The War of Austrian Succession 1740-1748

M.S. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582059504
• eBook ISBN: 9781317899204
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Set in motion by the disputed succession of Maria Theresa and her husband to the lands and dignities of Emperor Charles VI, this series of major conflicts (1740-48) involved far more than just the fate of the Habsurgs: soon, Austria, Prussia, France, Britain, Spain, Bavaria, Saxony and the Netherlands were embroiled in their different but interlocking power struggles, with profound long-term significance for Europe and beyond. The war marks the rise of Prussia to great-power status, and the opening of the struggle between France and Britain for maritime supremacy and colonial empire in North America, the Caribbean and India. This book examines the war and its consequences in their widest context.

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.

French efforts to check and weaken Habsburg power centred on a line of policy which now had close on two centuries of tradition behind it – that of supporting and strengthening a number of the German states and using them to reduce the still great Habsburg influence in the Holy Roman Empire. Of these states much the most important from this standpoint was the electorate of Bavaria. Its geographical position between the Austrian provinces proper, Bohemia and the Tyrol, meant that it drove a great salient into Habsburg territory and made Bavaria, in spite of its limited economic and military strength, a dangerous weapon in the hands of any enemy of Habsburg power. If, on the other hand, the Habsburgs could acquire the electorate, this would greatly strengthen their own strategic position by rounding out their territories, making their frontiers shorter and more defensible and increasing their influence and prestige in Germany. The dream of adding Bavaria to their dominions was by no means new in the 1730s. Later in the century it was more than once to play a significant role in international relations, most obviously when in 1778–9 it stimulated a short-lived Austro-Prussian war.

The Bavarian Elector Max Emmanuel had thrown his weight on the French side at the outbreak of the war of the Spanish Succession; and a series of agreements made by him and his successor, Charles Albert, notably in 1714 and 1727, promised French support in asserting Bavarian claims to much of the Habsburg territories and the imperial title if the Emperor Charles VI died, as now seemed very likely, without a male heir. These treaties struck notes which were to be heard throughout much of the fighting and the tangled diplomacy of 1741–5 – a heavy French investment in men and money in Bavaria as an anti-Habsburg stalking-horse and a corresponding dependence of its rulers on France and particularly on French subsidies. Yet another agreement of 1733 consolidated this alliance: in Paris it seemed that the electorate might well become the focus of a French-backed anti-Habsburg coalition of German states. The clerical electorates of Cologne, Mainz and Trier might form part of this. More important, Saxony, whose ruler also had dynastic claims against the Habsburg inheritance which he might put forward if the emperor died without a male heir, could well join such an alliance. In July 1732 a Bavarian-Saxon treaty of friendship supported by France was signed, while the French government supplemented its subsidy agreement with Bavaria by making another with Saxony. The French Foreign Minister, Chauvelin, discussed with Charles Albert the possibility of joint Saxon-Bavarian resistance to any effort by Charles VI, still without a son, to secure before his death the election of a successor of his own choice, and promised if necessary to provide 50,000 men to support such resistance. The great objective which the Marshal de Belleisle pursued so energetically and with such apparent success in 1741,¹ that of building up a union of German states which, with French backing, would reduce or even destroy Habsburg power and make French influence dominant in western Germany, had thus clearly taken shape much earlier. Belleisle's apparently brilliant though only momentary achievement was possible partly because he was pursuing objectives already well-established.

