Berkeley, was revealed in the Public Advertiser, 5 January 1779. For a discussion of these allegations, see Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics, 126–7. 11 Palliser’s exculpatory letter appeared first in the Morning Post, 5 November 1778, and then in a host of other papers. 12 Morning Chronicle, 7 November 1778. 13 For a sense of the discourse surrounding these attempted exculpations, see The Narrative of Lieut. Gen. Sir William Howe, in a Committee on the 29th of April, 1779, Relative to His Conduct, during His Late Command of the King’s Troops in North America … (London, 1780) and A View of the Evidence Relative to the Conduct of the American War under Sir William Howe, Lord Viscount Howe, and General Burgoyne … (London, 1779). For discussion of Howe’s disappointing campaigns in Philadelphia, see Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (London: Longmans, 1964), 124–6, 154. 14 For the latter see Morning Chronicle, 27 August 1778. 15 Morning Chronicle, 22 August 1778. 16 Morning Chronicle, 4 August 1778. 17 See Ruddock Mackay’s entry on Keppel in the ODNB. 18 Morning Chronicle, 17 December 1778. 19 Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics, 128–9. 20 Reynolds’s famous painting actually commemorates a dubious moment in Keppel’s naval career. The picture ostensibly depicts the moment after Keppel ran aground in pursuit of a French vessel in the summer of 1747. Keppel and his crew were taken prisoner. After Keppel was exchanged and his men returned from France, he faced a court martial for his actions. As in 1779, he was acquitted. It is perhaps worth considering the fact that Reynolds’s most innovative paintings of his friend are effectively post-court-martial portraits. 21 See David Solkin, “Great Pictures or Great Men? Reynolds, Male Portraiture, and the Power of Art,” Oxford Art Journal 9, no. 2 (1986): 42–9. 22 Solkin, “Great Pictures,” 46. 23 Solkin, “Great Pictures,” 46. 24 For an extraordinary reading of the Orme painting, see Mark Hallett, “From Out of the Shadows: Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Captain Robert Orme,” Visual Culture in Britain 5, no. 2 (2004): 41–62.

Facing Past and Future Empires  335 25 See David Mannings’s discussion in Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue, 288. The 1759 images are labelled [1038] and [1039]; the picture is plate 30 in the catalogue. 26 Fisher’s engraving is earliest, and multiple imprints were published by Elizabeth Bakewell, John Bowles, and Sayer and Bennett. All of these date from 1760. A second wave of imprints based on Fisher’s engraving hit the market in the fall of 1778. 27 For an important discussion of Hayman’s Vauxhall painting and the notion of “satisfaction,” see Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 94–103. See also Martin Myrone, Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art, 1750–1810 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 33–4. 28 Morning Post, 12 February 1779. 29 During the lead-up to the court martial and during the court martial itself, Keppel consistently defended himself, not by offering a clear narrative of events, but rather by expressing his faith in the “essential courage” and reputation of the navy, and by enacting a kind of honourable inactivity. This refusal of narration was crucial to Keppel’s oratorical response to Palliser’s attack in Parliament: “Admiral Keppel, said, he rose in a very different situation to that of any other Gentleman who had gone before him [including of course Palliser], – under the accusation of not having done his duty to his country. However, he had received notice of the charge laid against him, and would meet his trial with pleasure, conscious that he had done every thing that could be expected from him. He should say little more on the subject, and having said that, should retire. – Nothing that his adversary had alledged against him should make him alter his sentiments of the Vice Admiral, whom he believed to be a very brave, and good Officer; yet, what he had advanced on a former occasion, he left with the House for their decision, as he never could retract a syllable of it” (Morning Post, 12 December 1778). With this Keppel simply left the House. For observers suspicious of Keppel’s actions, this was a remarkable rehearsal of the Battle of Ushant itself: under attack from his adversary, he decided to forestall the action to a more appropriate time. Once again K ­ eppel’s “heroism” lay in doing nothing by simply absenting himself from the scene of attack. But in this rhetorical conflict, Keppel appears to be fully aware that Palliser’s very physical and oratorical presence in the House can be used against him. By once again refusing any narrative exculpation, Keppel’s dignity becomes a matter of style, and it appears that he was well aware that he would embody a kind of masculine restraint everywhere missing from Palliser’s vituperative performance in the House and from his recourse to the press. 30 Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics, 122.

