The course of the Seven Years’ War
1756
Crossing the Saxon frontier with 70,000 Prussians on August 29, 1756, Frederick entered Dresden, the Saxon capital, on September 10. The Saxon army, numbering no more than 20,000, fell back to Pirna, in the southeast. Prussia offered assurances of its good intentions to Saxon elector Frederick Augustus and his minister, Heinrich, Reichsgraf (imperial count) von Brühl, but those promises, quite naturally, were greeted with mistrust, and an Austrian force of 32,000 under Maximilian Ulysses, Reichsgraf Browne, moved from Bohemia to reinforce the Saxons. To prevent that union, Frederick advanced southward into Bohemia, where he soundly defeated Browne at Lobositz (now Lovosice, Czech Republic) on October 1. Returning to Saxony, Frederick received the capitulation of the Saxons at Pirna (October 16), whereupon he took nearly all of them into his own service. Frederick Augustus and Brühl retired to the former’s kingdom of Poland.
Russia might have dispatched forces to assist Austria at once, but the most-direct route to the conflict lay across Poland, a country that was within the French sphere of influence and largely opposed to Russian designs. For the perfect achievement of an anti-Prussian coalition, it was most desirable, as Kaunitz saw, for Russia and France to come to terms. The Russians, however, saw the new development as an occasion for extracting concessions from France with regard not only to Poland but also to Sweden and Turkey. The French foreign ministry was ready to admit swift passage of Russian troops across Polish territory and thus relieve France of the obligation to help Austria. However, that came into conflict with le Secret du roi, a primary purpose of which was to exclude the Russians from Poland at any cost. In Great Britain the accession of William Pitt the Elder to office as virtual prime minister in November 1756 would have a decisive effect on the development of the war.
1757
After weeks of negotiation at cross-purposes, Mackenzie, having returned to St. Petersburg as France’s official agent, obtained Russia’s accession to the First Treaty of Versailles by secretly pledging that France would assist Russia in the event of an attack by Turkey (December 31, 1756 [January 11, 1757, New Style]). That contradiction of the long-standing Franco-Turkish entente was immediately disavowed by the French government. A personal letter from Louis XV to Elizabeth, the first of an important series, finally secured Russia’s accession to the treaty without the objectionable appendix (April 19). An Austro-Russian offensive alliance against Prussia was concluded on February 2, 1757, with each party undertaking to put 80,000 men into the field and forswearing any separate peace, while secret articles provided for a partition of Prussia.
On May 1, 1757, Austria and France signed the Second Treaty of Versailles, an offensive alliance against Prussia that additionally provided for significant territorial adjustments. Austria was to recover Silesia but would cede the Netherlands to Louis XV and his Spanish Bourbon cousin, Philip, duke of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla. Philip’s Italian possessions would then revert to Austria. Militarily, France was to maintain 105,000 men in Germany, in addition to the contingent to be supplied to Austria (which was raised from 24,000 to 30,000), and would grant an annual subsidy of 12 million livres to Austria. Shortly after the treaty was concluded, Bernis was named French foreign minister.
By a large majority of votes in the Council of Princes of the Reich, Austria secured the declaration of a “war of the Empire” against Prussia. Though Hesse-Kassel, Brunswick, and, naturally, Hanover opposed it, some Protestant states supported Austria, despite Frederick’s attempt to pose as the champion of Protestantism against an Austro-French Roman Catholic coalition. In April 1757 the Prussians again advanced into Bohemia. On May 6 the 66,000 Austrians under Browne and Charles, prince of Lorraine and Bar, were routed by Frederick’s force of 64,000 at the Battle of Prague. An Austrian force under Leopold Joseph, Graf von Daun, arrived too late to affect the outcome of the battle, and the Austrians lost more than 14,000 men. Some 16,000 escaped to join Daun while the rest took refuge in Prague itself, which the Prussians, who had taken comparable losses, proceeded to besiege. A month later Daun, with more than 50,000 men, moved to relieve Prague, and Frederick met him with a force of 34,000. On June 18 the two groups met at the Battle of Kolín, and Daun won a great victory, inflicting 13,000 Prussian casualties while suffering just 8,000 of his own. Raising the siege of Prague, the Prussians evacuated Bohemia.
Prussia, meanwhile, was exposed to attack from several directions. The French began their spring campaign by sending Louis-Charles-César le Tellier, comte d’Estrées, with 100,000 men against the so-called Army of Observation, a force of Hanoverians and their allies under the command of William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, a younger son of George II. Defeated at Hastenbeck on July 26, 1757, Cumberland withdrew to Stade, near the Elbe estuary, abandoning the defense of the electorate and Brunswick. French command then passed to Louis-François-Armand du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, and on September 8 he forced Cumberland to sign the Convention of Klosterzeven, which stipulated the disbanding of the Army of Observation and the evacuation of Hanover. Richelieu then advanced on Prussia’s western frontier while another French army, of 24,000, under Charles de Rohan, prince de Soubise, was crossing Franconia to join Austria’s German allies under Joseph Frederick William of Saxe-Hildburghausen. Furthermore, Sweden, having signed an alliance with France and Austria on March 21, invaded Prussian Pomerania in September with the intention of annexing it.
