At the same moment, these two remarkable Americans, Toussaint and Jefferson, were reading the same books – Voltaire, Diderot, Raynal – and yet dreaming of different versions of freedom.
Maria Theresa did not know much about America but a remote American massacre led by a young colonialist now gave her the opportunity to destroy Frederick the Great.
MIMI AND ISABELLA: YOUR ARCHANGELIC LITTLE BUM
On 28 May 1754, in the vastness of Ohio County, a young British officer led his force of 300 Americans and Mingo Native Americans in an ambush of French and Iroquois troops under Sieur de Jumonville. French and British officers were competing to colonize the American interior.
The officer, George Washington, aged twenty-two, six foot tall and strapping, was, like Jefferson, the son of a wealthy planter descended from the first settlers who owned thousands of acres and many slaves. Washington’s father died young, his mother was frostily overbearing and he grew up reticent, solid and cautious. But like Cromwell he was much more canny and ambitious than he ever let on.
Thanks to his friendship with the Fairfax family, descendants of Cromwell’s commander in the civil war, who controlled five million American acres, Washington at sixteen had started surveying the Shenandoah Valley. By the time he was twenty, he owned 2,000 acres. During these early years, he fell in love with Sally Fairfax, the dazzling wife of his best friend and patron, the singular passion of a phlegmatic life that he later referred to as ‘a thousand tender passages’. After this romantic crisis, he married a rich, plain widow, Martha Custis, who brought with her land and three hundred more slaves, making him one of the richest men in the colonies. Jefferson noted that Washington ‘always ruled severely’. Indeed he was ‘first brought up to govern slaves, then an army then a nation’. Washington constantly watched for his slaves’ laziness, complaining that ‘there’s not to be found so idle a set of rascals’. When his slaves ran away – 7 per cent of them did – he was tireless in recapturing them. He sent badly behaved slaves to early deaths in Caribbean plantations.
Tracking the enemy in Ohio County, Washington earned the nickname Conotocaurius – village destroyer – from his Mingo auxiliaries. When his force caught up with the French and Iroquois, they ambushed and slaughtered them: many were scalped. While Washington was interrogating Jumonville, one of his Mingo allies split the captive’s head with a tomahawk.*
When the news reached London, the flappable prime minister, Thomas Pelham, duke of Newcastle, one of the brothers who had continued Walpole’s system, studied the map, struggling to find these obscure places. ‘Annapolis must be defended to be sure,’ he huffed. ‘Where is Annapolis?’ Newcastle had run British foreign policy for thirty years, but it was the first time a British statesman had needed to master America. Now even he realized that a colonial war against France was inevitable: the French were challenging British interests in America, India and west Africa. Newcastle had always backed Maria Theresa against Prussia – his ‘Old System’ – but in a dizzying change of dance partners he ended up backing Frederick the Great against Maria Theresa, who in turn found some surprising allies who were threatened by Prussia. Louis XV and his mistress Pompadour loathed Frederick, as did Peter the Great’s steely blonde daughter, Empress Elizaveta of Russia: Frederick did not help his cause by calling Pompadour and Elizaveta ‘the whores’.* Maria Theresa dramatically switched alliances, allying herself to her traditional enemy, France, and they were joined by Russia.
Funded by British subsidies but now facing a lethal coalition, Frederick launched a pre-emptive strike into Bohemia and besieged Prague, unleashing the first world war. At Kolín on 18 June 1757 Maria Theresa’s armies smashed Frederick’s: as his troops wavered, he cried, ‘Rascals, you want to live for ever?’ Forty per cent of them were killed and the king barely escaped with his life. ‘Phaeton has finally crashed to the ground,’ sneered his jealous brother Prince Heinrich. ‘We don’t know what will become of us.’ But Frederick, aided by Austrian inertia and Russian unreliability, darted at the French, defeating them at Rossbach, then routed the Austrians at Leuthen, his greatest victories.