336  Daniel O’Quinn 31 Because of pre-existing radical constituencies, the celebrations in London were far more volatile. 32 For a discussion of the performance dynamics of these celebrations, see my Entertaining Crisis, 243–8. 33 Morning Chronicle, 13 February 1779. 34 See Anon., “Frontispiece to Admiral Keppels Tryal,” Proceedings at Large of the Court-Martial (London, 1779). BM 5536. 35 The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. John Ingamells and John Edgcumbe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 80–1. 36 William Hayley, Epistle to Admiral Keppel (London, 1779), 6, line 17. 37 William Tasker, A Congratulatory Ode to Admiral Keppel (London, 1779), n.p., line 205. 38 Martin Postle, “Augustus, 1st Viscount Keppel,” in Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 108. 39 See Mackay’s ODNB entry. 40 For an acute discussion of the portraits in light of the complex relationship between Keppel, Reynolds, Lee, Dunning, and Burke, see Jones, Literature, Gender and Politics, 148–54. 41 Morning Chronicle, 13 February 1779. 42 Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Georgians: Eighteenth-Century Portraiture and Society (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990), 46–8. Reynolds admired the statue and purchased it in the early 1780s (Postle, Joshua Reynolds, 108). 43 See online curatorial notes for the painting (BHC2822) at the National Maritime Museum. 44 For the importance of this issue for establishing the trial’s theatricality, see Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics, 128–9. 45 I am basing the directionality of Keppel’s gaze here and elsewhere on the assumption that as Admiral of the Channel Fleet the seascape is that of the English Channel. 46 Rodney’s victory at Les Saintes occurred on 12 April 1782, and the ensuing celebrations have been compared to those mounted after the “year of victories” in 1759. For discussion of these celebrations, see Stephen Conway, “‘A Joy Unknown for Years Past’: The American War, Britishness, and Celebration of Rodney’s Victory at the Saints,” History 86 (2001): 180–99. 47 Edmund Burke, Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), 6:76, quoted in Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics, 151. 48 Edmund Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord, in On Empire, Liberty, and Reform: Speeches and Letters, ed. David Bromwich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 508. 49 Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord, 510.

Facing Past and Future Empires  337 BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Anon. “Frontispiece to Admiral Keppels Tryal.” Proceedings at Large of the Court-Martial. London, 1779. – The Narrative of Lieut. Gen. Sir William Howe, in a Committee on the 29th of April, 1779, Relative to His Conduct, during His Late Command of the King’s Troops in North America. London, 1780. – A View of the Evidence Relative to the Conduct of the American War under Sir William Howe, Lord Viscount Howe, and General Burgoyne. London, 1779. Burke, Edmund. A Letter to a Noble Lord. In On Empire, Liberty, and Reform: Speeches and Letters, edited by David Bromwich. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. – Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907. Hayley, William. Epistle to Admiral Keppel. London, 1779. Reynolds, Sir Joshua. The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Edited by John Ingamells and John Edgcumbe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Tasker, William. A Congratulatory Ode to Admiral Keppel. London, 1779. Secondary Sources Broomfield, J.H. “The Keppel-Palliser Affair, 1778–79.” Mariner’s Mirror: The Journal of the Society for Nautical Research 46 (1961): 195–207. Conway, Stephen. “‘A Joy Unknown for Years Past’: The American War, Britishness, and Celebration of Rodney’s Victory at the Saints.” History 86 (2001): 180–99. de Bolla, Peter. The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Hallett, Mark. “From Out of the Shadows: Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Captain Robert Orme.” Visual Culture in Britain 5, no. 2 (2004): 41–62. Herbert, Brigadier Charles. “Coxheath Camp, 1778–1779.” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 45 (1967): 129–48. Jones, Robert W. Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain during the War for America, 1770–1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. – “Sheridan and the Theatre of Patriotism: Staging Dissent during the War for America.” Eighteenth-Century Life 26, no. 1 (2002): 24–45. Mackesy, Piers. The War for America, 1775–1783. London: Longmans, 1964. Mannings, David. Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

