ABSTRACT
When Charles Middleton came ashore in 1763, his pockets stuffed with prize money, his country was on the verge of the greatest victory it had ever won over France. By winning the Seven Years War, a mercantilist’s dream come true, Britain enriched itself, increased its colonial holdings at the expense of its chief rivals, inflicted huge losses on French merchant and naval fleets, and restrained, by means of the alliance with Prussia, French military ambitions in Europe. The war left both Britain and France staggering under huge public debts, but the French monarchy, fiscally weaker to begin with, had been dealt a blow from which it eventually proved unable to recover. 1 Yet Britain’s triumph was short-lived. France, smarting under the multiple humiliations sustained in the Seven Years War, resolved on a policy of revanche against its chief maritime and colonial rival, of which the most tangible – and worrisome – expression, was a naval rebuilding program. 2 Partly in an effort to overcome its own war-borne fiscal difficulties, Britain resorted to a series of schemes to squeeze revenue out of the American colonists. These misfired, and resistance to British authority deepened into rebellion against British rule. Between March 1775, when Middleton returned to active duty, and August 1778, when he assumed the Controllership of the Navy, Britain’s prospects in America and security at home deteriorated dramatically. By the time Middleton assumed office ‘the odds facing Britain were so overwhelming’, as Paul Kennedy remarks, ‘that only the bleak years of 1940–41 compare with them’. 3
