The War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) Read online

  THE WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION

  * * *

  MODERN WARS IN PERSPECTIVE

  General Editors: H.M. Scott and B.W. Collins

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  The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–1748

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  * * *

  THE WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN

  SUCCESSION,

  1740–1748

  M. S. ANDERSON

  First published 1995 by Pearson Education Limited

  Second impression 1999

  Published 2013 by Routledge

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  Copyright © 1995, Taylor & Francis.

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  ISBN 13: 978-0-582-05950-4 (pbk)

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Anderson, M.S. (Matthew Smith)

  The War of the Austrain Succession, 1740-1748 / M.S. Anderson.

  p. cm - (Modern wars in perspective)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-582-05951-8 (CSD). -ISBN 0-582-05950-X (PPR)

  1. Austrain Succession, War of, 1740-1748. I. Title. II. Series.

  D292.A32 1995

  940.2'532-dc20 94-15591

  CIP

  Set by 7 in 10/12 Sabon

  CONTENTS

  List of maps

  Acknowledgements

  Abbreviations

  Introduction

  1

  Europe in 1740: the Pragmatic Sanction and the Anglo-Spanish War

  Franco-Habsburg rivalry

  The Pragmatic Sanction

  Imperial rivalries and the Anglo-Spanish War

  2

  Armies and navies in transition

  States and armies: provision and control

  Armies: the hold of the past

  Armies: recruiting

  Armies in action

  Navies: the problem of manning

  3

  War and society

  Waste and loss

  Stimulus and opportunity

  The difficult balance

  4

  The Prussian invasion of Silesia and the crisis of Habsburg power, 1740–1

  Frederick II invades Silesia

  Europe reacts to the invasion

  The Habsburg monarchy survives

  5

  From Klein-Schnellendorff to Breslau, 1741–2

  The imperial election and the Habsburg conquest of Bavaria

  The war begins in Italy

  Frederick II makes peace but remains insecure

  Britain begins to play an active role in Europe

  6

  From Breslau to Dresden: the end of the war in Germany, 1742–5

  French disappointments and frustrated Austrian hopes

  The war in Italy and the Hanau negotiations

  The Treaty of Worms and its results

  Frederick II re-enters the struggle but with little success

  The war in Italy and Franco-Spanish divisions

  Frederick II's difficulties and eventual triumph

  A realignment of French policy?

  Decision in Germany: but the war continues

  7

  Italy and the Netherlands, 1745–8

  Frederick II's continuing fears

  The Netherlands, 1746: French successes

  Italy, 1746: d'Argenson's plans and their results

  Italy, 1746: Franco-Spanish disunity

  Italy, 1746–8: the invasion of Provence, the revolt of Genoa, final stalemate

  The Netherlands, 1747–8: French success and Dutch collapse

  8

  The naval and colonial struggle

  The navies and their work

  The West Indies and North America

  The struggle in India

  British successes and the war against French trade

  9

  The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle

  Peace feelers and tentative negotiations, 1745–7

  Britain and France force the pace

  Disappointments and recriminations

  10

  The results of the war

  Prussian success and Habsburg reform

  A British or French alliance for Austria?

  Colonial stalemate: limited military innovation

  Chronology

  Bibliography

  Maps

  Index

  LIST OF MAPS

  1

  The West Indies

  2

  Silesia

  3

  Bohemia, 1742

  4

  Northern Italy

  5

  Flanders and the Netherlands

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book, which covers relatively briefly a large and complex subject and is intended in the main for students, is the product of reading and teaching which has extended over many years, sometimes intermittently, and to which many friends have contributed, sometimes unconsciously. I should like, however, to pay tribute to the memory of my former teachers, David Horn and Richard Pares, who did most of all to awaken my interest in history in general and that of the eighteenth century in particular, and also record my debt to the editor of this series, Hamish Scott, to whose perceptive and illuminating comments I owe much. As always, I am also deeply indebted to the British Library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science and the London Library. Without their bountiful resources and helpful staffs my task would have been much more difficult.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  Arneth, Geschichte A. von Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias (10 vols, Vienna, 1863–79)

  Barbier, Chronique Chronique de la Régence et du Règne de Louis XV (1718–1763), ou Journal de Barbier (4 vols, Paris, 1885)

  Baudi di Vesme, La Pace C. Baudi di Vesme, La Pace di Aquis grana (1748) (Turin, 1969)

  Baudrillart, Philippe V A. Baudrillart, Philippe V et la Cour de France (5 vols, Paris, 1890–1902)

  Berney, Friedrich A. Berney, Friedrich der Grosse: Entwicklungsgeschichte eines Staatsmannes (Tübingen, 1934)

  Butler, Choiseul R. Butler, Choiseul, i, Father and Son, 1719–1754 (Oxford, 1980)

  Carutti, Storia D. Carutti, Storia della Diplomazia della Corte di Savoia (4 vols, Turin, 1875–80)