338  Daniel O’Quinn Myrone, Martin. Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art, 1750–1810. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. O’Quinn, Daniel. Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Patterson, A. Temple. The Other Armada: The Franco-Spanish Attempt to Invade Britain in 1779. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1960. Postle, Martin. Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Rogers, Nicholas. Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. – “The Dynamic of News in Britain during the American War: The Case of Admiral Keppel.” Parliamentary History 25, no. 1 (2006): 49–67. Russell, Gillian. “Theatricality and Military Culture: British Army Camps in the 1770s.” Eighteenth-Century Life 18 (1994): 55–64. Shawe-Taylor, Desmond. The Georgians: Eighteenth-Century Portraiture and Society. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990. Solkin, David. “Great Pictures or Great Men? Reynolds, Male Portraiture, and the Power of Art.” Oxford Art Journal 9, no. 2 (1986): 42–9.

Notes on Contributors

Fred Anderson is Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (2000), the standard modern account of the Seven Years’ War, The War that Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War (2005), and The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (2005, with Andrew Cayton). Nigel Aston is Reader in History at the University of Leicester. His publications include Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1830 (2003), The French Revolution 1789–1804: Liberty, Authority and the Search for Stability (2004), and Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2008). He recently co-edited An Enlightenment Statesman in Whig Britain: Lord Shelburne in Context, 1737–1805 with Clarissa Campbell Orr (2011). He is currently completing Oxford and the Enlightenment: The University and the Cultural Life of Eighteenth-Century Britain for Oxford University Press. Alain Beaulieu is Professor of History at the Université du Québec à Montréal and Canada Research Chair on the Aboriginal Land Question. He is the author of numerous studies of the encounter between Europeans and Aboriginal peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is historical consultant to the Parliament of Canada and the Supreme Court on land claims questions. Erica Charters is University Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford. Her monograph, Disease, War and the Imperial

340 Contributors

State: The Welfare of British Troops during the Seven Years’ War, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Her current research is a comparative study of Franco-British medical knowledge during the Seven Years’ War. Joan Coutu is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Waterloo. She is the author of Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (2006) and of several articles on the social and political functions of art. Frans De Bruyn is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke: The Political Uses of Literary Form (1996) and editor of Eighteenth-Century British Literary Scholars and Critics (2010). His recent publications include a number of essays on the reception of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. He is currently preparing a monograph on georgic writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and he is editing a volume on eighteenthcentury thought for the Cambridge Companion series. Douglas Fordham is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. He has published widely on British art and its relation to politics, religious identity, and empire. He is the author of British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (2010) and co-editor of Art and the British Empire (2007). Michael J. Griffin is Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick, Ireland. His critical edition of The Selected Writings of Thomas Dermody was published in 2012. A monograph, Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith was published in 2013. Robert W. Jones is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds. He is most recently the author of Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain during the War for America, 1770–1785 (2011). He has previously written a study of conceptions of taste and beauty in the eighteenth century, as well as numerous essays and articles. His current research is focused on the political career of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. He also intends to write a book about honour. Thomas Keymer is Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His

Contributors 341

books include Richardson’s “Clarissa” and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (1992), Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (2002), and “Pamela” in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (2005, with Peter Sabor). He is General Editor of The Review of English Studies, co-General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, and editor of numerous primary works and essay collections including the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Johnson’s Rasselas (2009) and The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (2009). Daniel O’Quinn is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 (2011) and Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (2005), along with a wide range of publications­ in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. He has also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830 with Jane Moody (2005), and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters with Teresa Heffernan (2013). Shaun Regan is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–1789 (2006, with Brean Hammond) and of articles on Laurence Sterne, Olaudah Equiano, Scriblerian satire, and early Irish fiction. Most recently, he has edited Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (2013). Nicholas Rogers is Distinguished Research Professor of History at York University, Toronto. His publications include Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (1989), Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (1997, with Douglas Hay), Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (1998), The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and Its Opponents in Georgian Britain (2007), and most recently Mayhem: Post-War Crime and Violence in Britain, 1748–1753 (2012). He was the coeditor of the Journal of British Studies, 2000–5.

