In 1744, Britain and France finally went to war officially. They had been sparring ever since the War of Jenkins’ Ear began in 1739, and more seriously since the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession in Europe in 1740. An accumulation of events such as the brief fire-fight between Captain Curtis Barnett's squadron and several French ships near Gibraltar, and the British blockade of Toulon – technically a blockade of the Spanish warships which had taken refuge there - had finally brought both countries to a decision for open war. Even so, it was only after a failed French attempt to invade Britain (in peacetime) and a full-scale naval battle between their fleets (also in peacetime) that a final declaration of war was made. That the declaration came from France is scarcely relevant; nor, after all the sniping and hostility of the previous five years, is the actual moment of the declaration of war important. But it was the battle of Toulon which was the real start of their war.

The War of Jenkins’ Ear was only one of a series of separate wars, involving in the end most of Europe, which finally coalesced in 1744 into the general European war. In 1740 Prussia invaded Austrian territory and stole Silesia; in 1741 Sweden attacked Russia, and Austria began fighting Bavaria; Bavaria invited France to come to her assistance, and jointly they attacked Austria; later in the year Spanish troops were landed in Italy (see chapter 5), though Commodore Martin's threat to bombard Naples kept the fighting restricted to the north of the peninsula. Until then the two wars, the Anglo- Spanish and the Austro-Prussian, were more or less separate, with most participants fighting each other but not formally at war – a British army fought a French army at Dettingen in in the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) in 1743, getting away with it by being classified as a German army. But the link was finally made early in 1744 when a French invasion of Britain across the Strait of Dover was planned and almost carried out. In March France declared war on Britain and Hanover, in May on Austria; the two wars had at last become one.