England now threatened to withdraw her subsidies, and as the Prussian armies had dwindled to 6o.000 men the end seemed very near. But a turn of fortune was already at hand. On Jan. 5, 1762, the tsaritsa died, and her successor, Peter III., at once offered When the Seven Years' War broke out, with the Prussian in vasion of Saxony on Aug. 29, 1756, eight years had elapsed since the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748, which concluded the War of the Austrian Succession. During the years 1754 and 1755 the French performed a number of hostile acts against the British on land and sea in various parts of the world to which the British retaliated, especially in the Mediterranean and along the frontier between French Canada and British America. Thus there existed during those two years a state of affairs which can be best de scribed as an unofficial war of outposts between the British and French. Although no part of the Seven Years' War, it is con venient to review briefly the naval operations of those three years.
In June 1755 a British squadron under Boscawen was sent into the Straits of Belle Isle to intercept French ships carrying soldiers and stores. On June 8 Boscawen seized two French line-of-battle ships fitted as transports, the "Alcide" and the "Lys." Hawke was sent to sea with the Western Squadron and a general seizure of French merchant ships followed. The Government of Louis XV. did not reply by a declaration of war, but prepared to retaliate by a surprise invasion of the British Isles, which soon degenerated into a threat, which was, however, kept up as a feint to cover an expedition against Minorca.
A squadron of 12 sail of the line was prepared at Toulon under La Galissoniere. It escorted transports carrying 15,000 troops under the duc de Richelieu. The danger to Minorca, where the garrison had been allowed to fall below its due strength, was well known to the British ministers. On March 11 they appointed Ad miral John Byng to command a squadron which was to carry re inforcements. He had ten sail of the line, and reached Gibraltar on May 2. The French invasion of Minorca had been carried out on April 19. The governor of Gibraltar, Gen. Fowke, refused to part with any of his soldiers to reinforce Minorca, though under or ders to do so, and on May 8 Byng sailed, and was off Minorca on the i9th. Before the officers of the garrison, whom he carried, could be landed, the French fleet came in sight. Byng had been joined by three ships of the line at Gibraltar, and had therefore 13 ships to 12. On the morning of May 20 he gained the weather gauge, and then bore down on the enemy at an angle, the van of the English steering for the van of the French. The sixth ship in his line, the "Intrepid" (74), having lost her foretopmast, be came unmanageable and threw the vessels behind her out of or der. Thus the six in front were exposed to the fire of all the
French, who were with difficulty repulsed. Being now much dis turbed by the crippled state of the ships in his van, Byng made no effort either to land the soldiers he had on board or to renew the action; and after holding a council of war on May 24, which confirmed his own desire to retreat, he sailed for Gibraltar, and Minorca surrendered in June, which gave the French a great ad vantage in the Mediterranean.
In 1757 the naval war began to be pushed with considerable vigour. The elder Pitt became the effective head of the Govern ment, and was able to set about ruining the French power at sea. He sent out, during the last months of 1757 and the whole of 1758, a series of combined expeditions against the French coast which, though costly and for the most part unsuccessful, forced the French to divert large bodies of troops from the Rhine frontier. In the East Indies, the squadron under Vice-admiral Watson, with the assistance of the Company's troops under Clive, re captured Calcutta in Jan. 1757 and Chandernagore in March. On Watson's death, Rear-admiral George Pocock succeeded to the command, and fought an indecisive action with the French squadron under M. d'Ache on April 29, 58, off Cuddalore, and again on Aug. 3 off Negapatam, after which M. d'Ache retired to Mauritius. Meanwhile the French were so occupied on their eastern frontier and their Atlantic ports were so well watched, that they were unable to send sufficient reinforcements to their Colo nists in Canada. Consequently, Boscawen and Gen. Amherst were able to undertake a combined operation against Louisburg, which capitulated on July 26, 1758, thus giving England control of the whole of Cape Breton island and the mouth of the St. Lawrence.
On the West Coast of Africa, Commodore Henry Marsh cap tured Senegal in May 1758, and Commodore Augustus Keppel captured Goree in December. In 1759 the French made a last effort to retrieve their naval position. In European waters they again made plans for an invasion of the British Isles ; but the attempted concentration of the Toulon fleet under de la Clue at Brest was defeated by Boscawen in a running fight ending in Lagos bay in August. On Nov. 20 Hawke, in Quiberon bay, de feated the Brest fleet under Conflans, which had slipped out while Hawke had had to withdraw the blockading forces owing to bad weather. Hawke and Boscawen's watch on the French At lantic and Mediterranean ports had been so close that few ships of the line had been able to leave them during the year, and French colonial possessions had become completely isolated.