came to Canada, took and burnt Oswego, and took up a position at Ticonderoga.

Pitt set himself against the treaties and subsidies for the safety of Hanover made with Russia and the German princes, and was dismissed from the post of Paymaster in consequence. Frederick, afraid to join France, signed in January, 1756, a treaty with Great Britain, to prevent foreign troops passing through Germany. After much diplomatic marching and counter-marching, Maria Theresa succeeded with the Czarina of Russia in working up a union of European powers to crush Frederick and partition his territories. Austria, Russia, Sweden, France, Saxony, Poland, and some German States combined, France and Austria signing a treaty of neutrality in May, 1756.

It was a disastrous year for Great Britain. On the 19th of June occurred the episode of the Black Hole of Calcutta,* and in October Watson and Clive left for Bengal to reach the Hooghly at Christmas. Frederick for his part began war by invading and crushing Saxony and afterwards defeating the advancing Austrians.

In November, after a good deal of shuffling, Newcastle resigned, and the Duke of Devonshire formed a government with Pitt and his kinsman George Grenville and Lord Temple, Temple being First Lord of the Admiralty. Walpole gives us a spiteful portrait of Pitt in the course of these negotiations. Pitt, he says, "came to the discussions in all the studied apparatus of a theatric valetudinarian. The weather was unseasonably warm; yet he was dressed in an old coat and waistcoat of beaver laced with gold: over that a red surtout, the right arm lined with fur and appendent with many black ribands, to indicate his inability of drawing it over his right arm, which hung in a crêpe sling, but which in the warmth of speaking he drew out with unlucky activity and brandished as usual, etc."

The opinion of George II. of these statesmen, in view of their subsequent actions in the reign of his grandson, given in the Waldegrave Memoirs, is interesting. Pitt, he says, made him long speeches which might possibly be very fine, but were greatly beyond his comprehension, and that his letters were *See, for an account of this, Orme, Bk. VI., pp. 73-77.

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affected, formal and pedantic; that, as to Temple, he was so disagreeable a fellow that there was no bearing him; that when he attempted to argue he was pert and sometimes insolent; that when he meant to be civil he was exceedingly troublesome; and that in the business of his office he was totally ignorant.

Each in turn lectured the King. When later George Grenville assumed the position of chief lecturer to the young King George III., the King told him, when he asked the reason for his dismissal, that under his tutelage he, the King, had felt too much confined. (Grenville Papers.)

These estimates of character by their contemporaries are of value, as these kinsmen played a very prominent and disastrous part in the succeeding reign. George Grenville was responsible for the American Stamp Act, Pitt in his second administration permitted Charles Townshend to lay the customs duties on the colonies, which ended in the Boston riots; while Lord Temple put one difficulty after another in the way of conciliation of political parties and formation of a stable government. Pitt himself, the disappointed dictator, later played the part of the demagogue in encouraging violence and opposition to a friendly settlement in the American colonies.

Reinforcements were now sent to America and the West Indies. Pitt was popular, and was supported by the Prince of Wales (George III.). But one of his most valuable measures, a Militia Bill brought in by him, caused riots and was very widely opposed. The subsidies to Frederick and for Hanover were continued.

Except for India, the war was unsuccessful. In January, 1757, Montcalm took Fort William, on Lake George, while Lord Loudoun and Admiral Holburne sailed to attack Louisburg, but came back again. Watson and Pocock, with Clive, retook Calcutta. On June 23rd, 1757, Clive won the Battle of Plassey, which established our rule in India. His victory over an army which outnumbered the British by more than ten to one was rendered easier by one of the shifts frequent in Indian policy, and by one of the physical accidents which played so great a part throughout the war. Meer Jaffier, Surajah Dowla's general, stood to one side with half the Indian army; heavy storms wetting their ammunition rendered useless the enemy's heavy artillery; Clive's gunners had covered their supplies

with tarpaulins, and were able to use them with great effect on the masses of the enemy.

In March, 1757, George II. sent the Duke of Cumberland to command in Hanover. He refused to serve under Pitt. In consequence Pitt was dismissed, but after nearly three months of confusion Pitt and Newcastle formed a ministry, Pitt to carry on the war and Newcastle to manage the bribery. Fox was to be Paymaster of the Forces. From this time until he resigned in 1762 Pitt was supreme War Minister and war maker.

The disinclination to sacrifice our men and our money for the support of the war in Germany continued to increase. Hardwicke, writing to Newcastle in 1758, tells him that he believes that the country gentlemen would only vote supplies on the terms that our armies were not to operate for the benefit of Hanover and Frederick in Germany. But it was impossible either to give up altogether the support of Frederick, who was fighting the coalition desperately, winning great victories over the French and other Germans, or to abandon Hanover. In July the French defeated the Duke of Cumberland at Hastenbecke, and overran Hanover. The Duke concluded with them the Convention of Klosterseven, by which he was to send home the subsidized troops and disband his army. The British ministry repudiated the agreement, put the troops employed by Britain under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, and drove the French out of Hanover.

