an imprudent early marriage, Edward Wortley Montagu junior’s youth was spent in dissipation, travel, and minor criminality (being, for instance, a known associate of several highwaymen). His early years also included spells as a soldier (when he acquitted himself well enough, being mentioned in dispatches after the battle of Fontenoy on 12 May 1745), as a student of Oriental languages at the University of Leiden, as a bibliophile, and as a diplomat; his command of languages apparently proved useful during the peace negotiations at Aix-la-Chapelle which concluded
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the War of the Austrian Succession. From 1747 until 1761 Montagu led a racketty life in Paris and London, acquiring and discarding wives, mistresses, and illegitimate children. He also served as an MP for first Huntingdonshire and then Bossiney, a constituency in Cornwall controlled by his father. He supplemented his parental allowance by operating as a professional gambler, where he seems not to have been above, if not actual cheating, then certainly entrapment and intimidation.
On the death of his father in 1761 his hopes of inheriting the major part of the vast family estate were disappointed, and he contested the will, which had been drawn up to the advantage of his sister, Lady Bute. Very wealthy herself as a result of her marriage, she was prepared to settle. Furnished by the Butes with cash and an estate, and confirmed as MP for Bossiney (thereby acquiring a useful immunity from imprisonment for debt), Montagu shook “the dust of an ungrateful country” from his feet, and retired to the continent.2 For the remainder of his life he traveled in Italy and the Levant, pursuing both esoteric scholarly enthusiasms and, on occasion, the wives of other men. He affected Turkish costume and professed to be a Muslim. But in March 1776, a broken bone from an ortolan or beccafico on which Montagu was dining lacerated his throat. An abscess developed, leading to a general infection, and he died in Padua on 29 April 1776. In its mingling of luxury and mishap, touched with a dash of absurdity, the manner of Montagu’s death was entirely in keeping with the way he had lived his life.
However, in 1759, and in what seems to have been an attempt to secure the favor of his bookish, political father, Montagu had temporarily laid aside his feckless and dandyish ways. In that year he published Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks, a work of no little scholarship and some political engagement, which he seems to have begun during the summer of 1756, and which was received by the literary world with polite applause.3 It was revised and expanded for its second edition
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the following year, and this revised text was reprinted for an English readership in 1769 and again in 1778. Dark suspicions lingered that the book had in fact been written by Montagu’s former tutor, the Rev. John Forster.4 But setting those rumors to one side, why might Montagu have believed that a book which extracted from the histories of five republics of the ancient world political, military, and economic lessons for mid-eighteenth-century Englishmen would improve his standing in the eyes of his father? The answer to that question must be approached by way of a review of the worsening international situation from the late 1740s, and the early phases of the global conflict in which Britain would thereafter be embroiled with France.
The Political and Military Context
The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1747)—in which, as we saw, Montagu had played a minor diplomatic role—proved to be nothing more than an armed truce. In the early 1750s tensions between the French and English in India began once more to rise as the English East India Company resisted French attempts to establish control over the Carnatic and the Deccan. In the West Indies, England and France squabbled over the “neutral” islands. Most gravely, in America the ambitious French strategy to link their settlements in Canada with Louisiana by means of a series of forts along the Ohio and the Mississippi had led to skirmishes with the English colonists, who were themselves now seeking to break out from the eastern seaboard and acquire additional territory west of the Allegheny Mountains.
The British response to these French provocations was muffled and slow—the consequence of hesitation and a lack of consensus among a political class in transition. But eventually, in October 1754, British regiments under the command of General Braddock set sail for the colonies, and measures for raising troops in America were put in motion. The
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outcome was, to begin with, disastrous. In July 1755 Braddock led his troops into a French ambush on the Monongahela and suffered dreadful casualties, from which he himself was not excluded.5 Public sentiment in Britain was further depressed by the apparent fruitlessness of the naval blockade of Brest which from July to December had been entrusted to Hawke, and which had somehow failed to engage the French fleet under the command of de la Motte. The new year brought fresh reasons for alarm in the form of well-founded fears of a French invasion.6 The resulting public panic over the state of the nation’s defenses prompted Pitt and Townshend to propose a Militia Bill which cleared the Commons in May 1756 but was rejected by the Lords. To fill the gap, mercenary troops were imported from Hanover and Hesse (events to which Montagu would make several references in Reflections).7 The final provocation arrived that same month, with news that (as British ministers since February had feared would happen) French forces had landed in Minorca.
A formal declaration of war with France followed, and although this to some degree cleared the air, it did not herald any immediate improvement in British fortunes. In April a squadron of ten ships under the command of Admiral Byng had been sent to relieve Minorca. Byng was slow to reach the theater of operations, and once there failed to engage the enemy with resolution, instead returning to Gibraltar, leaving the Minorcan garrison to struggle on until it finally surrendered, after a gallant defense, on 28 June 1756. British public opinion was outraged, and a scapegoat was required. Byng was the sole and inevitable candidate. After a court-martial in February 1757 he was shot the following month “pour encourager les autres” as Voltaire memorably put it.8
However, now the tide of war was beginning to turn in Britain’s favor, although as is commonly the case the actual moment of reversal from ebb to flow escaped the attention of most onlookers. In the summer of 1756 the
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collapse of Newcastle’s continental diplomacy and his evident inadequacy as a war leader had led him to make overtures to William Pitt, then the most effective speaker in the Commons, and a man whose Patriot platform was proving popular in the country at large and devastating in the House. Eventually, after several months of maneuvering and false starts, by the summer of 1757 Pitt and Newcastle were working in harness, the latter as First Lord of the Treasury, but the former as the dominant figure in both the Cabinet and the Commons.9
The change in the direction of policy and the tone of administration was immediate. The Militia Bill was reintroduced, and finally passed the Lords in June 1757. The German mercenaries were sent home, and two new regiments were raised from the same Highland clans that, a mere twelve years before, had seemed to threaten the very existence of the Hanoverian regime.10 The American colonists were by turns flattered, encouraged, and cajoled into making greater efforts for their own defense, and for the security and extension of the empire. Frederick the Great, Britain’s ally on the continent, was generously supported with money and men; considerable French forces, which might otherwise have made a nuisance of themselves in America, were thus tied up in central Europe. In less than three years the strength of the British navy was increased by fifty-five thousand men and seventy ships, and with it the operational reach of British arms was transformed.
Pitt’s strategy, which his extraordinary energy and charismatic personality made feasible, was to exploit Britain’s financial advantage over France, and to deploy the manpower so raised to seize the initiative on every front of what he realized was a world war.11 France was to be
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destroyed as an imperial power, not only in America, but all over the globe. As Johnson observed, “Lord Chatham [as Pitt was to become in 1766] was a Dictator; he possessed the power of putting the State in motion.”12 The fruits of such a strategy inevitably took some time to appear, and the second half of 1757 seemed at first like a continuation of the previous trend of calamity, with the defeat of Frederick the Great at Kolin, the duke of Cumberland’s signing of the Convention of Kloster-Zeven