IX.
George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, was officially endowed as The Prince Regent by an Act of Parliament on July 20th, 1787 immediately following the Spanish and French declarations of hostilities. Under the terms of his appointment, George was not permitted to sell the King's property, grant Peerages, or attempt any move to expand his powers without the consent of Westminster. While Lord North had hoped to secure the right to dismiss the Prime Minister, the rapid materialisation of the war forced a speedy resolution that had left little time for lengthy bargaining. The matter was far from finally settled and all sides agitated for further appeals, but both Whigs and Tories knew that the task awaiting them was worthy of Heracles and presented little room for petty squabbling. The Prince took the reigns of an exuberantly optimistic British Empire which would now be tested in what looked to be the most devastating and widespread war in recent European history. The decade following the Act of Union had revitalised the Empire and now its collective peoples agitated for a sufficient opportunity to demonstrate the perceived superiority of their governing system, their nation, and their very way of life.
Political boundaries, on the eve of war in 1787.
North Americans relished the chance to move on Spain's holdings in Louisiana and continue their predestined advance westward, though also not unfavourable to the notion of decisively proving their fitness to skeptics in Britain. Governor-General Cornwallis eyed Pondicherry and, perhaps, the Philippines. The Admiralty formulated plans for the defense of Sicily, Gibraltar, and the other numerous island possessions that now bore the Union Flag around the globe, while also tentatively exploring the possibility of seizing Cuba. Among the colonies, the next stage of the war was viewed with uncompromising certainty. The new combatants and their outposts were seemingly little different from the undeveloped Portuguese backwaters that initially confronted the military and the path to victory appeared, to officers in New York and the Western territories, as little more than a matter of entrusting the Royal Navy to block all ocean lanes and thus open the way for an uncontested route through the Americas. Faced with the less optimistic strategic realities of the situation and tasked with prosecuting a war of unprecedented global scale, Pitt and the rest of the Privy Council immediately set about building the network of solid allies that had proved crucial to victory in the Seven Years War.
Entirely content with his previous dealings on the continent, the Prime Minister would come to discover that the base foundation of British diplomacy in Europe had been left unattended and allowed to rot away. The tentative coalition, once cemented by the imposing person of Prussian King Frederick II, lay in shambles under the stewardship of his recently crowned successor and nephew, Frederick William II. The new monarch was a notoriously extravagant wastrel, an ineffectual ruler whose incompetence was only superseded by his vanity, and decidedly ignorant of the underlying political machinations in contemporary Europe. When a German courier arrived at 10 Downing with a letter declaring his intention to “Make all haste in fortifying the Prussian lands and preventing the French attack into the East of Germany”, Westminster erupted in a fiery outpouring of both confusion and rage.
Frederick William II, the King of Prussia and Elector of Brandenburg. He inherited a stable and prosperous realm from
his uncle, popularly known as Frederick the Great, and would be thrust into an immediate war.
Prussia would indeed honour its obligation to enter the conflict, but nowhere did it confess any aspirations of greatly contributing to the war effort by striking at the heart of France or, perhaps even more importantly, rallying the already apprehensive Dutch and Hapsburg courts. Within weeks, it had become apparent that Emperor Josef II, after conferring with his sister and brother-in-law, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI of France, held little regard for an alliance without his long-time friend and cohort Frederick the Great at its center. With no political benefit to be gleaned from such an action, short of the questionable possibility of gains in the Austrian Netherlands, the Hapsburg ruler declined to declare war on either the French or Spanish crowns. Willem V and the Netherlands followed suit shortly after, citing a lack of available resources and domestic instability. Often thought of as perfidious competitors in East Asia by the common people of Britain, this betrayal placed them in even lower esteem. Having found no promise of easy spoils but, rather, the prospect of a long and bitter general war, those two erstwhile allies had now stepped aside and left a beleaguered Britain and a non-committal Prussia to face a juggernaut comprising two thirds of the Americas and the entirety of Western Europe past the Alps.
The British delegation in Paris, among whom Sir Benjamin Franklin numbered, were imprisoned upon the outbreak of hostilities.
The loss of their contacts and expertise would prove a devastating blow to continental diplomatic efforts.
The British government, now beginning to question the Royal Navy’s ability to blockade the entirety of the Atlantic seaboard while facing a combined triple force with strength roughly equal to its own, began a frantic search for any kind of outside assistance. There were numerous disgruntled courts throughout Europe, Asia, and North Africa who had grudges to settle with the Spanish and French alliance and with whom, it was thought, common cause might be maintained, though many of them also held no particular love for the British Empire. Diplomatic missions were undertaken to all manner of those states, from the Barbary pirates of the Mahgreb and the Islamic states of the Holy Land to the feuding principalities of Northern Germany and the Italian Peninsula. George Macartney, the Earl Macartney, was dispatched as the Crown’s ambassador to the great East Asian realms in an attempt to incite them against Portuguese and Spanish trade, while Lord Cornwallis set about ensuring the neutrality or even friendship of the Indian Maharajahs. The grand coalition envisioned by Pitt had been swept aside by the sands of time, but the downtrodden and ignored states of the world might be pried with the promise of future protection and trading agreements. Victory was far from assured when the first skirmishes began to break out across the borderlands but, as the Empire marshaled its forces for this, the most titanic of challenges, the people rode to war with a greater patriotic fervour than ever before. What had been hinted at in the Indian Crisis would become fully realised, as the military transitioned from the mercenary force of yore into an extension of the national consciousness. The Age of Nationalism had begun.