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Index

Aboriginals. See Indigenous Nations of North America; Indigenous Peoples of North America Acadians, deportation of, 34 Amelia, Princess, 195–7 American War of Independence, 6, 13, 16, 17, 92, 104, 120, 276, 307–8, 310, 314, 325–6, 328–30 Amherst, 1st Baron (Jeffrey Amherst), 36, 61–2, 100–1, 102, 248–50, 320 Anderson, Fred, 7, 14, 120 Anglo-French rivalry, 6–7, 10, 38, 56, 64, 69–82; in literature, 147, 149, 151, 154, 158 annus mirabilis. See under Seven Years’ War Aristotle, 152–5, 160 arts and arms, 6, 119–20, 136, 152, 288 Baretti, Giuseppe, Discours sur Shakespeare et sur Monsieur de Voltaire, 158 Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko, 183 Berkeley of Stratton, 5th Baron (John Berkeley), 191–205; ambivalent

response to war of, 196–7; diaries of, 191–2 black African experience, 16, 235–50; maritime experience of blacks, 235–50; Middle Passage, 236 Blenheim, Battle of, 123 Bluestockings, critique of war, 12 British “blue-water policy,” 32–3 British Empire, 25–42, 148–50, 240, 259–61, 265–7, 270–1, 307–8, 310, 314, 325–6, 328–30; colonialism, British, 97, 99–100, 101; and commerce, 26, 30, 32–3, 36–8, 181, 236, 265; debate over and critiques of, 30, 125–6, 171, 176–7, 183; experience of, 26–7, 42, 148–52; impact on Britain of, 26, 29, 34, 126; loss of America (see American War of Independence); problems arising from, 25–6, 38–42; transformation of after Seven Years’ War, 25–6, 38–9. See also Indigenous Peoples of North America British Empire: colonies, 25, 32, 37–8, 41, 73, 77–9, 177; American, 13, 32, 38, 41, 54–64, 93, 98, 103, 148, 276, 308, 314; Caribbean, 30–1, 37, 79,

344  Index 81, 203, 236, 238, 242–3, 247; Nova Scotia, 33–4, 97, 133; taxation of, 40–1 British Navy, 55, 69, 72, 80, 124, 199, 202; and impressment, 31, 238, 241, 244; and military medicine, 69–82; naval servitude versus slavery, 236, 238–9; perspective on from below decks, 235–50. See also Byng, Admiral John; Keppel, 1st Viscount (Augustus Keppel); Vernon, Admiral Edward Brocklesby, Richard, 75, 80 Burke, Edmund, 229, 326, 328, 331–2 Bute, 3rd Earl of (John Stuart), 127, 130–1, 134, 226, 270–4, 285, 288, 291, 297, 299 Byng, Admiral John, 8, 11, 15, 178–80, 225, 247 Canada, 37–9, 54–9, 91–105, 148–9, 161–2, 182, 203 Capell, Edward, 150 character. See identity; masculinity Carter, Elizabeth, 12 Charles II, 151, 193 Churchill, Charles, 126–7, 131, 134, 291, 299 Cockings, George: War: An Heroic Poem, 120–1 Cock Lane Ghost, 284–5, 288–9 colonialism, British. See under British Empire conquest of New France (la conquête), 3, 6, 8, 11, 16–17, 91–3, 98–9; as historical turning point, 4, 14, 37–9, 41, 54, 91, 104–5. See also Indigenous Peoples of North America: and the conquest of New France (la conquête); Seven