  Guglia, Maria Theresia E. Guglia, Maria Theresia: Ihre Leben und ihre Regierung (2 vols, Munich-Berlin, 1917)

  Lodge, Studies Sir R. Lodge, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Diplomacy, 1740–8 (London, 1930)

  Mediger, Moskaus Weg W. Mediger, Moskaus weg nach Europa: Der Aufstieg Russlands zum europäischen Machtstaat im Zeitalter Friedrichs des Grossen (Braunschweig, 1952)

  Pares, War and Trade R. Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (Oxford, 1936)

  Pol. Corr. Politische Correspondenz Friedrichs des Grossen, ed. J. G. Droysen et al. (46 vols, Berlin, 1879–1939)

  Richmond, The Navy Sir H. W. Richmond, The Navy in the War of 1739–48 (3 vols, Cambridge, 1920)

  Sautai, Préliminaires M. Sautai, Les Préliminaires de la Guerre de la Succession d'Autriche (Paris, 1907)

  Sautai, Débuts M. Sautai, Les Débuts de la Guerre de la Succession d'Autriche (one vol. only published; Paris, 1909)

  Wilkinson, Defence S. Wilkinson, The Defence of Piedmont, 1742–8: A Prelude to the Study of Napoleon (Oxford, 1927)

  INTRODUCTION

  The war of the Austrian Succession is not an easy subject for the historian. Its difficulty lies in its lack of unity of theme, in the fact that it does not centre around any one clearly defined and predominant issue. It has, therefore, no single narrative spine around which secondary aspects of the story can be grouped. It was a series of struggles,
interrelated indeed but sometimes quite loosely so, the product of widely differing ambitions cherished by different rulers and governments. These interreacted in complex and changing ways which are not always easy to make intelligible to the reader. The fact that many of the states involved – Bavaria, Saxony, Sardinia-Piedmont, the Dutch Republic, even to some extent Prussia – were of relatively secondary importance helps to strengthen this impression of flux and incoherence. Very often they were not strong or self-confident enough to pursue consistent policies and tended to become in effect clients and dependants of some greater power. This exposed them to the temptation to change sides, or threaten to do so, when they felt that such a move might offer greater security or bigger prospective gains. Such a situation explains much of the complexity of the diplomacy of these years. All the other great conflicts of the eighteenth century – the war of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War, the war of the American Revolution – had also a complexity and many-sidedness which is oversimplified by their textbook titles. But this is most marked of all where the struggles of the 1740s are concerned.

  The most important and lasting results of these struggles came in east-central Europe, in the sudden leap of Brandenburg-Prussia to at least potential great-power status. Yet it was at war for less than three years of the seven and a half during which there was fighting on the continent. The ambitions of Frederick II were, from the widest European perspective, the most important single element in that fighting, and the only genuinely new one. It is from them, and from the reaction to them of the Archduchess Maria Theresa, that much of the drama of the events of these years arises. From this confrontation, even though the king and his great opponent never met face to face, the reader gains a sense of personal conflict, of individuals gambling, sometimes desperately, for the highest stakes, which no other aspect of these years can give. By contrast, much of the fighting in west Germany, the Netherlands or Italy, important as it was and was seen to be, appears almost routine, a continuation of ambitions and antagonisms already visible for generations. Yet here also there were real issues involved with important implications for the future. The emergence from the war of Charles Emmanuel II of Sardinia-Piedmont with significant gains, even though they fell short of what had been hoped for in Turin, underlined the fact that his dominions were now the most ambitious and expansionist of the Italian states. The failure of France to exploit its overwhelmingly strong position in the Low Countries when the war ended was one of the most remarkable renunciations of its kind in the history of modern Europe. The ending in 1748 of the Spanish Bourbon dynastic ambitions in Italy, which had done so much for over a generation to complicate international relations, was a dividing-line in the history of Spain, and a constructive and necessary one. Even the indecisive Anglo-French naval and colonial struggle of 1744–8 strengthened existing antagonisms and hardened in both London and Paris the conviction that a further and conclusive struggle for empire must come soon.

  The array of ambitions and fears which underlay the struggle of the 1740s – the desire of Frederick II for reputation and personal achievement; the tradition of French hostility to Habsburg power; the appetite of Charles Emmanuel for any territory he could lay hands on; the eagerness of Elizabeth Farnese and her husband to forward dynastic interests in Italy; the determination of Maria Theresa to preserve the territories she had inherited and the imperial title which was now seen as a Habsburg hereditary possession; the British desire to strike at French trade and colonies and the French one to avert any British maritime and imperial monopoly – all these forces, intertwining and often conflicting, make the story of these years a complicated one. But this does not mean that it was an unimportant one. These struggles were in many respects inconclusive, a prelude to the more decisive ones which were soon to come. In the eyes of posterity they have suffered by comparison with the longer and, for most of the participants, more demanding war over the Spanish Succession which preceded them, and even more because they fall short of the drama of the Seven Years War which followed. The life and death struggle of Prussia in 1756–62 and the sweeping naval and colonial victories of Britain in 1759 and 1762 have an element of the spectacular which the conflicts of the 1740s cannot quite match. But these conflicts were not meaningless.

