Ferdinand of Brunswick
Ferdinand of Brunswick took over a beaten army in November 1757 and kept the French out of Hanover for five years, which is the German half of how Britain won the Seven Years' War. He was born in 1721, a younger son of the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and a brother-in-law of Frederick the Great, and entered Prussian service at nineteen. He fought through the Silesian wars at Mollwitz and Soor and took Prague's outworks in 1757. At Rossbach that November he commanded the infantry of the left, and the French and imperial army was destroyed in an afternoon. Three weeks earlier the Duke of Cumberland had signed the Convention of Klosterzeven, disbanding the Hanoverian army and leaving the electorate to the French. George II repudiated it, Pitt paid for a new army, and Frederick lent them Ferdinand to command it. He attacked in midwinter, when armies did not move, cleared Hanover by February 1758, and by June had crossed the Rhine and beaten Clermont at Krefeld. He lost at Bergen in April 1759 and was pushed back to the Weser. There, at Minden on 1 August, his infantry advanced through the French cavalry by mistake and broke it, which won the battle. The British cavalry under Lord George Sackville did not charge when ordered, and Ferdinand's general order the next day, thanking the army and regretting that his lordship had not been at the head of the horse, ended Sackville's career. He held the line of the Weser and the Rhine through Vellinghausen in 1761 and Wilhelmsthal in 1762, always outnumbered, and gave the French nothing to bargain with at the peace. He left Prussian service in 1766 after a quarrel with Frederick over his standing, lived at Brunswick and Vechelde as a patron of Freemasonry and of the mystics who attached themselves to it, and died in 1792, the year his nephew Charles William Ferdinand, the reigning duke, marched on Paris and was turned back at Valmy.
- Lived: 1721 CE – 1792 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: general, military_leader