Years’ War: battles and actions: Quebec (fall of) Corneille, Pierre, 149–50, 152 Court, British. See St James’s Palace Cowper, William, 13 Culloden, Battle of, 133, 182 Dennis, John, 159 Dezon, Monsieur: Lettres sur les principales maladies qui ont regné dans les hôpitaux de l’armée, 75 Dodsley, Robert, 11 Dowager Princess of Wales (Augusta), 201 Draper, General William, 136 Dryden, John: An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, 152 Edward, Prince, 201–2 Elizabeth, Princess, 201 empire. See British Empire Equiano, Olaudah, 235–50; and British identity, 239–50; maritime and naval experience, 237–50; and personal identity, 235–9; and Seven Years’ War, 243–50; as slave in America and the Caribbean, 238, 242–3 Ferdinand of Brunswick, Prince, 194, 200–1 Ferdinand, Prince of BrunswickLüneburg, 213, 216 fine arts. See visual arts First Nations. See Indigenous Nations of North America; Indigenous Peoples of North America Fitzroy, Colonel Charles, 216 Forbes, John, 59–61 Fox, Henry, 194

Index 345 Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, 193, 201–2, 205 Frederick (the Great) of Prussia, 36, 63, 196, 200–1 French colonial expansion, 93–4; basis of colonial claims, 100, 102 Garrick, David, 151, 158 George II, 13, 169, 175, 191, 194–5, 197, 200–3, 205, 216 George III, 13, 205 Gildon, Charles, 159 Glorious Revolution, 172–3 Goldsmith, Oliver, 15, 126, 169–83; ambivalent response to Seven Years’ War, 169–72; anxieties about empire, 171–2, 174–7, 183; History of England, 180, 182; and Native American peoples, 176–7; and returning soldiers, 175, 178, 183; The Traveller, 174–5, 182–3 Gordon Riots, 13 Granville, 2nd Earl (John Carteret), 193–4, 198, 203 Gray, Sir James, 197 Gray, Thomas, 10, 11–12, 13; Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 119–20, 132 Great Peace of Montreal, 94 Grenville Cousinhood, 263, 270 Greville, Fulke: Maxims, 129–30 Guthrie, William, An Essay upon English Tragedy, 152, 156, 159 Hardwicke, 1st Earl of (Philip Yorke), 195, 198, 202 Henley, Sir Robert, 199 Holdernesse, 4th Earl of (Robert Darcy), 200 Horace, 155

identity, 4–7; communal and national, 70, 81–2, 151, 171, 239–43; empire and, 25–6, 39, 126; personal, 133, 239; personal versus public, 214–16, 243–7. See also Equiano, Olaudah; Keppel, 1st Viscount (Augustus Keppel); Sackville, Lord George imperialism, 3, 9, 32, 56–7; shift in perception towards, 5–6, 13–15, 176–7, 183. See also British Empire Indians. See Indigenous Nations of North America; Indigenous Peoples of North America Indigenous Nations of North America: Abenaki, 56; Cherokee, 28, 56, 60, 289; Chickasaw, 56; Choctaw, 56; Creek, 56; Delaware, 56, 58, 60–2, 101–2, 148; Huron Wendat, 91, 93; Iroquois Confederacy or Six Nations, 34, 56–8, 61–2, 65–6n8, 66, 93–4, 96, 98–9, 148; Mi’kmaq, 34, 91, 97–8; Mingo Seneca, 56, 58, 62, 148; Ohio nations, 56–62, 93, 96, 99– 102; Shawnee, 56–8, 62, 102, 148 Indigenous Peoples of North America, 4, 7, 39–40, 55–64, 104– 23, 176–7, 96; and British guardianship policy, 92, 99–101, 103–5; and the conquest of New France (la conquête), 91–3, 99, 100–1, 104–5; involvement in Seven Years’ War, 14, 28, 33, 39–40, 55–64; messianic movement, 101–2; Murray Treaty, 96; Pontiac’s War, 40, 99, 101–2, 104; relations with British, 25–6, 34, 56–7, 59–62, 91–2, 96–105; relations with French, 33–4, 56, 58–9, 62, 92–9; resistance to subjugation,

