When Clive returned he was met with a cry for vengeance.  He gathered his troops, recovered Calcutta, and ended by fighting that great battle of Plassey, 1757, which was the means of permanently establishing the English empire in India on a firm foundation. (See map opposite.)

545.  The Seven Years’ War in Europe and America, 1756-1763.

Before the contest had closed by which England won her Asiatic dominions, a new war had broken out.  In the fifth year, 1756, of the New Style[2] of reckoning time, the aggressive designs of Frederick the Great of Prussia caused such alarm that a grand alliance was formed by France, Russia, Austria, and Poland to check his further advance.  Great Britain, however, gave her support to Frederick, in hope of humbling her old enemy France, who, in addition to her attempts to oust the English from India, was also making preparations on a grand scale to get possession of America.

[2] The New Style was introduced into Great Britain in 1752.  Owing to a slight error in the calendar, the year had, in the course of centuries, been gradually losing, so that in 1752 it was eleven days short of what the true computation would make it.  Pope Gregory corrected the error in 1582, and his calendar was adopted in nearly every country of Europe except Great Britain and Russia, both of which regarded the change as a “popish measure.”  But in 1751, notwithstanding the popular outcry, September 3, 1752, was made September 14, by an act of Parliament, and by the same act the beginning of the legal year was altered from March 25 to January 1.  The popular clamor against the reform is illustrated in Hogarth’s picture of an Election Feast, in which the People’s party carry a banner, with the inscription, “Give us back our eleven days.”

Every victory, therefore, which the British forces could gain in Europe would, by crippling the French, make the ultimate victory of the English in America so much the more certain; for this reason we may look upon the alliance with Frederick as an indirect means employed by England to protect her colonies on the other side of the Atlantic.  These colonies now extended along the entire coast, from the Kennebec Riber, in Maine, to the borders of Florida.

The French, on the other hand, had planted colonies at Quebec and Montreal, on the St. Lawrence; at Detroit, on the Great Lakes; at New Orleans and other points on the Mississippi.  They had also begun to build a line of forts along the Ohio River, which, when completed, would connect their northern and southern colonies, and thus secure to them the whole country west of the Alleghenies.  They expected to conquer the East as well, to erase Virginia, New England, and all other English colonial titles from the map, and in their place to put the name New France.