Ah Maria, Yes It’s War, But Besides That…

On August 29th, 1756, Frederick the Great invaded Saxony. It wasn’t his intention to start a Europe-wide war. He needed Saxony as a buffer for Silesia and as a jumping-off for an invasion of Bohemia. He did these things not to provoke Austria, but because he believed Austria intended to strike at him.

With a Franco-Austrian treaty signed and sealed, he sounded out Austria as to her intentions. The answers he received were evasive and, to Frederick’s way of thinking, very suspicious. He even promised to withdraw his troops from Saxony if Maria would promise not to strike at Prussia. She wouldn’t do it.

He found the treaty between France and Austria alarming, but he couldn’t bring himself to believe that France would really fight alongside Austria. They had been enemies for far too long. Russia wanted to attack him, but he knew Tsaritsa Elizabeth wouldn’t do so without being paid to do so first.

Austria didn’t have that kind of money. England did, but why would England pay Russia to invade Prussia? They wouldn’t. So, the only thing he really needed to worry about was Austria. He was wrong. What he failed to see was that France had that kind of money and King Louis REALLY didn’t like him.

For England and France, the stakes could hardly have been higher. The Seven Years war put England on the map as a world power. France lost Canada and all of it’s North American real estate east of the Mississippi. Her possessions in India were much reduced. The Russians, for the first time, made their presence felt as a European power with the crushing defeat of Frederick at Kunersdorf in 1759.

For Count Kaunitz and Maria these things were peripheral. First and foremost was the recovery of Silesia, followed in short order by the utter vanquishing of Prussia. The law of unintended consequences bothered them not at all. It should have.

If Maria can be forgiven for not seeing the outcome of her actions, she did, after all, have other things on her mind. Like her growing family and way-ward husband. No such excuse can be made for Kaunitz. It was part of his job to consider the wider implications of his plans.

Maria considered some of these things. Particularly the emergence of Russia as a European power. It filled her with dread, but she said nothing to Kaunitz. He had everything under control. And that was what she had been looking for for years. People she could trust to get things done in their own sphere, thereby freeing her to consider the Big Picture.

Of course, he didn’t have everything under control. But his confidence in himself and his “Master Plan” left him with no room to maneuver. The unforeseen and the imponderables caught him completely flat-footed.

To be fair, part of the problem was military. Something he had no control over. When the fighting began, Maria called on her brother-in-law, Prince Charles of Lorraine. He was not the worst choice she could have made, that would have been letting her husband have his old job back. But against an opponent like Frederick, he was not the best.

The thing is, she did have a commander who could have done well against Frederick because he had done well against him in the past. That man was Maximilian von Browne. Alas, he was not one of the Better Sorts.

While Maria was more than happy to look the other way on someone’s background, provided they could get the job done, her generals were not. To ask them to serve under a “parvenu Irishman” was simply too much. Charles was a Prince.

And it didn’t hurt his case that Maria liked him personally. “With his pock-marked face, his virile, jolly nature, his frequent drunkenness, she seems to have valued him as a reassuring and cheerful link with a courser, less complex, more full blooded world than the one she herself inhabited.” For all that, she eventually did replace him when it became evident that he was bringing Austria no closer to victory.

For Maria, the ultimate victory would have been the reclamation of Silesia. It was never to be. With the Treaties of Hubertusburg and Paris, in 1763, the war ended with Austria accomplishing little of what it had set out to accomplish and expending much in the way of men and treasure.

If she did not get what she wanted, she did not blame the men she charged with the task of getting it.
“She did not disown her advisers. She remained every inch a queen. But as she contemplated the appalling ravages of the war she had so confidently entered, and as she looked back on the diplomatic maneuvers which had preceded it, she was clearly at some time overcome with a renewed sense of the vanity of worldly ambitions and of the wickedness of lies.”

— Mr. Al