346  Index 40, 99–102; Royal Proclamation of 1763, 102–5; Treaty of Easton, 96, 100; Treaty of Oswegatchie, 96, 98; warfare techniques, 57; and War of 1812, 92, 104. See also Indigenous Nations of North America Johnson, Samuel, 124, 126, 136, 138, 176–7, 180; critique of colonialism, 136, 138, 180–1, 183; and Shakespeare, 148, 158–60 Jonson, Ben, 153 Kames, Lord (Henry Home), 158 Keppel, 1st Viscount (Augustus Keppel), 6, 16–17, 197, 246; court martial of, 308, 310–12, 315, 320–2; engagement off Ushant (1778), 308–9; at Havana, 307–8, 312, 323, 325; portraits of (see under Reynolds, Sir Joshua); at Quiberon Bay, 307–8, 315, 323 Lind, James: An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, 14, 70, 75, 77–80, 81; Treatise on Scurvy, 75 literature and war, 119–38, 148–50, 156–7; aestheticizing or sanitizing of war in literature, 120–1, 122–3, 124–5; periodicals and war, 172, 174; press reports and war, 27–30, 121, 126–7, 130, 131, 248; Romantic literature and war, 6, 121–2, 124, 125, 132, 138. See also arts and arms; print culture: paper wars Louisbourg, capture of in 1745, 29, 33. See also under Seven Years’ War: battles and actions Louis XV, 38, 199

luxury, as social malaise, 27, 36, 124, 176, 178, 215, 219, 224–5 Macpherson, James, 15, 126, 127, 131, 132–4; Ossianic themes and war, 132–4 Marlborough, 1st Duke of (John Churchill), 123, 135, 274 masculinity, 4, 9, 16, 27, 36, 213–30, 247, 326; changing perceptions of, 16, 213–15; and effeminacy, 214–15, 218–19, 222–3, 226, 228; and homophobia, 224–6, 228–9 Mason, William, 299–300 Mayhew, Jonathan, 54 medicine, 69–82; Anglo-French medical collaboration, 69, 73–4, 76–7, 79–81; British military medicine, 69, 72–80; climate and health, 78–80; colonial medicine, 70, 71, 73, 78, 82; focus on public health, 69, 72, 82; French military medicine, 71–2; and Seven Years’ War, 69–82; translation of medical treatises, 74–81 Milton, John, 128, 151, 157 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 153 Monro, Donald, 75–7, 80 Montagu, Elizabeth, 148, 150, 158–60; Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, 159–60 Montcalm, Louis Joseph de (Marquis de Saint-Veran), 4, 54, 58; commemoration of, 12 Morgann, Maurice, 148, 161 Murphy, Arthur, 130, 155–7 nationalism and national identity, 7, 14, 17, 38–9, 82, 121, 151, 171, 183, 239–43, 259, 298, 330

Index 347 Native Americans. See Indigenous Nations of North America; Indigenous Peoples of North America Navy. See British Navy neoclassical criticism, 147, 150–2, 154; English disregard for, 154–5; as sign of French absolutism, 152, 155 Newcastle, 1st Duke of (Thomas Pelham-Holles), 178–9, 193–8, 200, 202–3, 259, 261 North Briton (newspaper), 38, 127, 130–1, 272, 285 Northington, 1st Earl of (Sir Robert Henley), 199 Otway, Thomas, 149 pamphlet wars. See print culture paper wars. See under print culture Parkman, Francis: Montcalm and Wolfe, 54–5, 62 Pascal, Michael Henry, 238–41, 243 Peace of Paris (1763). See under Seven Years’ War Pelham, Henry, 193 Pelhamites, 195, 198. See also Newcastle, 1st Duke of (Thomas Pelham-Holles); Hardwicke, 1st Earl of (Philip Yorke) Percy, Bishop Thomas, 179, 181 Pitt, William, 10–11, 13, 36, 41–2, 59, 178, 285, 291; and coalition with Newcastle, 194, 196–200, 202–3, 205, 259; commemoration of at Stowe, 266–7, 269; and monument to Wolfe, 260–1, 263–6, 273–6; and paper wars, 127, 130, 134, 273; and Temple’s imperial ambitions, 265–7, 270–2, 276

