Meanwhile the war against the Bavarians and their allies the French had begun to be prosecuted with great vigour; the kings of Denmark and Sweden (the latter in his capacity of landgrave of Hesse Cassel) having been subsidised, and a treaty of alliance concluded with Frederick III. of Prussia, George II. joined his army on the Continent iu person iu the beginning of June 1743, and on the 26th of that month shared in the great victory gained over the French at Det tingen. On this occasion the English king behaved with distinguished courage. This Instance of success however was only followed by inactivity and reverses; one consequence of which was the expulsion from the ministry, in November 1744, of Lord Granville (formerly Lord Carteret), the great promoter of the war, and as such the member of the cabinet who had the greatest influence with the king. The ministry that was now formed was called the Broad-Bottom ministry : it contained a few Tories, but consisted principally of the Newcastle and Grenville Whigs, the only patties wholly excluded being the connections of lords Granville and Bath. Mr. Pelham, brother of the Duke of Newcastle, was first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer, and Mr. Pitt (afterwards so distinguished both under that name and as Earl of Chatham) being promised a place as soon as the king could be induced to admit him, gave his support in the meantime to the administration. This change of men however brought no change of measures. The king's German polities continued to receive the same support from the new ministry as they had from the old. Nor was the war carried on with better fortune. The defeat of the allies at Foatenoy, 30th of April 1745, was the great event of the next campaign.
In August of the same year another Jacobite rebellion, instigated by Franca and Spain, broke out in Scotland ; the towns of Dunkeld, Perth, Dundee, Edinburgh, and Carlisle rapidly fell into the hands of the insurgents; the king's troops were routed at Preston-pane and I•'alkirk; and the Pretender, Charles Edward, had already advanced as far as Derby in his bold march upon the metropolis of tho empire before any euccessful attempt was made to 'reeist him. The rising however which had wore so threatening an aspect was completely put clown by tha victory of Culloden, gained by the kIng's second son, the Duke of Cumberland, on the lath of April 1746. In the preceding February, in the very midst of the public alarm, the king had made a sudden attempt to reinstate lords Granville and Bath as the heads of the ministry ; but after being three days in office they saw that the project was hopeless, on which Mr. Pelham, who had resigned, was taken back, and continued at the head of affairs till his death in 1754.
The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the preliminary articles of which were signed on the 30th of April 1748, at last put an end to the war, the latter years of which were distinguished by roma brilliant naval successes on the part of Great Britain. The conditions of this peace on the whole excited great dissatisfaction in England, especially the restoration of Cape Bretou, which had been taken from the Freuch in 1745, and had been accounted the great acquisition of the war. On the other hand, Madras, which a French fleet had reduced in 1746, was recovered. The power of the mioietry however was not shaken by the vigorous and persevering assaults upon the treaty by the oppo olden in parliament; and Mr. Pelham and his friends also triumphed in a division that broke out in the cabinet after the death of the Prince of Wales (20th of March 1751), on the subject of tho Regency Bill, rendered necessary by that event, when the Pelhams, to whom Mr. Pitt attached himself, were opposed by the party of the dukes of Cumberland and Bedford, and their proteg6, Mr. Fox—the origin of a long and in its issues very important rivalry. But the death of Mr. Pelham (6th of March 1754) produced a succession of new con tentions, intrigues, and changes. At last, iu November 1755, Pitt and his friends were dismissed, and Fox, as secretary of state and manager of the Ilouse of Commons, became, under the Duke of Newcastle, who since his brother's death had held his offices and nominal station, the moving spirit of the ministry.
Meanwhile however war had again broken out with France iu the preceding June. In ono quarter of the world indeed, in India, the French and English, as allies of the conflicting native powers, can scarcely ho said to have ever laid down their arms. But the new quarrel of the two governments took its rise from a disagreement about the boundaries of their respective possessions in North America, which had been left unsettled by the late treaty. This war, in which all the principal European powers were eventually involved, is kuon u by the name of the Seven Years' War. Its commencement was extremely disastrous to the English—Minorca and Calcutta having both fallen to the French in the summer of 1756. The popular indig nation excited by these reverses overset the administration of the Duke of Newoastle. Deserted by Mr. Fox, his grace resigned in the beginning of November ; and by the end of December, Pitt, who had for some time past attached himself to the court of the young Prince of Wales at Leicester-House, was secretary of state, with a cabinet composed of his own friends and those of Lord Bute. The antipathies of the king however, and the intrigues of the Duke of Newcastle, overthrew this arrangement in a few months. In April 1757, Esrl Temple, who held the office of first lord of the admiralty, haviug been dismissed, Mr. Pitt immediately gave in his resignation. It was some time before anybody could bo induced to accept the task of con structing a new cabinet ; at last, in the beginning of June, after the country bad been for nearly two months without a government, the Earl of Waldegrave was appointed first lord of the treasury, with Mr. Fox as secretary of state. This administration lasted only for a few days ; tho king was then informed that he must seek for other aid. After some further negociatiou, Mr. Pitt was before the end of the mouth recalled and appointed premier, with the office of secretary of etato, the Duke of Newcastle being made first lord of the treasury, and Mr. Fox paymaster of tho forces. This arrangement subsisted to the end of the reign. From the moment in which the chief direction of affairs was thus placed in the hands of Mr. Pitt the war was prose cuted with extraordinary vigour and success. In January 1756 a treaty of alliance had been contracted with I'russia, and an alliance between Austria and France was concluded in May of the samo year. The commencement of active hostilities between Austria and Great Britain signalised Mr. Pitt's accession to power. In Germany the enemy were early in 1758 driven out of Bremen and Verdes, which they had overrun the preceding year ; soon after, Senegal, Gorco, and other possessions of the French on the coast of Africa, were reduced ; in 1750 the great victory of Minden, gained (August let) by Ferdinand, the hereditary prince of Brunswick, drove back the French to the Rhine ; by a succession of brilliant successes at sea the French navy was almost annihilated ; the victory on the heights of Abraham, in which Wolfe fell (September 13th) all but completed the conquest of Canada; Cape Breton, in the same quarter of tho globe, had been already recovered ; in the east, Clive had recovered Calcutta (2nd of January 1757), taken Chandernagore (March 14th), overthrown the Subabdar of Bengal at the great battle of l'lasey (June 23rd), and was now engaged in driving the French from every remaining pos session they had held in India. In the midst of these successes George 11. expired suddenly at Kensington, from the extraordinary circumstance of a rupture of the right ventricle of the heart, on the 25th of October 1760, in the seventy-seventh year of his age and the thirty-fourth of his reign. His children by his queen, besides those that have been already mentioned, were, William Augustus, born 1721, created in 1726 duke of Cumberland; Mary, born 1723, married 1740 to Frederick, laudgrave of Hesse Cassel ; and Louisa, bore 1721, married 1743 to Frederick V., king of Denmark. He was succeeded by his grandson, George Ili.