A Russian army of 90,000 men, which had begun to cross Polish territory in May, at last entered East Prussia in August 1757. On August 30 Russian commander Stepan Apraksin inflicted a crushing defeat on the Prussians under Hans von Lehwaldt at Gross-Jägerndorf, west of Gumbinnen (now Gusev, Russia). In a puzzling move, Apraksin then began a retreat, pleading difficulties of supply. It seems that his conduct was caused, partly at least, by a consideration that was long to bedevil Russian affairs—the fact that the empress Elizabeth, who hated Prussia, was in notoriously uncertain health, while her heir, the future emperor Peter III, adored Frederick and opposed the anti-Prussian war. Any Russian general or statesman who did too much harm to Prussia was therefore risking the displeasure of his future master.
Frederick, with Saxony as his main base, decided first to confront the danger from the west, leaving Frederick Francis of Brunswick-Bevern to face the Austrians in Silesia. To prevent Richelieu from joining forces with Soubise and Saxe-Hildburghausen, Frederick marched first toward Halberstadt, but Austrian successes in Silesia, where Brunswick-Bevern was defeated at Moys (near Görlitz) on September 7, made him turn eastward again. Meanwhile, Frederick’s nephew Charles William Ferdinand of Brunswick remained to observe Saxe-Hildburghausen, and a daring Austrian raid on Berlin caused further diversion of Frederick’s forces. Finally, hearing that Soubise and Saxe-Hildburghausen were in Thuringia, Frederick moved to engage them. The Battle of Rossbach followed on November 5, 1757. The combined strength of the French and the Army of the Reich was at least 41,000 against just 21,000 Prussians, but the aggressive Saxe-Hildburghausen and the more-cautious Soubise were at odds. When at last the battle was joined, the greatly superior mobility of the Prussians, with the brilliant cavalry leadership of Friedrich Wilhelm, Freiherr (baron) von Seydlitz won the day. In less than two hours’ fighting, the Prussians inflicted 7,000 casualties on the allies while losing only 550 men. Encouraged by the news of Rossbach, the British government repudiated Cumberland’s Convention of Klosterzeven. The British decided to reinforce the Hanoverians and to transfer the command in western Germany to Frederick’s brother-in-law, Field Marshal Ferdinand of Brunswick. In September a British naval expedition against the French base of Rochefort had been a failure.
In Silesia the Austrians took Schweidnitz (now Świdnica, Poland) on November 11 and Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) on November 22. Frederick then force-marched his army from Thuringia to support Brunswick-Bevern, and at the Battle of Leuthen (December 5, 1757), he won the greatest of his victories. With 43,000 men, he attacked the 72,000 under Charles of Lorraine and utterly routed them with an unexpected cavalry charge followed by an artillery bombardment. Frederick suffered 6,000 casualties, but Charles lost 22,000 men, including 12,000 who were taken prisoner. Shortly thereafter the Prussians reclaimed Breslau. In the course of the winter, Lehwaldt drove the Swedes back into their own part of Pomerania, where they were able to hold the Prussians outside Stralsund. Frederick’s masterful handling of well-disciplined troops, combined with Apraksin’s retreat, saved Prussia from a situation which, after Kolín, had appeared desperate.
1758
William Fermor, a Scottish emigre in Russian service, had taken Apraksin’s place in autumn 1757, and on January 22, 1758, he captured the East Prussian capital of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). With the onset of spring, however, thawing snows made the northern roads impassable, and his force was temporarily immobilized. In Russia itself, the anti-French Bestuzhev was arrested, and power came into the hands of his rival Vorontsov.
Ferdinand of Brunswick, with his Anglo-Hanoverians, launched a successful offensive against the French in Westphalia, and on March 27 he crossed the Rhine River at Emmerich, near the Dutch frontier. On June 23, with 40,000 men, he defeated 70,000 men under Louis de Bourbon, comte de Clermont, at Krefeld. The effect of that victory, which enabled him to secure all of northwestern Germany, was scarcely offset by subsequent French successes farther to the south, in Hesse and Thuringia. Apart from reinforcing Hanover, on April 11 the British signed a new treaty with Prussia, promising an annual subsidy of 4,000,000 talers (£670,000), and both parties undertook not to make a separate peace with any of the other belligerents.
Frederick began the year’s campaign with an offensive in Silesia, where Schweidnitz fell on April 16. He then advanced into Moravia to lay siege to Olmütz (now Olomouc, Czech Republic). In July, however, the Austrians forced Frederick to abandon the siege by threatening his supply bases. In the north, meanwhile, a new Swedish attack on Prussian Pomerania was being fended off by Lehwaldt, but the Russians were on the march again, going southwestward from East Prussia toward the Oder River and Brandenburg.