Plains of Abraham, Battle of the. See Seven Years’ War: battles and actions: Quebec (fall of) Pocock, Admiral Sir George, 136, 237 Poissonnier-Desperrières, Antoine, 79–80; Traité des fièvres de l’isle de S. Domingue, 91 Pope, Alexander, 76, 123, 124–7, 131, 135, 153–4; edition of Shakespeare, 153–4 Porter, Roy, 73 Pottinger, Israel, 226–8 Pownall, Thomas, 41; The Admini­ stration of the Colonies, 25–6 Pringle, Sir John, 72, 75–6, 80 print culture: Grub Street accounts of royal zebra (“queen’s ass”), 285–8, 291–5; newspaper announcements about Stowe, 270, 275; pamphlet war over Sackville court martial, 216–30; paper wars, 15, 121–2, 126– 32, 138, 147, 149; press accounts of Keppel and court martial, 308–11, 321, 326–7; press reports and war, 27–30, 121, 126–7, 130, 131, 248. See also arts and arms; literature and war; North Briton (newspaper) prints and engravings. See under visual arts Privy Council (British), 199 Racine, Jean, 149–50, 160 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 16–17, 291, 294, 298; portraits of Keppel, 307–8, 313–32. See also illustrations 13.1, 13.3, 13.4, 13.5 and plates 5, 6, 7, 8 Richelieu, Cardinal, 152 Rockingham, 2nd Marquess of (Charles Watson-Wentworth), 274, 276, 295–8, 310, 321, 326, 329–30

348  Index Romanticism: Romantic literature and war. See under literature and war Royal Society, 72, 74–5, 78–9 Rymer, Thomas, 159, 160 Sackville, Lord George, 16, 36, 213– 30; actions at Battle of Minden, 201, 213–25; court martial of, 135, 192, 201, 213–14, 220–6; as “coward of Minden,” 192, 213, 219, 225 Sancho, Ignatius, 13 Seven Years’ War: artistic representations of, 9, 29, 35; colonial warfare and disease, 78–82; consequences of for British Empire, 5–6, 10, 13, 16–17, 37–8, 40–2, 63, 308; on continental Europe, 194; Convention of Klosterzeven, 194; critiques of, 176–7; and European identity, 70, 82, 162–3; as divinely ordained, 39, 41, 54; financial cost of war, 40, 196–7, 270; global scope and consequences of, 3–6, 12, 57, 64, 69–70, 79, 120–1, 136, 173, 236, 331; human cost of, 12, 31–2, 70, 121–2, 134–5, 241, 245–6; newspaper accounts of, 14, 27–30, 34, 38, 133, 248 (see also print culture: paper wars); origins in Ohio Valley, 34–5, 56–62, 93, 100–1, 148, 161; Peace of Paris (1763), 13, 16, 37, 54, 57, 63, 100, 101–3, 125, 129, 135, 284; recent scholarship on, 6–9; 1759 as annus mirabilis, 54–5, 191–2, 194, 203–4, 246, 259–60, 265, 270, 272, 310, 320 Seven Years’ War, battles and actions: Cherbourg (attack on), 202, 204; Fort Niagara (fall of), 62, 102; Gorée (capture of), 37, 197; Guadeloupe (fall of), 37, 70, 79,