THE PRAGMATIC SANCTION

Charles VI and his ministers were very conscious of the dangers which loomed if he died without a son to inherit his territories; the safeguarding of the succession very soon became the most lasting preoccupation of his reign. His elder brother, the Emperor Joseph I, had left two daughters; and their rights to the Habsburg inheritance had been put aside only by a family arrangement of 1703, the Pactum Mutuae Successionis. If Charles died childless their claim to succeed him would be irresistible. If he left only daughters it would be very strong. In fact a daughter, the Archduchess Maria Theresa, was born in 1717, and another in the following year. For the rest of his life, as it became clear that no son was to be hoped for (one born in 1716 had lived for only a few weeks), Charles's most important objective was to ensure by every possible means that his dominions, so heterogeneous, dispersed and vulnerable, should pass undivided to Maria Theresa when he died. As a woman she could not inherit the imperial title which gave the Habsburgs, in the eyes of many contemporaries, a formal status superior to that of any other ruling dynasty (though it might well be possible to secure the dignity for her eventual husband). But all the Habsburg territories must be hers. Already in April 1713 Charles had issued a formal declaration providing that at his death all his hereditary lands should pass to his male heirs, and in default of these to his daughters and their issue. Only should both these lines of succession fail were collateral branches of the family to have any right to inherit. If this document, the Pragmatic Sanction, were accepted and effectively applied by the different Habsburg territories and the powers of Europe, Maria Theresa would receive the entire Habsburg inheritance.

In 1720 the emperor asked the diets of the various Habsburg provinces for formal confirmation of the Pragmatic Sanction; and this was forthcoming with little difficulty. In particular, the Hungarian diet in 1722–3 agreed to accept Charles's arrangements and the female succession. This was important, since in the kingdom of Hungary the diet was more powerful and had more real independence than similar bodies anywhere else in the Habsburg territories, and since if the Habsburg line were to fail the Hungarians would recover the right to elect their own king. It remained to persuade as many as possible of the states of Europe to recognise and guarantee the right of succession of the young archduchess. In this, over a period of years, Charles VI had considerable apparent success. As part of the complex and often futile diplomacy of the 1720s and 1730s Spain recognised the Pragmatic Sanction in 1725, Russia in 1726, Prussia in 1728, Great Britain in 1731, the imperial diet in 1732, and France in 1735. The next few years were to show how little many of these paper promises were worth. Indeed, most well-informed contemporaries saw clearly in the 1730s that there were threats to the integrity of the Habsburg territories, perhaps even to the continuance of Austria as a great power, which no amount of diplomatic skill could conjure away.

The claims of the daughters of Joseph I were always a potential source of danger. The Pactum Mutuae Successionis had declared itself to be ‘irreversible and valid for all time’; but it was possible to argue in divine right terms (as their mother, the Dowager Empress Wilhelmine Amalia seems to have done) that, since their claim to inherit was given by God, no paper renunciation could nullify it.² The elder, Maria Josepha, married in 1720 the elector of Saxony; and her younger sister, Maria Amalia, became two years later the wife of the electoral prince of Bavaria. Both husbands formally agreed that the Pragmatic Sanction, and therefore the claims of Maria Theresa, overrode those of their wives. Yet when in 1732 the imperial diet recognised the Pragmatic Sanction, both Saxony and Bavaria refused to accept this decision; and behind both loomed the power of France. The elector of Bavaria, the pre-eminent French protégé, seemed particularly threatening. ‘Europe will never be quiet’, wrote the British ambassador to the Dutch Republic in 1734, ‘until that Prince is satisfied, and if he can be satisfied it will cut up by the roots all the vast projects of France, upon the death of the Emperor.’³

The position of France by the middle and later 1730s had indeed become very equivocal. Its guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction in 1735 could perhaps be reconciled with the promises made to Bavaria in 1727 and 1733; for that guarantee specifically excluded any rights of third parties to the Habsburg inheritance. But a new agreement with Bavaria in May 1738, which confirmed and extended that of 1727, was hard to see as anything but a betrayal of the undertaking given to Charles VI three years earlier. The most effective obstacle to active French intervention as soon as the emperor should die was no paper promise, however solemn, but the attitude and character of the chief French minister, Cardinal Fleury. In power since 1726 and now in his late eighties, he was cautious by nature, and this tendency was strengthened by age. It seemed likely that his death would be followed by a more active and interventionist French policy in Germany. ‘The guaranty of peace to the Pragmatick Sanction’, wrote the same British diplomat in October 1735, ‘is not worth a button after the Cardinal's death.’⁴ Events were to show that it was not even necessary for Fleury to die for the ineffectiveness of the efforts of Charles VI and his ministers to be all too clearly displayed.