To evade the Austrians, Frederick had to march first northwestward into Bohemia, then northward across Silesia. Fermor’s 52,000 Russians, having reached the Oder, began a siege of Küstrin (now Kostrzyn nad Odra, Poland) on August 15, but Frederick was at Frankfurt an der Oder by August 20. He then moved around Fermor’s east flank and, with a total of 36,000 men, attacked the Russians at Zorndorf (now Sarbinowo, Poland) on August 25. In the bloodiest battle of the war, the Russians lost 42,000, with 21,000 killed, and the Prussians lost 13,500. Leaving Christoph von Dohna to pursue the defeated Russians, Frederick hastened back to Saxony to save his brother Prince Henry from attack by superior Austrian forces under Daun. Daun fell back until he found a strong position at Kittlitz, where he decided to stand with his 90,000 men. Frederick, with 37,000, advanced as far as Hochkirch, not believing that Daun would venture an offensive. Daun’s attack, in the early morning of October 14, took the Prussians by surprise, but Hochkirch would prove to be an expensive victory for Daun. He lost 7,500 men (the Prussians lost 9,500), and he was unable to interfere with Frederick’s retreat into Silesia. Daun advanced on Dresden again, but the news of Frederick’s approach through Lusatia caused him to withdraw to Pirna in November.
Hochkirch put new spirit into the French, who after Krefeld and Zorndorf had been inclined to despair of their European war. Étienne-François de Choiseul, duc de Choiseul, became foreign minister in December in the place of the exhausted Bernis, whose overtures for a separate peace had been scorned by the British government.
1759
The Third Treaty of Versailles, already drafted by the end of December 1758, was signed in March 1759 and ratified in May. Under its terms French obligations of direct help to Austria in men and money were considerably reduced, and the 1757 plan concerning the Netherlands and Parma was discarded. The French, however, were still to maintain 100,000 men in Germany. On April 13 Ferdinand of Brunswick, who had advanced against the French in southwestern Germany, was defeated by Victor-François, 2e duc de Broglie, at Bergen, near Frankfurt am Main. Broglie took Minden, on the Weser River, on July 9, once again opening a passage into Hanover. When Marshal Louis Georges Érasme, marquis de Contades, joined Broglie, the French could field 60,000 men against Ferdinand’s 43,000 Anglo-Hanoverians. On August 1, however, at the Battle of Minden, Ferdinand contrived to lure Contades into an engagement which—thanks partly to accident and partly to extraordinarily stubborn fighting by British regiments—resulted in the complete rout of the French.
Choiseul had relieved France of its heavier commitments to Austria in order to prosecute the war against Great Britain with greater vigour. He planned an ambitious cross-Channel invasion, with landings around London and in Scotland. To transport and escort the expeditions, the Mediterranean fleet from Toulon was summoned to join the Atlantic fleet at Brest. On its way northward the former fleet was attacked and scattered by Boscawen in the Battle of Lagos (August 19) off the Portuguese coast. Meanwhile, Edward Hawke was maintaining a blockade of Brest. On November 9 Hawke withdrew to English waters, and the Brest fleet took to sea. Hawke then reappeared, and in the Battle of Quiberon Bay (November 20–21) the French suffered a decisive defeat. Not only was the planned invasion scrapped, but British naval superiority was established for the remainder of the war.
Minden, Lagos, and Quiberon Bay, together with outstanding successes in North America—the capture of Fort Niagara on July 24 and, of far more significance, that of Quebec on September 13—made 1759 the annus mirabilis for the British. From its strong position, the government began negotiations for peace with France. Britain’s terms were too stiff to be accepted by the French, and its proposals were made in association with its Prussian ally, which, at the end of the year, was in no position to expect favourable treatment from its enemies. Furthermore, Austria and Russia strongly objected to France’s treating separately with the British.
In May 1759 the Russian command had been transferred from Fermor to Pyotr Saltykov. Advancing across Poland through Poznań and into Brandenburg with 70,000 men, Saltykov defeated 26,000 Prussians under Carl Heinrich von Wedel at Züllichau (now Sulechów, Poland), east of Crossen an der Oder (now Krosno Odrzańskie, Poland), on July 23. Saltykov then moved down the Oder toward Frankfurt while Daun sent 35,000 Austrians under Gideon Ernest, Freiherr von Laudon, northward from Saxony to join forces with him. Frederick, who had been facing Daun, promptly moved to block the Austro-Russian junction, but he failed to do so. Having joined forces with Wedel and with another Prussian army, under Friedrich August von Finck, Frederick, now commanding some 50,000 men, boldly assailed the Austro-Russian position at Kunersdorf (now Kunowice, Poland), east of Frankfurt, on August 12. The result was an appalling disaster for Frederick, who in six hours lost more than 18,000 men. Saltykov made no immediate use of his victory, but Daun, advancing against the diminished Prussian forces in Saxony, took Dresden on September 14.
Attempts at further concerted action by Daun and Saltykov were frustrated by Frederick’s skillful movements after Kunersdorf. When lack of supplies forced Saltykov to retire from the scene, Frederick turned on Daun again. Finck was sent with more than 12,000 men to attack Daun’s rear, but he was surprised by 42,000 of Daun’s men at Maxen, south of Dresden, and had to surrender (November 21). The year had been a bad one for Frederick, and the necessity of reinforcing him after Kunersdorf had precluded the full exploitation of Ferdinand’s victory at Minden.