  The conventional title ‘war of the Austrian Succession’ implies that they were inspired, at least in the main, by dynastic considerations. This is only very partially true. Maria Theresa was determined if possible to preserve in its entirety under Habsburg rule her ramshackle inheritance of disparate lands. Elizabeth Farnese's passionate desire to endow her younger son with a substantial principality in Italy irritated many of those who had to cope with its results. But, like the struggle over the Spanish Succession which had preceded it this was essentially a war about power, about territorial ambitions and the European balance, not about the legalities of dynastic rights. These might be used in efforts, often very transparent ones, to justify to the world a course of action inspired by quite different motives. But they were seldom more than camouflage of this kind. Frederick II knew well that the legalistic arguments he put forward to justify his crucial invasion of Silesia in December 1740 were worthless. The Elector Charles Albert of Bavaria had more faith in the claims to much of the Habsburg inheritance which he advanced a few months later; but few contemporaries saw these as much more than a convenient pretext. In this respect the struggles of the 1740s were something of a watershed. They came at a time when dynastic rights and claims of the kind which had so dominated international relations for centuries still had some power to inspire rulers and statesmen and influence state policies. Yet these rights, or alleged rights, were now more that ever before subject to simple considerations of state power. They had become merely one element in a balance whose preservation was now, more than ever before or since, an article of faith for virtually all observers of international relations.

  In some ways the war of the Austrian Succession looks back rather than forward. It was the last great Anglo-French struggle, at least before the French Revolution, in which colonial rivalries were clearly subordinate to events in Europe. Much of the fighting was in areas – the southern Netherlands, northern Italy, to a lesser extent the Rhineland – where the great states had already fought out their quarrels for generations, even for centuries. The French attack on Habsburg power in 1741; Saxe's conquest of the Austrian Netherlands in 1744–8; efforts to assert Spanish power in Italy: all these struck chords which had resonated through earlier generations of conflict in Europe, back to the Habsburg-Valois rivalries of the early sixteenth century. Here again, however, forces of change can be seen. The sudden rise of Prussia was a very important element in the eastward movement of the major focus of international relations which was to be so noticeable after 1763, as the questions of Poland and the Ottoman Empire rose to a new level of urgency. The occupation of Prague in 1741–2 was by a considerable margin the furthest penetration eastwards of any west European army before Napoleon's campaigns against Russia in 1807 and 1812.

  The war of the Austrian Succession therefore, more than many other great conflicts of its kind, sees the continent in transition, with dynasticism as a guiding principle in the relations between states clearly on the wane, with a great and enduring new rivalry emerging in east-central Europe, with the Bourbon-Habsburg antagonism so long accepted as inevitable now entering its last active phase. But it was more than a mere preface to later and more dramatic changes. It was a great and demanding struggle. It saw military achievements and diplomatic skills which can stand comparison with any during the decades which followed. As such it demands and deserves attention in its own right.

  1

  EUROPE IN 1740: THE PRAGMATIC SANCTION AND THE ANGLO-SPANISH WAR

  FRANCO-HABSBURG RIVALRY

  Western and central Europe at the end of the 1730s were at least as much divided by interstate rivalries and jealousies as at any time in modern history. Three sources of division were particularly important and threatening. In the first place, and still bulking largest of all in the minds of most contemporaries, was the traditional rivalry, with roots which went back to the early sixteenth century, between Bourbon and Habsburg. This was a struggle between the rulers of France, who saw themselves as heads of the most powerful of all European ruling families, and those of the Habsburg territories (already conventionally referred to as Austria), the group of provinces in central Europe and outlying possessions in the southern Netherlands and Italy united merely by their common allegiance to the imperial dynasty in Vienna. The sometimes spectacular defeats suffered by Louis XIV in 1703–9 during the war of the Spanish Succession had not shaken the belief of politically conscious Frenchmen that their country was the greatest European power and the focus of European civilisation. But the remarkable successes achieved by the Austrian Habsburgs during the last half-century – the recovery from the Turks of Hungary and part of Serbia; the making of the Hungarian crown hereditary in the Habsburg family and the suppression of a dangerous Hungarian nationalist revolt in 1703–11; the acquisition in 1713–14 of extensive new territories in the southern Netherlands and Italy – had given them an international importance which was not to be surpassed, or indeed equalled, at any time before the collapse of their power in 1918. The mediocre performance of their armies against France in the Rhineland during the war of the Polish Succession in 1733–5 and their downright bad one against the Turks in the disastrous Balkan campaigns of 1737–9 had taken some of the gilt off the gingerbread; and the financial weakness which had always dogged Habsburg government was at the end of the 1730s very serious. None the less, the power of Austria now seemed to many observers more than ever the only effective counterpoise to that of France in continental Europe.