203, 289; Havana (capture of), 33, 37, 136, 307–8, 312, 323, 325; Hastenbeck, 194; Lagos Bay, 199, 203, 240, 242, 244–6, 289; Lake George, 58; Louisbourg (capture of), 11–12, 34–6, 41, 57, 194, 242–5, 248–9; Martinique (capture of), 37, 70, 197, 203, 237; Manila (fall of), 136; Minden, 16, 36, 192, 200–1, 213–30, 289; Minorca (fall of, to French), 8, 35, 121, 174, 178–9; Montreal (capitulation of), 62, 99–100; Quebec (fall of), 3–4, 10, 13, 27, 37, 41, 54–6, 62, 71, 132, 169, 173–4, 202 (see also conquest of New France); Quiberon Bay, 10, 55, 199, 203, 235, 245, 248, 289, 307–8, 315, 323; Ste-Foy, 55; Ticonderoga, 41, 59, 173 Shakespeare, William, 15, 147–63; French reception of, 157–8; international audience of, 150; national appropriation of, 157, 160; and Seven Years’ War, 147, 151, 159 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 226–8 slavery, 28, 31–2, 37, 175, 197; Middle Passage, 236; and Olaudah Equiano, 235–9, 242, 247 Sloper, Colonel Robert: testimony at Sackville’s trial, 222–4 Smart, Christopher, 126, 128, 136–8 Smollett, Tobias, 10–11, 126, 127, 131, 132, 179, 180 Spanish Empire, 30–3, 41, 237 Spavens, William, 235, 241 Spenser, Edmund, 157 Sterne, Laurence, 9, 123, 127, 134–5, 223; Tristram Shandy as critique of war, 123, 126–7, 134, 223 St James’s Palace, 15–16, 191, 195–6; centrality to British politics, 192,

Index 349 196, 204–5; demise as political epicentre, 205 Stowe (landscape garden), 9, 16, 261–76. See also illustrations 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4 Stubbs, George, 16, 284–300; The Zebra, 288–91, 294–5, 297–300; Whistlejacket, 295–8. See also plates 3, 4 Swift, Jonathan, 123, 131, 136 Talbot, Catherine, 10, 12 Temple, 2nd Earl (Richard Grenville Temple), 16, 259–76; and Grenville Cousinhood, 263, 270; and Stowe Gardens, 261–76; imperial ambitions of, 265–7, 270–2, 276. See also illustrations 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4 Temple, Viscount Cobham (Richard), 263–3, 267–70. See also illustration 11.1 Thion de la Chaume, Claude-Esprit, 76, 77–8, 79 Treaty of Utrecht (1713): literary representations of, 123–4, 127–9, 131 Vernon, Admiral Edward, 27–32, 36 visual arts, 16–17, 259–330; as public spectacle, 284–300; animal (and equestrian) paintings, 288–300; contemporary history painting, 16, 260, 265, 276, 313; public exhibitions, 16, 288–9, 294, 297–300; portraiture, 307–8, 313–30; prints and engravings, 35, 224, 284–8, 291, 308, 315, 317, 320, 329; sculpture (monuments), 260–3, 269, 273–6, 288. See also illustrations and plates (listed on vii–viii); Reynolds, Sir Joshua; Stowe (landscape garden); Stubbs, George; Wolfe, Major General

James Peter: commemorations of Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 15, 149–50, 156–7, 161, 178; Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe, 149, 157; Candide, 156, 178; nationalistic rhetoric of, 149–50; as proponent of neoclassical criticism, 147–63 Walpole, Horace, 4, 10–12, 148, 158, 160–1, 198, 272, 295–6, 299; Castle of Otranto, 160–1 Walpole, Sir Robert, 32, 124, 128, 130, 263, 269, 272 War of the Spanish Succession, 121, 123, 127, 135, 151 Washington, George, 34, 61 Watts, Carol, 171, 175 Whalley, Peter, 152–3; Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare, 152 Whitehall, 191 Wilkes, John, 127, 130, 272–3, 276, 284–5, 288, 291, 295, 298 William, Prince (Duke of Cumber­ land), 194, 202 Wolfe, Major General James Peter, 27, 36, 42; commemorations of, 5, 14, 16, 29, 36, 123, 181–3, 260, at Stowe, 259, 261–7, 273, 275; in Westminster Abbey, 260–1, 263, 273–4, 276; death of, 4, 27, 54, 181, 202; disputed legacy of, 42, 249; eyewitness accounts of, 248–50; and Gray’s Elegy, 119–20, 132; military victories of, 11, 41, 202. See also illustration 11.1 and plate 1 Yarmouth, Countess of (Amalie van Wallmoden), 195 Young, Edward: Conjectures on Original Composition, 119, 124