There was another tangled succession dispute which also gave France opportunities to fish in troubled German waters. This was the question of the Rhenish duchies of Jülich and Berg. Frederick William I of Prussia asserted, against a rival Wittelsbach claimant, that these rightfully reverted to his own Hohenzollern family on the death of their present ruler, the Elector Palatine; and from the 1720s onwards the vindication of this claim became his central objective.⁵ Throughout the 1730s, however, it became increasingly clear that Habsburg influence would be used to oppose Prussian aggrandisement of this kind in west Germany. The paranoiac Frederick William developed as a result a deep and partly justified sense of betrayal. Here was another source of anti-Habsburg feeling based on jealously nurtured dynastic claims which France might exploit to reduce the power of its great rival. Its attitude here, however, was even less consistent than where the ambitions of Bavaria were concerned. In January 1739, a secret Austro-French agreement provided for the occupation of both duchies by the prince of Pfalz-Sulzbach, the Wittelsbach claimant, as soon as the old Elector Palatine should die (he did not in fact do so until 1742). But only a few months later secret Franco-Prussian negotiations in The Hague produced a French promise that Prussia should have part of Berg. In this fluid and unsatisfactory situation the question remained during the last days of Frederick William's life. When only a few days before his death in May 1740 he drew up for his son, the future Frederick II, a survey of Prussia's international situation, he urged him to enter into no alliance with France unless he were guaranteed the whole of Berg. In the event the Jülich-Berg issue was very soon to be pushed completely into the background by the spectacular emergence of much greater territorial disputes in eastern Germany and central Europe. But in the 1730s it was one of the more obvious elements of potential conflict in international relations and another indication of the way in which German dynasticism might open the door to French power and influence. ‘France hath taken care’, wrote an English pamphleteer in 1739, ‘to gain over several Princes to the Interest of the House of Sultzbach; by which we see that the two Dutchies in dispute are of no small Importance; and ‘tis great chance if, at the Decease of the Elector Palatine, a War will not be inevitable.’⁶

Moreover, if France should attempt actively to weaken the Habsburgs it was likely to find a ready ally in Spain, now also under Bourbon rule. In 1713, at the end of the war of Succession, the Spanish empire in Europe had been destroyed. The Spanish Netherlands, the duchy of Milan, Sardinia and the kingdom of Naples then went to Charles VI, making the territories ruled by the Austrian Habsburgs much more heterogeneous than ever before, while Sicily was taken by the duke of Savoy. (In 1719 he was forced to exchange it with Charles VI for the less valuable Sardinia.) These catastrophic losses marked the end of Spain's position as the centre of a great multinational European empire. They therefore relieved Spain of military and other burdens which it could not bear and helped it to concentrate on essential administrative reforms and economic growth. In this way they benefited Spain. Yet the losses were deeply resented. The Spanish government in 1713 refused to sign any formal peace with the emperor, while for his part Charles VI stubbornly adhered for a number of years to his claim to be the country's rightful ruler. Moreover, the desire in Madrid to recover lost territories and prestige was sharpened by the ambitions in Italy of Elizabeth Farnese, the second wife of the king, Philip V. Obstinate, domineering, narrow-minded and often stupid, she quickly gained over her husband an ascendancy which lasted until his death in 1746 and which gave her for a generation or more real influence in the affairs of Europe. By his first wife Philip had a son who was likely to survive and succeed him in Spain. To establish her own sons, the Infants Don Carlos and Don Phil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Modern Wars in Perspective
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Europe in 1740: the Pragmatic Sanction and the Anglo-Spanish War
• 2 Armies and navies in transition
• 3 War and society
• 4 The Prussian invasion of Silesia and the crisis of Habsburg power, 1740–1
• 5 From Klein-Schnellendorff to Breslau, 1741–2
• 6 From Breslau to Dresden: the end of the war in Germany, 1742–5
• 7 Italy and the Netherlands, 1745–8
• 8 The naval and colonial struggle
• 9 The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle
• 10 The results of the war
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Maps
• Index