Pitt, in spite of his former violence against the German subsidies, agreed to an annual subsidy to Frederick of £700,000, and sent a naval force under Holmes to blockade the German rivers and help Prince Ferdinand. At the same time, on the suggestion, it would appear, of Frederick, he organized raids on the French coast by a combined military and naval force, with the view of relieving the pressure on the armies in Germany by keeping French armies in defence on the west coast and safeguarding the islands from invasion.

The three raids attempted may have had this effect, but from every other point of view they were failures. In September, 1757, an expedition was sent to attack La Rochelle. The sailors were quite equal to the work required, but the generals, trained in the dress parades of Flanders, were leisurely, uncertain, and quite unprepared for the dashing operations required

for such a raid. In June, 1758, a second raid on St. Malo, commanded by the Duke of Marlborough and Lord George Sackville, did little or nothing; in September a third raid on Cherbourg and St. Malo under an aged general Bligh, destroyed ships, stores and docks, but had no other success. It was notable for the excesses of the soldiers, who, under a feeble commander, got out of hand and committed outrages on the people. The losses were considerable on this raid; the want of information, the failure of the general to adapt his operations, and the confusion caused by want of discipline resulted on reembarkation in the destruction of the rearguard.

Luckily, while Pitt was spending on these raids, Anson at the head of the Admiralty was reorganizing the navy, which, like all other branches of the services, had fallen into confusion and decay. Writing of the expedition to St. Malo, he said: When I began to examine the fleet I never saw such awkwardness in going through the common manœuvres necessary to make an attack upon the enemy's fleet at all. Most of the captains declare they have never seen a line of battle at all, and none of them more than once." He had obtained that the French fleet at Brest should not be in any position to threaten our communications, while our fleets searched the seas on the watch for the enemy. Under Anson and such men as he a great school of naval leaders was growing up away from the control of the Parliament at Westminster, men who were to carry the British arms gloriously all over the world, winning Canada for us, driving the French out of the West Indies, holding the seas to enable men, money and stores to be sent to India, conquering in Africa, controlling the Mediterranean Sea, and destroying French commerce all the world over.

In February, 1758, Osborne and Saunders met a French fleet from Toulon, on which was the Marquis Duquesne, whom they captured with his 80-gun flagship and another ship. In April, 1758, Hawke went from Spithead with a small force of ships of the line, and found a number of French ships and a large convoy off the Isle of Rhé. He chased them into shallow water, where they stranded, being obliged to throw their guns and stores overboard. Although Hawke was not able to get at them to capture them, they were prevented from going to the assistance of Louisburg.

But on 28th of April, in the absence of the British fleet, Lally de Tollendal and his regiment, with 12 ships, arrived off the fort of St. Davids, south of Madras, and in June it surrendered.

v. The Seven Years' War in the West.-The operations of 1758 concentrated on the American colonies and the West Indies. The value of the colonial trade, even at this period, was growing to be very great. In 1759 (Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. 32, p. 533, quoted by Corbett, Seven Years' War, 355) it amounted to nearly 2 millions, the imports from North America being £648,683, and the exports to them £1,832,948. There was also a great trade with the West India Islands in tropical products which quite justified the troublesome and risky naval operations taken to protect them. The Admiralty order of January, 1757, required two convoys from the Islands to sail each year for Britain, one early in June and the other early in July. The first Leeward Island convoy assembled at Antigua in this year numbered 170 sail, and was valued at £2 million, almost all uninsured. Its course was determined by the trade winds, the Admiral of the Leeward Islands escorting it about as far as the Bahamas. The French islands had an advantage in the winds. Practically the whole of the French trade was carried on under the Dutch flag, which made seizures by the British very unpopular, and prevented any possibility of true intelligence of the enemy's movements.

The generals appointed for the commands in the operations in N. America in 1758 were Amherst, probably the greatest British organizer of victory throughout the war, Forbes, and Abercrombie, who was one of the worst failures, unable to adapt his Flanders training to American warfare.

It was proposed to attack Louisburg on Cape Breton Island, to take Fort Duquesne and, if possible, to take Quebec and Montreal. If the navy could prevent fresh troops, food and material being sent from France to Canada eventual success was certain, as the French were hopelessly outnumbered, and always short of supplies, the fighting force apart from a few thousand regulars being such men as could be drawn from the farms. Hawke watched before Rochefort in the Bay and Osborne cruised in the Mediterranean to prevent assistance being