The War of the Austrian Succession
THAT same year, 1742, French favourite Charles VII was elected Holy Roman Emperor. Maria Theresa promptly drove him from Bavaria; and Carteret, taking advantage of Walpole’s fall, encouraged George II to bring Hanoverian troops south to help her. But Carteret’s ploy almost got his King captured in a nail-bitingly narrow victory over the French at Dettingen on June 27th, 1743,* and nettled Louis XV into joining Spain’s war on Britain the following year.
The momentum now shifted dangerously. In Scotland, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s French-backed Jacobite Rising of 1745 drew off British troops. In India, French forces captured Madras in 1746. However, back-to-back victories for the Royal Navy near Cape Finisterre in 1747 ended French hopes of annexing Britain or her American colonies, and Madras was traded for Louisbourg in Nova Scotia, captured by Britain in 1745.* Maria Theresa grudgingly ceded Silesia to Prussia, but Louis’s audacious bid for the Austrian Netherlands fizzled out, and Walpole’s successor Henry Pelham helped negotiate peace at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.*
Now Karlstein am Main. This was the last occasion when a reigning British monarch commanded his troops on the battlefield. The victory, so nearly a disaster, was celebrated with relief in London on November 27th, 1743, with a Royal command performance of the Te Deum to music by George Frideric Handel, in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace.
Nova Scotia was a British colony founded on land ceded by France to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which ended The War of the Spanish Succession. The French had an enclave at Cape Breton Island (Île-Royale), including the town of Louisbourg, which was besieged and captured by the British in 1745, and restored to the French in exchange for Madras. The Battle of Louisbourg in 1758 saw Britain’s control over Nova Scotia firmly re-established. See The Seven Years’ War.
Henry Pelham (1696-1754), Prime Minister from 1743 to 1754. Not to be confused with his elder brother Thomas Pelham-Holles (1693-1768), 4th Duke of Newcastle, Prime Minister from 1754 to 1756 and (in coalition with William Pitt the Elder) from 1757 to 1762.